Television Is Nice Because It Likes Me

There was a particularly good episode of Miracle Lays on yesterday. I'm not crazy about the new hosts they have---do they need a guy and a girl to introduce these segments?---but the show is still really inspiring. This one was mostly about a guy who worked for an insurance company for twenty-two years and was suddenly let go for no reason other than downsizing. Well, the very day this happened, he came home to find his house in ruins. His cousin, who had been staying with him, had accidentally left the toaster oven on and the next thing he knew, whooosh, the curtains caught on fire and the whole place was lost! Can you believe such awful luck? So this insurance company guy was in terrible shape. He started drinking a little too much, couldn't find another job....it was pretty dour, like all the stories on Miracle Lays. But then one night, in his darkest hour, the guy was sitting alone in a motel room, drunk, thinking about ending his life, when he opened up the drawer of the night-table beside him. And inside was a local phone book, and beside that, a Bible. So he started flipping through the book, looking for something that would inspire him, and he found the number of an old high school crush who still lived in the area. He called her up on a hunch, and she answered, and she agreed to drive out to have a drink with him in the motel bar! Talk about a sign from above! So the woman showed up and even at forty-five she was still hot, and one thing led to another, and wham, the guy got totally laid, one for the ages. He woke up the next morning with a renewed sense of purpose, and on the show he looked about ten years younger than his photos from before that night. The studio audience really liked him, you could tell. So now he's working for Merrill Lynch and he's doing super, all because he found the faith that had always been dormant inside him, and in his hour of crisis, he was rewarded with great sex out of the blue. (Okay, the re-enactment they did of the whole story was kind of cheesy, just like always, but the human drama was completely there. Now if they'd just stop shuffling Miracle Lays all around the damn schedule, I'd consider it one of my favorites, right up there with I Inherited How Much? and Amazing Jury Reversals.)