On Handles & Habitat
Hunter’s Creek in Wales, NY
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
On My Magical Screen Names
I’ve had the itch to change my screen name / handle recently. However, I’m thirty-fucking-seven, and I’ve been on the interwebs for 23 years. Do I really need to go through this again? It’s such a hassle.
My early internet days back in the late 90s — like most people’s — were filled with some god-awful screen names. I believe Chaos667 (ugh) was one of the first when I was 14. There was a flurry of Nine Inch Nails-inspired handles for a while and probably a few from Marilyn Manson and the Smashing Pumpkins, too. Later, I got more creative. TrickED by the Sun was one of my favorites, as was IMing you nakED because it had “I’m Ed” secretly tucked away in it.
Then, screen names become much more fixed as the internet became increasingly less fun. I settled on inconstantmotion (or incostantemoto if the character count needed to be shorter) for a long time. I had aspirations of travel and moving to Italy. Sadly, I didn’t get to move to Italy, but I did travel the world for grad school: I lived in London, Leiden, Vienna, Geneva, and Beijing (and visited Rome and other cities on the side). It was a fun experience for a shockingly useless and incredibly expensive piece of paper.
For the last few years, I used paxfool, which is an almost-portmanteau of peaceful and the Fool from the Tarot. I’ve been into Tarot since I was a teenager. Since naming myself paxfool, however, my Tarot skills have leveled up considerably. I’m now a confident card reader and fortune teller. I can even do crazy-long spreads (25 cards!) and almost read with playing cards, something I had always wanted to do since I spoke with some witch on AOL back in the day who claimed she could do it (AOL! I’m showing my age).
Is it weird that I can say I’ve had successful magic from screen name intentions? Probably a little, but the universe works in mysterious ways.
On The Mad Habitatter
I finally got the idea of the Mad Habitatter a few months ago. It’s a play on the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland with the hope of creating habitat instead of hats. Interestingly, the Mad Hatter is just called the Hatter in the books, and it’s the Cheshire Cat — whom I love — who calls the March Hare and the Hatter “mad.”
The Mad Hatter just wants to have his tea, but the world keeps interrupting him with rude English girls and court cases about stolen tarts. He talks a lot about knowing Time, which I find intriguing in a Saturnian sense, but what I find most interesting is the origin of the phrase “mad as a hatter.” Obviously, it predates Alice in Wonderland as Lewis Carroll had to get it from somewhere.
Hatters in the 19th century used mercury in felt hats. This wasn’t the best thing to do as it sadly made people sick. Nevertheless, I’m a big fan of Mercury / Hermes, so it’s fun to have an association with him in the name even if he drove people literally crazy.
This also led me down the rabbit hole of the etymology of the word “mad.” Turns out, it’s perfect. Its origins come from the word gemædde in Old English, which meant “out of one’s mind.” That is exactly what I’m hoping to accomplish going forward. Honestly, it couldn’t be a better fit to include in my new screen name.
I’m a very logical person, and I’ve been very cerebral — if not outright colonized by the Western way of thinking — for most of my life. Getting out of my mind and into different types of habitat through hiking and gardening is where I’ve found the most happiness and meaning lately. I think this is what’s needed for us to heal collectively in the West, too: we are awful at being embodied, and we’ve severed ourselves from the world around us mentally, physically, and spiritually. Of course, none of this is to say that the mind or the intellect is bad; we’re just way out of balance.
Thus, the main idea behind the Mad Habitatter is to create fertile habitat for the more-than-human world both in the physical, land-based sense of the word and in the idea of the mind as habitat for less colonized ideas. So off I will go, marveling at the habitats I encounter, opening up my heart up to the songs of the pines and the roses on my merry way, hopefully completely out of my mind.