About minusfive

If I got a penny for every time I’ve been asked: what is minusfive? Or: why minusfive? Or per­haps: what does minusfive mean? I would prob­a­bly be a mil­lion­aire by now. Ok, maybe not a mil­lion­aire, but I’d have a cou­ple of thou­sand at least. Ok, 35 cents, happy? Any­way, it doesn’t mat­ter how many times I’ve been asked, or how, or when; I’ve never been able to pro­vide a sat­is­fac­tory answer.

Minusfive has been my nick­name for years. The name has been an inspi­ra­tion for many of my cre­ative endeav­ors and, prob­a­bly because of the same lack of objec­tive expla­na­tion, a source of exhaus­tion and frus­tra­tion; but at the same time, the name has helped me develop the sense of abstract cre­ativ­ity that I’ve always pur­sued. Through the name I’ve found ways to give mean­ing to mean­ing­less things, to decon­struct the mean­ing­ful ones and to sim­plify my cre­ations. Ok, you might think I’m crazy by now, but I assure you, you’re prob­a­bly right.

The fact of the mat­ter is that minusfive, the name many auto­mat­i­cally relate to me nowa­days, has no real mean­ing, no back­ground, no rea­son; it just popped out of my mind on a reg­u­lar night of 1996, while I was look­ing for a cool, orig­i­nal nick­name for my IM and chat ses­sions and couldn’t find any. No more. That’s all there is to it.

Unfor­tu­nately, as it often hap­pens in the inter­net, my seem­ingly mean­ing­less intel­lec­tual cre­ation, and there­fore prop­erty, has been stolen and used hun­dreds of times for dif­fer­ent pur­poses by all kinds of peo­ple and busi­nesses. I guess that comes to prove, at the end, that it is cool after all.

I mean, I’m sure some­one else might’ve thought of the same com­bi­na­tion of words to name some­thing else, per­haps, with a real mean­ing behind it, in which case I don’t really mind. It is the per­sonal use of the name by other unscrupu­lous users of the ser­vices I fre­quent on the web that hits my nerve. I mean, at least add to it your own touch of orig­i­nal­ity for heaven’s sake! But any­way, I sup­pose it’s flat­ter­ing after all.

All I can say is: what does steal­ing a mean­ing­less name from some­one else say about you?

Thanks for read­ing. I hope I didn’t waste too much of your time.