How are you coping?

I’ve identified two of my own recent coping mechanisms (assuming there are ways I also cope that I might not even be aware of yet).

There’s a channel on tv that is all cartoons. There’s another channel called “Stories by AMC.” If classic Looney Tunes are playing, I’m watching. Particularly if it’s Bugs Bunny. On the “Stories by AMC” channel, there is an inexplicable schedule of all five seasons of Breaking Bad on a loop. I’ve sat down hoping it would be on only to find some other strange show that qualifies as “Stories by AMC.” But most of the time, it’s Breaking Bad. Hours of it.

This is quite a change from when I’d find the Pluto TV I Love Lucy channel to serve as my ongoing coping mechanism background noise.

Why can I never place the actor who plays Marie even though I watched Just Shoot Me? Because she is that good. Exploring every actor’s face and movements because every actor in it is phenomenal. I love how Bryan Cranston is often in his tight white underwear. I like thinking of Hal in Malcolm in the Middle transforming into Walter White, how both incarnations appear in their underwear as part of the plot. Walter White/Jesse Pinkman. They are awfully white, so white they’re pink. The White Family and all that that connotes, taking over a Mexican drug lord’s business, as later happens in the tv show Ozark. Ozark is the Midwestern Breaking Bad, just without the messiness of drug manufacture. What would Jesse have become/remained if he had just stuck to small time drug manufacture and dealing? I call that harm reduction. Walt and Jesse are not related but they are a father and a son, where the father abuses the son verbally, physically, psychologically. The distaste I felt for the show when I tried to rewatch it the first time. I read the pilot script of the show in a tv writing course and learned it was meant to take place in the Inland Empire. Lydia Rodarte-Quayle—could she be related to the vice presidential Quayles?? My appreciation of Tuco, his grill, and his terrifying enthusiasm. How much I love the revolving machine gun in the trunk, just for its visual genius. Jesse’s remarkable escape. I love the appearance of Robert Forster, who played Max Cherry in Jackie Brown, who I always think of as Max Cherry. Like Max Cherry goes on to become, of course, the person who will disappear you if you need to be disappeared.

(I finished the second draft of the essay. Read the news. Consulted with the lawyer. Cleared another closet. Talked to the realtor. Made a date with the hauler. Donated another trunk-full. Raged at the news.)

Then I changed the channel, found Bugs Bunny biting lustily into a carrot, and rested.

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