No Name

My friend Tom's blog mentions that I am blogging anonymously. I never wanted to be anonymous, as anyone who knows me will easily believe. I find it artificial and faintly absurd and also somehow grandiose and self-important. I can't see what difference it makes if people who know who I am know who I am, and it's not as though it would be hard to work it out anyway.
However, I have friends much more circumspect and generally cautious, one of whom told me a creepy story of being stalked, and insisted I take my real name off. So I have. There is also that old chestnut that I'll be unemployable when interviewers discover that I once had one too many gins or made a catty remark at the expense of Aristotle's prose style or something, though (quite apart from the unlikelihood of this scenario) it is no drawback for a person who experiences massive attraction to anything which might relieve me of the necessity of ever having a proper job. (Actually, that may be the sort of thing which is better said anonymously.)
I feel like Odysseus, playing the No Man trick, and thinking thereby to evade all reponsibility for his actions: vanity will out, of course. Endlessly circling the jobmarket must be the modern equivalent of being cursed by a man-eating giant to meander the Aegean for a decade. What strikes me, and this may be revealing, is that it's all even worse when he does finally get there. It's better to travel hopefully than to arrive.