My Fellow Inebriates,

We saw our first shirtless man of the year today, rocking his moobs along 66^th Avenue.

Whether too polite or too stunned by his wobbly pallor, my mother failed to take a picture. She said, invoking the usual clichés, that it was adequately seared onto her retinas, that it couldn’t be “unseen,” and all the rest of it. She said if my dad had the decency to confine his teats to the yard and she to cover her jiggly bits during Non-Swimming Occasions, surely this dude could spare us his flapping manboobs.

But I was really taken with his springtime exuberance. It was only 13°C out (that’s 55°F for my American friends)—not hot enough to warrant stripping off and barely warm enough to justify drinking lager over ale. But there he was, owning it, rocking those jouncy bits of his down the avenue.

The world needs more happy, optimistic people like this and fewer negative, critical people like my mum. Don’t you think? Does her smarmy, captious assessment of this, the first shirtless man of 2012, even compare to the joy he must have felt swinging down 66^th today?

Even when he’s slathering aloe vera over his lobster-pink tatas this evening, he’ll be able to say, Yes, I’m a guy who lets it all hang loose.