Supermarket and Suicide

The idea of being able to choose a sudden exit fascinates me on many levels. For example, I may be at a party having a good time and suddenly the thought crosses my mind that I could actually just walk out and leave it. Sometimes once I get this thought in my mind I become possessed by my own curiosity. Then I may feel compelled to immediately leave the party and walk to some random spot where I could not have predicted I would be at that moment. I may touch a mailbox and think to myself 'I could easily have never touched this mailbox. I could easily still be inside. But instead, because a random thought possessed my mind, I am having this completely different experience now, one which could never have been foreseen.'

In a way I guess it seems totally ridiculous that I get this amazing high from walking out of a good time and touching a mailbox by myself, but it gives me this surreal sense of being a free agent that operates my mind at its own whim, as opposed to being led into predictable patterns of behavior designed by evolved instincts or learned behaviors. And leaving in itself is so sudden - a complete change to the senses - there is something so exciting to me for a moment when an exit is made and suddenly I am standing outside in the vast wild world.

Once I was at the supermarket when I got an attack of this type of thinking. I started to fantasize about walking away from my shopping cart and going out into the parking lot and exploring the suburban streets behind the supermarket- being somewhere completely unexpected and not being in the supermarket at all. The thoughts overtook me and I abandoned my full cart of groceries to get the rush of walking out into the parking lot where the world could not have expected me to be coming- to penetrate a moment in that lot which never thought it would see me.

Standing in the parking lot I was truly heady, intoxicated by own freedom, feeling that I was seeing some secret surreal moment. For several minutes I stood there on top of the world enthralled by own consciousness and the sensation that I had been newly born by walking out the automatic doors. I was communing with the branches of the trees and the cracks in the pavement as if I was in the midst of an intense acid trip. I was thinking about making memories and making memories of making memories and the memories of doing that some more (yes, these are those very memories!)

But after these wild sensations wore down, I became more conscious of the other reality. The reality that I really did need to buy groceries in the near future was the same one that had propelled me toward the supermarket in the first place. Now that reality came back more strongly to my mind. I sighed to realize that although I was free to go off and do whatever I pleased, that it would only mean that I would have to come back to the supermarket tomorrow and start back over with all the shopping. Finally I had to concede that the only thing to do was to go back in and buy my groceries and I may as well just go back and get my cart right now so I wouldn't have to start all the way back at the beginning tomorrow.

When I went back into the supermarket, though, my cart was not in the aisle where I had left it. Because I had only been outside for a few minutes, it surprised me that my cart would have been already moved, and I searched for it in vain throughout the store. After going up and down each aisle several times in search of the work I had done assembling my groceries, I began to feel incredibly lost. At that moment it occurred to me that the entire experience was a perfect description of suicide. I had suddenly chosen to walk away from my unfinished work and jump into a different reality. Then I had experienced a euphoric freedom, which was followed by the return of the original need to perform my human duty. Then, realizing the error of my whim, I had attempted to return to my human body, only to be devastated by the loss and the finality of what I had done and forced to begin from the beginning.

After that experience I decided to resist the urge to leave at such moments. Instead I make it a point to experience suburban supermarket parking lots in a psychedelic sense during my walk in and out from the car. That way I still get to chuckle to myself in knowing euphoria without slowing down my chore in the slightest.

Philosophy of Viagra

Remember: "It is clear that Viagra needs to be examined not only from a sociological but also from a philosophical point of view"!

The impotency remedy Viagra is the “fastest selling drug in history” (McGinn 1998). It is no longer just a medical phenomenon, but also a cultural icon, appearing in television sitcoms as a pretext for jokes or as a murder weapon. Viagra has socio-cultural implications not limited to sexuality, but concerns various parts of our cultural landscape. Being relatively convincing in terms of bio-medical efficiency, criticism of Viagra has so far mainly been expressed in the (often feminist) “Liberal Arts” camp where Pfizer (the maker of Viagra) is reproached for its profit-oriented negation of any psychological, social, emotional, and relational components involved in impotency. Further criticism ridicules Viagra’s mechanical imagery of a “techno-fix” (Vares & Braun 2006) not only intensifying the medicalization of impotency current since the early 1980s (Tiefer 1986), but also making “sex into a medical function like digestion” (Tiefer 2003) and the fact that Viagra renders masculinity as a mere problem of chemical engineering, plumbing, and hydraulics. A further concern is that through Viagra, the traditional gender role of the “potent man and the happy woman” is restored without any critical revision (Loe 2004). In spite of, or because of, the narrow humanistic basis offered by its producers, Viagra has obtained the status of a lifestyle drug.

It is clear that Viagra needs to be examined not only from a sociological but also from a philosophical point of view.

What do philosophers have to say about the “viagrification” culture? Is there a philosophical principle behind Viagra as a cultural phenomenon?

Possible subjects are:

• Viagra and Posthumanism (artificial life)
• The Body as a Machine
• Reality and Desire
• Pursuing Hedonism. Why not?
• Non-natural sex?
• Ethical concerns about Viagra
• Viagra and the Virtual. Through Viagra the desire is not created but has always been there in a virtual (that is, not actual but also not non-actual) form. Through Viagra the desire becomes (virtually) real.

A simple Question

Hey friends....

I have been thinking over a question for a long time....I present this question to you.....

Would you take a billion dollars if as part of the deal the ‘Earth’ would be made an uninhabitable place a year after your death!!???.......(of course you would think about your friends, family, grandchildren!!) ......but what if the condition is changed to that the Earth would be poisoned a thousand years subsequent to your demise???

We feel strong obligations towards our immediate generations....should we not feel the same for our great grandchildren and their children and the generations thereafter??!!!