The last bit is in a different voice, tacked on as disclaimer perhaps after someone raised a hue and cry.

"You are reminded that everything on the Island recorded and subject to broadcast."

They do mean everything, too. At first the cameras are startling, how common they are. Even the crappers only provide privacy from the waist down.

You want to be mischievious? Not on the producer's dime, goddamnit.

We're all here to get on teevee, to get healthy. Maybe a little of both.

I'm here for the experience, mostly. They've built up an enormous unreality for us to play in. A giant amusement park built around recreating a lifestyle that never existed.

That's not for nothing, is it?

We board long boats pushed by guys who look like they are made up mostly of beef jerky, struggling to get the shallow boats underway with long poles. They take us through a display that reminds me of the Pirates of the Carribean and I can't help think they punch it up to make you forget that everything is unreal.

The island is all American, built just a few miles off the coast of Thailand atop an archipeligo that is now more concrete than sand. The environmentalists are still screaming.

Even the fact that they built it here is straigt out of the old US-of-A. Back home, labor laws would have gotten in the way of draining all the juice out of their production staff.

Its built to resemble a mythical Asian island somewhere off the coast of Korea. The style is a hodgepodge of Japanese architecture and tropical foliage.

The myth is all bullshit, of course, drawn out the ether by some screenwriters in LA.

Yes, this is the fantasy island where everyone lived forever through healthy living and they greeted visitors with open arms to teach them their ways and rid them of all their old vices.

A busload of staff psychologists will daily be slicing and dicing everything we do and say, creating scenarios for us to participate in and somehow become uberpersonages.

Ultimately, this is all to sell dish soap and tampons to grateful consumers. We will be sandwitched in between to provide some entertainment while they cue up another set of commercials to pay for all this nonsense. This snake eats is own tail and occasionally consumes poor saps such as myself and Fred to keep itself sated.

Artful rivers run through the place, guided by pumps sucking glistening pools dry at the bottom of the gunnite mountain and shooting it back to the top.

We glide along the glistening stream in the back and I shoot the shit with Fred, the guy from Minnesota I met on the plane over. There is no game plan here, no way to influence our own destiny. No prices to win, we're all here for self improvement.

I'm here to give up cigarettes and boozing, lose a few pounds. I know my girlfriend will be watching and she really wants me to improve, so I'll really be doing it more for her than anything. Fred is here to lose weight -- his third heart attack was the wake up call, he says.

The first one he thought was a fluke. The second one he dismissed as bad timing.

Apparently the third one wasn't as forgiving.

He's already dropped fifteen pounds, but wants to do more. Get active, have some adventures.

We head off to dinner and its amazing how quickly you turn out the cameras. There's maybe fifty people here in the program. We'll all be taped, catalogued. Ten of us have just arrived, ten just left.

Each group spends five weeks before going back with only what we remember. Everything in between is recorded and some weeks later a group back in LA will decide which of our stories are the most compelling.

Some of us will become stars and the vast majority of us will be unpaid extras.

Fred and I pick a sushi house. There's about seven places on the island to eat, all built up to look like traditional houses that never really existed.

We're given jobs, actual jobs that we actually have to do that have been tailored to suit the storyline and our temperments.

They've made me a fisherman and beachcomber. My installation onto the island came with a bag of trinkets that I could use to get by with until I get my feet under me with the rest of the fishing/combing crews. Some shells, dried fish, a few pieces of iron.

I'm ten times better off than Fred. My profession gets me free eats at the sushi house, which is frankly a dream.

Fred has gotten the job of sweeper, which he figures is to tach him humility and to get him to mellow the hell out, unwind.

I figure its because they don't trust him with anything more strenuous than sweeping or else he'll blow a goddamned valve and that won't look good on TV.

He'll be trucked off into the "sacred mountain" where all the production facilities are and the better part of a day will be ruined as we all stop and discuss the calamity and try to forget the intrusion of the real world onto our well-crafted fantasy one.

I am sorely tempted to pig the hell out, but I know this will be one of those first-night hilights that will haunt me if I do. Better to try to keep with the program.

I keep myself to six tasty mosels, and damn they are good.

Temptation is part of this, of course.

On the way back there is some drama: a foam-rubber dragon is attacking one of the houses of the villiage. Silk flames shoot up on gusts of air and spot lighting.

I stop and stare for a moment, unsure what to do.

A boat pushes quickly by and Maury Pauvich is aboard, gliding by close enough to touch while the rest of his escaping villiage group squawks in terror.

I poke Fred, distracting him from the display: "Jesus, what kind of program are we on -- there's MoPo."

"Yeah," says Fred, a bit too loudly -- the only way he ever seems to speak. "What a wash-up". Fred is going to be a star and Maury and I know it.

Maury turns to shrug at us, lifting his brow as if to say "what can any of us do?"

On so many levels, this is true.

Fred and I, unsure on what to do, stand by and watch the production-staff villiagers dressed in yellow t-shirts that read "Korean Villager" -- shirts that will be edited out for more traditional garb in post, simultanously attack and manipulate the dragon to make it appear alive.

All in the mythology, right?

Honestly, the dragon looks great.

A father-son team I'd seen earlier, paired up in a charming way, decide they're going to rush in and attack the dragon.

I don't know how kosher that is and the production staff doesn't either -- some of the faux Koreans glance nervously at the spear-wielding duo.

I think this is their role, though. Their garb indicates that perhaps they are the villiage policemen. That'd be with the show's standing and their glasses and Dad's balding pate make me think that maybe he's the sort who needs a good double-shot of outgoing injected into him.

"What do you say," says Fred. "Visit the red light and call it a night?"

Ah, temptation. "I think I'd better call it a night."

"My mother might be watching."