It started as a joke. My friend decided he was going to annoy me and started calling me Peaches. This was a long time ago when we were goofing around in our twenties. It didn’t really take hold. It was a balancing act. My friend was persistent and he knew how to push my buttons. If I protested too loudly, the nickname was going to stick like bugs to sap. My girlfriend at the time loved it, so she picked it up. I just kind of ignored it and rolled my eyes ever so slightly when I heard it, as if to suggest I was surrounded by children.
Overtime, my friend was really the only one who kept calling me Peaches. He’s a very good friend and we have spent a lot of time around each other so I just let him call me that and explained to others that my friend was a juvenile and I was unsure why I put up with him.
One day I bought a CD by Nina Simone and listened to a song called four women. It is a great song telling the story of four black women in America. The last woman is pissed and in the last line of the last stanza Nina screams “THEY CALL ME PEACHES!!!!” I played it for my friend and from then on I embraced the nickname. Today, all my cronies (best friends in the world) call me Peaches.
I first started using it online while playing an internet game called RealmWars. It was hosted by a guy named Bit who site was called PlanetBang. I was there too much playing an addictive game and avoiding life’s responsibilities. It was fun though and very interesting watching this online community come together and evolve. I was one of the older players and, at first, Peaches took a lot of crap. But, people soon learned that Peaches was a good ally and could whip ass on you in the game. Peaches took his share of ass-whooping, too. When I was asked about my name (at first, people always assumed I was a chick, and thought it was cool I was playing this war game), I’d started explaining about the 6’3” tattooed 350lb Hell’s Angel Member everyone called “Tiny.” That’s who Peaches was. It was a little exaggeration, but it fit for Realm Wars.
Eventually, I had to stop playing this game or be locked into the virtual world without friends and family forever. So, I unhooked the internet from my house and stopped playing. Then, I began posting on a political blog called Talkleft.com as Peaches and a new personality was born. Peaches is basically me. Most of his ideas are my own. However, Peaches goes off half-cocked a lot, although he attempts to be fair. For the most part, Peaches is a lot smarter than I. I mean, he surprises me. He is all over the place at Talkleft and sometimes I find his ideas difficult to pin down. Sometimes he sounds like a conservative and sometimes a liberal, but he insists on identifying only as a liberal. Well, again, this sounds like me. But, I tell you, in all honesty, Peaches is a hell of a lot smarter than I am.
