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"\n\n I would rather not be telling you what I'm about to tell you, but it turns out my kid needs some dumb operation. Obviously what I should have done\u2014it occurs to me only now\u2014is contact the surgeon in person and offer to share this with him privately, in return for him fixing Ralphie's bile duct for free. I suspect he would have gone for it, too, surgeons being the way they are, but it didn't occur to me. Not in time, at least. So here it goes.\n\n When you're making love to a lady, as can happen, and you find yourself suddenly desperate to postpone the moment at which you are no longer making love to her, if you follow me, then the absolute best thing to think about, in your mind, better than baseball, better than corpses, better than your mother in a wet suit, is former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee playing the bass guitar.\n\n If it were up to me, I'd leave it at that, and hope that some of you might forget what you've read, thereby leaving me some sliver of the godlike advantage I've enjoyed over my fellow men these past two years.\n\n But this place pays by the word. And what with my spontaneous generation of a certain sum toward the Cause being\u2014as of this writing\u2014the only pre-agreed circumstance under which I'll be excused from the impending ten-kilometer \"Run for Ralph,\" I shall also, if you'll indulge me, tell you why.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n Where to begin? That was a joke. We begin, obviously, with Baseball, a sport that some men continue to insist is just the thing for a man in the throes to think about, yet which hasn't spared a man his blushes since about 1975.\n\n See, back in olden times, when the Thinking About Baseball method first acquired its reputation for effectiveness, nobody had a television. The job of being a baseball fan back then entailed opening a newspaper every morning and memorizing a huge slab of batting averages and pitching statistics. When recalled to mind in a frantic moment, yes, the sheer tonnage of numerical data could indeed gum up the works of a man's autonomic sexual response. But those days are gone. The modern game, you may have noticed, is presented in the lushest of high definition, the white ball surging hugely toward the pale moon's waiting face, while the splintered lobes of the shattered bat, discarded in midair, slowly helicopter... And I shall abandon that sentence, right there, if I may. These are my only pants.\n\n What's that, you say? The now iconic image of Mike Huckabee playing the bass, inescapable during the 2008 presidential campaign, was also broadcast in color and high definition?\n\n That's putting it mildly. To pay even a lick of attention to the historic '08 campaign was to have one's cortex tattooed with hideously vivid glimpses of old Mike up onstage somewhere, sheepish yet complacent in his pouchy jacket, forehead furrowed by concentration and by yo-yo dieting, those soft fingers bothering the strings... But we're ahead of ourselves.\n\n You didn't have to Think About Baseball before Huckabee came along. You could also try thinking of something repulsive. Eleanor Roosevelt gutting a dolphin. Alfred Hitchcock gnawing flesh from the bloated corpse of David Crosby. And this could work. The sudden drop-off in attractiveness between thoughts of one's lady and thoughts of Benjamin Franklin having a back wax often would shock the system into resetting itself and forgetting where it was about to arrive.\n\n But not always. The problem with these scenarios is that for all their repellency, they were fantasies and thus prone to getting out of control. One minute there you were, watching Andy Rooney, naked on all fours, as he offers himself to you from the tiled surround of a hot tub...and the next, Lesley Stahl would saunter out with her top off and start fondling that new one, you know, the incredibly hot young new one with the funny accent who was sleeping around in Iraq, the one who acts like she thinks she's playing herself in a bad TV movie of her own life... Game over.\n\n Yet that was the choice, before Huckabee, for men. You could distract yourself or you could disgust yourself, but either way, over the course of the average short relationship, you were still looking at more premature climas than the long version of \"Bat out of Hell.\" It was, therefore, with somewhat heavy hearts that many of us sat down, late on January 2, to watch The Tonight Show. Leno's guest that night was a presidential candidate, former Arkansas governor, and amateur bass guitarist whom Jay, with that edgy spontaneity of his, invited to go play a few numbers with the band....\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n Thinking about it now, gazing back over these past two marvelous years, it's the sheer efficiency of Huckabeeing that's impressed me more than anything. Those other techniques, with their setups and their backstories, and the constant frantic editing of the dramatis personae, they were such a chore. You practically had to set up a deli table on your hippocampus just to keep everyone fed and watered. But not with Mike. With Mike it's just...ping and there he is, awkwardly hunched over another borrowed Precision, as much or as little of him as you need. Just a pinch of the man and his instrument, I find, just a snapshot, will usually buy you ninety seconds more. But if the heat is really on\u2014as it is for me whenever Clarissa goes with pigtails\u2014then just roll tape and let Mike play a few measures. Watch that body shift around a bit, uncomfortably, like a bag of root vegetables on the deck of a ship, and that excruciated moue, clenching and reclenching as the beat slips further away, as those white fingers fumble vainly for the tonal handles of another chord...\n\n I don't pretend to know how it works or why Mike never, ever lets you down. Certainly it isn't just his politics. True, Huckabee does represent that awful rump of the illiterate Far Right who consider human sexuality God's only mistake, but I don't think that's it. Nor is it Mike's personal lack of erotic charisma, though it's as hard to imagine him engaged in an act of intimacy himself as it is easy to believe that his closet contains a dedicated \"sweater shelf.\"\n\n No, what it is, I believe, is all of the above, juxtaposed with a bass guitar. Mike himself is a perfect black hole of unsexiness, but the bass, historically, is one of the sexier musical instruments, and somehow those thoughts intertangle. They get wedged trying to pass each another in the hallways of the mind and combine to create a sort of vortex that suctions every spare joule of erotic energy from the brain, while leaving just enough to keep the machinery ticking over...\n\n Who knows? I'll leave it for future generations to figure out\u2014and they will have that opportunity. Just as the Baseball method was handed down, father to son, across a century of generations, so men like me will teach men like my Ralphie, should he make it, about the power that crackles between those jowls and those frets. Over time the image may lose its context. \"But who is this man?\" young men may ask. \"What was his name? His function? His meaning?\"\n\n It doesn't matter, their fathers will tell them, because it doesn't. All that matters is the power of the image. Because like someone once said: A picture's worth a thousand words. And when it's the picture, held in the mind, of Mike Huckabee playing the bass, well, I swear to God it's more like twenty-five minutes."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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