How am I doing? Honestly?

If I can muster the nerve, the next time anyone asks me, “How ya doin’?” I’ll respond, “I’m horny! How are you?”

Chances are it’ll be true. I remain one of those average guys the studies say think about sex something like a gazillion times a day. Now that our kids are out of school for another 81 3/4days, the odds of me actually having any sex are greatly diminished.

The kids are always in the house, are light sleepers, and are so clingy to Mommy that me taking any kind of run at her would immediately bump me from 2012 “Father of the Year” consideration.

So responding “I’m horny!” to our most mundane conversational inquiry will be factual.

Even better, it will be interesting.

You rarely hear anyone announce their horniness aloud.

Instead, we all lie and say, “I’m fine. You?”

Bullcrap.

No one’s ever fine.

We’re bewildered, angry, frustrated, unfulfilled, underpaid, overweight, sleepy, grumpy, sneezy and maybe two of the other Seven Dwarfs.

Fine?

Never.

My inspiration for this, as it often is, is Dave. He’s my friend, my office landlord and the man who spends his waking hours conspiring to inebriate me and our buddies in the tavern he and his family have owned since 1954.

He’s spent the last couple of weeks responding to mundane conversation with brutal honesty.

If someone asks, “How ya doing?” Dave will scream at them, “Mind your own damn business!”

When a cheerful customer gets up to leave and invariably departs by saying something like, “Take it easy, man,” Dave’s face will darken and he’ll growl with menace, “By god, don’t you ever tell me what to do!”

It’s the same reaction the hapless bastards in “Goodfellas” get when they good-naturedly inform “Tommy” (Joe Pesci) he’s a funny guy.

It’s made me alert to all our little lies.

I guess that makes me spiritual sort of soul mates with Brad Blanton. He’s the tactless genius behind a movement he calls “Radical Honesty.”

He maintains we’re all playacting in our relationships and the only way for us to prosper personally is to be brutally honest with ourselves and each other. He believes our little lies corrode our souls and erect impenetrable obstacles to our ever being happy.

If he’s horny, he expresses it to whomever is within earshot. He told me in graphic terms, which I’ll paraphrase even as I’m certain the sanitizing would infuriate him.

He said if sees a girl he’d really like to “hug” he’d tell her, man, I’d really like to get a bottle of wine and spend the afternoon (hugging) the (stuffing) out of you. 

Such demolition of traditional courtship rituals would doubtless reduce poets and florists to tears, but I remember admiring his directness.

He assured me the tactic was very successful. I may be mistaken, but I think I recall him saying it was helpful in him meeting two of his ex-wives, a statement that reveals radical honesty might have trouble gaining traction in matrimonial arenas.

I interviewed him for Playboy about 10 years ago and remember thinking, gee, what a really swell guy.

That’s a lie. To be radically honest, he’s what someone radically honest would call a real dick.

It’s my contention that honesty without tact is like brain surgery without anesthesia. The operation could cure but the complications can kill.

But it would indeed spice up our lives if we could make one another more alert to our true feelings and we answered honestly next time someone asks us, “How you doing?”

If we could incorporate that little bit of one-word honesty into our daily conversations, I believe it would help spread empathy and erase some of the stealth difficulties we all face in our daily lives. 

It could lead to a happier society, to better personal well-being and, for a lucky few, to romance.

Honest.

The forgiveness of forgetfulness

I’m not saying this in an attempt to be funny, but I’d made a mental note to read a Yahoo story last week about memory loss and it slipped my mind.

Completely forgot about it.

Human memory has been on my mind for two months since I danced through the memory minefield that is the 30th high school reunion. I am amazed by the variations of our recollections from those heirloom days.

For instance, one girl, a good friend of mine, said the thing she remembers most about me is that I was never without a big wad of snuff tucked into my lip.

Funny, I said, because I didn’t remember you being insane. I’ve never once in my life had a even a pinch of snuff in my mouth.

Yet, her enduring memory of me is I was the friendly kid with the tobacco spit dribbling out of his smile.

How odd is that?

Then there was the good buddy of mine who’s spent the past 35 years attributing one of my greatest pranks to someone else.

It was Miss Picci’s 8th grade chorus class. We were walking in line from the basement class to the first floor auditorium. She was on DefCon 4 to make sure we all behaved.

Now, there’s a woman who could have used a soothing dip of Copenhagen.

Me, Doug and the other troublemakers were in the front of the line so she could keep an eye on us. It was like a miniature version of one of those perp walks you see on the news.

I waited until we got to the big heavy doors at the stairway. I gave the door a mighty yank straight into my kicking boot. It echoed like a thunderclap.

Miss Picci turned with a look of startled horror in time to see me grasping my head with both hands and moaning, “Why, Doug? Why?” right before I began faking concussion-like symptoms.

I’ll never forget what happened next. She lit into poor Doug like she wanted to kill him. Said she never did like him. Said he was no good. That I was always her favorite. That he couldn’t sing a lick and that she’d see he’d get suspended for a month if what he’d done had ruined my handsome young face.

See, my recollections are crystal clear.

Yet, when I overheard Doug telling the story of this Hall of Fame-worthy prank . . . he said it was Schwartz!

An outrage. The slight made me want to drag him to the stairway hall door and make like Joe Pesci on his head.

That wasn’t even the worst of it.

No, that was the girl I remember from her sexy jungle girl suit.

I was standing alone at the bar when she walked up. I have an indelible memory of her wearing the outfit to her 1980 Halloween party to which she’d invited me.

I glanced at her nametag and said hello.

She looked at my name tag and dismissively said, “I have no idea who you are!”

I’m sure it wasn’t her cruel intention to make me feel like a nobody, just as it wasn’t my intention to make her feel like a slut when I said, “Sure you do. You invited me to your Halloween party our senior year. You wore that skimpy little Tarzan outfit. I wore a diaper and dressed like a big baby. We made out at midnight beneath the pool table in your basement. Remember?”

She did not. In fact, I think the clarity of my recollection upset her because she began backing away without ordering a drink and avoided me the whole rest of the night.

The reason we forget chunks of our silly pasts is because our minds are forever being refreshed by new memories.

Our minds in high school are canvasses yet to be colored.

Back then, I didn’t have things like kids, anniversaries, the complete rosters of five new world championship Pittsburgh teams and the lyrics of 248 songs by Robert Earl Keen and Todd Snider important enough to commit to memory.

You know now that I think about it, maybe I did have a dip or two of snuff back in high school. Maybe it is my memory that’s off because, yeah, that Schwartz kid was damn funny.

And, if memory serves, maybe I was wrong about the girl in the Tarzan suit.

Maybe it wasn’t her after all.

Must have been her mom.