If you’re like me you have given some thought to all those Viagra and Cialis commercials out there, and likely that thought is how long you will have to get along without your TV  after you throw a table lamp through it because you just channel surfed to the fourth Viagra or Cialis commercial in five minutes.  Why in the world are these drug companies so obsessed with erectile dysfunction?   Can’t they move on for Pete sakes?  Thanks to them the whole world knows about ED (not to be confused with VD).  But they have saturated the awareness level by now, don’t you think?   There seems to be a lot of pressure on their creative departments to come up with something new to hard sell their products.  At first there were reasonably informative commercials, like the one featuring Bob Dole.  Imagine any politician, even a retired one, admitting to anything remotely embarrassing.  Then along came some semi-inoccuous videos, but they stretched the limits of even the most credulous.  What is the deal with all the bath tubs anyway?   We see an apparent cialitized guy and his partner sitting in separate bath tubs all over the place- at the beach, their home, and I’m not sure if the implication isn’t claiming cialis can make your income grow as well as your shlong, because there is one commercial where these two are sitting in their bath tubs watching the sunset from what appears to be their vacation home.  It could be the manufacturer is attempting to seed the subliminal message that you might be in for sticker shock and only those who can afford a vacation home will have enough reserve cash to purchase their expensive drug.  I have so many questions about those bath tubs.  Will Cialis somehow give me the almost superhuman strength to drag two bathtubs from my bathrooms to my patio and back again?  I have to haul one of them up a very long flight of stairs.  Just the thought of all the disassembly and reassembly of  the plumbing gives me a headache.  Will Cialis get rid of my headaches?  I gotta tell you if Cialis will improve my plumbing skills I might consider paying thirty bucks a tablet.  Every time I tackle a plumbing project, it turns into a disaster.  I usually end up tearing out a section of drywall in order to fix the problem I created when I attempted the initial repair.  Shit I hate that.  Maybe the people in the videos just travel around with two extra bathtubs wherever they go.  I guess that makes more sense.  But what if they fly overseas?  Seems to me the air freight would be exorbitant.  Then again, I guess these guys can afford it if they can afford a vacation home.  And Cialis.

Then there’s a set of similar commercials that are all about a guy who has “reached the age.”  I don’t know if the term “middle age” is offensive to a large group of people, but the pharmaceutical industry must think so, because they seem to want to dodge the issue by replacing it with several more complimentary labels, like, but not limited to, the age of never backing down from a challenge, the age of knowing how to make things happen, the age of knowing a thing or two, and the age of knowing what you’re made of.  I am not sure anymore exactly where I fall in these age brackets, but I’d like to think by now I do know a thing or two.  What I have learned is these fucking commercials are offensive and an assault on privacy.  I’m tired of dodging questions my eight year old granddaughter asks me about Viagra, typically on Sunday before we head out to church.  She expects some clear thought about this shit from a retired pharmacist.  God damn it it’s not up to me to give her the old birds and bees lecture.  Her mother can step up and do that.  I shouldn’t be put in that position.

The latest round of Viagra commercials is really pressing the envelope of good taste though if you ask me.  What we now see are several commercials featuring a number of extremely attractive women who all strut about in various stages of suggestive apparel, seductively brushing hair and slipping  evocative phrases into their dialog.  The one with the gal exclaiming she would rather curl up with her man than a good book more than likely has many ladies in the viewing audience wondering if they shouldn’t set fire to their library cards.  I’d be curious to hear the age-related phrase Eli Lilly has for the stars of these productions.  The age of robbing the cradle comes to mind if their target audience is truly the average American middle aged man.  Typically these commercials are about the lure of sex and how it alters perception.  Is there supposed to be an underlying thought here that if a guy takes Viagra his partner will start to look like one of the hot babes in these commercials?  I know the drug can make you see blue, but that type of vision alteration seems like a stretch.

So, what’s the next step for the advertising arm of these drug companies  The only thing left I can think of is to blast full speed ahead into pornography.  Get ready to witness the penetration of the last frontier in the commercial television world boys.  If anyone can pull this off it’s the pharmaceutical industry.  The next series of ED commercials is going to provide bonerfied pandemonium in us guys dwelling in the age of knowing what we’re made of.  No doubt staring at a fully unclothed vamp moaning and gyrating on your big screen TV set is going to have you recollecting about the age of knowing how to make things happen.   Keep looking at the screen and everything you need to solve this problem is effortlessly going to happen.  You won’t be needing any overpriced Viagra.  Just keep paying your cable bill.

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I sincerely meant to get right back to all of you about this, but that Kanye West thing I saw during the SNL 40th totally fucked me up.  I mean I actually had nightmares about it.  I basically withdrew from society for three days.  Pulled all my window shades down and locked myself in my house.  I didn’t answer the phone, let alone touch my keyboard.  Things were just more or less frozen in time during that stretch.  You know, the woodwork and some other flat surfaces around the house seemed to have collected more dust than usual too.  Maybe I just never noticed it before. I guess I should pay more attention.   Anyway, thanks to all of you who sent the get-well cards, emails. and what a touching blog comment from Vinnie “the Shiv” Gallo.  I really appreciate your suggestion, but I didn’t need to remove a bullet from my jaw.  It was just a toothache.

In the end I didn’t go through with it, the pulling my own tooth thing.  I chickened out.  But in the end I came to the conclusion I just might have been able to pull it off.  I chickened out because I lost faith in the tools I had available to me, and I am too cheap to spend any more money on another tool.  I have all these tools around and anymore I am hardly using any of them.  But in the end, as I glanced at the tools my assigned oral surgeon had aligned neatly on the tray that was perched no more than a foot and a half in front of my face, I noticed very quickly that they really didn’t look a whole lot different than the ones I had selected from my work-shop (see picture in previous self-help dental post), but in the almost-end had also considered inadequate.

The end all began after I called my dentist and told him that his hopeful solution to my dental pain turned out to be a very hopeless exercise in futility.  From my disjointed conversation with him that was broken by pauses of gasping moans he seemed to grasp the fact that I was still in serious pain, and offered the professional courtesy of securing an appointment with an endodontist for me.  Apparently someone in the  endodontic field of practice is the specialist your dentist will pass you along to after he gives up trying.   I had to tough it out for another 24 hours, but that visit reestablished my faith in health care in this great country.  That dude had some really genuine state of the art equipment.  First off, there was this magnifying apparatus that he peered through.  From my  vantage point prone in the dental chair, he looked like he was observing action via a pair of night vision goggles, but the business end revealed two cracks in my tooth that were imperceptible on X-rays.  One of them was so astonishingly unique my endodontist excitedly instructed his assistant to take a peek at it herself.  Apparently this crack was the dental equivalent of a  new astrophysical discovery.  These two professionals were beside themselves with joy.  I would have liked to have called their attention to the fact that as far as I was concerned they were on the clock, but that’s hard to do when you have your mouth locked wide open with a dental dam.

That, I would have to say, was the most enlightening event of the visit for me.  I had never  been introduced to the legitimate use of the dental dam.  The vague knowledge I had of that thing previously involved ribald tales told to me by some of my more questionably worldly but nonetheless safety conscious acquaintances.  You’ll just have to google the term to see what I’m talking about.  I don’t want to gross you out.  Just be aware in case your endodontist ever asks you if you’ve ever heard of a dental dam. You don’t want to blurt out an answer that reveals a seamy side to your character.   I have to admit I was impressed with its effectiveness.  It eliminated a lot of the gagging on flying dental debris I have often encountered during a cavity filling.

After reaming out everything my dentist had installed in that tooth and exposing its cracks, my endodontisst gave me the bad news that the tooth was irreparable and would have to come out.  In the way of even worse news,  he also informed me endodontists don’t perform extractions.  As was the case with my dentist, he made the accommodation of handing me off to the next dental professional, the oral/maxillofacial surgeon.

Of course that appointment could not be secured until the following day,  On the positive side, all the drilling down from this last procedure at least enabled the putrid infectious material that was causing my intermittent but jarringly intense pain to drain away.  At that point the form of pain I was enduring was simply a constant ache.  So I knew I was nearing the end of my ordeal.  And thanks to all the grinding and chipping and extracting bits and pieces of my tooth by my oral surgeon, the end became a reality.  Thanks for your concern.