Hmm. Before I answer, please let me give you a backstory. I rolled off a bed and landed on my head as an infant, which made me disabled instantly. Unfortunately for me, my doctor told my parents that I looked fine, so there was no reason to check if my brain was bleeding.

Two days later, I started tipping over like a bowling pin. When my parents took a closer look, they realized I was soon to be karmically fucked. The fingers on my left hand looked like Frankenstein put his hand in a shredder for a month or two, and my left foot looked nomadic. I was ugly. Hell, I was fugly, 40 years before fugly became a thing.

Then, in 1973, I found a UCLA snowcap buried in the snow during recess in kindergarten. After turning the beanie in to lost and found, something I only did because a rigid teacher with no tolerance for indifference witnessed me finding the beanie in a snowdrift, made me. Luckily, nobody claimed the beanie, so it became mine.

When I took the cap home and asked my parents what UCLA was, they told me it was a school in Los Angeles where it's always warm, and that they taught filmmaking. So, I began visualizing my future existence.

I would wait for my family to go to bed, then I'd go to the kitchen and get a plate and a salad fork. I'd proceed to our sofa, and pretend it was Porsche. The dish would become my "steering wheel," and the salad fork was my "stick shift." I'd drive around Los Angeles with UCLA Film School Alumni license plate frames on my car until I went home to my beach house...

I learned how to ride a bike at five, a minibike at eight. I crashed the shit out of both on occasion, so "gravity" was a law I broke often.

Then in 1980, when I was 12, a drunk neighbor put a gun to my head and blamed me for the Iran Hostage Crisis. I cried as I rode my bike all the way home, but I wasn't sure if the pistol-toting, scraggly bearded, sweaty lump of racism hated me for my skin color or my disability. Either way, he wasn't a fan of little Hammadi.

I avoided my family when I got home, ran to my room, and locked my bedroom door. I hated being different, brown, disabled, short, and everything else under the sun.

I needed a change, or at least an answer or two. So, I did what any other self-loathing teenager-to-be would do: I put on the Beatles Abbey Road album on my record player and started to take my clothes off, piece-by-piece, as I stared into a wall-sized mirror.

My whole perspective on life was about to change overnight (literally).

I stood in front of a mirror and stared at my naked body until I liked what I saw. Then I stared longer, a lot longer, until I loved what I saw. It took forever.

After Abbey Road, I listened to The Beatles' "Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band", The Rolling Stones' "Sticky Fingers", Supertramp's "Breakfast in America," The Who's "Who's Next," Pink Floyd's "The Dark Side of the Moon," Queen's "News of the World" and The Eagles' "Hotel California." All of that beautiful music therapized me through the night, as I stared, cried, and then stared some more.

I heard the birds of the morning chirping when I finally liked what I saw.

A few months later, my beloved Kansas City Royals beat the New York Yankees in the playoffs to get to their first World Series. So, to gift me an unforgettable memory, my parents took my sisters and me down to the Country Club Plaza to celebrate with 100,000 ecstatic fans.

But that never happened. Why? Because the second we parked Mom's 1979 brown Oldsmobile Delta 88 smack dab into the middle of the joyous mayhem, several drunk fans started pounding on our trunk, roof, and hood as they told us to "go home to Bum Fuck Egypt." "Egypt," I thought. I'm not Egyptian. I'm a Kansan, just like them.

So, my dad peeled the car away. Yes, that moment sucked big, fat donkey dicks as I used to say back then, but my life didn't, because I believed I would someday live a life of real bliss and not just the shit I daydreamed about.

Then, ten years later, when I was 22, I limped my way into barely affording and ultimately attending the most mind-blowing, memory tattooing concert in my life: The Knebworth Festival on Saturday, June 30, 1990, in Knebworth, England. The performers included Pink Floyd, Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, Elton John, Phil Collins, Genesis, a Robert Plant/Jimmy Page Led Zeppelin reunion, Elton John, Dire Straits, Tears For Fears, Status Quo, and Cliff Richard and the Shadows.

The key to my experience at Knebworth wasn't the concert itself, but how I got there and what I learned while I was on the trip to London.

One year earlier, on Tuesday, June 27, 1989, I attended The Who performing Tommy at the Radio City Music Hall in New York City. After seeing it, I went on-air on my college radio station (at Rider University in New Jersey), and announced that I would never see a more fabulous concert. Minutes later, someone called in and told me about the show in Knebworth. It suddenly became my mission to attend. Although tickets were sold out, I was determined to find a way there, so I contacted the company that sells prize give-away trips to radio stations, and I bought the journey that other people were winning on various radio stations.

Since I went on the trip alone, once I got to London, I had to room with another person traveling alone – Gary, a 45-year-old man from California.

(My roommate Gary pictured in front of Abbey Road Studios in London).

The first thing Gary told me is that he had AIDS. The second thing Gary told me is that when he found out he had AIDS, he truly began living his life. He took out a second mortgage on his home, bought himself a race car, and started taking as many vacations as humanly possible. His advice to me was to live my life to the fullest because every day could be my last. He asked me what I really wanted to do in life, so I answered:

“I want to move to Los Angeles, go to UCLA Film School, live at the beach, drive a Porsche with UCLA alumni tags on it, and hit the Super Bowl for my birthday.”

Gary smiled, then urged me to drop everything upon my return to New Jersey, and head west to Los Angeles to chase my dreams.

The last thing Gary told me is that I would never forget June 30 (the date of the concert). Gary was right. I never forgot June 30, but not because of the concert.

My wife Shahina and I became parents are two amazingly healthy and beautiful twin girls on June 30, 21 years after the Knebworth concert...So true and so weird…

So, I flew back to New Jersey on July 3, 1990, dropped everything, and became a California resident on August 20.

Three years later. I started attending the Super Bowl every year for my birthday (The picture above wasn’t my first Super Bowl).

My first Super Bowl was on my 25th birthday, Jan 31, 1993, at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. I got into the game when my dear friend/college roommate/groomsman at my wedding Larry got me a gig to pour beers at a concession stand at the Super Bowl with his business fraternity. The Dallas Cowboys were already blowing out the Buffalo Bills by halftime, so Larry asked everyone coming to our stand if they were leaving the game, and if so, could they please give me their ticket because it was my birthday. After numerous “no way in hell’s” a reporter from New Orleans asked to see my license to prove it was in fact my birthday, and when he verified it, he game me his ticket. So, I ran to my nosebleed end zone seat, caught the last few minutes of the Michael Jackson halftime show, and witnessed the second half. I’ve attended every single Super bowl since.

About six weeks after attending my first Super Bowl, I was accepted to the UCLA Graduate School of Film Producers Program, and year later, I took a picture with Francis Ford Coppola on the day I received my Masters from UCLA (see my rockin' mullet under my graduation cap).

Things started to roll from there, and eventually (after 131,680 failures) I limped into a life I love. I work in film, live at the beach with my amazing wife, twin girls, and a dieting yellow lab, and I drive my dream car with UCLA Film School alumni plates on it.

So, to (finally) answer your question, living life to the fullest to me means embracing happiness; and going after the things you want in life, no matter how far away them may seem. It means spending every moment soaking up every drop of joy you can absorb, knowing full well that happiness is a treasure than can be lost instantly.

Life is almost as short as I am, so go embrace it, live it and love it.

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