Did I Become I

"As soon as you are born, you're given a name, a religion, a nationality and a race. You spend the rest of your life defining and defending a fictional identity."

- Brandon Garic Notch

My sister, nearly a decade younger than myself has been in poor health for awhile and recently suffered a heart attack. I have been diagnosed terminal, once again. In reality, however, we are all diagnosed terminal upon birth so who knows the timing of the definition? But I thought I would like to go visit my sister and we could visit one last time before she goes to her heaven out there, wherever it may be, and I go to mine, upon the grounds of this earth to feed its renewal,however it should use my decay to its benefit.

Well, everyone knows that the cost of a flight decreases greatly if it is delayed a bit. And while my father’s recent death had granted me no part in the inheritance, as the estate was being distributed it was discovered there was a life (death?) insurance policy my father had left in my name.

Everyone found this incredulous (and probably an annoyance that I received anything.) And in fact when the information about the policy was conveyed to me, I was told to hurry up and get the policy resolved so they could finalize the rest of the division of the estate.

Now don’t get me wrong, this was no great fortune to everyone’s relief; a meager thousand from the US govt, issued when he was sent to Korea, and under my name and not my mother’s.

Now I don’t mean to sound like a complainant against my father. I had requested being removed from the will and suggested being bypassed in favor of my one natural daughter. But it is sort of an indictment against the inheritors, who (with the exception of my sister) thought I did not even deserve the meager little insurance policy that I received. But that little policy was something that I was able to use half to fix my wife’s car and then after my sister had suffered her heart attack and my diagnosis was delivered, I thought I would use it to make plane reservations to visit my sister.

Now this a very long prelude to say that in eleven days my identity becomes unreal and I cannot fly on an airplane ever again, or at least one that departs from any American airport. I am unreal and must remain unreal to prevent me from flying any plane I board into any building.

Aha! They got me now!

Beginning in May all terrorism in America must be done properly with assault weapons. No nasty unreal people can just hop on a plane and use it as a weapon.

But any other weapon of war (maybe tanks are questionable, I’m not sure) is of course not terroristic, and terrorists are freely permitted to purchase them.

Of course if you live in California you know I just fibbed to you because in California you must have a real ID to purchase a weapon of mass destruction. But unless you live in California inside a bubble of plastic wrap you must also know your California law is illegal and as soon as brothers Sam, Clarence, Neil, Brett, and little bitty chief Johnny get their mitts into your California law of reality they will be able to inform you just how far short your California idea of reality is of REAL american reality, which is Being Real in America is contingent on two very important factors, only one of which is necessary to being declared real.

Of course Realness can be achieved by the color of one’s skin. But those whose skin is unreal can be made Real by a truly significant bank balance. But what many whose skin might be Real don’t realize is that a truly insignificant bank balance can just strip that reality right away from them

And since this real-ly colored individual has such an insignificant balance, he will forevermore be too Unreal to visit his dying sister.

Sobeit, no one cares about the insignificant anyway, that’s why they are insignificant in the first place. But my issue here hasn’t anything to do with any of this. My issue of learning I cannot identify myself in the manner I have always identified myself just gave me an opportunity to vent about weapons, skin color, and bank balances.

Same old things I always vent about, but those things I do always vent about are issues only because of how my identity is decided. And of course my own role in defining my own identity.

Upon being born I am given an identity. An identity of color that is then encoded upon me and filed into boxes of other index cards similarly color coded. And I am given a name that hereafter is the label upon which my identity becomes the Me that is my Realness.

Vincent Furnier can certainly go to court and change that realness to Alice Cooper. I might come along and type into google search what is Alice Cooper’s real name and google promptly informs me that it is Vincent Furnier. So what is the reality of our perceptiveness of this identification which is Furnier/Cooper. Legally he is Cooper not Furnier, so legally he is not Furnier and I would suppose his Real ID name would be Cooper

A woman (or married person) can become someone new by taking on the identity of the spouse and so that fictive name, as well,can become the Reality of the person.

In America, all imported African persons were given fictive names that became their Real identities. And what am I to make of Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake’s Reality? Certainly I venture to imagine not many know who Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake even is; nor would you probably connect to the literalness of that name in English,which I am told is something like, “The bull who lacks fear so that he is able to sit within the herd of Buffalo.” But I suppose you might begin to recognize Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake is the one identified as Sitting Bull.

If a name is an identity must it be stipulated that the person identified can only be identified thusly, unless there is a fictive reidentification whose fictiveness becomes Real? And how does that even make it Real?

{Google says I mean fictitious. I do not. Legal fictions, are not fictitious in the sense of being not true; but true by law though untrue by nature and therefore are fictive rather than fictitious. The nomenclature of legal alters the status of untruth to legal truth so it is no longer legally false,but legally true.}

Furnier, after all, became Alice Cooper only to remain capable of using a popular band name to maintain his popularity after the demise of the band.He just transferred the band identity to his personal use. Women, slaves, or Natives in America,supposedly were denied identities of their own to becoming legally insubordinate.

And once more, I am far astray of my own case. But I am using my own lack of realness to illustrate a well known social relevance (or irrelevance) to fictive nomenclaturizing. But this fictive nomenclaturizing is fictively legal and therefore becomes real.

But what if this fiction is not accomplished legally, is it, not fictive and more real, or is, as not legally fictive, truly ascribed but incapable of ever becoming Real?

In my case my identity of the birth name was simply an infirmity in my vocal cords that prevented me from saying a double “t”; or perhaps an infirmity due to the sloppiness of those from whom I learned to speak that never pronounced the double “t”. Those from whom I learned to speak never said “at-titude” , they always said “ad-ditute.”

At any rate, when I began venturing into other neighborhoods and being asked my name, the expectation was not to just to tell them your first name,which is often the case today, but your first and last name, and I found I had a difficulty in separation of the names into two names and tried to pronounce them as one. Because my family never told me my name was Kent, but Kenttaylor; and I really didn’t know they were actually a first and last name, but that the two were my one name.

And I couldn’t say it, okay, I was a child,and the adults attempted to assist me—I became Ken, I remained Ken.

The year we returned to Indiana, from Japan and my parents completed their graduate degrees, my father insisted I get a job. You were not then given a social security number at birth, but went to the social security office and applied when you were old enough to “get a job”.

I don’t know if it was normal for fourteen year old boys to go in alone, but the representative didn’t remark if it was. I showed him my hospital birth certificate and he handed me a form to fill out. Under name, I wrote “Ken” because that’s who I thought I was. I knew, of course, that was not my birth name, but after ten years or better or only being Ken I didn’t even think twice when I wrote my name as Ken.

I do remember the agent asking me if I wanted my name to be Ken or Kent. I said Ken and that was it . I never thought of Ken as a nickname,but my name. That had come about long ago, as I said, when to my own self I had ceased to be Kent.

But it does not match my birth certificate, and to become real enough to fly on an American airplane my identity can only be an identity I have never been. So those around me say just change the name on your social security card. Ah! were it so easy. Kent Taylor, however, has no work history, has no employment records, has never paid utility (or any other) bills; has never been treated at the doctor. So why can’t I just go and legally change Kent to Ken, like Alice Cooper or a married woman?

Possibly no problem,but that new Ken Taylor has no identity. He, the new Ken, requires a new social security number. The new social security number has no records. Well what about the “informant” who gets a new name and social security. Well in that case there becomes a fictive history to go with the fictive name. Kent Taylor is a real identity but historically empty. Nothing happened to him to create a need to create a fictive history and there would be no reason for the government to allow this to happen.

But the government won’t transfer the identity of either because this is no longer 1961 and the identity I was permitted to assume then is now a false identity;an illegal identity; an identity that is not capable of being transferred into reality because today’s legal understanding is that my dropping one fucking t from my name I existed as a fake person my entire life with a fake or fictitiously illegal identity. Suppose Joe Biden had no records as Joseph Biden but had assumed everything he had ever done under Joe, not as a nickname, but as a real identity. Well Joe, as of this May,would never be able to fly on an American airplane again because according to the Patriot Act no non-birth certificate identity is Real (unless it has become fictively Real), and within the definition of the act, defined to stop terrorists who have not become fictively real,but whose Reality has now become declared fictitious.

Now this is not something I learned yesterday, but what I learned over the last three years since I transferred my driver’s license into a state identity card. But in Nevada, nothing changes and no one has to have a Real I.D. But if you don’t have a Real I.D. instead of a gold star you get a note on the card that says, “This card cannot be used for identification.” Admittedly, I am unsure of why I was issued an identity card that can’t be used for identification, but I do sometimes find myself somewhat dense.

But what I didn’t know until I decided that I wanted to go visit my sister next month was that next month my identity officially becomes Unreal as far as flying in America goes.

But that is of course, of less matter,than this question of identity and whether my identity is just a piece of paper that says I exist; or is my identity the identity of my life, the identity I have presented to others in work & play. Is the life I have led and the people I have encountered totally irrelevant to my identification of myself or how others have identified me?

Did I Become I only by a paper that declares me to be an I, or did I become I by the life I have led, positive or negative in that relationship of the I as I was perceived and the I attempted to portray to others and to myself?

If my I is only the I on the certificate of birth, then we never live beyond our own birth certificates and the next definition when we are given existence again when we cease to exist with our death certificates then we might began to realize why we are so often ignored as non-relevant during the part of our lives we might think most relevant.

And you might begin to see mental illness in connection with this lack of relevance.

And just maybe if you pause for just one second and reflect upon how you might become more relevant, you might pause to contemplate on this question:

Do you become more or less of the I you are by embracing the relevance of the other I’s you encounter; or are you satisfied with being a nonparticipant and simply letting your I be defined for you?

Because if you so let yourself define others then you so define yourself and neither you nor your neighbors are more than the fictions created about you. So defined, we are in need to watch for the terrorists we create with our definitions. So undefined, maybe terrorism will decline.

And maybe the more you recognize the value each can bring to you, maybe your fears will decline, and if your fears decline,maybe there will be fewer terrorists, real or fictive.

Maybe. But I am a mere squatter in reality and don’t exist in any legal reality. So I suppose there is no reason to trust someone who has been declared fictively not a real person.

"Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.

-Theodor Seuss Geisel