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So, my name is "Coyo" and this has been my name since 2008
or so. Even my immediate family, cousins, coworkers,
classmates, friends and neighbors know me by this name and
call me that. Only my enemies, people who want to see me
fail, who want to sabotage me, call me "Alex" so I rarely
react well to someone insisting on calling me by my slave
name.
But I'm not here to talk about how bad the government is,
or how bad corporations are, or how the slave name my
teenage mother gave me turned into a curse, I'm here to
talk about how I got the name "Coyo" and why it means
everything to me.
You see, when my life got ruined by toxic shriekers and
Internet bullies in 2017, I could have changed my name and
created a new identity, started over, people have a short
attention span, right? Well, no. Because no name would have
the history, meaning and significance that "Coyo" would.
And I'm about to tell you why I chose to stick to my true
name, and endure the hate and discrimination that could
come because of it, that arguably I could have avoided had
I simply changed my name and abandoned something
meaningful to me.
My mother once told me this story. This was before I was
born, by a few years. In the rural countryside of Texas,
there was a small town. Deep in the Bible Belt, these
peope were insular, inbred and stuck in their outdated
ways. These were people so backwards, they made Westboro
Baptist Church look modern and intelligent. In this small
Texas town, there was a man named Gerold. Gerold was a bad
man. He owned a lot of land around the town, and by that
means he had influence, almost enough to own the town and
its mayor. Everyone treated him with respect, simply
because he inherited his ranch from better men than him.
On that ranch was a young teenage girl, gangly, lanky,
with her head in the clouds, people in school called her
"space cadet" which was very hurtful. Even though her
constant daydreaming and nose in bodice rippers ended up
leading to neglect of me and enabling abuse
of me, I can't hate her. She was just never suited for
childrearing, that isn't really her fault.
Anyway, one of her daily chores was so walk from the house
before dawn every morning, to milk the goats. The new ram
was very protective and aggressive toward her, obviously
insecure in his dominance and masculinity over the large
herd of female goats.
At some point, and this is the way the story was told to
me, by my mother, a pack of three coyotes, I wasn't told
which was the father, the mother or pups, she was a young
teen, maybe she didn't really know it was a family like
hers, but these coyotes would stalk in the tall grass
between the farm house and where the goats were kept. At
first, she was afraid, coyotes were predators, and while
they normally didn't attack prey larger than themselves,
any animal can be driven to desperation if they were
hungry enough.
They didn't however, it just became something they did,
accompanying her to the goats and back every morning.
Then one day, a young calf of a neighbor's yard was found
dead, and small coyote tracks were found in the blood.
The town was in an uproar, and they all said that coyotes
had attacked and eaten the calf.
A deafening roaring was heard as a gang of rednecks on
pickup trucks and jeeps, toting shotguns invaded the
property, chasing a pack of coyotes. By this point, my mom
had read books on coyotes, and found that coyotes are
scavengers, and the herd the calf was in had a strong herd
instinct, the herd protects itself from predators. There
was no way it was the coyotes, but as my young teenage mom,
no older than 14, tried to talk sense to these rednecks,
the coyotes hid behind the young teen girl, under the
mobile home, in the space underneath huddled and shivering
in terror.
The gang of inbred rednecks fired their shotguns right
past the young girl, at a mobile home with people in it.
My mom said that her mom, my grandmother, doesn't remember
this at all, and denied it ever happened, even though the
master bedroom was right there.
All three coyotes were shot to death, and they died within
feet of my teenage mother and her mother.
Later that morning, my mom found blood and bones on
Gerold's mean old dog, I don't remember what breed he was,
but it was some kind of pit. Now, don't get me wrong,
raised properly most pit mixes are sweet couch potatos,
but they are often selected by a certain kind of person
and raised to be attack dogs out of cruelty, both to the
dog himself and any victims of that dog, and Gerald was
most certainly that kind of person, so it became clear,
that Gerald used his political influence to blame the
innocent coyotes of something he ordered his mean old
attack dog to do out of boredom and cruelty, and murdered
the calf that everyone was so happy and proud about.
After all, nobody else was allowed to have good things and
be happy about things that weren't his. That was Gerald
for you. And there were worse things he did to my mom and
grandma, but that would make this story NSFW and too
depressing, so I'll just leave it at that for now. I will
say that Gerald ISN'T my grandfather, my grandma didn't
even know who the father was when my mom was concieved,
the suspect list was in the double digits, and at the time,
my grandfather was not willing to take the responsibility,
so my grandmother married someone else, but my mom
inherited her bad taste in men from her mother, so they
were always drawn to the worst of the worst.
Anyway, the coyotes were wrongfully accused for something
the powerful politically connected landowner did out of
sheer spite, pettiness and boredom, using his poor dog as
the weapon.
Two years later, my teen mom was motivated by that
incident and how nobody believed her to meet and marry
my father, and had me at age 16. She had to lie to the
hospital due to her age. She was willing to do whatever it
took to escape small town Texas and people like Gerald.
Then, once I was born, aged out of the foster care system,
and returned, and was exploring myself doing some
meditation exercises I got from a site about Wicca, I got
an unusual result, what looked back at me from the mirror
was a black amorphous coyote. I talked to a few
particularly capable psychic friends of mine, I was really
into that kind of stuff back then, and they all said the
same thing. There was this shell around me like an armor,
it was black and stuff and shaped like a coyote. Something
was protecting me.
I have even stranger tales to tell regarding my early
childhood, but this story is long enough already, so
inspired by this strange phenomenon, when I joined EsperNet
IRC, I initially took the name "coyotesong" but it was a
fad at the time to shorten names to 4 character names, and
mine was shortened to "coyo" which ultimately stuck.
On some smaller IRC networks I even went by a single
character name, "C" which I was told was a high prestige
name that generally only IRC opers were allowed to have.
Anyway, I might post more strange tales of mystery that
lead to me solidifying my online persona as a coyote named
Coyo, but for now, that should give you an idea of
why, even if it meant facing hate and discrimination, I
cannot simply change my name.
