Three things from DAH.

DAH is me, David Anthony Hance. I pen, promote, and make change (not the coin kind). 

First up this week, David …  
The map is not the territory. The word is not the thing. These are concepts propounded by Alfred Korzybski in his scheme for general semantics, laid out in the 1930s. Labels have long amazed and worried me. They carry so much power. So much meaning is shorthanded as a label, substituting for the real thing. Much simpler than delving into the complexities of reality, I know. I have two brothers. We are not all addressed by our first name, although I am: David (middle name Anthony, which was my father's first name, but he went by his second: James or, rather, "Jim"). Inexplicably, a few people call me Dave or Davey. These people include some who know me very, very well, and some who know me not at all. I've never suggested to anyone that they ought to call me Dave or Davey. And yet there's my childhood label-name David and its diminutives, Dave and Davey. Calling me back to where I began. I hear "David" and I hear my parents. I hear "Dave" or "Davey" and I hear some near and dear, or some insinuating themselves to pretend so. But however much we may love the sound of our own name, my name isn't really me. It's a label I've been given, or sometimes one I've taken for myself. 
The name you’re given as a child might affect the shape of your face

Second up this week, Davis …  
A slip of the finger on a keyboard yields Davis instead of David. I've done it often. My labels are linked in this seemingly careless way. I'm not a Davis, California native but I did live there from ages 10 through 22 and again for six years in our current century. Davis seemed idyllic to growing-up-David, albeit rather hot in the summertime. We bicycled everywhere around town. It felt friendly and human-scaled. Yet teenage friends yearned to move somewhere "real" -- and I thought, "that's strange thinking." These friends weren't clear whether they wanted somewhere less friendly, or larger and with fewer bicycles. I think they really just wanted somewhere different. They wanted somewhere they could be different, where they could escape their hometown labels. That's something I ultimately did, too, without particularly planning it. Labels give a sense of personally-imagined reality, without being the reality itself. Davis: The City of Bicycles! The home of a University of California campus! Such clear and settled parts of the Davis label. Also rather a prison, I'm afraid, now having lived other places that either had no particular label identity, or had lost their label identity when something big changed (like entire industries leaving, as in North Coast logging). Labels are so much to live with, and don't adequately share complex and changeable reality. 
Davis, California – the American city which fell in love with the bicycle

Third up this week, DAH …  
For a short time during my fist round in Davis I tried to reinvent myself as D. Anthony Hance. Mostly a stage name. I thought it sounded so much more adult and worldly, D. Anthony vs David. That new branding didn't stick. Then, when I first moved away from Davis, I did it with a new surname: One that combined my last name with that of my then-wife. I became David Hansmith. That still causes confusion because there's a subset of life-acquaintances who only knew me with the Hansmith surname. With the end of that marriage at the beginning of a new century I was back to David Anthony Hance. But how could I go backwards? In the 1990s I'd begun signing almost everything with my initials: DAH; sometimes DAHance. This wasn't a very purposeful reinvention but I persisted with it. And it's stuck. Nobody ever called me "D. Anthony" (not without a giggle, anyway). But plenty of people now address me as "DAH." It sounds like they're saying "yes" in Russian, or perhaps they consider me an Irish father. I expect that's what newbies to DAH wonder. Yes, there are still plenty of people who address me as "David" (or Dave or Davey). But there are also plenty of people who address me as DAH (sometimes it's the same people in different situations). Part of me re-labeling myself for the 21st Century, I guess. How else have I reinvented myself, with careful thinking and without? There's something to journal about!
How to reinvent yourself

And a bit more …  

By A Swimming Pool Outside Syracusa
by Billy Collins

All afternoon I have been struggling
to communicate in Italian
with Roberto and Giuseppe, who have begun
to resemble the two male characters
in my Italian for Beginners,
the ones who are always shopping
or inquiring about the times of trains,
and now I can hardly speak or write English.
I have made important pronouncements
in this remote limestone valley
with its trickle of a river,
stating that it seems hotter
today even than it was yesterday
and that swimming is very good for you,
very beneficial, you might say.
I also posed burning questions
about the hours of the archaeological museum
and the location of the local necropolis.
But now I am alone in the evening light
which has softened the white cliffs,
and I have had a little gin in a glass with ice
which has softened my mood or—
how would you say in English—
has allowed my thoughts to traverse my brain
with greater gentleness, shall we say,
or, to put it less literally,
this drink has extended permission
to my mind to feel—what's the word?—
a friendship with the vast sky
which is very—give me a minute—very blue
but with much great paleness
at this special time of day, or as we say in America, now.

And that's all for this week.
From Mary Oliver’s poem "Sometimes" …  

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it. 

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