Yesterday I was driving D and K home from the Blazer game, and we were listening to the sports network broadcast, which was re-hashing what they had already seen. It's always interesting and appalling to see how paid advertisements dovetail with the broadcast. It's a truism that sports events are supported by alcohol (mainly beer), cars (mainly trucks), and girls (mainly supporting the other items.) But yesterday I heard this: "This is something that everyone has and no one wants to talk about....yes, we're talking about hemorrhoids."
It took me a mile to stop hooting.
(So, do sports fans get this lil' problem more than other people? Is it from riding around in trucks, drinking beer?)
Then I started thinking about how far we have come.....or rather, how low we have fallen....since the days of my youth, when bras were worn outside the dress, Madge soaked nails in Palmolive, and the big personal hygiene product was something that promoted "freshness." It took years for me to understand these coy commercials, but now very little is left to the imagination.
Years ago, I read a James Thurber essay about his secret life of metaphor. He spent hours worrying about chance-heard phrases, imagining horrors that were never intended (e.g., Mrs. Harris, who was "terribly cut up" when her husband died.) I suppose today's children have their own areas of mystification, the elucidation of which marks the beginning of adulthood. And perhaps I should be glad that figuring out how hemorrhoids are cured is not part of that inscrutable process. But I am not.
While I am a big advocate for honesty and plain speaking, I find I still retain some glimmerings of....dare we say?....shyness. I am actually disturbed by the bluntness of today's commercials, by the no-holds-barred invasion of privacy. Is nothing off limits? Do I really need to hear about the side effects of various medications? Commercials, with their blaring intrusions into the program, hold enough horror for me, by their mere existence. And some are clever (at least for the first 100 viewings.) But these medical and personal hygiene commercials really do set the bar way too low.
In fact, this may be another sign of the descent of civilization. No, let's not talk about hemorrhoids.
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