Okay – so I was watching TV in bed late at night (too tired to read, too wound up to sleep) and noticed that practically every commercial was for some kind of pharmaceutical product. This recent phenomenon of drug ads is really cool – now we can finally be treated for things we never even knew we had. Allergies? Bladder control problems? Strange taste in clothes? Yeah - we got a cure for that. All you need to do is make an appointment with your doctor – you know – the one who just had a gourmet lunch brought in by a hot babe pharmaceutical rep – and we’ll get you hooked up.

Hey dude - surely you must have insomnia since it is 1:00 AM and you are watching a rerun of The Jeffersons, so call your physician immediately and load up on some Ambien. You’ll be asleep for the next month. Of course, you will not be able to operate heavy machinery, but were you really going to do that anyway? Personally, I was only planning on operating light machinery, so things should be okay.

And then, just like the small print in the car commercials, they start going over the side effects. It seems like whatever you are having cured will surely be counterbalanced by some horrible things that you never would have had if you hadn’t popped the pill in the first place. But fear not – if the side effects are really bad, there is a pill for that also. I think that one day there will be a pill that doesn’t actually treat anything at all but is loaded with those crazy side effects that we all crave. It will have a cool fake word for a name like Effexor – oh wait a minute. I think that one is already in use.

What was really scary is that one of the side effects of this sleeping pill was diarrhea. Now I don’t know about you, but to me that sounds like an accident waiting to happen. Isn’t one of the rules of life “Never take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night?” Now you don’t have to worry about needing two pills to ruin your mattress – one pop does it all.

Then of course the next pharma commercial was the famous Cialis ad – the one where the older couple is on top of the huge hill, both recumbent in separate bathtubs. How did they get there? I’m thinking if that guy can lug two tubs to the top of a hill he probably doesn’t need any medical help to put some lead in the pencil. Or maybe that got him so tired out that he needs all the help he can get. In either case, the whole situation seems a bit strange.

And then, just as things are getting really romantic, the big announcer voice comes in and proclaims:

“If you experience an erection that lasts more than four hours, call your doctor immediately!”

Call my doctor? The hell with that! I’m calling everyone I know! It will be like a bakery line! Next – number 27! If I call my doctor it will be thank him! I don’t even want to know what the side effect of this one could be, but I’m thinking that guy better clean the water in the tub.

Alright – it’s getting late here. My sniffles (from chronic allergies) have gone away, and the chamomile tea is kicking in, so hopefully there will be no nocturnal bladder control problem like the last ad warned me about. Time to turn off George and Weezie and dream about what the side effects of watching bad TV commercials late at night could possibly be.