Live Right and Find Happiness (Although Beer is Much Faster) Read Free

runway, and when you reached this board, you launched yourself into the air, then you landed in a sawdust-filled pit. I figured, how hard could that be?
    What I did not anticipate was gravity. Apparently some people contain more gravity than others, and it turned out that for a high school student, I had an extremely high level of gravitational attraction. I was probably affecting the tides. During track team practice I would run down the runway and launch myself from the board, then I would soar through the air for approximately the length of a standard matchbook cover before thudding back to Earth.
Sometimes
I couldn’t even jump far enough to land in the sawdust pit.
I possessed essentially the same natural leaping ability as the Lincoln Memorial. As a result I took a lot of good-natured ribbing from my fellow track team members. (“You suck.” “Why are you even on the track team?” “Who cuts your hair, an enraged barn owl?”)
    So that was a discouraging time for me. But there’s an old saying among jockstraps: “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” These words are very true. Sometimes, when we face adversity, instead of becoming discouraged, we decide to work harder, to show the doubters that they were wrong. This was not one of those times. The doubters were 100 percent correct: I sucked. So I quit the track team. The only way I will ever own a varsity letter is if I buy one on eBay.
    (On a more positive note: I
was
elected Class Clown by the Pleasantville High Class of 1965. But that was not much consolation. Another thing you will never hear a high school girl say is, “When I lose my virginity, I want it to be with the Class Clown!”)
    At this point I hear you saying, “But Dave, so
what
if you were an unattractive, non-athletic, four-eyed, hand-farting loser with zits and a bad haircut in high school? That was many decades ago! Since then you have gone on to enjoy unparalleled success as a minor humor celebrity. You have also made many friends, and apparently even had sexual relations with the opposite sex at least twice. Get over the past!”
    Ha-ha! That’s easy for you to say, because, as we have already established, you are a stupid idiot. The truth is, I will
never
get over high school. My self-image was permanently etched into my brain back then, and nothing that happened since has changed it. No matter how old I get, when I look in the mirror, this is what I see:

    My point—and I admit this is pathetic—is that I am still insecure about how I look.
Deeply
insecure. And this insecurity gets much worse when there are good-looking, athletic guys around.
    Which brings us to David Beckham. He is of course the world-famous former soccer star and underwear model who is considered to be the hottest man on Earth by essentially every woman on Earth, a group that unfortunately includes my wife, Michelle. I am not saying Michelle does not love me. What I’m saying is, when she says the words “David Beckham,” she gets a certain look on her face that she does not get when she says other words, such as “delicatessen.”
    â€œBut Dave,” I hear you saying, because you apparently are unable to help yourself, “it’s perfectly normal for a woman to harbor a harmless ‘crush’ on a handsome international superstar! It’s not as though anything could ever come of it! How would your wife ever even have the opportunity to
meet
David Beckham?”
    If you will be quiet for just a moment, I will tell you how. Michelle is a sportswriter. For her entire career, she has been going into locker rooms filled with large athletic naked men who are not wearing any clothes because—as I may have mentioned earlier—they are naked. I can live with that. My wife always tells me that she finds this situation to be very uncomfortable, and I believe her. I’m sure that if I were to walk into a room filled