What this site is about?
Ostensibly it is about relationships. From brief encounters, torrid affairs, to loves that last forever. I hope to bring a little perspective, a bit of clarity.
Who am I?
No one important. Just a bored cubicle worker who’s lived a fair bit of life. I will never live up to the image of me you have in your head. Just another ghost in the machine, a sad sack punching out TPS reports during the day and small time adventures at night.
Should you believe me? Should you trust me?
Of course not. I’m some crank on the internet. I probably live in my mother’s basement for all you know.
The words though…if they strike a chord in you, if they reflect your experience, if they make sense to you – that’s what you should believe.
So how should this site be used?
The primary value is entertainment…but for the clever, there are ideas, thoughts, techniques, and philosophies that I have amassed over the past ~`15 years that can be understood, repurposed for you own life, and then tested.
Who is West Indian Archie?
The bartenders would let me know which among the regular customers were mostly “fronts,” and which really had something going; which were really in the underworld, with downtown police or political connections; which really handled some money, and which were making it from day to day; which were the
The latter were extremely well known about Harlem, and they were feared and respected. It was known that if upset, they would break open your head and think nothing of it. These were old- timers, not to be confused with the various hotheaded, wild, young hustlers out trying to make a name for themselves for being crazy with a pistol trigger or a knife. The old heads that I’m talking about were such as “Black Sammy,” “Bub” Hewlett, “King” Padmore and “West Indian Archie….
….West Indian Archie had finished time in Sing Sing not long before I came to Harlem. But my boss’s wife had hired him not just because she knew him from the old days. West Indian Archie had the kind of photographic memory that put him among the elite of numbers runners. He never wrote down your number; even in the case of combination plays, he would just nod. He was able to file all the numbers in his head, and write them down for the banker only when he turned in his money. This made him the ideal runner because cops could never catch him with any betting slips.
I’ve often reflected upon such black veteran numbers men as West Indian Archie. If they had lived in another kind of society, their exceptional mathematical talents might have been better used. But they were black….
(From the Autobiography of Malcolm X )