Do Tell...

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.

-Franz Kafka, read by Bubbles in the final episode of The Wire

Some of you who know me well will understand the true depravity with which I have consumed the entire five-season HBO series The Wire.  I have rarely been fortunate enough to lay eyes on anything so engrossing and compelling.  The Wire is literature -- truly the Faulkner, the Dickens of this generation.

I'm sort of a late arrival to the party if you're a long-time fan (the show ran 2002 - 2008), but the show is just incredible.  If you've never seen it, see it.  Immensely entertaining and culturally rich.  People have basically written online all there is to write on The Wire (think one million monkeys on one million typewriters here), so I'll leave this short.  If you want to know more, break out those Google skills.  You owe it to yourself.  Now that I've finished the show, I'm trying to think of my favorite character -- the complexity and personality of the characters is one of the show's best features -- but I'm stuck thinking of five to ten that I loved.  Bubbles, the sometimes-recovering heroin addict, and Omar, the homosexual, principled stick-up artist, are probably my top two.  Slim Charles is another I enjoy, but his character suffers from a background role.

Some classic Omar, just to taste.  I guess this is a spoiler if you're a purist about that, but nothing major.

By coincidence, I noticed that David Simon, the creator of The Wire, has a new show called Treme, whose premier was this Sunday.  The show focuses on post-Katrina New Orleans in the neighborhood Treme.  It's HBO-only but may or may not have been downloadable moments after the premier on a popular peer-to-peer protocol whose name rhymes with "warrant".