The Wire

Yesterday, I left to deliver papers around 3:30 am. I had coffee, some cake, music, movies. It took me less than an hour to get stuck. Last summer, a customer had paved an elevated asphalt drive to their place and my tires -- which slipped over to deliver the paper -- couldn't overcome the ridge to get back on the road. AAA put me on hold, wore down the phone battery, and then told me it would take six hours to reach me. The News-Gazette wasn't in the office. The neighbors nearby were on vacation in Hawaii. The policeman I finally reached was off-duty and couldn't help me either.

At least I had my DVD player. I watched The Wire.

It is the best television program of all time, I think. I've now seen all four seasons, although I watched them out of order, which made them even more entrancing.

If Six Feet Under was essentially a melodramatic comedy, The Wire is Shakespearean tragedy. Each season has been devastating, rich and real, unlike anything else I've ever seen on television. Watching a season is like becoming immersed in a great novel, a Dostoevsky, philosophical, moral, complex, searing. Some teachers have had to stop watching the fourth season; the heartbreak and the recognition of the middle school system was entirely too real, too hopeless. No happy endings for these kids you come to know and root for. No, that would be too easy, too Hollywood.

I don't know how many times I've felt like Charlton Hesston at the end of Planet of the Apes, pounding the sand with my fists and cursing what humanity has done, whether in the war or in the public school system. Damn them to hell.

I finished the third season yesterday, the season during which a police major decides to do something about the drug problem by moving the traffic to "free zone" corners, making the old neighborhoods safe again. The areas he creates, which the dealers call "Hamsterdam," essentially legalize drugs, and when the politicians and captains find out, of course it cannot last. Not that it is ideal. The free zones are a perfect vision of hell.

Anyway, eventually I found a neighbor after dawn -- a UI professor who lives in the country and doesn't know how to use the four-wheel drive on his SUV -- willing to drive me back to Urbana, where I rounded up another car, a chain, and Miles and Lee to accompany me. I pulled the car out myself, then let Lee and Miles return home while I continued delivering newspapers. I got done around 1 p.m.

Long shift. I broke a side mirror when I slid into another mailbox and I got stuck another couple of times, but I managed to maneuver my way out. One could say it is a daily effort, extracting myself from the abyss.