Ever watch The Wire?

So Lieutenant Carver and his former partner drink cans of beer in the police station parking lot. It’s the final season of The Wire, so we’ve seen the officers make mistakes. A recent one ruined a young boy’s life—his foster mom gets third degree burns after a Molotov cocktail attack, and he ends up getting brutalized in a group home. That knowledge haunts Carver. He was a bit of a knucklehead in his early days, but he’s since grown to be a competent cop and a good man who really tried to help that poor kid. “We thought none of it mattered,” Carver says, “but it did.”

He crumples up this cheap beer can. He can’t let go of all the fuckups he must have made when he was young and stupid, and he can’t let go of the fuckup with the kid, and he can’t shake off the fuckups he has yet to make even when he tries to do right, so he just crumples up this can and hurls it onto the station’s roof, where there’s already a pile of a thousand other empties other cops have thrown.

I try to write the beer can.

I think I’ll have the blackened salmon.