Viiiivvvvvaaaaaaaaaaa Viagra!!!!

I can’t believe this is happening to me. They say it happens to every guy at some point….but not now. Doesn’t this only happen to old guys? I’m 25 for god’s sake. Am I less of a man then? Don’t you judge me…for all you know this could be you at some point.

I suppose you want the details huh? Ok here goes….it happened the other night…. I was on the couch…and a certain commercial came on. Now I can’t remember exactly which commercial it was, the whole situation was kind of a blur. It was like a dream, but yet I was wide awake. Maybe it was the commercial with the fake Elvis singers (Viivvvvaaa Viagra!!) or maybe the one with the man and woman in separate bathtubs holding hands (maybe it’s just me, but shouldn’t they be in the same tub?) or the old guy doing the tango with his wife. It doesn’t really matter. The calm and unruffled commercial voice bombarded me with side effects like headache, night blindness, and stroke. I didn’t even flinch. I kept staring blank faced at the screen until whatever program I was watching came back on. About a half hour later, when I finally broke from my trance, I realized what had just happened. I had officially been desensitized. I am desensitized to the little blue pill….advertising. What did you think I was talking about?

Next time you’re watching TV for an extended period of time, do me a favor and count up the number of “male enhancement” pill commercials you see I could swear it’s about every third commercial. By the way, “male enhancement” might be my new favorite euphemism. It replaces calling these pills what they really are, which is b______r pills (for those of you who are a little slower, and by that I mean anyone who religiously watches Deal or No Deal, the b word rhymes with donor). The companies that make these are spending tens of millions of dollars a year on TV commercials, radio spots, and billboards. Hell there is already a PGA Tour Event called the Cialis Western Open. Is it completely crazy to think the Mets could open the season at Viagra Field?

I suppose these “donor” pills must be flying off the shelves to pay for this media blitz. My screwy mind leads me down kind of a murky path here....so please bare with me. Now I’m assuming these blue pills didn’t just appear out of thin air…. and they’re a medical product for public consumption right? Someone had to develop it in a lab. That means at some point there was team of doctors, medical researchers, and scientists (you know guys who got like 1500+ on their SAT’s and went to Ivy League Schools for seven years) huddled in some sterile laboratory, wearing long white coats, mixing chemicals, and by enlarge doing typical chemistry “doctor-y” stuff. And to what end? Not to cure cancer or alleviate human suffering in any way…no no it’s a much nobler cause to which they sought a remedy. These brilliant men of medicine and science spent the better part of their professional lives trying to artificially produce an erection. That would be a good one to have on a grave stone huh? Maybe it could read: “Here lies Dr. Green, the man who helped pitched a million tents”.

Now you can’t just come up with these pills, distribute them right to the public and say “have at it Sparky”. You have to test them first. That’s right. At some point a bunch of guys were rounded up, handed a glass of water and a couple of blue pills, and then told to drop ‘em. I can just imagine a dude standing with his pants at his ankles, suffering the “effects”, surrounded by fifteen guys with lab coats and clipboards all scribbling notes. And if you think that’s sick, think about this: they can’t test anything on humans before they test animals first. Yeah.

You can tell a higher than average percentage of those who participated in clinical trials suffered side effects. Just look at the commercials. If a typical “male enhancement” commercial is 30 seconds, the last 20 or so is that unruffled voice-over rattling off a list of horrible side effects with a huge disclaimer on the screen. I alluded to some of these side effects above. However, there are like fifty more, and each is worse than the next! Did a quick Google search and netted these possible side effects. From what I can gather, basically the best side effect you can suffer is a stroke:

Viagra (sildenafil)- side effects: headache, flushing (o really?), impaired vision and loss of peripheral vision, seeing in tinted blue, sudden hearing loss, stroke, severe hypotension, heart attack, ventricular arrhythmias, and priapism

Levitra (vardenafil) – side effects: nausea, abdominal pain, back pain, photosensitivity, abnormal vision, eye pain, facial oedema, rash, itch, hypertension, heart attack, and priapism.

Cialis (tadalafil)- side effects: headache, indigestion, back pain, muscle aches, flushing (seriously can you really call this a SIDE effect?), impaired vision, vascular problems, hypotension, anginal chest pain, sudden hearing loss, and priapism.

As a whole these pills appear to be about as safe as swallowing a live grenade. I wasn’t quite sure what priapism was until I looked it up. You know when the commercial says, “…if erections last for more than 4 hours seek immediate medical attention” that’s priapism. OVER four hours!? Are you freaking kidding me? So if I go to the hospital after say three hours and fifty minutes I'm a hypochondriac? I got news for you if I ever had 4+ hour woody; I’d need a psychiatrist more than anything else, because I would be seriously emotionally scarred.

Wanna know the scariest thing in all this? There is going to be a whole generation that grows up not knowing a world without little blue pills. If you were born in 1940, you’d never know a world without the automobile. If you were born in 1960, you’d never know a world without television. If you were born in 2009, you’d never know a world without.... instant erections? Progress. Nice.

Just trying to wrap my head around that idea made me a little woozy….whoa…kind of light-headed. Feels like all the blood in my body is rushing to my….well…nevermind. Probably just the pills talking.