Oz

I hardly watch TV anymore, but there is one TV show I will not miss and it's on every Monday night. Tonight is Monday night and the TV show is called Oz.
Oz is a BRUTAL prison drama where EVERY episode features atrocity upon atrocity committed by man against fellow man. Every week somebody gets stabbed, sliced up, burnt up, raped, thrown from a balcony, injected with a poison, etc.. The show's creators must have a whale of a time coming up with new atrocities. (Is a modern prison REALLY this bad? Could it be?) I doubt if even one per cent of the population would have the stomach for it. But I just love it. Why? What is so compelling about a prison drama? Well, there's one thing that I think of whenever I watch it, and that is thank God Almighty I'm out here and not in there. Even disregarding the likelihood of getting savagely beaten, or killed, or painfully butt-banged by a foul-smelling musclebound psychopath, in prison you are constantly surrounded by people. And not even by people you like. In fact you would be surrounded by people you would probably not like because they are not very nice people.
You might think, I don't like my job very much, no it is not my dream job, and my boss is not very nice sometimes and he or she tells me what to do and is sometimes in a bad mood and also unfair sometimes, gee look at those movie actors don't they have a real swell life with all that money and all those fans and wtf that one has a totally pimped out escalade and gee they are all so good looking isn't it unfair here I am stuck in my shitty job where is the justice?
Well, at least you can go home after work, back to your little apartment where you can sit by yourself and have a can of baked beans and write in your blog how unfair everything is, and how mean your old boss is, and you can sit there by yourself in relative comfort and have some pleasant daydream about telling your boss to go shove it because you just won the lottery. You can also watch a movie or read a book or play a video game and temporarily forget about your imperfect life. And didn't Edgar Allan Poe say Never to have suffered would never to have been blessed? So you are blessed. And you are not REALLY suffering, really, are you? If you still think you are, write about it in your blog and we'll see if you are really suffering. Because, you are probably not. But fuck it hey, it's all relative...
But what I aim to get to about this prison business is this: If you are the type of person who is a solitary sort, somebody who can quite happily spend hours or days alone with nothing but your *intellectual pursuits*, and you don't like crowds, and perhaps you do enjoy spending time with the other humans, but only one or two at a time, and then for only just a certain amount of time at which point you happily take yourself back to your *cell* (haw!) and you know, and all that jazz, WELL, you are not going to enjoy prison very much, are you?