A friend of mine was considering names for his soon-to-be-born first child and asked my opinion. During what would normally be a happy occasion, we nearly came to blows, all over a disagreement on baby names. For the sake of the forthcoming child, I'll not mention the name his parent suggested. Suffice it to say that some parents aren't qualified to name their pet goldfish.

Apparently, some countries have gotten so fed up with random fistfights over baby names that they've passed laws on just this subject. Countries with baby-name legislation have an "approved" list of baby names, and forbid parents from naming their children anything else. Generally, countries with this sort of law will not register a child given an unauthorized name, and birth records will simply reflect "Girl" or "Boy" on that child's vital record. This brings up a creepy tangent -- what happens to a child who grows to adulthood and yet is a non-citizen? I personally don't know, nor do I know anyone in that predicament. Even so, the threat of social ostracism, or being a living non-person, tends to scare parents into naming their kids something acceptable, for the benefit of everyone else.

Sadly, I don't live in a country that values that benefit. Americans consider it their liberty to name their children anything they want, going so far as to call it an important, constitutionally-protected expression.

Apparently, then, a parent's liberty to name his child Bonkzillius (a name I just made up, but I've heard worse) outweighs the eighteen years of ridicule, shame, and abuse that child will endure until he becomes an adult, when he may legally change his name to Steve.

Before you throw bricks at me and label me a fascist, consider this: do we really want all the sci-fi geeks naming their kids Hyperion? Do we want all the roleplaying game nerds calling their progeny Excelsior? Or all the doctors' kids Caduceus? Or the lawyers' Res Ipsa?

Hell, can we put up with all the carnies naming their kids Spin-A-Whirly, after the ride in which those children were conceived?

I don't think I can, nor would I want to.

How do you chase something whose footfalls make no sound? What nets do you use to snare something incorporeal? And, assuming you can catch it, who in their right mind would dare hunt something no one knows anything about?

Believe what you will, if you wish, or not, if it suits you. The point is not to convince you that these events happened. Rather, it is to share with you that they did.

The home where I grew up was built in the 1950’s, in a quiet suburban neighborhood. Its living space was distributed in such a way that the master bedroom was at the extreme front corner of the structure, with a window looking out into the front yard. The other bedrooms were connected along the same side of the house via a corridor.

When my sister was born, we built a second master bedroom for my grandparents to live in, and the rest of the family played musical chairs with the living arrangements. My sister took my old bedroom in the middle of the hall, I moved into my parents’ former bedroom at the front of the house, and my parents took my grandparents’ old bedroom at the opposite end of the hall.

By the time my brother was born, there wasn’t any more room to make additions to the home, and so he moved in with me. My bed was arranged parallel to the wall closest to the street. Were you to enter the room from the hallway, you would see my bed in the far left corner, with my brother’s along the opposite wall.

One night, when the house was quiet and everyone was asleep, I awoke. I found it strange that I should be awake because there hadn’t been any loud noises or anything that would have roused me. Lying on my back in bed, I actually considered this, when I noticed a faint light in the hall. It was pale green, like the face of a glow-in-the-dark watch. The light slowly grew in strength, as though its source were drawing nearer.

I was terrified. I had no plausible explanation for what I was seeing. At the time, we did not have any motion-activated lights in the hallway, and when my mother did eventually buy those, they were incandescent orange. Worse - whatever approached was coming from the hallway, which was the only way out of the room.

The glow entered and lit up the doorframe with a sickly green haze. The light was pale, and transparent - even as it drew closer I could see through it to the desk and television hutch behind it. The glow moved toward me. Once it had wafted halfway across the room, it changed. The light shifted to its extremities and became a ring. It did not become brighter - it was as if the light compressed itself and had become opaque in the tight area of the ring it formed. Within the ring it was as dark as the rest of the room, but not so dark that I was blind. My bedroom walls were painted stark white, and I had white furniture and so with the scarce light of the streetlamp beyond my window I could still see.

The space within the approaching green disk darkened, as if it had become a sheer film of black silk. The figure within the disk was human. It had a clearly discernible head, trunk, and limbs. I could not see details. I could not see its face, or digits, nor could I tell if it had either. The legs and arms were positioned away from the trunk in a posture that might have been uncomfortable for a person to maintain for too long, but this made it abundantly clear to me the figure was human-like. The air space that the figure occupied was perfectly dark, opaque. The area it did not occupy I could see past.

It floated toward me in a slow, even pace, as though it were on a conveyor belt. It did not swing its arms or move its legs as it approached. It did not have feet, but the pointed ends of its legs appeared not to touch the ground.

Just as it brushed against my bedside, numbers lit up in the glowing green circle. Twelve at the top, three to the right, six at its feet, nine at the left. In the center of the figure’s torso appeared a tiny disk of green light from which shot three bars - an hour hand, a minute hand, and a second hand. The seconds ticked with rigid precision.

I watched, wide-eyed, as the figure drew within arm’s reach. Meanwhile, my brother slept, unaware of any of this. Had it gone for him instead of me, I don’t know what I would have done, if anything at all. It was all I could do to keep from screaming.

The figure brushed against my bedside, then, as abruptly as it had appeared, it vanished. The shadow in the clock was gone. Without its green glow, the bedroom was darker than before.

I did not sleep the rest of that night.

Empirical studies have proven that with proper discipline, most fairly intelligent primates and even some children can be taught to behave.

When I was growing up, there was no such thing as time-out. Whenever I acted out of line, my parents smacked me in the jaw with a sandal, a ladle, or whatever else was at hand. Depending on what theories you adhere to, I turned out all right because of, or in spite of, timely application of corporal discipline.

After getting smacked enough times (I'm a slow learner), two truths dawned on me: (1) getting smacked in the mouth really hurts, and (2) behavior that results in my getting smacked in the mouth should be avoided.

Eventually, it came to be that force was no longer necessary, because the threat of getting smacked was enough. I'd get "The Look," that halting stare that my mother would level at me whenever I drew dangerously close to trying her patience. 

This one's for you, mom.