Enter The Michael Cohn Society

I have a common name, but only on a few occasions have I met any of those who share it with me. And yet, what with me not being the only Michael Cohn to have a significant web presence, I’m constantly reminded that the others are out there. They come up in Google Alerts and searches. Once, I even got an email from someone asking me if I was the same Michael Bennett Cohn she’d met at a convention, and I wasn’t. (2MBC: Write me. She sounds hot.)

Back when I was a kid, i.e. before/during the formation of the Internet, knowing that others surely shared my name was not strange or discomfiting. Just as there are probably alien civilizations on other worlds, the prospect of other Michael Cohns (Michaels Cohn?) vaguely intrigued me, but didn’t bother me. I also wasn’t sure who I was back then. So why not others like me? Who knew what the universe had in store? Maybe some of us were backups.

But now that I’m in my 30s and I more or less know who I am, I decided that the situation was not sustainable. Were all of us MC’s going to simply drift through life, never attempting any sort of reconciliation? (Or maybe the term should merely be “conciliation”?) Was there not some implicit coming-together, or at least connecting, that was waiting to happen? Or, taking the other view, would it be better if we stayed as far apart from each other as possible, pursuing separate but arguably parallel destinies, like Will Smith and that blonde girl in Hancock? Even if that was the most desirable outcome, would we not be better off getting in touch just enough to coordinate our movements, avoiding collisions? And yet, wasn’t there still the possibility that to even begin making those connections, to even start the process, would be to start a boulder rolling down a hill? Would we perhaps be sucked into an unavoidable Battle Royale, like in Highlander, or, more aptly, like all the incarnations of Jet Li in the schlocky, but nevertheless diverting, The One?

Eventually, I couldn’t stand it. Action had to be taken. About two years ago, after haggling that had been going on for years in itself, I spent over a thousand dollars to acquire michaelcohn.com. (Don’t bother looking; there’s nothing there.) I found that owning the domain wasn’t doing me much good, though I dreamed of a “Michael Cohn Disambiguation Page” in the tradition of Jessamyn West’s Jessamyn Clearinghouse. And then, I felt, I would become a sort of Michael Cohn Prime, acknowledging all the rest, while validating my own significance relative to the others by being the hub of the wheel.

With Facebook, I’ve found a great way to pull them all together. Enter The Michael Cohn Society, a FB group with membership open only to Michael Cohns. The group was easy to create, but assimilating the members has been more cumbersome. You can’t invite someone to a group if you are not already friends with that person (although they can ask to join on their own initiative, even if the two of you are not friends). So I did a search for my own name, and then offered friendship to everyone who came up. In the friend request note, I pasted a paragraph I’d written about what I was trying to accomplish. Then I had to go through and invite all the Michael Cohns to the group, except a few helpful selves who took the initiative and requested to join on their own.

The whole process took me over an hour. It was tedious, but oddly fulfilling. I was doing something that had meaning, sort of. I was taking on my role as Michael Cohn Prime, sort of.

So far, I’m not sure what the Society’s agenda will be. The first MC who joined the Society is a web designer, and he wants to help me do something cool with michaelcohn.com… maybe turn it into a social network. Which would be strange, but might actually be a good idea. We might have to all use nicknames, or something.

On the downside, I’ve taken to turning off updates for all the other Michael Cohns in my Facebook feed. The constant stream of “Micahel Cohn is doing this” and “Mike Cohn is doing that” got to be a bit hard to read. I mean, stop putting pressure on me, you know? But maybe, like the Christian Bale character in The Prestige, I should take comfort in the fact that other aspects of myself are out there, living bits of life that I may not be experiencing directly, but for which I am still, in a way, racking up a sort of cosmic credit.