signatures.

There seems to be an expectation amongst the world’s human population that early in our lives each should select one certain way to sign his or her name and then never deviate from it. If at the crucial era of decision Julie decides to insert an obscenely large loop into her “J,” well, then that giant loop she is expected to maintain to her very grave.

But the problem is that I never agreed to keep the same signature for the duration of my life. When I signed the back of my first library card at around age five, or my school ID as a teenager, or my driver’s license at age sixteen, there was no disclosure provided to me, no document to indicate that the signature I then used would serve as the standard by which all of my future signatures would be measured. In what government building lobby is the single signature for life regulation posted? In what free and fair election was this system voted into law? Never do i recall being asked if I was amenable to these terms. Never.

So you know what I say? Screw convention and social expectation. My signature is my signature. If one day I want it to be half print and half cursive and the next day I want it to increase in size with each progressive letter until the final “N” in Hardison takes up a full half of the sheet of paper, then, by goodness, that is my prerogative.

The far reach of this unofficial but much enforced protocol has caused my rebellious juices to stir. For years now I’ve gone out of my way to not only frequently modify my signature, but to change it beyond recognition. Eventually, I started signing receipts with the names of my favorite notable personalities. It was all in hopes that whatever establishment I had patronized happened to employ some individual whose job it was to filter through each receipt for accounting or other purposes. He’d be sitting in a dimly lit and tiny room in the restaurant’s kitchen, just a few feet from the deep fryer, the stink of grease forever saturating his flesh. He’d shuffle through stacks and stacks of crinkled white receipts and finally see in blue ink the name “Michael Jordan.” The employee’s heart rate would rise and his mind would race as he wondered if the Michael Jordan had come to this lowly restaurant and, somehow, he’d missed it. Think of the unrealized photo op, the autographed napkin that would never be. What rotten luck.

The next phase involved signing the names of dead people. For a period of about a year Abraham Lincoln, Sunny Bono, Karl Marx, The Linbergh Baby, The Beatles, Henry VIII, Hitler’s girlfriend (I would have put her actual name had I known it), and Waldo of the Where’s Waldo book series (I'm sorry to have to be the one to inform you that he's dead) each frequented various restaurants and gas stations in the Phoenix metropolitan area’s East Valley. After that method grew stale, I began to just draw pictures. Boats mostly.

After multiple years and a host of different receipt-signing techniques, I think I’ve found something that I can stick with as my signature—the one with which I can forget my roving ways and settle down for good. It’s odd because the whole thing started as a rebellion against the implied expectation of fidelity to a single signature. But now I do it not because I must, but because I like the signature I’ve chosen for myself. Here's how it goes: a scraggily gas station clerk slides the receipt across the counter, past the rack of jerky and king-sized candy bars. With leashed pen in hand, I take it and, using up far more than the allotted space provided, jot in large, all-capital letters my patented signature and casually slide the slip of paper back across the counter top. As he rotates to deposit the receipt in the undertray of the register, he cannot help but notice the giant scrawl I've produced. His brow crinkles dramatically. He looks at it again, more deeply this time, to make certain that the words read as they first seemed to. They do: "YOUR WORST NIGHTMARE."

The receipt still in his hands, the drawer still open, he looks back at me as I stand, all stoic, and cracking my knuckles before the backdrop of innumerable Baked Lays and extreme-looking energy drinks displays. I gaze at him through squinted eyes, my shoulders flexed in subtle threat, and nodding my head ever so slightly, as if to say, “Yes. You read correctly. Your worst nightmare.”