And you want to be my latex salesman...

It's a smoky room with a big screen TV, leather couches, and a poker table. It's where I spend one night a week with a collection of salesmen, developers, engineers, retirees, and dentists. It is where, if only for a few hours a week, we are men. It is a place where we can tell dirty jokes, sling some cards, and talk about the one guy at the table who once hired a hooker and ended up giving her a massage.

Deep down, though, we are romantics. The married among us talk about our kids, our wives, and how we do our bests to be good husbands. Take for instance the one man who bought his wife a laundry list of Christmas presents that ended with, in his words, "A new set of tits."

You know, romance.

"Quite a gift," I said, "I only bought my wife new eyes." Then I made a self-deprecating comment about how my wife can now see how inadequate I really am in the bedroom.

The host sought to comfort me. "She already knew," he said.

I am happy with the more intimate side of life with my wife and can't ask for anything more. She doesn't need any plastic surgery help and she is as forgiving as any woman can be when it comes to having to spend the rest of her life with my mess of a body. Still, I often wonder how long a woman in her thirties will put up with my aging, wrecked form.

That's my way of explaining how I--out of sheer, morbid curiosity and nothing more, I assure you--I ended up clicking through a web ad and running into Dr. Al Sears. I'm not even 100% sure what he has to offer, because I barely got past his header graphic.



Dr. Al Sears has his own website and seeks to instruct men over 40 how to reclaim their manhood. Whoever is behind it, whether it be Al himself or some other ad genius, is spending no small amount of money to pimp this plan online.

I ask this: If Dr. Al had spent $10 more on his ad campaign, would somebody have told him that the first step in selling his product is taking his picture off the web page. Or, at the very least, shave the damned 'stache.

Now, I'm no Adonis. I'm barely good looking enough to get my kid to give me a goodnight hug. The dog only licks my face if I've shaved. I'm brazen enough to put my picture on the top of this web page, but I'm not going to tell you I can help you make your sex life better. Even if you put M.D. behind my name, people are not going to buy into my inverted pile driver experiments. And yet, Dr. Al is spending untold amounts of money to put his face on a web page that promises to allow you to "have enough stamina to play golf in the morning, go for a jog in the afternoon... and still make love to your wife or lover at night!"

I wouldn't trust the guy to change my oil, let alone talk to me about my dipstick.

Dr. Al should take a page from the Oprah-iffic success of the guy in the picture below, self-reported badboy Steve Santagati. Even if he is full of mincemeat, he's going to sell his book because he is attractive enough to make my wife shift around under her laptop.



Mind-blowing as it is, there are people who will get past Dr. Al's face, scroll down through his page, and eventually buy his books and self-improvement plan. Still, I can't get over the belief that the last time Dr. Al had sex was the early 80s blockbuster, "White Bun Busters."

Regardless, I'll have something to talk about at the next poker game--as long as my copy of "12 Secrets to Virility" gets here in time for Christmas.