On the bad days, I wish I’d chosen crab fishing as a vocation. You’ve seen the footage. Grizzled, sleep-deprived men on rickety ships getting tossed about on the Baltic Sea. Day and night, they bust their humps hauling crate after crate from the icy ocean. Rugged work. Bone-rattling work.

But on the really bad days, I don’t wish to be something as lofty as a sea-battered fisherman. I wish I were merely the bait used to tempt the crabs from the ocean floor.

Yeah. It gets that bad.

My mind gets to wandering when I think about the other careers I might have chosen. Frequently, I have fantasies of giving up this life of street splendor for a new job in the business of grave-digging.

No, really. This is a recurrent theme in my alternate-profession daydreams. I love cemeteries at night. Just me and rows of graves with the solemn shadows of trees cast by the light of the moon. Just me with a shovel and a 6-foot hole to dig as the dead sleep eternally around me.

Actually, I’d be spooked within an hour. The first echo from the first shovelful of dirt would cause me to freeze in mid-dig.

“What was that?” I’d bark into the night.

The high sound of my own voice would further rattle me. I’d be looking around wildly in all directions. There! Beyond that giant monument! Something creeping toward me under the stealth of shadows. Something tall and gaunt, with red eyes and long, gnarled fingers.

I’d never get that hole dug. The foreman would find me in the morning, attacking errant shadows and tree branches with the shovel. Another washout from a noble, unnerving career; the victim of an overstimulated imagination and too many B movies watched in childhood.

Digging in the desert

Occasionally, I feel I should have wended my way to the world of archaeology. A few months in the deserts of Egypt poking for ancient tombs. A half-year in the Congo trying to unearth lost fortresses that may or may not be fabled. A hike along the Amazon to search for ruins; treks to the far reaches of Mexico to hunt down relics.

But the first 4-foot insect to land on my back would send me shrieking away like a grade-school girl. That perfectly intact skull I’d been holding would sail from my hands and shatter on a rock. In my haste to run all the way back to North America, I’d trip over a half-buried Mayan monument and break the sucker in half. Other Indiana Jones wannabes would wet themselves laughing, and they’d make buzzing sounds every time I came near.

Who needs it?

I’m almost certain I should have gone into astronomy. At parties, I’ll corner victims and assail them with my views on relativity, the mysteries of quantum mechanics and my theories on dark matter. Is it any wonder I used to be so popular with the ladies?

I have the telescope. I have the sky charts. What I don’t have is any damn clue when it comes to numbers. An old colleague of mine used to call me Markimedes. He’s seen sweat bead on my upper brow when I have to do the complex math necessary to fill out a time sheet or tally up an expense account.

To grasp concepts like the cosmological constant or string theory, you need to know the numbers. The really cool astronomers are never heard mumbling, “Carry the 1 …” as they perspire and count on their fingers.

I’m not saying I’m a complete washout. I had a fair amount of success in the business of kitchen manufacturing. I could hold a countertop like nobody’s business while somebody else cut it at precise angles.

I made a decent wage cutting chain-links with a torch. I did well as an automobile fuel distributor. I enjoyed a degree of success in furniture moving until an unfortunate incident with an armoire, which I still don’t like to talk about. I flipped burgers with the best of them, held expensive items for display at an auction company and painted some nightclub roofs down South.

Ah, the glamour jobs. I never quite steered myself toward deep-sea explorer or underworld spy. I never took the steps necessary to become the pilot of a small charter plane hauling tourists to faraway islands.

I lacked ambition during my crucial years, defined as ages 16 through 30. I stumbled into this profession and sort of clung to it, like a barnacle to the side of a boat. It suits me well and I make enough to afford these fancy cars.

But still, the daydreams. At least once a month, I indulge in the gravedigger fantasy. Now and then, I consider giving my notice and becoming a professional spelunker, pumpkin farmer or horse dentist. Hitchhiking to California to live over a bar doesn’t count as a career, so I had to give up on that one.

So I sit and toil in the world of news and late-breaking rumors. Here I am at my desk with an ear to the police scanner. And looky there. An editor is sending a cold gaze in my direction, like a predatory bird preparing to swoop in and eat an insignificant rodent. I think I heard murmurs about a weather story.

Bait! I wish I were bait!

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter.