When I heard last week that "Survivor" was going to do a new show that pitted races against each other, I thought to myself, "Wow, they must have heard about the contest I just had with my friends last month." Then I started to think about other "reality" shows that almost mirrored my everyday life. At first, I was alarmed that it could be so accurate, then I started to panic. Could they be spying on me and I don't even realize it?

Just a few years ago, I called a group of my friends together for a contest in which we would live in the same house and work the same jobs for a couple of months. I called my friend Mark who is black, and was born and raised in Harlem. He's 31 years old and works with inner-city youths. I wrote my friend Melissa, a 19 year old who is actually Amish and lives in rural Pennsylvania. Then I got in touch with Maria, one of my Latina friends who is 28 and has a Masters degree from Stanford, and Billy from Oklahoma who's 22, was raised on a farm, but now works as a D.A.'s assistant in Dallas. Finally, I was able to convince Fumika, a foreign exchange student from Japan who is only 18 and has never left home before, to come join me at my 6,000 square foot beach house in Ft. Lauderdale. While we lived there, we all worked at the local radio station and volunteered for the fire department while a national cable network footed all our bills.

Of course, none of that is true, but I'm sure most of us have done something eerily similar to that at some point in our lives. No? So you haven't been offered $1 million to wrestle alligators, eat bugs, and live on a deserted island for a few weeks? Well, you've at least entered a contest with some co-workers to try to win a million dollars by finding your "soul mate" and marrying them within three days, right? Perhaps you've been offered money to have some British lady come into your house and take control of your life for a week, discipline your children, "save" your pathetic marriage, and show the whole world why irresponsible and immature people should not be having children.

Let's just call "reality T.V." what it is: a great, big pile of horse excrement that has been making all of us dumber for the better part of a decade. This is what happens when brilliant minds in the entertainment industry run out of good ideas for quality television shows. If it involves eating things that starving Ethiopians wouldn't touch, throwing away your morals or beliefs and marrying someone you met in a made-for-TV contest, or embarrassing your family and friends in front of millions of strangers for large sums of money, then the public will eat it up. The sad part is, they're exactly right. I don't know who's to blame, the people who create this crap or the people who watch it.

Whatever happened to shows like "Seinfeld", "The Cosby Show", and "M*A*S*H"? At this point, I'd even take "Perfect Strangers". I guess the same thing that happened to those shows will eventually happen to the junk we watch now. Well, we can only hope, but I'm out of time for now. Reruns of "The Contender" are about to start.