An odd thing happens after you've seen your name in print over and over again. It becomes detached from your sense of self. The shipping label no longer has any relationship with what's in the box. The experience is sort of like when you were a kid and you'd quickly repeat a word until it had no meaning and was just a funny sound. It's disorienting when that happens to your name, but after awhile, surprisingly, it's actually quite liberating. There's your name in an article or some blog, and then, far away, in some other place - or no place if you're feeling zennish - is you. Another way to look at it is to imagine a soul or spirit rising up from a corpse. Everybody is standing around the dearly departed, singing his praises or bitching about him, while his 'ectoplasmic body' is hovering near the ceiling and yelling, "Hey, I'm over here! I'm not that. I'm something else." (Or, zennishly, nothing else.) Of course, aside from the family dog, no one can hear or see him. They're all fixated on the body. The name. Which brings up an interesting idea. Dogs don't know our names. They see the real us, sans moniker. If they think anything when we walk into a room, it's probably something like, "Hey, it's food, petting and playing!"
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