I suppose there are numerous ways I could address this essay. I could talk about the names I’ve assigned in my life, especially to my children, although I’ve covered that one before. But I guess there are some wrinkles I could address. For example, my son Cormac wasn’t actually named after Cormac McCarthy, but for a Celtic king, but the American writer is the only person anyone can recall with the name. Cormac McCarthy also become somewhat toxic of late because he had a long-term relationship with a teenaged girl in the 1970s … and, oh yeah, he also had ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

So, no, he’s not named after Cormac McCarthy, who isn’t my favorite writer anyway. And we mostly call my son Mac, and no he wasn’t named after the computer either. By the way, I called my son Quinn by the name of Mac last week.

This is another issue about names that I’ve pointed out before and continues to be an issue — my tendency to forget names and to confuse them. I’ll often mix up people with a similar social class, such as two of my sons. Last week I called one of my colleagues by the name of a woman who reports to her. She ignored me, which is either kind of her or a sign that she thinks I’m insane.

Oh, speaking of insane, I guess I could write about President Trump’s strange fetish for naming things America now … as in the Gulf of, Lake, and mostly recently and bizarrely, the state of New. The final feels especially weird … how exactly is the state west of Texas the New America? Is it for the nuclear weapons that were developed there, the UFOs in Roswell, something to do with “Breaking Bad” or, returning to a previous subject, that ranch that Jeffrey Epstein had in the state. A ranch that was also connected to, you guessed it, Cormac McCarthy.

Regarding McCarthy, apparently a film version of “Blood Meridian” is once again in the works. It has widely been regarded as one of the most un-filmable novels due to its graphic violence. But I recently read Roberto Bolano’s epic “2666” and I think it surpasses it for grotesque descriptions of senseless killings. By the way, the novel gives us absolutely no clue what the title “2666” means, and apparently you have to follow clues from two previous Bolano novels to get the sense that it’s about the future date of the apocalypse.

Ok, that pretty much exhausts my ideas for writing something about names today. But now that I think about it, I wish I’d given this one a better title.