Talk Thursday: Guilty Pleasures

By definition, all pleasures are somewhat guilty. Guilty of what, is the only question. Guilty of luring you away from your day's work? Hands up who surfs the Internet on the job. Yeah, I thought so. Now, hands up who lies about surfing the Internet on the job but secretly does it anyway. Yeah, thought that too. But some guilty pleasures are guiltier than that. Some guilty pleasures, such as the ones in the sock drawer, are guilty of making the males of the species (or for that matter, any others of the species) totally unnecessary. Yep, just fire up the double A batteries, buy yourself a suitcase with wheels, start taking out your own garbage and you're good to go. No wonder they try to ban them in Texas. Remember, kids, fundamentalism is the secret fear that someone, somewhere, is having a good time.

But my guilty pleasure pales in comparison. My guilty pleasure is guilty of causing chores not to get done, laundry not to get folded, beads not to get beaded, and just in general the wasting of a whole lot of quality time. And it doesn't get much guiltier than that. Plus, my guilty pleasure is shocking, horrifying, insulting to those of considerable intellect (and darn near everyone else) and besides that, something no decent Buddhist would ever stoop to. Well, luckily for me I never said that I was a good Buddhist.

My guilty pleasure is Son of the Beach.

What, you may want to know, is Son of the Beach? I'm so glad you asked!! Son of the Beach is possibly the rudest, crudest, lewdest, and quite certainly the stupidest show on television. It's one long ridiculous parody of every bad beach movie ever made, and when it isn't busy just being gross, it insults every sexual and racial group there is as well as a few it just made up. There's no depths to which it won't stoop, no sacred cows it won't slaughter. In short, it's the perfect show for a snarky babe like me. I'm only sorry it got canceled after three magnificent seasons. Thankfully, it lives on in DVD-land.

Son of the Beach features the world-famous lifeguard, Notch Johnson, and his crew of elite uh, well, I'm not sure what they are, exactly. Fellow lifeguards, I guess. We have B.J. Cummings, we have Jamaica St. Croix, we have Kimberly Clark, and the name jokes are just the beginning. We have Chip Rommel, and we have the evil Mayor, Anita Massengil. And then there are the supervillains; Notch does battle with Osama bin Loyden, an evil Asian beauty named Roocy Roo, and an eco-terrorist (she sneaks around with a boat full of barrels of stuff labeled 'Whatever You Do, Don't Dump This Stuff In The Ocean' and of course promptly dumps them in the ocean). And that's just Season One. It all culminates in the day Notch has to surf the Miso Honei, the tsunami that killed his father. And then--oh, hey, don't take my word for it. You have to watch the thing. It's kind of beyond description.

What on earth is a nice girl like me doing watching a show like this? I have no idea. It just grabbed my funny bone in a way nothing else would until The Good Guys came along some eleven years later. Maybe we all need something that's the core opposite of our personalities to remind us of who the heck we really are. Or maybe I'm just watching it for the scenery. Whatever, I have the complete run on DVD. So when things get slow around the house, I'll cue up a couple of episodes and scare hell out of the cats by barking out a loud laugh every ten seconds or so. You have been warned.