Do you know there is an actual hobby called bird watching? I guess it’s like Pokemon where they try to find new species of birds, but instead of trying to collect them with Pokeballs and try to use them to battle each other, they just observe them and write down that they found them. How lame is that?

If you can’t collect the birds for battling what is the point? Seriously, would you rather have unsupervised kids traveling the world to collect Pokemon and battle other unsupervised kids and collectors of Pokemon, or would bird watchers? I think we could all agree that the kids being active and assertive is much better than some people just “watching” birds. I mean, how is watching birds any better than watching TV?

Not to say that watching TV isn’t a noble cause, as it is my favorite hobby. It’s one of my more active hobbies. Do you want to see a guy who is almost comatose at work come to life? Just come watch me watch TV show about watching bird watchers. It’s pretty amazing to see how active I can be.

I don’t actually watch shows about bird watching. What I do watch is shows about people doing bad things. There is The Office, where Michael Scott’s main purpose in life is cutting down on his employees productivity, by performing his stand-up, allowing Jim to play pranks on Dwight and getting in the way of Stanley’s crossword puzzles.

I also enjoy Community, a show that centers around Jeff Winger, a lawyer who forgot to get his degree and spends his whole time at Community College trying to get out of the college as fast as he can. Then there is Parks and Rec, a show that centers around Ron Swanson, a guy in government that thinks government shouldn’t exist. Another show, The Good Place, which centers around a girl that ends up in heaven, even though most of her life wasn’t worthy of it.

I even watch the news in the morning, which as we knew should just be called Bad News, because they only report on that. So, why am I magnetically attracted to shows that are about bad things. The obvious answer to that is, of course, because if a show doesn’t have drama, then it isn’t really a show right? If it was just about me at work every day, putting me headphones in, typing numbers into spaces and then going home, I kind of doubt that anyone would watch it (except me). Even reality shows find a way to make things interesting, by having writers on the show create script the drama for the “actors” to pretend to be doing as reality.

The real reason I like watching bad people on TV is because I like to make myself feel better about how bad I am.

For instance, if I see Michael, Dwight and Jim driving to Utica, dressed up as warehouse workers, accidentally destroying a printer, and threatening to burn Utica to the ground, just so they can try to save Stanley, then I don’t feel so bad if I just burn down one of the warehouses accidentally (allegedly).

Or if Michael drives his car into a lake just because he followed the literal directions of the GPS, I don’t feel so bad when I wreck my daughter’s scooter.

If Ron Swanson can make April not ever schedule a meeting for an entire year, then I can justify missing a meeting I don’t want to go to, by “having a necessary doctor’s appointment” right when the important meeting was scheduled.

If I am ever caught doing something bad, I can just claim that someone on TV did something much worse. Like I might have shut the internet for an hour, but Wreck-It Ralph destroyed the internet completely.

I might steal some ideas and Giftures to make my blog run, but at least I didn’t steal $150 million from a Casino like Ocean’s 11 did.

Speaking of Giftures I steal, here are some…

I’m not like this monkey…

I didn’t burn Utica to the ground…

I might lie on my taxes to get more money…

I may cheat in Monopoly in order to get a game over with faster…

I may get in the occasional fist fight…

I may have spent too much money on the platinum version of my new video game…

Thanks to bad TV and movies, I can now be a much worse person. TV is all helping cover for your bad behavior. And that is why I love it so much.

ARRRGGGHHHHH

Bitter Watching Bad Ben