Honolulu Lite
Honolulu Lite
These little blue pills
are in the mail,
but not the maleI received unsolicited in the mail the other day two blue pills and a ton of written material explaining why the most personal of my personal business was in need of improvement.
The pills came from a Virginia company claiming they had a revolutionary and truly amazing discovery from nature that would "restore spontaneity" to those intimate times shared between two (and sometimes three or four) consenting adults.
I don't know much about spontaneity except that if you need to take pills and then read brochures, cards and letters to achieve it, you probably won't.
There were several disturbing things about receiving this uninvited public interest in my private affairs, not the least of which was the audacity of complete strangers sending me pills through the mail during these times of terrorism. It wasn't too long ago that people wouldn't even open their mail for fear of being contaminated with anthrax. Did these blue-pill bozos actually think anyone would ingest into their bodies an unknown substance from someone they've never met? Even the most hard-core addict knows not to take drugs that don't come from a reputable doctor or semireputable drug dealer.
WHAT IS MOST disturbing is the idea that some jokers in Virginia are making judgment calls on my ability to ... well, let's just say my ability. The pills clearly are designed to look like Viagra, the expensive male fixer-upper advertised on the side of race cars and former presidential candidates.
In tiny, tiny print, the company discloses that the pills actually are not medicine at all. These things are not approved by the FDA, or the FAA, DEA or AAA, for that matter. They contain "natural" ingredients, which is supposed to make you think they are good for you. Dirt is a natural ingredient. Eat some of that sometime and see how swell you feel.
The natural ingredients in the blue pills sound like important, scientifically meaningful elements like "quebracho extract," "L-arginine," "mucuna pruiens" and "cnidium monnier." Quebracho extract comes from quebracho trees in South America and allegedly gets your libido living la vida loca. Cnidium monnier is an herb that came to America from China, apparently losing a vowel along the way. Natural sexual stimulants always come from somewhere other than the United States. You never hear of a libido booster coming from Bismarck, N.D.
The fact is that every ingredient in the blue pills is relatively harmless unless you, say, managed to ingest an entire quebracho tree. I don't know how that would affect your sex life, but Bono probably would write a nasty song about you for destroying the rain forest. These ingredients are available all over the Internet and are part of a billion-dollar industry devoted to restoring a man's circulation south of a certain latitude.
I don't get it. I'm not bragging. I just don't get it. When it comes to my body, I'm a chicken. I go to the doctor for a hangnail. I'm not going to consult with an Amazon carp fisherman on my more delicate health issues. And I'm certainly not going to take any old blue pills that come in the mail. Although they didn't seem to hurt my dog.
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com