Addict

This weekend, I purchased Season 1 of "Breaking Bad", and, in a kind of hallucinatory trip, with little sleep, finished watching both Seasons 1 & 2. I am now a confirmed "Breaking Bad" addict! Now, on to Season 3 (if available on-line)!

Such a good series! Amazing! And since it's filmed in Albuquerque, my hometown, every street view, and even the interior views, evoke powerful emotions. I recognize so much (not everything, of course, because it's been awhile since I lived there and much has changed). And it is all encompassed by looming tragedy!

In addition, the television series touches a very sensitive subject, methamphetamine addiction, which impacted my life, when A. fell under its powerful influence while working at my house in the spring and summer of 2006. Some of the drug's influence is effectively-dramatized in the TV series.

For example, the paranoia. When A. asked me, "Who lives next door? Somebody there's been talking bad about me," all I could think of was the eleven-year-old next-door neighbor boy - utterly harmless, of course. With menace in his voice, A. said "He must think he's pretty tough," and suddenly I grew worried about the boy's future (the menacing voices A. heard emanating from the house were all imagined, of course). In Season 1, "Breaking Bad" dramatized paranoia well when Jesse interpreted Mormon missionaries at the front door as being heavily-armed biker dudes. Meth generates paranoia like Niagara generates spray!

And the long sleeps. Like when A. slept for nearly 24 hours on the floor of my garage. Cloudy, my bunny, even took to biting him, since the garage floor was the bunny's turf. "Breaking Bad" effectively dramatized the passage of time during Jesse's long sleep with beautiful, time-lapse photography.

And the freakish nature of the drug trade. No trade demands a higher level of trust, and no trade has less of that vital property. The writers on this show understand well the constantly-changing, provisional nature of the drug trade; the deformed personalities, the bad faith.

But what slays me, of course, is recognizing street scenes. Season 1 had more complete views of the Crossroads Motel, where Jesse holes up with 'Wendy'. Brother-in-law Hank in the DEA takes Walt, Jr., to the motel to meet 'Wendy' and to scare him straight after he was caught buying beer illegally.

The Crossroads Motel has always been the kind of place you'd go if you knew no one in Albuquerque, but you had to stay anyway, because your cousin had to have surgery the next day. The place is pretty utilitarian. Still, there are deeper currents.....

Visible across the street is Presbyterian Hospital, where Cousin Cynthia sees her patients daily, and where me and my sisters were born. Just out-of-sight, on the other side of the freeway exit visible in the show, is what used to be Railroad Memorial Hospital (now Hotel Parq Central), where my grandfather died in 1940. In walking distance is where Bruce currently lives, and where atomic bomb secrets were passed by David Greenglass and the Rosenbergs to the Soviets in the early Fifties. Historic! The Crossroads Motel is at the center of all this. It should be a candidate on a national list of historic motels. Yet here, it is a meth dive hangout! Nice! (It's fun reading the customer reviews - service there is, shall we say, erratic). Probably not the best advertising for the establishment, but then no one ever really plans to end up at the Crossroads Motel - it just happens.

And the whole TV series is just chock full of similar stuff! The writers on this series "get it."

Just love it! LOVE IT!