All Together

What is it with this "rcs" in my signature instead of my name at the bottom of these posts? Am I a supreme egotist? Well, yes. The substitution for "Ron Southern" has been going on since I was a teenager when I began signing poems and letters with those initials. At the time, I would scrawl an "x" under the initials and later it turned into a curly rat-tail connected to the "s". In the Internet world, the "x" turned into a period ("."), don't ask me why. Email and blogs may have curtailed all the cursive writing in the world as well as my esoteric "signature", but there remains this keyboard signature. So the current "rcs" dates back to when I was 17 or so, and that means about 40 years of scrawling or representing that signature. Isn't that boring? Am I so famous? Not exactly. I seldom send any real mail any more, so that old signature has little chance for expression. But I am not the only one. Every lazy boy and girl I know does much the same, signed their messages to me with their initials as if no one else in the world might have them. And oddly, I do know them at a glance. If I see a "JE" or "gk" or "pt" or "go", I do know exactly who that's likely to be, even in the machine fonts of the Internet. I guess initials are a form of familiarity--of humanity, even-- and the Internet can't entirely overcome that. Humanity survives, even in the machine. What was it the Beatles said? "I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together." Yeah, that. Clear as mud.