Why Guys Are Fascinated With Deadliest Catch and Black Gold

I think I know why we men are so fascinated by shows like "Black Gold" and "Deadliest Catch" and "Dirty Jobs".

It is because we still admire hard working men who risk their lives for a buck to feed their familes but mostly, especially in the case of "Dirty Jobs" because these poor bastards have a worse job than ours.

Some time ago we Americans, at least most us, forgot how to do back breaking manual labor. As we became more educated we chose more and more jobs that don't require breaking a sweat or risking freezing waters or loosing toes and fingers.

In the vacuum that was created illegal and legal immigrants began to fill the hardest jobs, glad to get paid ten times the wage for doing the same thing as in some small, hot country to the south. While that happened we almost forgot that ordinary guys like us, more specifically our own parents used to do those kind of jobs every day to get our sorry asses to the state of evolution we find ourselves in.

To reconnect to that past, when men had balls, we have to tune in to a recorded show and watch for an hour some poor white men that have chose to hang on to a dying way of making a living. It makes us believe that we could, if we really wanted to, choose that rough and tumble life of flipping crab traps or connecting joints of pipe if we wanted to.

The sad reality, pardon the pun, is that most of us are far too soft, spoiled and far gone physically, even at the tender age of today's overweight twenty and thirty somethings to go out and begin to make a living with our hands.

We laugh at the greenhorn who looks a bit like us who gets drummed off the crab boat or oil rig as if we could have done any better.

I'll still watch. Maybe there is something about watching this kind of reality tv that gets the testosterone in my gonads going.

By damn, I'm going to get out the weed whacker and tackle that dangerous corner of the yard.

Just as soon as I finish this beer (or two) and it cools off outside.