Cavymage

Way back when, in the 1990s before there was such things as blogs or MySpace I had my own web page titled the Cavymage Pages (Cavymage was my first screen name).

Why Cavymage ...

More than a couple people have asked some variation of "what's a Cavymage?" Well, for starters, its mage as in magi or magician, and cavy is the proper name for a guinea pig; No this does not mean I try to do fun magic tricks with large rodents. (Actually I recently heard that the jury went back out on whether or not a guinea pig is a rodent, apparently their chemistry is wrong.) What this does mean, is that someone claimed that a guinea pig was my totem and I thought, "Hey cool." Since Guinea Pig Totem didn't have quite the right sound to it, I went with Cavymage.

Now, for the pseudo-esoteric version of, "why a guinea pig is a cool totem." For some reason the people in my family have weird, I mean really odd dreams. My mother once dreamt that my sister gave birth to a hippopotamus. Does this say more about my mom, or my sister? She also had a dream about our Welsh Corgi winning the Olympics. Anyway back to guinea pigs. Sometime back around 1987 or so, I had a very profound dream in which a short, dark and handsome guinea pig gave me some advice. He was pretty much just standing or sitting, its sometimes hard to tell with guinea pigs, keep in mind that they're essentially natural footballs with legs, and he just started talking, saying, "you know ..." Just like in Dr. Doolittle, except not so annoying.

Two years later I opened a birthday present to see an extremely self-assured, but short, all black straight-haired guinea pig. I promptly named him Peeve since he was my pet. He promptly peed on me. Well, Peeve reluctantly took on the role of my totem; following me around, making me look foolish and complaining when I did things that "lacked style". I'm sure he would've offered all sorts of advice, if he could only make me understand. Unfortunately, like all totems, Peeve only hung around a short while before going where ever totems go when they are done with their work. I still consider myself lucky to have been chosen by such an auspicious animal.