According to the nice domaintools folks, I first registered uncronopio.org on 5 February 2002. That is eight years with a name that started as a play on Julio Cortazar’s Cronopios and Famas (Historias de Cronopios y de Famas en español). It was an easy choice, one of my favorite books and the chance to make some sort of statement: I was un cronopio (a cronopio).
In the short stories cronopios are ‘greenish, frizzly, wet objects’ but, more importantly, they are free spirits. They are what we many of us think as an ideal: creative, unconventional, etc. The stories also include famas (planning all the time, judgmental) and esperanzas (‘hopes’ in Spanish, non-creative, dull).
But although we all play with the idea of being cronopios, in fact not all of us can. Sometimes it is a matter of temperament, of being scared or the weirdness of that unassailable reality. It is like the idea of being a superheroe, appealing in the surface but nor for everyone, even if you do happen to have some super powers.
I feel the need to move on from that. Some days I like to act cronopio-like, but many other days I just want to be plain me. It is time for a change. It will take a while to move things around, change software, scrub all the corners and write a few new things from scratch.
I can hear Jorge Tellier’s words from Los trenes de la noche (1963):
Pero debo dejar el pueblo
como quien lanza una colilla al suelo:
después de todo, ya se sabe bien
que en cualquier parte la vida es demasiado cotidiana.
Un cronopio no more.