Conventional wisdom would favor me searching for jobs this evening but I’ve just returned from Whole Foods and I’m a little distracted. I ran in to pick up some vitamin B supplements, bath salts, and kale — the staples of any household affected by a layoff — and got sidetracked in the vitamins and tinctures aisle.
Finding the vitamin B was easy enough; it was the morass of men’s libido and testosterone supplements cluttering the adjacent shelf that bumped me. It began on the left side with a product called, simply, “Male Libido.” I thought this was funny — Haha, imagine, boxing up something that literally no woman on earth wants to see more of and then selling it to dumb men — and so I reached for my phone to take a picture of it. To its right sat a bottle of something called “Charged Men,” which I took to be a nod and a wink from some perceptive, feminist grocer. Ha, clever. I snapped another picture.
Crowding my lens was a jar of Yohimbe-Plus, a pill promising maximum enhancement for men intending to stay active, but failing to specify what was to be enhanced. I would have slid the jar out of the way had it not been for the bottles of Steel Libido and Steel Libido RED crammed beside it.
In a time when high-profile men are dropping like smacked mosquitoes to the consequences of inappropriate and many times predatory behavior, I wondered if maybe a cultural and commercial insistence on having BURNING-HOT LIBIDOS was only making things worse. Despite an exhaustive search, I could not locate any products promising to cool one’s jets or guaranteeing flaccidity, though I feel the world needs these more than the others. Imagine if Harvey Weinstein had had access to Stale Libido or if Garrison Keillor could have taken a daily dose of Libi-Don’t. Call me uninformed, but it doesn’t seem as though offensive boners and unwanted come-ons are in short supply these days.
Anyway. Next to the libido enhancers were a few more rows of bottles, the focus shifting now to testosterone: Ripped-Man, Testosterone UP, and — easily the coolest-sounding one — TestoJack 200. How much testosterone do people need, I wondered, reviewing the ingredients of TestoJack 200. Am I jacked enough with my testosterone? It was a fair question coming from a grown man holding a bag of organic kale in one hand and his signature blend of bath salts in the other. God damn it, I thought. Maybe I’m not jacked enough.
I returned home determined to enjoy a nice, long peppermint soak and to contemplate the possibility of getting myself super-jacked on testosterone. And then, in the morning, I thought, in the morning, I’ll start looking for jobs.