Breaking Bad Beat

I apologize for not having your regularly scheduled blog post ready for you this evening.  This isn’t really a blog post, and is certainly not a Vegas and/or poker related blog post.  It’s more like a fake blog post. Like fake boobs, only not really like that all.

Anyway, the reason I don’t have a “real” post ready today is that I took a break over this past weekend and binge-watched the final season of Breaking Bad.  Yeah, yeah.  I know I’m late to the party.  I’m pretty sure I’m the last person on the planet to have watched the complete series.  I mean, a few months back, my dentist even brought it up to me, and I had to stop him from spoiling anything by telling him I wasn’t through watching it.  (Note:  There are NO spoilers in this post)

I didn’t really intend to take so much of the weekend watching it, but man, at a certain point, I just couldn’t stop.  I only took breaks to sleep, play a little session at the Bike (here) and then do a quick blog post about that session.  So, if you were wondering why my last post was so short, now you know. 

I really do like publishing three posts a week, that’s always my goal, and preferably on Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday evenings—at least when I’m home.  When I’m in Vegas, the schedule gets messed up.  Now, you recall that a month or so ago I had what you may call a mid-life crisis and considered ending the blog.  Fortunately, I handled my mid-life crisis a lot better than Walter White did.  It was suggested to me that I merely publish less often.  But once I decided to continue, I really wanted to keep posting three times a week.

And then I got caught up with the last season of Breaking Bad, and lost a weekend.

I’m sure everything that could possibly be said about Breaking Bad has already been written, so I’m not really going to write about my reaction.  Needless to say, I thought it was one helluva show.  If you want to say it was the best dramatic show of all time, I wouldn’t necessarily argue with you.  If you want to say it was the best black comedy of all time, well, you’d almost surely be right.

It did take me awhile to get into it, I started watching many months ago.  It wasn’t that I didn’t like it, but I was just always too busy to get to it more often than not.  Truth is, it was so dark, I almost didn’t keep at it.  It was only because a couple of my close friends were raving about it that I kept going.  They have watched the complete series about five or six times, minimum, and they keep sending me texts during the evenings telling me that they are watching it again.  Seriously.  So I kept at it and then got really, really into it as the show progressed.

The difficulty for me, especially at the beginning, was that there were basically no good guys.  I kind of like real heroes (and real villains).  I like characters I can actually root for, who I want to win at then.  But this was so dark, so depressing, so violent, and so nihilistic.  Just not what I usually like in any way, shape or form.  But the incredible writing, direction, and acting finally won me over.  So I watched three episodes Friday nite, three more Saturday night and the final six on Sunday.  Phew!

And, even tho this is not a real post, I can actually tie Breaking Bad into the blogging world somewhat.  You see, I am quite sure I first heard of the show (back when it was in first run on AMC) from fellow blogger grrouchie soon after I started up my own blog.  He mentioned it a few times on his blog, I don’t think he said that much about it, other than he really liked it.  I recall asking him about it in person one of the first times I played poker with him.  He tried to sell me on it, the idea of ordinary High School Chemistry teacher turning into a drug dealer.  But man, did that ever sound like something I’d have absolutely no interest in.  I mean zero.

But like I said, hearing some of my closest friends tell me that they were on the fifth time through the entire show, I took notice.  Besides, by the time I gave it a shot, I heard so much about it, it seemed like I just had to watch.  I mean, you can’t be the only person on the planet who hasn’t seen Kim Kardashian’s ass right? And so, you can’t be the only person on the planet who hasn’t seen Breaking Bad.

Anyway, that’s done, and hopefully I will have enough time to do a regular, poker and /or Vegas related blog post for Thursday.