The Greatest American Zero (Celsius)

Believe it or not, I was asked a few weeks back by my roommate, who is a woman who likes women, whether or not men ever have a cold penis. I actually had to think about it. I mean her reasoning was that men always complain about freezing their balls off, but never about having a cold cock. I literally paused for a while and realized I have never complained to my buddies “man, my snake is shivering”, or said “I’ve got an icy icicle”, or even nervously told my doctor “my bishop is turning blue.” I mean you would have thought I would have at one time told a girl I was dating, on a cold winter day, “God, my little Fink is frigid”.

After a while of deep thought, I couldn’t really come up with specific memories of when my penis was cold. I mean, my fingers get cold every time I touch a drink at a bar. My feet are cold during the winter time in bed and it usually takes a couple of minutes of canoodling, massaging, spooning, caressing, undressing, and probably any other fun thing that you can do with a woman that ends in “ing” for my body to really warm up. The fact that my ears are painfully cold in the winter time is the only reason I wear a hat (I look like a 12 year old in a hat due to youthful face and tiny ears). I guess you can chalk it up to the male body, like any other dumb animal’s body, having built in defense mechanisms. When we are outside in freezing conditions (or if we are thrown into a lake in the summertime as an eleven year old by counselors at a Jewish sleep-away camp who are drunk with power and boredom) the dreaded shrinkage occurs.

Ah yes, shrinkage, the act of the penis shouting “help me, I’m melting” during drastic changes in temperature or when surrounded by water for long periods of time. I’m sure shrinkage exists to protect the penis from the elements and not just because there is a God and he does indeed smoke weed. Ah shrinkage- the physical act that inspired a popular toy in the late ‘70s and ‘80s- the Shrinky Dink. Even the name sounds like shrink dick.

Shrinky Dinks were these plastic sheets that you and your mom would put in the oven and they would shrink down to hard plastic, but retain its original shape. This might be a nurture reason for boys growing up not naturally inclined for cooking. Watching the plastic shrink like that in the oven might have subconsciously reminded us of our already tiny penises getting smaller when we took our forced baths. The Shrinky Dinks (great name for a band) came in images of popular characters of the time like Superman, E.T. or possibly “The Fonze”. Actually, Fonzie is the only man in history to have never experienced shrinkage. That’s how he was able to satisfy the Polaskey twins, Pinky Tuscadaro and thwart the “Malachi Crunch” (another great name for a band) all in one night. Not only did his dick never shrink but it could probably start a ‘57 Chevy and switch the song on the jukebox to “Blueberry Hill” with one quick pelvic thrust.

I remembered the conversation between me and my roommate this past week as I walked home from work in 17 degree weather. I felt the sensation of not only being smacked in the face by the frigid air, but my tallywacker felt like it had been wacked by a popsicle. Anyone in the northeast knows that it’s been unusually cold this past week. I have a ten minute walk home, and it felt so cold that I was literally muttering ”Oh my god. Are you fucking kidding me” out loud while walking through the wind. New York is a walking city, and you know its freezing when you take momentary refuge in the a supermarket on the way home just to warm up your ears and you end up grabbing a pack of gum and a box of Cracklin’ Oat Bran.

On the walk, all I could think about was the fact that my penis was indeed cold and that cold penises mean frostbitten toes. Luckily I have a heat pole in my room which spews out steam that makes my room dry, but on nights like this, it was exactly what I needed to raise my body temperature. The next morning, before I layered up like the little brother in “A Christmas Story”, I was taking a shower and thinking. I get some of my most random thoughts in the shower, usually when I’m singing bad ‘80s songs. Now, I know that I sing horribly out of tune as I’ve been told by my roommate on many an occasion, but to me the acoustics of the shower turn my voice into Bryan Adams, the year into 1985 and a need to express my memories of the summer of '69.

This morning, after almost a week of freezing my ass, balls, feet, ears, Adam’s apple, and finally my penis off, a song came to me. It was the theme song to “The Greatest American Hero” and new lyrics spoke through my mouth as if they had been given to me by the same aliens who gave William Katt his suit. I toweled off quickly and went on Youtube with the song fresh in my head and played the video while matching up my own lyrics to the song. Unfortunately, unlike the fleeting cold sensation in my penis that day, the theme song to the Greatest American Hero is stuck in my head like a bad cold that I can’t quite shake.



Here is my version of the Greatest American Hero theme song. For those of you old enough to remember the show, this should bring back some fine memories of a time when a superhero could have a dorky suit and a blond afro and still be cool.

The Greatest American Zero (Celsius)
Lyrics by Think Fink.


Look at what’s happened to my balls
I can hardly feel them myself
Suddenly I’m starting to look like a girl
It should’ve been somebody else

Believe it or not I have a cold penis
It does not want to hang so freee
It’s shrinking fast in the frigid, cold air
It’s inside of meeee
Believe it or not it’s in meeee


Looks like the chill of a cold day
Hit me and made my balls blue
Breaking me out of the mood I was in,
Making me one freezing sterile Jew.


Believe it or not I have a cold penis
It does not want to hang so freee
It’s shrinking fast in the frigid, cold air
It’s inside of meeee
Believe it or not it’s in meeee

Why can’t I peee?
Believe it or not it’s in meeeee.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9Q3orQhEcA

Don’t Cut Down the Nyets Just Yet.

I just read that Mikhail Prokhov, the Russian billionaire has just reached an agreement with Brett Ratner and the ownership of the New Jersey Nets basketball team to help fund their Brooklyn arena and take over controlling ownership ship of the team. As one of six Nets fans who live in New York City, I am excited about the team getting an owner who is a passionate sports fan and has the money to spend to make the team better. That said, the first thing that came to mind after hearing this is what Russian comic Yakov Smirnoff would think of this news.

Yakov Smirnoff ,whose popularity is as connected to the 80s as Steve Guttenberg, Mr. Belvedere and that #5 robot from “Short Circuit”, owed his career to Mikhail Gorbachev’s mid 80s Glasnost era of openness and Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire” rhetoric which helped eventually bring down the Berlin Wall. It also ended the need for Smirnoff’s social commentary on Soviet society in the form of 1950's style “Borscht Belt” jokes. Smirnoff’s popularity may seem ridiculous and his material may appear to be outdated now, but back in the 80s , we couldn’t get enough of him and some other WTF performers of the day, like Howie Mandell(back when he had the jew-fro and the hospital glove on his head), Boy George(back when he looked like a woman and not Darth Vader after the unmasking in Jedi) and Jim J. Bullock( back when obviously gay actors had to play asexual neighbors on sit-coms that would rather hang out with a father who draws cartoons while wearing a hand puppet than his two beautiful twin daughters who wear nothing but short shorts.)

So, in honor of Yakov Smirnoff, ThinkFink hails the end of the ineffective Ratner regime and welcomes the new era of Glasnost in Brooklyn. I’m sure in 3 years, Smirnoff might be persuaded to dust his old act out of moth balls and do a tour of NBA arenas around the country. I can see him at the Staples Center performing before a Nets-Lakers game and it might go something like this:

“Thank you Los Angeles, you’re a wonderful crowd. Let me be the first person to say, Let's Go Nyets. What a country we live in! In America, you watch basketball players on TV. In Brooklyn, the basketball players watch you on TV. What a country you have in America! Back in Brooklyn, it takes four hours to wait on line for the bathroom at a Nyet game. In America, you eat hot dogs. In Brooklyn, dogs eat you. I was so thrilled to meet the starting point guard for the Brooklyn Nyets: Devon Denisovitch. I think this season the Nyets have the teamwork to make the collective unit complete its government assigned task.”

I had planned on ending this essay with the previous line and then I figured I would google Yakov Smirnoff just to see what he was doing with his life now. I’d like to picture him living with Paul Hogan and Mr. T in a large house in Miami where they argue over whose turn it is to do the dishes. Paul Hogan would hold up a piece of cutlery and go” You call that a clean knife.” Mr. T would grunt and go “Hmmm. That’s not a knife. That’s my salmon slicer. I use it to slice my smoked salmon. You know I love my nova and cream cheese on a bagel every morning. I pity the fool who can’t appreciate a good nosh. Mmmm.” Then Yakov would smile and say “ In Russia, salmon does not swim up stream. You swim up stream to cross the Bering Strait. How do you think I came to America.” And then they would all laugh and Paul Hogan would point out that they have a washing machine as they continue to laugh. I assumed that they would occasionally hop in their van or maybe a boat and solve mysteries or maybe go back in time and “put right what once went wrong”.

As crazy as my “Dream-On” like sit-com saturated thoughts may have been, Yakov Smirnoff has actually been in Branson,MO since 1992. He opened up a theatre and has been performing to a packed house ever since. Yakov Smirnoff went from Red Square to being a red-neck and I think that’s unbelievably perfect. He wouldn’t even have had to to change his material that much. “I love the country out here in Branson. If a giant rat scurries across your property you can shoot it. In New York City, giant rat shoot you.”

I hope the Nets get the funding for their stadium in Brooklyn and the deal with Mikhail Prokhov is finalized or else I might actually get to see Yakov Smirnoff perform before their game when they start the 2011 season as the Branson Nats.

The Night is Shifty or Happy Trees Done Dirt Cheap

I went to a birthday party for my friend’s two year old twins last Sunday. It made me momentarily re-evaluate the course my life has taken thus far(I do this a few times a day) when my friend who is my age has a birthday party for his kids and when I got the e-vite the first thought that came into my head was how it’s going to be hard to wake up before 9 a.m. on a Sunday morning.

In defense of my apparent laziness and seemingly twenty-five year old guy lifestyle(I’m in my 30’s), even though I do still go out drinking on the weekends , it is my night job that has altered my body clock. It’s gotten to the point that even on nights where I don’t work or when I get home before 12 a.m., I have become programmed to race the moon to sleep when I get home as I am wired and no one in my social universe is up to hang out or talk to after work. It’s a bizarro-world way to live your life that usually only emergency room nurses, people who work from home, astronauts and adult, out-of-work,daytime stoners usually experience.

Sometimes I’ll go on facebook at like 3 a.m. and I’ll actually see that I currently have no friends that are online and available to chat(including West Coast friends) and I’ll hear a whirling breeze against my window and look over my shoulder for a tumble weed to go tumbling by me in my fifth floor walk-up bedroom. So, instead of getting home and going to sleep by two in the morning, I end up doing non-productive things like reading about the Mets’ woes online, skimming through personal ads on Craigslist and watching the final hour of The Perfect Storm at 4 a.m. just because I’ve never seen the whole movie(it was kind of like Titanic, except without the happy ending.)

I realize that by extending my nights all I’m doing is shortening my days, which isn’t a good way to find another job. The only positive to getting out of of work after midnight, besides the short lines at Duane Reade is the people watching on my walk home. Every once in a while besides the various random drunk people that always seem to be staggering alone on third avenue in Murray Hill on a Sunday night, I will have the random encounter with the prostitutes that seem to occasionally leave their forbidden zone (which stretches from Broadway to Lexington Ave. in the upper twenties) and enter the suburban stretch that is third avenue.

They look kind of like lost puppies without their pimps as they realize that most twenty-somethings who live off of that avenue can meet someone at the Joshua Tree or other not-so-cleverly named bars in the area as it is not as deserted as Lexington Avenue is at night and therefore not ideal for their line of sales. I have had a few brief interactions with hookers in my area before and I was surprised and impressed that some of them now have business cards that they hand out to potential clients. I recall one industrious lady of the night used the Helvetica font and had a cool logo of a hotdog sliding into a bun.

One night a street walker told me to walk on the other side of the street after she realized I wasn't going to rent her for the hour and she thought I was hurting her business by walking near her. I obliged her request but it seemed odd considering A. she wasn't getting any business anyway on a residential sidestreet filled with people sleeping in their brownstone apartments, and B. I was walking my dog at the time.

You can’t really tell a prostitute nowadays from how they dress due to the fact that most 24 year old girls pretty much dress the same way. The difference is if you suddenly slow down while walking on a street late at night on the weekends a hooker will approach you and smile and a regular girl with a short skirt and heels will bump into you while crying into their cell phone. God, I wish it was the other way around.

I do seem to have occasional eureka moments of creativity at night, whether they stem from me staring at the way my dog is sleeping next to me on the bed and coming up with a perfect ad for match.com for my portfolio or switching channels from a Showtime soft porn to become momentarily engrossed in something like Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium and realizing that the line “We seem to have a nervous slinky” is as brilliant a line and a concept as there can be in a movie that is set in a toy store that comes to life(actually, that would work in most soft porns as well). (1)


I have recently finished my copywriting portfolio and am ready to take on the world of advertising. I can’t wait to get paid for coming up with ideas and work as part of a team to create advertising campaigns that will lead to me winning awards, getting a promotion, crafting a life, meeting my wife, working too late, buying a home, worrying about bills, sleeping with pills, getting burnt out of the city and moving to L.A. , working even later hours before calling it a day, going on on my first book tour and having an affair, coming home to find my wife is no longer there, feeling down and feeling blue, feeling like a waste of a jew, bumping into my one true soul mate, having a second chance at fate, doing an exercise informercial with my dad, unexpectedly starting the next big fad, looking young at forty-five, and loving every minute of being alive. Or, I could try writing for an online magazine, but really, who knows where a job in that unstable industry will take you.

It could take a while to start my career with this whole recession thing going on, so taking any other day job would definitely help end my nighttime addiction. The only good thing about being single and living paycheck-to-paycheck in a recession is that you don’t really have to change your lifestyle that much. It’s not like I now need to cut back from two vacations a year to one, or sell my villa in France for a share at the Jersey shore. In fact, most people have actually begun living more like me. Sure doing your own laundry in the city sucks, but it saves you around forty bucks(sorry, I had one more rhyme left in me.)

At the birthday party for my friend’s kids, they had a singer whose job it was to sing to a room filled with two-year olds and their parents, who after a year and a half of watching Dora the Explorer cartoons, were numb to all things goofy and Disney. The singer was dancing back and forth with a guitar and swinging his hips violently as if he had just drank six red bulls and experienced seven flags of fun before showing up. He performed with a constant Joker-like smile that only overly-medicated schizophrenics and people who entertain toddlers possess.

As I stood in the back of the room of the party with my friends, talking sports and checking for any cute moms, I observed the man singing with glee to the kids and gained a momentary sense of glee myself in thinking there was a guy with a worse job than my night one. Until I saw the cute mom slip him her number at the end of the party, which broke the illusion that he was gay , but made me think he must either be a serial killer or a severe alcoholic.

While watching him perform I was able to somewhat decipher what he was singing about. I believe he was singing “Happy Trees, Happy Trees, Happy, Happy ,Happy Trees . Who wants to climb a happy tree? Have you ever seen a happy bee? They make really sweet honey.” The two year olds were dancing and bopping their heads like those flowers with sunglasses that were popular in the early 90's that shook back and forth when put next to a speaker. As he was singing I realized that this guy doesn't need to be singing about "Happy Trees". He could easily be singing “Crack. It’s whack. It’s whack, it’s whack, it’s whack. I sold the TV for more smack and my wife’s not coming back." Or, even better, “Beat on the brat with a baseball bat, Oh yeah, Oh yeah Uh, oh."

Well, I guess I’m not the only one in this economy who is doing a job that is more 5-to-9 than 9-to-5, and I’m sure the toddler party singer also aspires to be maximizing his skill set on a grander scale. To become a star in his chosen industry. I’m sure just like I will one day soon be creating ads for an advertising agency, he will be working the really big arenas. I’m talking the Woodcliff Lake Hilton or if he has the right connections, Tavern on the Green. I’m talking the Bar Mitzvah circuit.

The Bar Mitzvah circuit has to be the dream job of child party entertainers. Forget performing in dive bars, you can make more cash in one day singing in front of Grandma Sylvia than in a month of playing clubs in the east village. You just have to keep 13 year old Seth Weinstein and his friends dancing and happy and you can ride the wave of good parent reviews all the way to a new condo in the Upper West Side. I’m sure he could put himself on the path to success with some new business cards. I happen to think a sharp font and an photoshopped image of a rabbi breakdancing would really stand out. But what do I know? It’s 4 a.m. and I’m awake, the dog is asleep and the moon is right on my tail.



1. True story. When I used to work as a set production assistant on independent films in New York during the golden era of NY independent films, otherwise known as the late '90s, I somehow ended up working for two weeks on a film with Marilyn Chambers called “Marilyn Chambers’ Desire”. This was a soft porn, but the sex was simulated and it was basically made to end up on Skinemax. Now for those of you who do not remember the late, great Marilyn Chambers, she became famous because she starred in “Behind the Green Door”, which was to the porn industry in the 70‘s what “The Wizard of Oz” was to colorized films. It is quite bizarre to hang out at the craft service table eating chips and dip with top-less stripper/actresses. The movie was only memorable because it had the greatest line of porn dialogue ever written down (I somehow doubt Marilyn improvised it).
A man complains to Marilyn ”I have a case of acute angina” and Marilyn says ”You should see mine.” Although Marilyn delivered the line in perfect May West form, it took the male actor around four takes to pronounce angina properly. It was a surreal, Living in Oblivion/indie film moment in a movie that did not warrant the description of "indie" or even "film."

Wrong Turn Clyde

I once climbed into a giant barrel of monkeys on a college dare and was instantly frozen in fear. If it wasn't for my accidental discovery that monkeys love the taste of CornNuts (apparently even more than skinny Jews), I would have been torn apart faster than a Wonka Bar by Augustus Gloop.

Now the reason there was a barrel of monkeys on a college campus is that I went to the University of Arizona and they had a large carnival every year known as the Spring Fling. The carnival seemed to get bigger each year, as did the campus, which is why they started adding animal acts. I guess someone thought college students would appreciate the irony of monkeys coming out of a barrel. This is probably the same person who thought Zima would become a lasting alternative to beer, forgetting the all too important fact that men like the taste of beer and Zima tasted like flat Mountain Dew. But, I was not your typical college male in that I hadn't yet developed an appreciation for beer, so I took to Zima like freshman girls took to tanning. I drank them mostly in my apartment before I went out for the night to get drunk early and then held a cup of beer at parties to keep up the illusion.

But, this was the night before Spring Fling and I had one too many Zimas along with a few jell-o shots, the perfect combination to give a man the false confidence to climb into a barrel of monkeys (and in most cases, a woman to take home a guy with simian features). Needless to say I was easily convinced by a few of my friends to climb up the ladder on the barrel and get a photo of the sleeping monkeys. As I climbed down from the top of the barrel, they seemed so peaceful I relaxed my hand a little and began to lose my grip on the ladder. Even though I landed on my feet, I let out a high-pitched shriek that had the same effect as Chevy Chase’s shout of “collld!” in the movie “Vacation” that woke up the motel and his wife (the incredibly sexy Beverly D’Angelo, whose character epitomized the phrase MILF to all young teenage boys in an innocent way, years before Craigslist made the word seem creepy.)

Suddenly, the monkeys woke up and began to hop up and down, so I began to do the same, frantically trying to remember the movie “Tarzan: The Legend of Greystoke” hoping Christopher Lambert’s acting would jar some hidden monkey whisperer ability that was genetically embedded somewhere in my highly evolved animal brain (but probably lost after filling it with one too many Brady Brunch reruns as a kid.) They looked at me and one of them threw a half-eaten banana at my feet. For some strange reason, probably due to my foggy-headed state of inebriation, I took that as somewhat of a sign and I grabbed my packet of CornNuts that I had bought at the Circle K earlier and threw it in the direction of the monkeys.

As the CornNuts floated out from the package and landed at the monkeys’ feet, they pounced at the CornNuts and sniffed before devouring each nut (I’m not sure if a CornNut belongs in either the corn or the nut family), creating loud chomping sounds as their teeth clamped down on the ultra hard snack. This was my clue to hop on the ladder and climb to the top. It wasn’t until then that I noticed that I had dropped my camera upon falling into the barrel and would not be able to capture the moment for posterity.

Of course, my friends had run off and I was left to ponder my actions alone. I mostly came to the conclusion that jell-o shots should never be mixed with malt liquor. When I told my story to a cute girl later at a party in my apartment complex she didn’t believe me, but she did laugh and say “that story’s about as funny as a barrel of monkeys." “They’re not that funny, but you do want to let sleeping monkeys lie. Now sleeping dogs, you can mess with. They’ll just roll over, shake their legs and look cute," I replied. As I made a panting sound and stuck out my tongue, she smiled and then kissed me. I looked into her playful eyes and almost forgot about my close encounter of the monkey kind earlier that night, until we both began to realize that I smelled like the inside of a bird cage. She suddenly began to believe my story and gave me her number, but the only clothes my opposable thumbs removed that night were my own.

The Survivor: A brief, short story

They say it's the little things that get you, well I once killed a man for snoring. We were the only two survivors of a plane crash over the Andes Mountains. We had been there for over two months, living in the one small section of the jumbo jet that was not destroyed in the crash. Ironically, it was the First Class section, which I only caught a brief glimpse of during the actual flight as the blissfully ignorant flight attendants pointed me towards my seat in the back of the plane. I imagine the experience of being in First Class must have been quite different during the flight than it was for us after the crash. For one thing, the seats no longer reclined, and secondly, the body temperature dropping, appendage-numbing winds that swept through the now open-air feel to the cabin, could not be stopped at the press of a button.

After two months, my fellow survivor and I had consumed all the bags of peanuts and cheese and crackers from the plane. I soon entered a downward spiral and started to become delusional from the cold. The lack of any real sustenance had begun to make me crave meat of any kind. I debated my future action in my head for a few more weeks, but after living on a diet of maggots and condiments, I eventually let my survival instinct take over. I lunged at him in the cold, dark night and suffocated him with one of the little pillows that we kept from the plane's wrecked overhead compartments.

Luckily for me, there was a group of extreme skiers who happened to be heli-skiing in the area and they saw the small fire I had made in order to barbecue his ribs. I told the skiers who found me that I did what I had to do to survive, that I had developed a bond with this man who had shared the same horrific experience with me up until the day before; when I munched on his charbroiled thighs like they were the Colonel's original recipe. But, I swear he had the most annoying goddamn snore I have ever heard. It was this loud, honking Felix Unger type snore.

To tell you the truth, I wanted to kill him during the flight. Not only was he snoring loudly, but he fell asleep with his fat, dandruff filled head against my shoulder, forcing me to press my body up against the window the whole flight. He didn't respond to any of my subtle nudges and even drooled on my shirt. Luckily for me, the oxygen masks fell down over our heads, and the screaming of the terrified passengers knocked this disgusting sloth out of dreamland and off of my shoulder. Finally, as the plane started falling out of the sky, I felt like I could breathe again.

The End.

Thank you John Hughes.

"And these children that you spit on. As they try to change their worlds. Are immune to your consultations. They're quite aware of what they're going through........"

Thank you John Hughes for holding a mirror up to our teenage selves and letting us realize that we are all, a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal.

No Trouble in Little Korea. or What’s up Kim Jong II?

I heard that Al Gore was all set to free the hostages in N. Korea himself until former Pres. Clinton found out that the reporters happened to be a couple of hot asian women and offered to make the trip himself. After Laura Ling shook the former president's hand for coming to her rescue, he slipped her his card which simply read:
William J. Clinton Esq.- Capricorn.

As the door to the private jet closed behind Pres. Clinton, Kim Jong II began to run after the plane as it picked up speed down the runway shouting in a screetchy- voiced, broken-English wail “Take me with you. You promised I would get to meet one of the Kardashian girls. I don’t care which one. Bring me back a Kardashiaaaaan.” While gazing outside his window as the jet soared up through the clouds on its way to a country where any man or woman has the right to write a story lampooning any leader, no matter how powerful , Bill smiled, lit a cigar and said “I love it when a plan comes together.”

Upon landing in America, he walked to the back of the jet and woke up Sec. of State Hillary Clinton. She got up slowly while holding her head and in a groggy state said to him ”Huh. Where are we? Bill, Did I black out again? This happens every time I’m supposed to meet a foreign leader.” “It’s allright honey, the former president said in a soothing tone. I talked to Kim Jong II for you and we got Ms. Ling and Ms. Lee back safely. That’s what’s important. Now , let’s go reunite these girls with their loved ones. OK.” As the former president gazed into the eyes of his wife and current Sec. of State, he rubbed her hand gently and said “You might want to fix your hair a little before we meet the press though. “

As Laura Ling and Euna Lee embraced their families and told the members of the media about their harrowing experience in captivity , Bill watched in the background and began to feel the wave of freedom rush over him as well. He nudged the pilot of the plane and asked him how much gas was left in the tank. When the pilot told him that the plane was being re-fueled and could fly anywhere he wanted, he then asked the pilot if he’d like to accompany him to Las Vegas. Bill then smiled slyly and said, “I might have to broker a deal with Steve Wynn to free a couple of strippers from their g-strings at the Crazy Horse.”



Before writing this story, I had just spent a weekend hanging out with my family and an ex-baseball player who used to play for a New York team and had become friends with my father due to the fact that they both had at one time had homes in the same development and the fact that my father is the world’s youngest 72 year old. He told me a story about how former Pres. Clinton had visited the stadium while he was a player on the day of a game and one of his teammates, a well known veteran player on the team was preparing himself to discuss politics with Pres. Clinton while he, a young guy in his early 20’s at the time, was unfazed. As Pres. Clinton arrived in the clubhouse, he looked up from the video game he was playing and said “What’s up Bill?”

Pres. Clinton proceeded to sit down next to him and talk sports with him for a half hour. I have heard that one of Pres. Clinton’s greatest strengths is his ability to communicate with people as individuals. He engaged the younger player over the star player, because he was cool enough to appreciate his relaxed candor. As I listened to this story beng told to me, I could only imagine my new acquaintance, a laid back
guy from SoCal, had been dipping tobacco, as ballplayers tend to do, while in the company of a President. I’d like to think that he asked the former President what he’s been doing with himself now that he’s out of office and Pres. Clinton responded by cracking open a beer and with a hint of his once more prominent Arkansas drawl said, “I’m just livin’.
L I V I N.”