Take a look at this man.  I am holding him responsible for a momentary hiccup in my creative process.  And by that I mean 100 percent to blame for the fact that the only writing I’m going to accomplish tonight is one where I vent my spleen about my inherent jealousy of a guy who possibly has the greatest job on the planet: He’s the host of Expedition Unknown.

Let’s just put it this way.  Imagine staring at a pirate map one day, getting  hankering for where the treasure might be, and suddenly, and executive producer drops out of the sky and offers you a six-figure income to explore your theories.  That’s what Mr. Gates gets to do. He gets paid to to be some modern amalgam of The Goonies, a Cosby Kid, a Little Rascal, with a side order of “Indiana Jones-meets Jaques Cousteau” thrown in for good measure.

One minutes he’s crawling around some unmapped tunnel under the Temple Mount looking for the Ark of the Covenant, the next minute he’s on the east coast looking at potential Viking hieroglyphics.  Another minute he’s exploring some underwater cave looking for treasure and the next minute he’s rappelling down into some obscure villa to talk to some shaman with a disc in his lip about how his uncle may have been eaten by a Chupacabra. It just doesn’t stop.

Now, he’s taken me over the edge with his traipsing about looking for any of the the twelve buried cache boxes, from the book The Secret

I’ll leave the minutae to this Wikipedia page for follow-up if you’re curious.  But here’s the breakdown.  In 1982, a guy buried twelve plexiglass boxes in major cities. he made a twelve sets of clues.  He had his artist buddy paint specially-coded iconography to match each set of clues.  He shuffled the pictures and the clues.  You have to figure out the city, and then the specific place her buried the boxes. Inside each box are some ceramic artifacts–to include a key that can be redeemed with the family for a jewel, and possibly other things. (Note: The cities and clues have been matched now, so at least the introductory stuff has been handled)

Thus far, only three of them have been found: Cleveland, Chicago, and Boston.  That leaves NINE, and one of them is in San Francisco (memo to anyone going there: There’s a high chance you’ll be gigged with a hypodermic needle if you fool about too much, or sustain a downwinder e. coli poisoning from that the poop-merchants roaming around now.  But have fun and don’t reach into things without vetting them).

I mention San Fran because that’s the one closest to me.  I just went to Barnes & Noble and saw the book, but this homie gonna hold out for a cheaper copy.  40 years has gone buy, I can play the long game. There’s a ton of other clues, history, poetry and lore in that book, and something tells me that simply going to the clues and pictures is the Failure For Dummies approach.

Now I must get back to my book.  But I just called Discovery Channel and told them my people will call their people and demand that Josh Gates give me his job outright.

In fact, please sign my petition here, and make sure he does just this.