And now for something akin to exhibitionism I blog for you. Previous attempts to do this have fallen apart largely because I tended to edit myself too much since my name was on the thing, for today at least I’m not terribly worried about that. I have been inspired to create anew after reading some of the very good content on and linked to a friends web site. Also I need an outlet for all of my daydreams, and bad ideas without having to pay for it.

So I’m the boy, like most boys I have a name: Will, obviously short for William although for several years I wasn’t aware of my name. Sometime shortly after being born I was given the new name Sam, because as the story goes, I was a very tiny kid, born premature tipping the scales at a robust 2 and a half pounds. As you might imagine clothes were hard to come by for a 2 pound baby and even the smallest sizes of infantwear devoured me. Someone in my family knew a song called “Sam You Made The Pants Too Long” and a nickname was born. I later discovered that the song in question was popularized by Barbara Steisand, I wasn’t happy about this but as far as I know no one else has sung a song about large pants, at least not one that I am aware of.

Life for Sam changed on the first day of kindergarten when I was rather rudely informed by Miss Height that my name was not Sam but was in fact William. I can’t blame Miss Height for her rudeness since I was the one crying and throwing things from the corner of the class you see we had all lined up along the side of the room by the closet and as she called our names she showed us where our desks were. Well my name wasn’t called. Sure my last name was called but I figure there was just another kid with my name (which is very rare outside of Berlin but at five I wasn’t too up on genealogy so I missed the significance) and that kid wised up to the fact that this place was weird and had a funny smell, like a doctors office and headed back home which was where I, through my tears told Miss Height I wanted to go. You try getting called a name you’ve never heard before at age five and tell me how you feel about it. Despite all of my teachers attempts to calm me nothing worked and finally my mother had to come and get me and explain to me what was going on, my name wasn’t Sam and her name wasn’t mom and nobody she knew really liked the sitar because it always sounds like there tuning it but sometimes you just went along with things while the smoke was good. From that day I was William at school and Sam everywhere else, it remained this way until adulthood when I dropped the Sam altogether and decided on the shortened version of my name for general use. It should be noted that my family still uses Sam only.

That’s enough childhood for one day. As for today I’m thinking about that little kid. Maybe because I’m clinging to youth as the calender continues to turn despite my efforts to stop it.