What is a Kojoteblau?

A friend asked where my name came from. The short version? I used CoyoteBlue back in the days of the personal sites and LiveJournal. I started trying to use it in other places, but I found it wasn’t as original as I’d thought – some sites already had another “Coyote Blue” registered. I needed something that was unique to me. A quick translation to German gave me Kojoteblau, and I’ve run with it since. Any online search for that is going to find me, for better or for worse. In some cases I lost the base account (like when I deleted Facebook but my Kojoteblau insta got killed in the process) and that’s why in some places I’m @KojoteblauX.

Why the coyote, though? Some Native American cultures tell stories about Coyote. Sometimes he’s a trickster that just seems bent on causing trouble. In other stories, he breaks the rules but with the best of intentions, to help the people. I may pretend that my personality matches up a little to that, but I think that would be giving myself far too much credit.

So here’s the story. When I was young and my parents divorced, my mom stayed in Los Angeles but dad remarried and moved to a little town in the desert called Lake Los Angeles. Most people in this rural community have dogs; “outdoor dogs” that have dog houses and guard chickens and such.

The desert was also pretty heavily populated by coyotes. Los Angeles has coyotes, too, like many places in America — but in the silence of a desert night, the howl of a coyote carries for miles. On many quiet nights, you’ll hear the lonely howl of a single coyote, a wail in the distance. All of the yard dogs will hear this wail, and respond with howls of their own. One lonely plea from the desert, and an entire town will fill with a cacophony of howls as every dog in every yard yields to instinct and tries to respond.

I no longer have the original poem I wrote one night while visiting my dad, but the gist was

Alone with my thoughts, I yearn for a friend, someone to commiserate and share my pains and dreams

I call out

So many responses, you want to help, you want to answer, you want to join

Your intent is sincere, your desire is pure, but you don’t know, you can’t understand

Though you want to

A few years later, someone said I reminded them of a coyote, and I thought of that poem. I’ve been a coyote, the Kojoteblau, ever since.