The Lost finale or the lake? Choose wisely.

Evan Dando and I will be watching Lost tonight.

"I don't bungee jump, skydive, swim, drive, hang glide, or fly to Cancun."

- Moe Berg, "the Truth"

Tonight's Lost finale will do more than bring to a close the ongoing adventures of Jack and the Smoke Monster.

Landing on a long weekend, the finale will, more importantly, definitively separate the happy campers from the pasty loners.

Quick quiz

What are you doing tonight?

• Sleeping in a canvass tent, foregoing bathing, and drinking Molson Canadian until you don't know the date, time, or year.
  

• Sitting at home by yourself in front of the TV, curtains drawn, eating Old Dutch chips and dill dip for six hours.

True, there are probably some people at the campground who are recording the Lost finale to watch after they get home and wash the sand out of their skivvies. These are people who can only be described as "reckless."

I mean, who wants to watch a two and a half-hour finale if you already know that - spoiler alert! - the island is the snow globe-inspired figment of an autistic child's imagination? Just kidding, that was St. Elsewhere, a TV show before it was a Gnarls Barkley album.

As the pastiest white man this side of Coco, you can probably figure where my loyalties lie: with the smoke monster, man in black, and alternate universe; that is to say, "Lost," since you can probably also find all of these things on Grand Beach.

Lost's wacky precursor

I come by my allegiance honestly. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with another show featuring another group of castaways: Gilligan's Island.

At this point, the show was already in reruns, but they were new to me. Painfully, the finale was being rerun on an evening in which I had a "prior obligation." I've forgotten what it was, but my money is on piano or swimming lessons.

It was pre-VCR, so I asked my mother to watch the show for me. When I returned home, I leapt up the front steps, swung open the door, ran through the doorway, and expectantly asked, "Mom! What happened?"

"What happened with what?" she asked.

"Gilligan's Island. Did they get rescued?"

"Uh, um, uh...yeah...they did," she said.

Points to mom for trying to satisfy a young boy's dreams, which was much easier to do in the pre-Internet age (in some ways, if you know what I mean: right, the Beaver magazine? Haw, haw).

It wasn't until years later that I found out that Gilligan never did get rescued from the island during the TV series - that happened years later on a terrible made-for-TV movie: Rescue From Gilligan's Island, in which Gilligan and the gang had trouble coping with life after being rescued. Go figure.

Here is the show in its entirety - you can thank me later:



So, enjoy the campfire, campers. You can go camping any old time, but you can only watch the Lost finale - sans spoilers - once.

Bring on the smoke monster!