Men – Page 8 – Hopeful Romantics

Buying Into the End of the World

People have been preaching the end of the world since there were…well…people. Over the centuries, you have everything to ruin your sleep from the dire predictions of Nostradamus to the guys with sandwich boards warning in ugly painted lettering of the impending Armageddon. We have had in the Cold War the ever present fear of nuclear annihilation. Now we have the fear of terrorists with weapons of mass destruction.

We also have the Mayan Calendar, which purportedly ends in December 2012. Many see this as Doomsday, the end of the world, the end date of a 5 thousand odd year cycle. A cottage industry has grown around the fact that the Mayan Calendar does not extend beyond December, 2012. It is the end of the world, see the movie, buy the cookies, wear the tee shirt.

Maybe the end of the Mayan Calendar has nothing to do with the end of the world. It may mean nothing more than they foresaw the end of political sanity as a bunch of mediocre candidates may be running for office. On more mundane levels, it may mean the Mayans were bored with their lives and found that one day ran into another there was no pressing need to chronicle their lives through time and space. So instead of extending their calender, it was a symbolic rejection of their future as that future only mimicked present and past–same crap on another day. Perhaps, after a long, spiritual consultation with their gods, where they sacrificed their last remaining virgins, Mayan priests saw in their future a world of MacDonald’s and Wal-Marts and figured the hell with the chronicles of history, not with Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin coming online to get it all wrong.

I don’t know. I don’t even pretend to think I know. I lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis and that was no joke. The specter of apocalyptic reality did indeed hover for those 13 days. Couple that with the insipid high school air raid drills where behind the closed paper window shades we gathered in the hallways, no talking, no chewing gum, to accept our fate of collective incineration. Easier that way, as for those who survived the nuclear holocaust would only have one hallway from which to sweep up the ashes. But as the Cuban Missile Crisis was averted, we were left only with the only one residual epiphany, that doomsday renders high school even more irrelevant than we had originally supposed. At least that was the value I took away, that no funky, out of date textbook could ever hope to refute.

But now here we are. We have any number of doomsday predictions. Pick your pet scenario for impending disaster. There are certainly enough to go around. Global warning has its virtues, and of course the terrorists and weapons of mass destruction. Those Mayans again. Nostradamus. Although you haven’t heard much about him lately, at least not since the movie flopped. Talk about lack of star power and box office draw. If you go out on the limb, like Nostradamus, you have to be at least somewhat on target about doomsday to keep them coming back for more. A couple of flop predictions and those eponymous tee shirts are remaindered to to the bargain racks at Ross Stores, before you can say “Von Dutch.”

So now you have some entrepreneurial soul who is selling bunk beds in a converted bunker out in the Mojave Desert. AT&T had a bunch of those bunkers stationed around the country. They were designed to withstand a nuclear blast and keep the communications open through secure microwave technology. The bunkers are around 14,000 square feet, which is roughly about the tenth the size of your average Kroger or the size of a modest supermarket. Not real big. But then, back when these bunkers were built they were constructed so wires and diodes would remain intact and not people.

But here we are in a frenzied world with frenzied headlines and hysteria about one thing or another at every turn. It’s an odd world that way. One minute we are told to relish the Hallmark moment, and the next we are warned about the reality of impending doom. Yes, odd. Buy stocks and prepare for retirement in one life’s breath and in the other just kiss your ass goodbye. No wonder people are confused, frustrated, and not sure which way to turn. If it’s all over twenty minutes from now, why even bother going to the gym? It is almost as stupid as going to high school. Well…maybe not that stupid.

So here they are out in the Mojave Desert, selling sanctuary from the end of the world. It could be all yours for a mere $50,000 in cash. Blast proof doors and a bunk in a room with three other people. Yes, you will have one of the four bunks. Kind of like a youth hostel with freeze dried food that may be slightly worse than the culinary mystery you buy off a roach coach. Just you and two hundred other people in your 14,000 square foot collective space. Cozy.

You get to sleep in the same call as three other people. This means a cacophony of bad breath, stinky feet, snoring, and the occasional sneaky night fart. This is what you get for your fifty grand. Not the Ritz, and not the Four Seasons. Not even the Holiday Inn. Naw, not even the Motel Six where at least a wall separates you from the commotion next door. After awhile, it would stand to reason you would be hoping a hundred megaton bomb would relieve you of your last bad decision. Just throw back the blast proof doors and release yourself to the refreshing embrace of nuclear radiation.
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Okay, so maybe after some deep contemplation the $50,000 investment for a berth in the bunker does not seem like the world’s greatest investment. Maybe the end result seems more akin to being stuck on a tarmac for several decades while the apocalyptic pilot waits for the nuclear radiation to reach half life. Maybe, like me, you would rather be swimming with barracuda than cramped in a tight space with vacant humanity for any time longer than it takes to go from here to there. So it’s possible sitting in a jail cell with a lounge chair is not the best way to slip past the apocalypse. Maybe you are not that eager to survive, after all.

There is another factor. Nuclear war happens fast. Missiles travel at high speeds. By the time you know the show is in its final run, the missiles are launched and it is a long drive to the bunker that is outside Barstow, California. Even if you live in Barstow, it’s a tough drive. And if you live in Los Angeles or any of its suburbs, traffic is at a standstill twenty of its twenty four hours. So when they announce on talk radio that your life will be over twenty minutes from now, I would venture getting from wherever to some dirt road outside of Barstow ain’t as easy as, say, resolving the national debt. The little venture gives true meaning to getting there is half the fun.

So there you are, sitting up to here in bumper to bumper traffic, forty three miles from sanctuary, listening to dire warnings from talk radio that the end the world missile is being delivered toasty warm just moments from now, in a big insulated pizza box. You didn’t make it to your rat hole. You are dead, thinking to yourself, damn, instead of this bunker, I could have bought a Winnebago.

But for those who are a bit more upscale and choosier about their apocalyptic digs, someone out of Kansas may soon be offering underground survival condos for a mere $1.75 million apiece. There you may have your much desired exclusivity and languish in the comfort of your Lazy Boy, oblivious to the pounding of scorched hands from those less fortunate than you. Never think of them as the unfortunate, but view them as fertilizer for the future landscaping you plan once the radiation has diminished. Those fatty food diets they probably ate will play off big time as they replenish the ground.

The condo does have its drawbacks. Yes, you might survive, but it is a long way to commute to anywhere. You are in Kansas, after all, and being some wigged out survivalist in Kansas should be punishment all to itself. In the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust you can be pretty sure you won’t have decent reception on your flat screen TV.

Look, this is a variation on an old theme. People have tried this before and rather than go the collective or condo route, they dug bomb shelters into their backyards. The stocked them with weapons, food, clothing, batteries for emergency radios and flashlights. The shelters maybe weren’t blast proof but what Russian in his right mind was dropping a nuke on Maple Shade Lane in Levittown? So blast proof wasn’t the issue. You only had to survive the radiation, Grandpa’s senile reminiscing, and the fact that one nuclear family member may croak, causing you to live with the stench until the radiation outside reaches half life and you can venture out into that brave new world of devastation.

But…many did consider the bomb shelter a worthwhile investment. There was a technical name to these people, attributable to their ability to see into the future and after careful contemplation realize what action needed to be taken. A very precise and technical name. Schmucks. But then after awhile even the schmucks discovered it might not be the end of the world and started using the bomb shelter for more worthwhile purposes. Like turning it into a sewing room, or the kiddies recreational room, or since there were beds there for having undisturbed sex with the pool boy or maid. Practical application. We are Americans after all.

As for the end of the world being imminent…two very basic and visceral responses pop into mind. Not likely. And if that is wrong…then…so what? Yes, so what? People are idiots and they ended the world. They were too dumb to live and something else will come along to take our place. Maybe enlightened protozoa. Hard to say. Such is life. Such is death.

Besides, have you ever been to Barstow? Imminent death may be a lot better than sitting it out in Barstow.

Each to Its Own Disease

Everyone tries to declare how special they are. While various groups debate their differences, define their histories and otherwise demonstrate their significance on what is becoming a very small planet, there is one undeniable fact that lingers in the back of our brain. We are all going to die from something. We may die quickly and violently, or we may linger and suffer before we pass on. But the stark fact is sooner or later we are checking out of here.

It is almost funny that this is perhaps the one remaining single fact where there is little or no debate. We argue about everything else. We argue about the big stuff, and we argue about the little stuff. We argue about global warming. We debate the merits and deficiencies of race, gender, and sexual preferences. We argue about gravity and the age of the Earth. We can spend hours debating the morality of everything from where to buy the best pair of jeans to driving an SUV. We argue whether we Darwin evolved or were a product of a divine plan explained to us ever so precisely through umpteen religions and secular theories. We argue whether cow farts and bottled water will hurtle out planet to its impending doom.

We argue incessantly. Taking sides and shouting each other down has become a major industry. You can’t market complexity and nuance, because thoughts that are complex and nuanced are disturbing and prey on our insecurities. We are more secure with crackpot theories than we are with uncertainty. So we argue in absolutes, and even then we prefer to keep our absolutes simple. If they are not simple, you can’t buy the books, go to the lectures and otherwise listen to the pundits and politicians who cater to our particular set of beliefs. Simply put, if you can’t put your thoughts on a tee shirt, they probably ain’t worth remembering.

But then every once in awhile some actual facts escape from spin cycle and we are confronted with their statistical reality. These are not the speculative statistics or manipulated statistics, positioned just to validate our point of view. No. Instead these are the types of fact that are actually hard to argue with. The ugly truth as it is sometimes known. These are the simple numbers that lay reality at your feet like an abandoned child that nobody wants to nurture. These are facts that remain consistent regardless of the cause , blame or subjectivity. These are the facts that leave little wiggle room, that are distinctive in their certainty so that debating them appears more like futile buffoonery than rational argument.

Such facts? Not only are we going to die, but we are actually killing ourselves. Maybe it’s the lemming concept or the human version of the long march to the elephant graveyard. Maybe its gross denial mixed with complex mixtures of stupidity and ignorance. Maybe deep down we just don’t care. Maybe our compulsion toward self-indulgence is so great that nothing, especially common sense, will get in the way of our collective suicide.

I am not talking here about the macro levels, the easy stuff, nuclear war, global warning, and the death of the planet. I am not even speculating on the probability of the sun eventually burning to the cinder or a meteor clipping us when we least expect it. Even global starvation and massive pandemics are not on the table here. Being invaded and eaten, as Stephen Hawking recently predicted, by aliens from another planet; we can forget about that, too. I am talking about how through our lack of responsibility we are in fact taking responsibility for doing ourselves in.

You should know what you are on line levitra taking aforementioned drugs. That component along with an additional hormone manufactured in actual body cGMP cast any offering part in order to destroy the actual existence on the devastating enzymes PDE5 manufactured in the actual blood stream. cheap super viagra The condition throws them to the time super generic cialis when they can’t reachthe orgasm yet. Cures male impotence generic cialis for sale and erectile dysfunction. New studies report that nearly half the adult population in America has high cholesterol, high blood pressure, or diabetes. One in eight is playing the quinella, where they have at least two out of three of these diseases. According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, 15% of us are walking around unaware we are afflicted with at least one of the three diseases. Which means to me, folks can pontificate authoritatively about everything from the rash on our ass to the Rapture and the End of Days, and yet still walk around having no idea they are seriously ill. We talk about lofty things like taking care of the planet and taking care of the poor, but yet we can’t seem to take care of ourselves.

What is even more interesting that certain diseases plague certain ethnic groups more than others. In America, African-Americans are prone to high blood pressure. Those of European descent find high cholesterol gets in their way, while Latinos suffer more from diabetes. Surely, there is some extension of these disease from one ethnic group to another, hands across the water so to speak. Also, there are other serious diseases that afflict different groups. I realize their are environmental concerns and individual or familial congenital defects. And then, in terms of health and fortune, it sometimes boils down to nothing more than the luck of the draw. But for our purposes we can stick with the article and just these three diseases.

While each ethnic group seems more in peril from a particular affliction, the causes for each of the diseases are pretty much the same. Mainly the causes revolve around smoking, a junk diet, obesity, and physical inactivity, better known as the sedentary lifestyle that makes the purchase of one of those fat mover electric scooters almost irresistible to some of the late night cable crowd. I would think no irony should be lost on the fact that our true common ground is our self-indulgence and bad health.

I have often found it just a tad specious that just about every ethnic group likes to brag about its past. Each ethnic group and nationality can go on for days about its glorious heritage and its contributions to civilization. There is no end to their performances and days of glory. Then. It is not that a disbelieve their claims. But often find myself searching for their particular relevance in the modern world. I wonder if all the casting back to the past serves as a distraction from the vagaries of our present times. I realize others will view a world through a different prism, but I tend toward the pragmatic and prefer to see how those past achievements can best be put to use in the modern day. How do we put them to use, and where does it leave us now?

From the looks of things, it leaves us obese with hypertension, diabetes, and high cholesterol. All represented in one form or another in the same collective rut. So in existential terms, regardless of specific achievements attributable to one group or another, we are all sitting here, living in denial and dying sooner than we should. If there is any consolation; it’s all pretty democratic. No matter what our ancestry, half of us are taking the decided inaction to let the quality of life slip out of our reach. We talk grandiose about saving the planet, but according to the recent study, we are having a tough time saving ourselves.

We talk about being sensitive to our surrounding, aware of the environment, our fellow creatures, and the challenges we are faced with. But yet in terms of our own well being, fifty percent of us can’t get out of our own way. We can’t hurdle our indulgences or come to terms with the realities of our own health concerns. Yeah, sure, we like to talk about it. We talk about the junk food, our carnivorous habits, and the polluted air we breathe. We even see the doctor. Yet here we are.

So I guess at the end of all this I am forced to wonder how are we doing to do all this planet saving when we can barely hurdle our personal afflictions? Is there any real logic to fending off hunger, water shortages, and global warming, while we continually ignore the factors causing our own demise? Here was are, ethnically speaking, all stuck with some kind of health burden and the best we can do is to skew the statistics to our own disadvantage. Maybe in the face of loftier ideals, the notion of the best example is the way we take care of ourselves.

The Life and Death of the Working Class

Whatever happened to the working class? From appearances they are all around us, working in everything from the dozen manufacturing plants still remaining in the United States to the auto and truck mechanic bays and doughnut shops across this fair land of ours. There are carpenters, plumbers, electricians, truck drivers, butchers, bakers, cab drivers, bartenders, waiters, sewer workers, construction crews, landscapers, and even farmers and cowboys. But, amazingly, no one is working class, anymore.

At least no one ever cops to being working class. Not in this day and age. When was the last time you heard a politician discuss the plight of the working class? Television news pundits never refer as working class to the blue collar worker losing his job to some eight year old kid in China. Or to a robot, also from China. Even the working class doesn’t describe itself as working class. Today the working class regards itself as middle class. The Tea Baggers, many of whom are working class, hold up signs and make speeches about the potential demise of the middle class. The guy that delivers your paper every morning will lament how massive media consolidation has all but destroyed his position as a middle class earner. Despite the dirt and grime of their professions, the hard physical work and all the dangers involved, the coal miners and oil drillers consider themselves members of the middle class. The blue collar philosopher, Eric Hoffer, would today be described in the back of his books as the notable middle class longshoreman. Even the crack whore working in the grimmest parts of town will tell you now she isn’t working class, but middle class, and that her livelihood is threatened by urban renewal ramped up by the monied elite.

Blue collar workers describing themselves as middle class, to some extent, is nothing new. In Europe the working class considered themselves to be working class, and they wore that distinction with pride, no matter how dubious a category it may appear to a lot of us. Even here in the early and mid-century United States, the working class was comfortable calling itself the working class. Hell, labor unions were first formed around that very notion. The workers. The working class. They recognized they were plumbers or trades people and as such they were people who worked with their hands. They cut meat and splattered blood on their aprons, made bread and were covered with flour. They laid bricks and dug tunnels, worked in steel mills and manufactured tools and garments. They got dirty and were physically tired at the end of the day from doing all that physical work. They had their dreams and visions, but suffered few delusions as to where they stood in the face of the overall strata. Simply put, they were working class.

But come the sixties and when America was in transition, it was increasingly uncomfortable to wear the label working class. Being working class meant that you maybe were less than your potential and couldn’t buy all the stuff that was being offered to consumers in the post-war era of guns and butter. If you were working class, you might have doubts as to whether you were entitled to the finer things in life. Perhaps you weren’t meant for that wall-to-wall nylon carpeting, the station wagon, and the Amana over-and-under frostless freezer that was touted as the prize on every game show.

Owning a television was a whole different story. You knew, even if you were working class, that you could at least have a television, because that kept you distracted and brain dead, which nullified the chance of self-improvement and further dissension. You also needed that TV for the commercials, so you knew how much all new and improved lemon scented crap was out on the market, and which brand of crap you should buy.

I came from a neighborhood in transition. It was the rare time in American history where doctors and lawyers lived next door to plumbers, carpenters, construction workers, and the guy who owned a store. It was the era when ethnic groups emerged from the ghettoized neighborhoods at the urban core to the city fringes and city suburbs where developing neighborhood offered affordable housing and access to the business centers. For some, they moved into these neighborhoods with the intention of remaining there. For a good many others, it was a whistle stop, the starter house between the old world neighborhoods of the inner city and the new. This is where you firmed up your professional practice or got your business together, before moving into the suburbs where the single family ranch-style house, two car garage and shopping mall waited to greet you new found success.

But no matter, whether you were the steel work, plumber, or the fledgling young lawyer, the general perception was you were middle class. Forget about the junker car, the clothing bought from off-brand stores, the cheap food, and cramped living quarters. Forget the fact that many of the parents were only high school graduates if that, and a portion of their kids what never put their foot inside a college door. Forget all the parochialism, and rigid stricture of the immigrant and post-immigrant class. The perception was you were doing better then both the poor bastards who had been stuck in the old world, or the ones fortunate enough to make it here. They didn’t eat what they wanted, and they were lucky if they had a pair of shoes. You had two pairs of shows, your work shoes and dress shoes. You didn’t go hungry, and you had a car to drive and a place to drive it to. You weren’t among the poor wretches working in some cotton field or some old world factory, scuffling out a a buck. So you had to be middle class.

That’s what America was all about, wasn’t it? Being middle class. If you declared yourself middle class, you demonstrated you had arrived at least in some fashion. You were doing better than your ancestors. They, those poor working stiffs, would have envied you. And while you shunned some of the constraints of old world morality and bias, you embraced enough of the Calvinist sensibility of hard work and a lot of denial to register as one with the middle class. You wanted things, and in many practical cases you could actual buy them. Who among your ancestors in the Irish Famine or the dregs of Lower Slobovia, had ever heard of frozen produce or TV dinners? And here you were loaded with those wonderful Birds Eye boxes of frozen Green Giant deliciousness stored inside your all new Amana Freezer.

So now that no one was working class anymore, you had a nation of the middle class. That is with the exception of the rich or wealthy. And the poor. but the poor had nothing and weren’t going anywhere, so there was no real need to pay much attention to them, other than to cluck cluck about how pitiful it all is and call them poor no longer. Instead they are the underclass. Sounds better, anymore than middle class sounds better to blue collar workers than working class. Except the poor don’t really give a damn that they are now the underclass and not poor, as no word phrase shape shift half-assed magic is going to make them anything but poor. No dilemmas here.

An ultrasound should viagra from india online be the first step. As should be obvious, its all exceptionally straightforward and its difficult to happen here. generic levitra http://www.tonysplate.com/review_eatsmart_digital_nutrition_scale.php Many of you cheap viagra order tonysplate.com out there who are still unaware with this medicine. As an Affiliate Marketer, you effectively become cialis online from canada tonysplate.com the ‘middle man’, you help people online, to find products that they are looking for, so here’s a description on many of the forms of modeling. But enough of the poor. Nobody likes to talk about the poor, except Mother Theresa and the patrons of a charity dinner where a couple hundred cronies looking for a tax write off to appear noble honor a rich guy for his selflessness and generosity. And since Mother Theresa is dead, you won’t hear her going on and taking your time about the plight of the downtrodden and helpless.

So it’s the rich. Once upon a time the wealthy patrician class in this country, the people who ran things, didn’t call themselves the rich. In fact, in a vain effort to remain discreet, they didn’t call themselves anything at all. But then they didn’t have to. For one thing it was considered gauche and unacceptable. Crude. Everybody knew, anyway. Besides, if you start calling your self the wealthy class then some of the working class might want some of your money.

But then, as the emerging wealthy class, as opposed to the established, patrician wealthy class, the Kennedy’s and the Rockefeller’s and the like, began to make more money decorum went south for the season, and the neo-rich couldn’t resist flaunting their toys for all the world to see. The very concept of gauche and good taste put on its designer goodies and fled the MacMansion on a Gulfstream. Gross consumption was the word of the day, and those who had come by recent wealth were heralded in the cross media platforms as was heroes of the modern world. They were to be admired, envied…and copied.

So this meant that the real middle class and of course the upper middle class– as there had to be at least an attempted distinction between the middle-middle and the upper middle–went chasing after the formerly middle but emerging wealthy class. This meant the middle class wanted what the rich wanted, and the rich in this case were the oil barons, the bankers, real estate mavens, stock brokers, models, sports stars, and the twelve-year-old start up guys with a new kind of digital company. Of course, this group, traditionally, were not at the pinnacle of great taste and culture. But they had what they had, cretins or not, and the middle class wanted it, too. And since some of the middle class was also the working class, calling themselves the middle class, you had an unprecedented demand for what in marketing parlance is termed luxury items.

There is an inherent problem with luxury items. It is not always easy to determine what is truly a luxury item and what is not. Other than the price. Once upon a time the more discerning, the connoisseurs could discern the difference in quality from everything from food to furniture. They were educated in the nuance and distinction. They knew woods, fabric, drape, and workmanship. The ability to distinguish the good stuff from the mediocre was either self-learned or was part of the patrician package deal. Or, at the very least, there was some cultural flunky in access who could fill them in. How else were you going to be the ruling class and, no matter how discreetly, lord it over the masses if you didn’t know the difference between fine bone china and paper plates?

But that was a different world. In today’s world who has time to learn all this stuff? And even if you did, chances are in a cookie cutter world of mass consumption much of the luxury brands you are buying at premium prices are being knocked out by the same slave in the same factory in a village that ten years ago finally got running water.. So along comes branding. You don’t actually need to know what makes something worth more, what gives it special quality and craft, form and function. All you have to do is look at the label. If it costs a lot, then it’s quality. That’s it. As with romance, politics, human behavior, or the history of the Earth, let’s not meddle in complexities. Let’s instead carve it down to a few simple concepts that even the idiots in the cheap seats can understand.

So in the middle of all this, where in the hell is the working class? And, more so, in this world of only one constant, that of eternal confusion, how do you make the distinction between the working class and the middle class, even the upper middle class. The wealthy elite; that’s easy. Just look for the Gulfstream parked in he driveway. But it it is only an RV taking up space in the breezeway and clogging all the neighbor’s view is the family who owns it working class and prepped for the big weekends out at Lake Somewhere, or are they middle class with a penchant for the great theme park?

Tough call. What does make the difference between the working class and the middle class? Is it education? Breeding? Income? Is it where you buy your stuff? But then the same designer sweat socks you paid a fortune for on Monday are selling Friday in a big box store. So no go there. If we break it down to occupation, it is still pretty confusing. Typically, a plumber or landscaper is working class. But if he owns a company and has a fleet of fourteen trucks, and he raked it in big time in the housing boom, then maybe he is worth more than his station would indicate. Maybe he is a wealthy guy, not wealthy class wealthy but upper middle class. While, say the account executive or sales manager who should be middle or upper middle class has fallen on tough times in the economic downturn in an industry that is facing obsolescence is making the same salary as the manager of a Piggly Wiggly. If you go by salary, then maybe the troubled account executive is working class, or out of work entirely and desperately in search of a job. But I digress.

And what about the manager in the Piggly Wiggly? Is he working class or middle class? If he has his name labeled on his shirt, does it make a difference as to which class he is part of. We have to contemplate the station of the IT guy, the techno geek, wearing the torn Mickey Mouse Tee-Shirt he bought at someone’s yard sale in order to forget he is very much under the thumb of a multi-corporate structure, is he working class or middle class? As for the hooker, mentioned paragraphs ago. Where is she in the class structure? I guess as with any other commodity, it is a matter or pricing and volume.

So it would appear in the great socio-economic milieu that the working class is gone and forgotten. It is an archaic term, I suppose, in some ways. Everyone works, after all.

The Life and Times of the Counterfeit Erection

The head of the Intellectual Property Investigation Bureau for the Hong Kong Customs Office, recently reported that eighty percent of the counterfeit drugs seized are used to treat impotence. This means that despite all the diseases out there that require treatment, from heart disease to restless leg syndrome, the main concern is penis performance. The heart arteries could be blocked, and the diabetes count could be four hundred and change; lungs could be like toasted marshmallows from years of cigarette smoke, and the brain riddled with mad cow disease, but if the penis works, then all is well with the world.

Stiffening the penis is big money wherever you look. Between the lap dances and the porn sites, the sex junkets to Thailand, even the somewhat tame Victoria’s Secret Catalog, much of the international marketing thrust is designed for Chubby. There are colognes promising sex attraction through Pheromones and monkey sweat. There are any number of herbs and foods considered to be aphrodisiacs. Where the penis is concerned, the world is its oyster. We are not talking a few bucks here We are talking mega-billions.

In fact the manufacture and sale of imitation Viagra and other such drugs used to treat erectile dysfunction generates more profits than any other drug sold in China. Much of it is also exported. But there is for the world wide boner effort, plenty of pills to go around. Viagra and Cialis are the two most pervasive counterfeit drugs confiscated by customs officials. Needless to say, these drugs are not regulated, so they either consist of harmful adulterants that can give the user damaging side effects, or they are merely placebos that have little affect whatsoever. In all, it is a gamble that most customers are willing to take. The hope of a hard on is more promising than the fear of, say, a liver disease.

I find this remarkable on at least one level. The fact that consumers will take health risks for elusive or ephemeral benefits is really unremarkable. In fact, it is commonplace. People will use Botox in spite of some of the possible nerve damage it can cause. They will smoke, drink, take drugs to excess. They will have themselves peeled and snipped and will disregard any possible dangers. Hell, they will overlook all the warning signs of transmittable disease and come closing time go home with a disaster just waiting to happen. So, I suppose, why not at least have a pharmacological erection to accommodate that ill fated night you may long remember?

No, nothing remarkable about this. What is remarkable is the fact that after hundreds and even thousands of years of the Chinese pursuit of the heavenly hard on, they are resorting to Western medicine to achieve their desired erections. All those centuries of eating everything from deer antler, tiger penis, bear bladder, and even gall stones has not compared to the majestic little blue pill. Or the yellow one. So has all the years of imbibing Shark’s Fin Soup, Bull Dick and Testicle Soup, Ginseng, Rhino’s Horn, Sea Cucumber and Bird’s Nest Soup not produced the results that we were led to believe? One has to wonder if the desire for Western treatment for erectile dysfunction is because all that other crap doesn’t work, or it is largely the notion that downing Tiger Penis is a much tougher project than swallowing one small pill. Even with hot sauce, it is hard to imagine what culinary delights the Tiger Penis has to offer. Common sense would dictate it’s a lot easier to take the Viagra or Cialis and leave room in your stomach for some veggie fried rice or a nice, juicy steak. But then the exotic lure of Tiger Penis is something that has escaped me, to date, so maybe there is in the end an acquired taste.

Chinese medicine has been venerated for a fair number of years. Skeptics of Western medical practices, and there should be, believe me, have often extolled the virtue of Chinese Medicine. We are not just talking acupuncture here, but the herbs and foods that offer curative power. Chinese medicine is regarded highly in holistic circles as both reputable and in certain ways advanced in its understanding of the human body and the way certain diseases should be treated. I have used Chinese Medicine. So why, when there are nine million herbs, body parts, food sources and whatever that are over the centuries devoted to raising a woody, have the Chinese decided to eschew all that and switch over to the pill?

Perhaps it is the nifty commercials where a boomer band sits around singing “Viva Viagra,” at the top of its bar band lungs as if a group grope at closing time is their collective reward for playing bad cover songs. Or the kinder and gentler Cialis commercials where “when the moment is right for you.” Yeah, like painting a room might suddenly inspire the two of you to put down the rollers and climb down off of that ladder. I have wondered if the suggestion behind double bathtub commercial is that once the Cialis takes hold of Johnny Wonder it will drill through one tub into the other. Better than Popeye’s spinach.

You would think with all the Viagra buying, the Chinese would have a lot of sex on their minds. The idea of buying counterfeit Viagra, or Cialis, or Levitra, for that matter, I would think is to keep the cost down. If you are messing around just here and there, what’s few bucks more for the real thing. Okay, one reason for buying counterfeit may be the confidentiality. In China, where losing face, or whatever, is a big issue, the Chinese man may want to keep it on the low down that his thingie ain’t working. It’s not like here where we are not only singing about it, but bragging to our friends.
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Perhaps it is a quantitative thing and Chinese men have become a bunch of horny souls who thanks to the national surge in their economy are looking for love in all the wrong places. It could be they went from the bitterness of short money and a lot of starvation to feeling flush everywhere but down below. Deer Antler letting you down? Try Cialis. So there in the need for quantity comes forth the need for economy. Viagra and such is expensive. Counterfeit pills have to be a lot cheaper. But then it is more than a tad ironic that a nation trying to retain population control is defying the odds of pregnancy that is strongly propagated by an insistent erection.

But the Chinese have for at least the modern age been largely a prudish nation. Movies are often censored. National policy forbids pornography. Yet when it comes to illegal brothels the government looks the other way. Usually, the illegal brothels are fronted by a hair salon. What a rude awakening for the unsuspecting soul ventures there for a cut and perm. And since the “hair salons” proliferate Chinese cities, perhaps a pocketful of Viagra is necessary to just to work your way down the block.

In fairness, every nation has had its aphrodisiacs. There are oysters, chili, dog meat, yes, dog meat, more oysters,ginkgo, turtle eggs, and the skink. After awhile, it seems just about everything but liquor and ice cream will help men get it up. Of course, Western culture being what it is, nothing makes more sense than a single pill you pop an hour before your are ready to roll of the sofa and turn off the TV. Can’t argue with that.

Although there are certain Westerners who are taking issue with the Viagra culture. As the Daily Beast has dubbed them The Viagra Brigade, here are the women who at a certain age have had their sex drives diminished to levels of a more sedentary convenience. Now here they are, content to pursue other interests, coping with a horny husband. Some of these men make increased demands on these women, depending on the size of the prescription. And some go astray, complicating long term relationships by jumping the reservation and heading for the younger women world for that one last time around.

Geezers with an attitude. And then there are the younger women who married the wealthier older man for security, companionship, and a lot of nice things his money could buy her. Sex wasn’t really part of the package. but now she suddenly has to perform. Talk about an inconvenient truth.

Maybe had a way of telling us to slow down. Maybe, in the original master plan, with aging we were not about to reproduce so there was not much need for erections. Maybe, after a certain point, the penis may be working with a little help from its friends, but the rest of us is not quite up to snuff. There are aches and pains. The aging body hurts just when you get up in the morning, yet alone when you are having sex. So maybe we are in defiance of nature and the master plan.

But then again, maybe not. Maybe the crap we put into our systems that we call food creates diabetes and assorted ailments that are well known to cause erectile dysfunction. It’s possible being obese or a least a couple dozen pounds overweight may have something to do with the way the blood travels through the body. Maybe the sedentary life and our self-absorptions, preoccupations and worries, real and imagined, impair the sexual reflect. One could justify that screwing in the face of age and adversity is a grand act of defiance and of telling impending mortality to kiss our collective ass. Maybe after the BMW and the decorator everything sex and its resultant pleasure is one of the only things that really matters. After all, we have how many sexual thoughts per hour? I have long lost track.

So for the horny Chinese and the horny rest of us around the world, if you can’t take the heat, stay in the kitchen. Viva Viagra. If nothing else, it is one of the few things in this world that actually works.

Los Angeles is the Hollywood Sign

Los Angeles has always been a city of contradictions. For one thing, most of its citizens share a love hate relationship with the city. It is a Western City, populated at first by New Yorkers and Mid-Westerners, and now with people from every part of the globe. It is an American city with an Hispanic past. Its major products are agrarian, technology, and dreams.

It has been ridiculed of its tackiness and referred to as Tinsel Town. Yet with the suburbanization of most cities in America, with their endless grids of unremarkable houses in predictable tracts all punctuated by a series of shopping malls and big box stores, the City of Los Angeles, has become incredibly unique to itself. On one hand when you live in Los Angeles you are aware that this may be the vanguard of American living. If only the rest of America didn’t despise us so much. You live here at the far end of America. When you visit anywhere else you feel more like you have been living on the moon.

The City of the Angels one of the most populous urban areas in the nation. Yet it’s odd and endless grids are offset by a large array of year round foliage, replete with any number of exotic plants, desert vegetation, oaks, maples, Bougainvillea, Jacaranda, and the occasional Willow. The houses themselves are a flurry and mix and match of architectural types, with Tudors standing next door to Spanish Mission, next to mid century modern, next to the sleek, contemporary pronouncements of the twenty first century. All encapsulated by an endless ribbon of freeways, highways, boulevards, and narrow, winding canyon roads. A city with extreme wealth and extreme poverty, luxury landscapes and urban blight, all embraced by the Pacific Ocean to the West and Santa Monica and San Gabriel Mountain ranges to its north and east.

LA has probably the worst urban gridlock. It is a once flat city going high rise. Yet in some parts of the city urban sprawl is being witnessed by decidedly non-urban creatures like deer and coyote. This is in addition to the opossums, snakes and wildcats, vying for space with major street gangs and gangs of paparazzi. It is some mix, and confused chroniclers of the city have labored for years to analyze the contradictions.

In my twenties, I remember when the richest part of Beverly Hills, the rich flats resplendent then with celebrities and wealthy replicants of the post-Ozzie and Harriet era, living just across the street from the Wonder Bread Factory. Here were houses envied by much of a nation, to say nothing of the Beverly Hills City Hall and Police Station, all enduring the smell of sugar and yeast from what was then the biggest bread maker in the country.

Los Angeles has long been denigrated for its lack of culture and abundance of nut jobs. But meanwhile, it has long been the political sanctuary for creative refugees, be it the Mexican artists, fleeing the Mexican Revolution, or the Europeans fleeing Hitler’s scourge. Despite the long standing and tired joke that the main culture here is in yogurt, the art scene flourishes as one of the most dynamic in the world. There are many literary luminaries living here, and a media and entertainment center it is second to none. As for the nut jobs, there are many, but the city’s financial and legal centers impact greatly the economics of Asia Pacific and global economics in general.

LA is the world-wide capital for self absorption. It is a powerful city, where many adults still dress like children. Yet it is for the most part a bastion of liberal politics, and more ethnically diverse than just about any other city. LA is a city where people don’t care much about your background, the color of your skin and to which religion you cast your prayers. They care instead about what you do and what you drive. They care about how you look and what you wear, and whether you are smart enough to seize on opportunity when it air kisses your front door.

So it is small wonder, that at least part of the consciousness of Los Angeles would be symbolized by the Hollywood Sign. Why is this a contradiction? At least for a city that likes to knock things down and build things new things in their place, thus reinventing itself and nullifying history, the temporarily constructed Hollywood sign remains a part of our permanent history. But maybe not for long.

They further explain that the time period cheapest levitra generic http://www.molineanimalaid.org/index-3 of 24 hours is completed you can then go for the second pill. Presence of catechin is the highlighting feature of brand levitra green tea. Kamagra have been an innovate discovery of the health experts buy cialis generic of Food & Drug Association (FDA). As you cheap super cialis age, you might require more jolts and a stretched out term of time to keep up an acceptable erection. The Hollywood Sign sits on Mt. Lee. It was constructed initially in 1923. It wasn’t built to honor Hollywood, movie capital of the world. No. The sign was an advertisement for a new building development known as Hollywoodland. The sign was studded with light bulbs, some 40,000 in all. It was garish and tacky, so very LA.

In 1949 the City Council in its great wisdom ordered the “land” part of the sign to be removed so it could become the enduring symbol of the center of the earth, as least as far as the motion picture industry was concerned. But structures made of wood and sheet metal were not meant to endure, and the sign fell in and out of disrepair. Its durability wasn’t helped any when people crashed their cars into it, vandalized it, and even jumped from it; as in one case where a failed and forlorn Hollywood actress jumped from the letter “H.”

Like many actors of a certain age, the sign may have looked good from a distance, but up close it was looking aged and worn, and perhaps only worth advertising that the once glamorous Hollywood proper was now populated by hookers and junkies, and tourists still gaping at the concrete feet of celebrities outside of Grauman’s Chinese Theater.

In 1978, the sign was in such disrepair that the city launched a fund raising drive to replace the letters. In steel. At the time, the cost of replacement was $250,000 or so. Alice Cooper donated a new letter “O” along with his manager at the time, Shep Gordon. To garner donations, pieces of the old sign were embedded in Lucite and sold or given away. A friend gave me one of those, and to this day it still adorns one of my bookshelves. Despite the passing of years, I still find it oddly reassuring, a relic of accidental permanence in an impermanent environment.

More work was done on the sign in 2005 and 2006. Like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, it needs maintenance.

So where is the big contradiction? Okay, if it is not a contradiction, then its is surely ironic. The Hollywood Sign started out as an advertisement for a housing development. And now, Fox River Financial Resources, Inc, wants to disrupt its solitary presence by putting up a housing development on the 138 acres of surrounding land. The real estate development will either jeopardize the Hollywood Sign or make it awfully damned ugly to look at with a bunch of houses in its perimeter.

The City of Los Angeles and its Trust for Public Land has but three more days to raise an additional $2.8 million of the $12 Million in total needed to buy the land from Fox River, which bought it from the Hughes estate in 2002 for $1.7 Million. A nice profit. For what Los Angeles considers one of its historical treasures.

Personally, I want to see the sign saved. A few luxury houses on the mountain crest will hardly substitute for the sheer beauty of the mountainous area, a rare bit of space unmolested by our problematic need to build on every piece of vacant land. As these are to be four luxury houses developed on this parcel, the abusively rich can find another place to park their ass. We would miss the sign, but hardly the cretins intent on their fiefdoms. The Hollywood Sign, after all, does symbolize Los Angeles.