No cover charge at the Bada Bing

Did you know that libraries still exist? I had no idea. Most suburban roadsides consist entirely of endless strings of Borders and Barnes and Noble stores, punctuated by the occasional Starbucks or dead opossum, so I just figured that the library system collapsed after I forgot to return my copy of “Hardy Boys: Mystery of the Aztec Warrior” in the fifth grade.

But libraries are still holding on strong, despite the fact that, given the choice between free and not free, we have, as a society, apparently chosen not free.

My interest in the library system was recently renewed when my wife Kara brought home season four of the Sopranos on DVD. For free. The whole season. If you’ve ever seen the DVD sets for sale, you know that they’re normally so expensive that a normal person, in order to raise enough capital to make a purchase possible, has to embark on a strict schedule of extorting small business owners.

We’ve since discovered that the local library is just like a free version of Blockbuster, but without the palpable sense of impending corporate doom. Poor Blockbuster. It’s like the neighbor’s arthritic old dog. You feel kind of bad for it, but what can you do? You have to cling to those old memories of paying five bucks to keep “Minority Report” for an extra few hours to make you feel better about its imminent demise.

When I told my buddy Rob that Kara and I had kicked season four of the Sopranos in a fevered and slothful bid to finish every episode before the due date, and that we’d just received notification that season five was ready to be picked up, he said, “Aw, man, you’re so lucky. You guys are about to watch some of the best TV ever created. I wish I could go back and watch it for the first time again.”

You’d be forgiven for expecting the most meaningful television show ever filmed to contain Elizabethan costumes or philosophical dissertations from people sitting in leather chairs. Luckily for us all, though, it appears that the ultimate cultural experience of our generation is mostly comprised of people in nylon jumpsuits wailing on other people with shovels.

I especially empathized with a scene in season four in which one of the characters accidentally sat on a dog and smothered it to death. Except for the heroin-induced stupor that caused the accident, I could identify.

A couple of years ago, I joined Kara on the couch to watch a Law and Order rerun ripped straight from the headlines of 1994. I plunked down on a pile of blankets at her feet. After a couple of minutes, I noticed some movement underneath me.

“Babe, am I sitting on your toes?” I asked.

“No,” she said, wiggling her feet under the blanket next to me.

I shot off the couch and reached into the quilt I’d been sitting on, pulling out a mussed-up and exhausted ferret.

Chopper looked at me with eyes that said, “Dude, seriously, that was so uncool.”

I had broken the central tenet of pet ownership: pets freely offer you all of their unconditional love and bowel movements, and in return, all they ask is that you give them food and water, and that you do your very best not to smother them with your derriere.

To make amends, I gave him a fingerful of peanut butter, to which he responded in the same way Popeye would have responded to a can of spinach, returning immediately to his charming and semi-continent self. You could almost hear the “Popeye the Sailor Man” theme song playing as he finished the peanut butter and started running around the house again. I haven’t sat on a blanket since, and Chopper seems to have forgiven me. At the very least, he hasn’t gotten me whacked yet.

Your email can sleep with the fishes in Mike Todd’s inbox at mikectodd@gmail.com.