the best loves last less than a season.

"We all have to decide for ourselves how much sin we can live with."

My brother lent me the first four seasons of Boardwalk Empire on DVD, and I've been indulging over the past week, when I'm not deep in the HTML5 trenches.

It's a good show; thus far, not a great show. I've just finished season one. Perhaps it improves, as things of this nature frequently do. The fact of the matter is, HBO has forced itself to hold itself to a higher-than-usual standard. Ever since the age of Deadwood, Six Feet Under, The Wire and the like, HBO can no longer be content with "yeah, sure, it's a good show". Now HBO must strive for "I would rather watch this show than fulfill several of the basic functions which underlie my continued existence in modern society." HBO's little cross to bear, I suppose.

One thing this final episode of S1 has elicited in me is the thunderous realization of how intoxicating it is when someone tells you that you know them in a way no one else does. Think on this. It's a drug, really, isn't it? What this person - and always, it is a person with whom you are involved, entwined, in whom you are somehow Invested - tells you is that you, YOU, of ALL people, you who deserve nothing (if you think of yourself the way I and others think of themselves) who have somehow groped and grabbed and bumbled through the muck of their clean exterior to the bubbling pure swamp beneath - to a place that, for whatever reason, yours are the only eyes to see. Maybe once, another person saw this - the more tragedy, then! - or maybe not; one way or another, now, you are this place's sole lessee, its sole resident besides the Owner, your beloved, the one who let you in the door. And what a drunken hideous roller-coaster rush this gives you, the knowledge of what you know, though frequently you have no idea what they mean when they tell you its meaning.

And the sick, reeling horror, the drop in the gut, the recoil when you realize that none of this is of any use to you, and that in the end, you, being as you are, human, keep only that for which you have use.