Ben Robinson

All About Ben

By Ben Robinson

It happens every summer. I guess it’s God’s way of reminding me that I really should not be carrying this much weight. It gets to be June, it starts getting hotter, and I sweat.

I would use the phrase “sweat like a pig,” but the swine community has threatened legal action if I do so. “We sweat, but nothing like you do,” said the letter from the pig lawyer that I received.

The extra weight I carry does not do me any good throughout the year.

Sure, each December I have dozens of young ladies offering to sit in my lap if I grow a white beard and dress in a red suit. But they never follow through, so that’s no good for me.

Either way, for the next several weeks, I can look forward to being hot and sweaty when I wake in the morning, hotter and even more sweaty by lunchtime, then still hotter and more sweaty by the afternoon.

It makes it tougher to be out looking for a job. I don’t know if you noticed, but very few want ads read, “Wanted: very fat professional who sweats a great deal. Intense body odor a plus.”

No, people just are not looking for a fat man in this kind of weather, unless they are trying to create more shade in their yard.

So I drive with my air conditioner going full blast. I justify this — I have to do that since my gas mileage will decrease — by saying I’m not doing it so much for me as for the people I meet. After all, nobody is impressed when they try to give you a friendly handshake, and you slide right out of their hands. And people like to know you are there at a new job more by sight than smell.

So I will continue, air blowing freely in my car, almost as fast as the gas tank is emptying simultaneously. Cooler weather is coming, I try to comfort myself by thinking.

But deep down I realize that actually football season is coming.

Cooler weather could take a while to get here.