James, I was thinking, that with all of these handles online that people use to protect themselves from doxing, you started it first by using nick names to protect criminals.

How did you get started and do you have any clues for making cool and authentic aliases?

-Mescaline Franklin

Thank you, Mister Franklin!

As Jeremy Bentham has noted, I seem to stumble like the pied piper of societal dysfunction ahead "on the cutting edge of societal devolution."

When I began writing The Fighting Edge, I had a need for a nickname for three criminals:

Ronbone, whose real name was Rob Mallory, a close friend with deep gnawing ghosts, who killed himself in a Maryland State park about 10 years ago. This guy had so many nick names, including Sasquatch and Robear, that I just picked from the menu.

Next came Banno, who is also now deceased, who I did not want to get busted for leaving a dead dindu in a basement stairwell on Charles Street.

His name was Joe I. The last name is Italian, but he has four surviving children whose privacy I would preserve.

His nick name was Joe Bananas, because he was crazy. He would sometimes get high and drink beer while cleaning his pistols and call up the 700 Club and tell them that Jesus had come back and that he was performing fellatio on him and asked if he should send him over when he was done with him. I just needed something that sounded masculine that I would connect to Bananas, so Banno it was.

The third one was Bubba Crank, who had, by his own admission, "shot tree niggas in da head...en done some time fo some odda shit." I do not know if he is still alive. I liked him a lot, even though he threatened Ronbone and scared the hell out of him. He looked exactly like NFL great Bubba Smith, and was a crank user, before crack hit Baltimore, hence Bubba Crank.

When it comes to real criminals all I need is a handle that a can relate to them and gives some measure of their essence to the reader.

As for your someday infamous moniker I wanted to paint an incongruent picture of a free thinking book lover with dreams of getting in on the ground floor of a new nation and is so intense that it's scary when he smiles and he paces like a caged leopard. The latter brought to mind a mescaline freak who used to work the ice cream section at the store where I was night captain in the early 1980s. He actually volunteered to work the ice cream, which everyone hated. And when he was done—as he worked at a fast pace, sweating bullets [The black clerks called him "Supaman."], he would pace at the end of the aisle and head back to the ice cream case while we filed up into the lunch room. I found out later that he hid his mescaline behind the Light & Lively Heavenly Hash Ice Cream Substitute—the worst seller in the case, sure that it would not be uncovered. I even thanked him for dusting off the snow from the carton and he gave me that "I'm supposed to be happy even though I'm thinking about biting your throat out" smile that you occasionally flash at random, terrified black folks, as if you're being diplomatic by showing your Neanderthal fangs.

That's about all the naming mud I can get out from between the ears right now.