Anyone who watches The Discovery Channel has seen Mike Rowe hosting the show: “DIRTY JOBS.”
Mike travels the world looking for ordinary people engaged in more (or less) than extraordinary vocations, made so by their less (or more) than decorous job descriptions. When he finds them, he volunteers as their apprentice, and great fun ensues.
These jobs always involve him getting up to his neck and elbows in other people’s gainful goop and grime: recycling casino food, catching crawfish, farming geoducks and digging wine caves. For those of you unfamiliar with the fare on The Discovery Channel, it’s the channel you watch only to discover that you may be the world’s most boring person, and that your life is a bottomless pit of trivial pursuits.
I’m not fond of being reminded of this, but I still watch occasionally, long enough to feel like I may have missed my calling as the guy who made his fortune designing & building custom motorcycles out of concrete, or the New Zealand fisherman who snagged the world’s biggest squid.
As for the latter, if it weren’t for The Discovery Channel, I wouldn’t know that there is a difference (in squid explorer circles) between the “Giant” and the “Colossal” squid. One could be consumed by my Uncle Bert on a football weekend; the other is humungous.
I also learned that a Colossal Squid in the water is a thing of beauty. Beached, however, it looks like my post-game uncle on a sagging couch, minus the seaweed, and I wish I didn’t now know that.
To paraphrase the old adage: Careful what you discover, or you just might learn something.
But, right about here I’d submit to Mr. Rowe that a duck habitat cleaner, or a volcano mud bath mixer, or even a steamship-cleaning, salmon carcass-counting, mule-logging alpaca trainer has nothing on humor-columning for being the world’s dirtiest job.
First, consider the hours:
All of them.
There is no rest for humor columnists. We’re always taking things seriously that everyone else finds funny, and worse, vice versa. This means that our brains can never accept the status quo of anything. Awake or asleep, we’re doomed to be always musing.
I’d give a week’s worth of bad puns for a simple case of Restless Legs Syndrome that didn’t drag my other body parts into the act, or a dream that didn’t startle me into consciousness and force me to sit staring at a 3 a.m. word processor, certain that I’d just had a funny deep sleep inspiration, only to realize it was indigestion.
Next, there’s the pressure put upon humor columnists to always be funny. It’s akin, I suppose, to a doctor being unable to attend a dinner party without being pressed to diagnose all the irritable bowels in attendance, or a tax accountant who can’t go to the beach without a treasure hunter demanding to know if his metal detector is deductible.
I’m sure Mr. Rowe suffers from this whenever he attempts to appear privately in public, and is cornered by a sewer worker inviting him, perhaps not so politely, to step into THIS manhole, buddy.
Still, I’ll bet Mike would run screaming into the night if he had to buck up every day against the dirty seductions of split infinitives, the slimy allures of dangling participles, and the muddy traps of sentence-ending prepositions:
“Sitting here yesterday where I like to boldly go, a bad joke came into my head that I found impossible to shake loose of.”
Try cleaning up THAT mess, Mike.
Or, the never-ending quagmire of overused clichés, mixed metaphors and runamok punctuations, eroding my frail mystic ship of imagination with a constant barrage of different-colored horse syntax, changing its spots in the midstream of expression like…like: a chameleon’s underwear!!!
One day of having to clean up thoughts like that, find a topic that Dave Barry hasn’t done to death, then do it to death and get it to an editor by deadline? Even Mike Rowe would be begging to stay atop that radio tower, where he went to research the art of radio peak tower cable anchor rust-scrubbing.
But, here I am: stuck in the muck of yuck, willing to sleep standing up and work lying down, believing that everything’s a conspiracy, knowing that the world is its own ulterior motive, and suspecting that life is just a variation on a scheme – because I love my job.
Sure, I could’ve made my bones modeling Halloween bunny suits. I might’ve been a fainting goat farmer, or a hippopotamus keeper, or a hoe tester, but you’d have missed discovering how a humor column should end.
I know it’s on another channel around here somewhere.
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