Dr. Bob

Back in the sporadic moments of my young childhood when we had television, I watched Jim Henson’s “The Muppet Show.” This was vaudevillian entertainment at it finest! Puppets doing stand up comedy routines, sketches, tap dancing, juggling fish, cooking segments…it even had hecklers. Man…that was entertainment.

Some of my favorite characters of that show were Dr. Rolf (a surgically minded dog) and Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, the scientist (incomplete without his laboratory assistant Beaker.) They always made me laugh…but since I was always on the verge of giggling back then, it couldn’t have been too hard to make me laugh.

I guess what it really came down to is that I wanted to be a doctor. I wanted people to call me “Dr. Bob.” Now my particular area of expertise narrowed as I understood the gross things that a doctor had to do to patients. Dealing with unsavory body fluids of sick people just didn’t appeal to me. I thought that I could become a veterinarian…but I quickly realized that it involved the unsavory body fluids of sick animals.

Ew.

So I took medical “Dr. Bob” off of the table. I thought that maybe a doctor of psychiatry or psychology would fit the bill, but they deal with crazy people. I already had my brothers, sister, and parents to work with…and that required no advanced degree. Granted, I wasn’t their doctor or anything, and I did not treat them in any way (in fact I may have contributed to their individual psychosis), but I knew from experience that I would not have the leather couch and charge $300 an hour to listen to people talk about their fears and anxieties.

I could have moved on to a research doctor, but as I didn’t even know what research was, I never explored the option. I figured that Dr. Bunsen Honeydew was a doctor of medicine (remember, I was a kid…what did I know?) Also, we had no cool shows like “Mythbusters” back then, so I never considered how cool science could actually be for me. Had I known that doctors could also play with explosives…well I may have overcome my fear of numbers and gone into physics.

No, I settled into the idea of a PhD in some academic field. Most likely “Dr. Bob” would write papers and books on other people’s papers and books. What’s more, I could become a teacher and teach my obscure thoughts on the punctuation practices of John Milton and William Shakespeare. I could wear turtlenecks and tweed jackets with leather patches at the elbows and keep an unlit tobacco pipe in my mouth. I would get summer vacations, Christmas breaks, and make millions as a famous doctor of English.

Then I grew up…

Becoming a doctoral candidate takes time, can grow boring quick, and the world has no shortage of useless PhD’s living off of government welfare programs. I understood that in working towards an academic doctoral goal, it was so important to choose the right school when doing my undergraduate work. I chose the School of Hard Knocks for my undergraduate degree program. I learned that in that school we had no sports teams, no school spirit, graduation day never came, and no one appreciated my level of education. Also, it all programs were kind of a dead end programs: no other schools took students of this school for post graduate work (since students never graduate.)

Don’t get me wrong, I tried to transfer my credits, but other institutions were loath to accept my college’s accreditation. Something about it neither being nationally, nor regionally accredited…I should have looked into it before I applied for admission and started paying the tuition. I did take some tests and get credit for “real world experience,” but schools just don’t transfer my credits one for one.

I still, however, persisted in my education. I secretly enrolled (so that the administration of the School of Hard Knocks wouldn’t find out about how I explore my options) in various college programs. I did earn credit for these programs (accept for CollegeAmerica—I don’t want to talk about it…) but I never finished any undergraduate work with them.

Today I feel that the academic experience, as we have been raised to seek after it, is bullocks. Even if I were to complete a degree program, pursue post-graduate work, and become a doctor of Philosophy, English, History…whatever...I don’t see that it would matter either in my own life or the course of the world. Sure, the planet Earth would have a few more books getting dusty on shelves in school libraries. Yeah, the United States would have one more person educated beyond any usefulness in the workforce. Granted, the human race would have one more talking head to ignore. But what will any of that matter when the world economies fall and Jesus comes again?

That is not my dream of “Dr. Bob.”

So I compromised and bought one square foot of land in Scotland. I am now Lord Robert of Lochaber. Not a PhD…but it sounds just as cool and the certificate on my wall is just as useless.