The "Old Block" Tells All.

  He always had good intentions. He wanted to be a good man, father, and husband more than anything in the world. However, the world would not let him be. In college, the girls came on to him like flies on stink! They were so sweet, “Me gustas, hombre,” some sweet-talking Latina would say. “Gusto kita, lalaki”, he would hear from a foreign exchange student. The unsolicited daily female attention he received, went straight to his big and little heads, twisting his self-made reality from the good guy path he pursued to the passively active playboy path. Parked cars and empty office buildings became his shameless playgrounds, where he spent many hours accepting the wanton favors of loveless ladies who easily turned his head with up-skirt glances, stolen touches, and secret smooches that attested to his furtive, manly magnetism. After a time, he did not care how or why he was given this surreptitious man-power over luscious ladies, he merely embraced his gift and shared the “love” with

The abnormal combination of retirement, black-out curtains, tinted window shades, and advanced age gave birth to the W.T.I.I. Syndrome! You know you are afflicted with this dread disease when you wake up at all times of day or night, and ask out loud, “What time is it?” For me, it started about four years ago when my wife, (CMB), and I moved into our pseudo-affordable, senior get-away apartment, on the shady side of Las Vegas. We moved from Sunny San Diego so we could afford to buy a loaf of bread, and still pay our rent! Vegas living, (although considered our last resort for retirement living), has been economically consistent, and very good to us. However, the summertime “sun-sations” blast a laser-intensive hole in your cool zones and your cooling bill! Thus the shaded window screens and black-out curtains! Our apartment is so dark that the photo-sensitive nightlights never go off! (Not even in the middle of the day!), “Just the way we like it!” Technology solves a myriad of s

 No, it is not Angela Davis! And no, she is not a famous eclectic singer. Her claim to fame is not what she did but what was done to her. We shall address her as "Lady" for anonymity and privacy. My Sister-In-Law, Lady was not the most beautiful girl in her family, (but you could not have told her that), nor was she the most intelligent of all the sisters born in her rather large, southern family. Lady grew up in a peculiar time and place where old-school ideology met new-school liberalism. (The scars on her back reflected the anger and misguided love of those entrusted with her care and upbringing!) Had she been born on the West Coast, under a more structured and caring parental regime, Lady might have been a scholar or a famous activist for her people and their cause, but life had other plans for Lady! Abuse to her was synonymous with love and eventually became the only language she understood. It shaped and guided her choice of men, and permeated her corrupted sense of soc