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I did! I can’t tell you how many hours I spent shooting craps or playing CeeLow in the stairwells of my building or how many bottles of MD 2020 and night train we drank. Once I started high school I began to cut back on that kind of stuff and spent a lot less time hanging out with the boys from my neighborhood. It was a good thing too… No, she was just a racist piece of shit. It took a lot of control for me not to do something I would later regret. @aka Contrarian I watched the first two games at sports bars and had a good time hanging out with friends and family. During the third game, I was exhausted from hanging out late and drinking the entire weekend before and didn’t even watch game three. I spent the time pulling together the BLK Bestsellers List (an activity. I’m sure I found more interesting than watching the game). While I am rooting for the Knicks I honestly don’t care that much. While I was an athlete and enjoyed playing sports, I’ve never really been a sports fanatic— it is just not in my DNA. It is probably why I’m not into pop culture very much. Speaking of bestsellers lists and pop culture. There was a book that just missed making the adult hardcover non-Fiction category, Live Your Promise: Escape Your Wilderness, Heal Your Pain, So You Can Manifest the Life You Want by Cheyenne Bryant https://aalbc.com/books/9781401998820 I had not heard of the author or book before, but when researching the title, I discovered The Author was the center of a lot of controversy shit, this guy named Toure (who I’ve met) got into a viral argument with her and there are a countless number of videos going in on her being a grifter lying about having a PhD and all sorts of things it was unbelievable the variety and number of people that were creating videos, just talking trash about her. Even the breakfast club had her on their program. While scrolling through that content. I also learned there was a fire storm brewing over Kevin Hart’s roast. Apparently they made a lot of inappropriate joke disrespecting George Floyd, and Cheryl Underwood‘s dead husband; while at the same time cutting jokes at the expense of white people like Melania Trump. Here too there was a tremendous amount of content with everyone and their mother weighing in on the controversy. Kevin Hart was also on the breakfast club defending the roast. It seems like the breakfast clubs business model is interviewing people at the center of controversy. All of this to my mind is contrived, unnecessary, and a colossal waste of time. It’s like a bunch of old maids, getting together and gossiping and talking shit about people and most of the people talking are grown men. I don’t get it. I mean, I do get it. It’s the way a lot of people make money and gain celebrity. This is one of the ways in which I think we were better off 50 years ago when men were incentivize to do things that were more constructive then talking shit about a comedy roast or a Cheyenne Bryant. While we’re on the subject of pop culture, I’m tired of reading about Scott Pelli and the other CBS correspondence who got the boot. They’re getting a bit too, sanctimonious for my taste. These guys have great high, paying high profile jobs, traveled the world met, smart, rich, famous, influential people and did so for decades—boo hoo! They act like losing their jobs is the end of civilization. Trust me, civilization will survive the loss of 60 Minutes.

ProfD If you see a dude with Rasputia... Oh no NOT NORBIT....lol. It's so funny to me because I have a cousin like that. Like that old school song, she can't wait to get in public infront of people and clown on him. Even at family reunions and get-togethers she clowns on him. And it's HIS family! Training to be a fighter doesn't require any more intelligence than being a weightlifter. Just matter of discipline & getting in the gym & repetitions. You said it doesn't require any MORE intelligence, but it does require a DEGREE OF intelligence. A stupid person is unlikely to learn those techniques or appreciate the pay-offs of the hard work, discipline, and practice. Those fake weed smoking, gun-toting wannabe n8gglets could be your distant cousins too. Distant? Some of them are my FIRST cousins! Just the other day one of them got into a fight with his brother-n-law because he came over to his house for a visit and he caught the clown in his garage using his tools trying to hack off his leg tether...lol.

@Del at the risk of being repetitive, the community where I spent my formative years is what shaped my identity and influenced my approach to life. The suburb of Chicago where I was born and raised during the Depression was unique in many ways. It was racially integrated to the extent that Whites, many of whom were Jewish, could and did live anywhere they chose, but because of restrictive convenance regulations, Blacks could only live in a certain area, - not by the railroad tracks surprisingly, but in the middle of town; a little black "island" surrounded by a Caucasian "sea", where the interracial population co-existed and where it was not unusual for Blacks to have white neighbors who didn't flee their homestead when Blacks began moving in. This quaint little village had, overa period of time, become the final destination of Negroes leaving the South seeking a better life via The Great Migration. Although ny father was from Missouri and my mother from Tennessee, most of the slave descendants in my hometown had roots in Mississippi, Alabama. and Georgia. Because Colored and Whites observed an unwritten rule of staying in their own lanes, at that time there was very little racial strife in my town. I always suspected that this was because we Blacks were comfortable and content in our own community which could be described as a carbon copy of its white counterpart, and we were secretly amused by the idea that, in our own special way, we could match the white initiatives when it came to any civic or social undertakings. And we did. No separate but equal scenarios when it came to education, however. Whites and Blacks all attended the same high school, which back then had the reputation of being one of the best in the state. Therefore, an excellent education was ours for the taking and what I learned during my 4 years there, benefitted me throughout the rest of my life. Amongst ourselves,we black residents of this town, also had our own codes and customs. Colorism, for instance, was incidental, superceded by achievement and accomplishment. Those 2 assets were what took priority and gave status, and they always remained at the core of my value system. Nor were we deluded about the plague of the racism that sent our elders fleeing from the South. But we had the luxury of humoring our antagonists. We snickered at their notions of racial superiority and this somehow neutralized them, an approach that I use to this day, arguing on Face Book with MAGAs. Incidently the "we" I refer to, consisted mostly of the circle of people I grew up with during the 1950s, an era often described as being "bland", something that may account for the compromises that defined our lives back then. These folk are all dead now but they remained my friends throughout the years, as we always kept up with each other, always finding things to laugh about, always reminding ourselves of the carefree days of our youth, forever marveling at how we somehow managed to circumvent discrimination, always removed from turmoil which is why I do not claim that my upbringing was typical or ideal . It was, what it was.... I cite all these examples of how growing up where I did, influenced how I later maneuvered through a world where I gradually realized that Life is a crap shoot. Sometimes you get lucky. I am truly a child of the 1950s era. I was very much influenced by the music of those times; both the modern jazz and the luscious melodic ballads and the poetry that was their lyrics. I loved the wry intellectual humor of the comedic satirists popular back then and the film noir movies that always had an ironic twist. The fads and trends that followed temporarily captivated me, but they never replaced my affinity for those idyllic times that first enchanted me. zzzzzzzzzzz

My father & mother. Music & books allowed me to see a world beyond my own environment & expand my knowledge respectively. Life experiences & traveling & meeting & kicking it with different people.😎

More than anything, my parents shaped my views growing up, but after a certain age it was school and reading. My parents were religious and not racist, and I don't recall ever hearing the "N" word from them, but they grew up poor in the South, with separate water fountains and facilities. They held distinct views about minorities, especially Black people. Our humble home was right next to what my parents called a "colored" neighborhood. So I frequently saw colored kids but was not allowed to play with them (and I don't think they wanted to play with me). There was only one colored girl in my high school class of 400. As I became a teenager and exposed to the news on TV and reading, I realized there was something fundamentally wrong with our society. Now that I'm am older white man, I see our country recently going backwards towards more unacceptance and hatred of others, especially minorities. It’s scary. To me, MAGA means pull minorities down or send them home to make some white majority greater. That's one of the reasons I wrote my novel, The Short Happy Life of Wyatt Outlaw. It tells the tragic story of an enslaved man that history wants to forget. The novel is framed with the murderous events that occur in Graham, North Carolina, on February 26, 1870. The atmosphere is thick with political tension and impending violence. Wyatt Outlaw, a Black town commissioner, master carpenter, and Union veteran, is marked for death by the White Brotherhood and KKK. To me, Wyatt Outlaw is a hero who overcame great odds to become successful. To me, our country has made great strides in accepting people who are different, but we still have a ways to go. I hate to see us going backwards. It would be nice if, on our 250th anniversary, we could celebrate for all Americans, and not just for a select group.