Erectile dysfunction. ED for short. You might remember a time when ED was just Ed, that creepy old guy with long hair who lived in his parent’s basement. You remember. He used to paint those pictures that were so weird they hurt your eyes just to look at them.
“What is that supposed to be!” you’d want to scream. “Send it to hell where it belongs you crazy bastard!”
No ED then. If you were a boy you’d get a boner by looking at a good looking fence; and if you were a girl at some point in the mystery of development you actually looked forward to sex, imagining that one day you’d meet a sensitive guy who would listen to you.
The problem with being 15 is that it doesn’t last very long. And anyway, what did you do with all that sexual vitality, that superb reaction time, that glorious muscle mass, that thick wavy hair, that clear 20/20 vision and that perfect pitch hearing?
“Dude, Spider Man could kick Superman’s ass.”
“Dude, no way.”
“Way, dude. He’d like put kryptonite in that web stuff and spray it on him.”
“No, dude. Superman would like burn it up with his heat ray vision…”
And of course you probably sat next to someone a lot smarter than you or anyone else in school.
“When I grow up I’m going to start my own computer business.”
“Shut up.”
“I’m going to call it Microsoft.”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass what you call it!”
Then what? You spend the next 40 years at a boring, dead-end job, hating yourself for being such a jerk because you’ve always been told that smart people don’t work, they get losers like you to work for them.
In bed, watching television past your bedtime, eating chocolate covered
goop, fried pork rinds, smoking or whatever else will stop your clock before it reaches midnight, thinking about those ED commercials.
“I didn’t know that getting my crotch crushed in a motorcycle accident could lead to my ED!”
One thought leads to another. You’ve worked 40 years but what do you have to show for it? And in all those years you’ve voted for political parties that have left you and your community in the dust. Congested freeways instead of mass rapid transit; a global military empire instead of universal health insurance and decent schools; mega rich oil conglomerates and high gas prices instead of cleaner, renewable energy; an endless war on terror instead of a war on poverty, hunger and disease…
Does it matter what the average person really wants anymore?
But there’s the pill for erectile dysfunction. You can have sex, or something like it, again!
Why don’t we turn back the clock and go back to 1970 again? When boys had boners 24/7 without drugs, when tough girls kissed hard and said what was on their mind. We could build an economy that works for us instead of the other way around. We could save the planet. We could even reinvent ourselves.
After all, it’s an American tradition.
