When I was 20, working as an apprentice embalmer, deputy coroner, and mortician, I thought deeply about death, and what is important in life.

When I speak about the predatory nature of dating ("getting laid", "catching a man"), I am speaking from experience; my wife literally caught me with her pussy, as if I was a fish biting a baited hook. At 21, on my wedding night, I asked my new wife, "What is love?", and spent the next 50 years searching for, and eventually finding, an answer. When my marriage failed after 17 years, I realized that I had not formed properly as a man, and hit the road as a wanderer, searching for manhood, and finding it at construction sites and on streets throughout America. My own father had lost his dad when he was 14, so he could not pass on the basics of manhood to me because he had never learned them himself. Most of what I know about being a man, I learned, not from my father, but from construction men and, in particular, from Black American men. As a street speaker, my most popular sign said, "BLACK AMERICANS ARE THE BEST AMERICANS". Most of what I know about race, I learned from face to face experience of the kind that a man can acquire only by hitting the road and seeking it.