DODGING BULLETS

Breaking Bad, “Breakage”

Tonight’s soundtrack: J.U.F., “Panic So Charming (What The Fuck Style)”

Another great ground rule for Breaking Bad: Everyone has secrets. For good reasons or bad, from selfishness or altruism, everyone has something they hide. That’s just how we are in the warm Albuquerque¹ sun.

And yet, and yet, the show manages to avoid being a soap opera. I think it’s because the things the characters hide and lie about are for the most part so petty. They’re people with secrets because people have secrets, not because the plot is going to hinge on a dramatic revelation.

A surprise party is a secret, right? Hating your boss is a secret. Wanting a cigarette when you don’t smoke, or for your husband to arrest you so you’ll feel part of his life - those are secrets. So in this atmosphere of quiet desperation and casual frustration, what’s one more deception? One more way to make money? One more cell phone?

* * *

At this point in his transformation, Hank is not yet the detective he needs to be to see the secrets closest to him. In fact, he’s sick to the marrow at the future-vision he’s been given: haunted by the moment his eventual apotheosis came back in time and possessed him, transfixing him, pulling the trigger. He fears that terrible Hot-Handed God of Cops; fears the power and responsibility.

If a world is laced with lies, and you can see the hidden patterns and reveal the secrets, you can bring that world down. Hank is being groomed to end his own show.

Also, he’s shit-scared from being shot at and daren’t tell anyone, so his lonely panic attacks are off the charts. Disturbingly accurate, wonderful television.

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¹ Took me three tries to type that right, and I once spent six hours on a Sunday morning waiting for a Greyhound bus to arrive in Albuquerque. This is after I’d been cursed by a Native American passenger for not turning out my reading light as we crossed the night desert. It was… not the sort of trip one forgets easily.

From Columbus Greyhound station.

So I met this man, While I was sitting in the Greyhound station in Columbus, Ohio.

A middle eastern looking man (unfortunately I’m not able to distinguish the intricacies of nationalities from that part of the world as well as I’d like to be able to).

Anyways.

This man was sitting at a table behind me in their little eating area with a television

and little metal tables with their just slightly uncomfortable chairs.

However I had just taken a 14 hour bus ride from New York overnight.

I had not showered since the morning before.

And since that shower, I had:

1. begun a new relationship with someone I had only met at the beginning of the summer.

2. Officially broke things off with my ex (who also happens to be one of my best friends) with whom I had been semi-seeing after he broke up with me a year and a half ago.

3. Had a huge fight with said ex over text messages, as I almost missed my bus back to Ohio, so I could start back at school in barely a week.

This is the morning I was saddled with, sitting at that little table in Columbus.

But this Greyhound station.

Ugly and barren as hell.

Had become something of a home to these prized moments between strangers.

Moments of blind trust and support from people who find themselves indefinitely in between things.

To get to the point.

This man sitting behind me, and frankly the details on how our conversation began are fuzzy, begins at some point to speak to me. And it becomes apparent that this will become more then a small exchange so I shift to his table keeping a close eye on my belongings now just behind me.

He is, if memory serves, a medical student or trainee or whatever they call them, on his way to Chicago. He was from Holland and I want to say his accent had hints of french. Strangely enough I didn’t have too much trouble with it despite it’s definite thickness when he became animated by our conversation.

As things go in aimless conversations, he ask what I was doing with my life.

I told him I was at Ohio University training to become a professional actor.

He told me that, that was fantastic to follow my dreams. And I must work very hard and perhaps I would become successful.

The mistake in America is that success comes from hard work. Success, as it is commonly defined in America, comes from luck; hard work or no.What hard work towards what you love gives you is a sensation of being fulfilled.

Which I believe is what he spoke of more then finding myself a nice little soap opera and settling down.

He told me to work hard.

He told me survival was the key.

“If I can go to sleep at night and wake up in the morning; I know I can make it.”

Breathing sleeping waking.

So precious, and we all forget so easily.

Put your hand down your shirt,

and press it to your chest.

Your heartbeat?

Such music.