Yesterday truly was a struggle of the human spirit. Due to the Netflix tragedy I gave up on the day at roughly 9:00 in the morning, which left a lot of daylight to struggle through. There was a stretch from 1:00-3:00 that I spent on our love seat just staring at the ceiling. That was actually a pretty enjoyable part of the day. The low point came around 10:00 last night when I found myself watching The Learning Channel's newest series: Heli-Logging.
This has been an interesting trend in cable television when channels like TLC and the History channel air a series that follows blue collar people doing their blue collar jobs in a format that is absolutely impossible to interpret as being informative or historical. The basic premise to these shows is to find a job with an inherent amount of risk (like driving trucks on ice, fishing in the Arctic), put a camera crew on location and record all the drama as it ensues. The most interesting thing about these shows is that they prove that people will watch anything on television.
Last night I watched as this train wreck of a wife--the kind of woman who wears glitter eyeshadow around the house--tries to console her heli-logging husband who, for some reason, is still wearing a bathrobe at noon and is halfway through a six pack. I'm not saying I am above this behavior, but isn't this guy supposed to be heli-logging? We cut back to the wife as she addresses her marital problems and explains them away as caused by her husband's passion for heli-logging. The husband, still in his bathrobe and cracking open another cold one has just lit a cigarette in his living room.
Meanwhile, back at the logging site, everything is going according to plan. The safety standards that have been put in place seem to be working and the trained professionals doing their job apparently know what they're doing. This doesn't deter the production crew from reminding the viewer that disaster could strike at any minute. But after several hours without a disaster (sigh) the cameras head back to base camp to follow the drama of a worker who is--wait for it--drunk on his day off. This is where I turned the program off. First off, you're supposed to drink on your day off. Secondly, this guy is in the middle of the woods--what else are you going to do? Log? It's almost like the only peril these guys deal with is the danger they pose to themselves....
And that's when I figured out what the appeal of these shows was. It's not the danger of the job; it's getting a chance to see the absolute depths of existence these people inhabit. If you've spent your whole life in the lonely frontier of Alaska, or even worse, anwhere in Canada, the thought of losing your life isn't tragic. If anything it's probably appealing. The guy in the beginning of the show who was shamelessly drinking and smoking in his bathrobe wasn't passionate about heli-logging. He was passionate about killing himself. And I totally empathized with him after seeing his wife. I bet he enters the forest each day and says, "Please Lord, end me." But I wager God gets as big a kick out of his misery as the typical cable viewer at 10:00 on Thursdays does. Can you imagine how frustrating it must be for these people to come home alive at the end of each work day? Needless to say, this series is now being DVR'd by yours truly.
Congratulations (or my condolences) to everyone for making it through another workweek. For the next two days you can live like me.
Forever Unemployed
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment