Confidence makes such a difference in your life. I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “fake it till you make it”. That’s impossible to do without confidence. It’s something that has eluded itself from me for most of my life. Maybe if you met me now you wouldn’t think so, and I’ve made great strides in looking like I have confidence. But I still don’t. It’s something that’s rooted very deep within me.
As cars sped past me kicking up dust in my eyes in the bright sun, I tried to keep focused on the road ahead. Just stay on the shoulder, I told myself. You’ll be fine. I didn’t have a destination in mind, I just knew that I had to get out of there. Looking ahead, the road seemed to stretch on forever, glistening in the late afternoon sun with heat distorting the air above the asphalt. One foot in front of the other, I thought, as I tried to hold back a floodgate of tears. That’s all I had to do.
Something I’ve always tried to instill in my son is a sense of safety. Not just for his physical safety - that’s a given - but also for his mental safety. I want him to feel a sense of stability and know that he doesn’t have to worry about carrying any weight for the family. It’s something of which I carry a very strong sense. I want him to know that I’ve always got his back, that if he needs me for anything I’ll be there, and that I, as the parent, am the one who has to worry about paying the bills, strategizing for his future, and dealing with work. All he has to do is be a kid.
It’s not something I talk about often, but I had a sister who passed away shortly after she was born. I was only three years old when it happened, and for many years I thought that it didn’t have a huge effect on my life. I knew I was getting a new sibling, but was too young to really understand much and, because she died before I ever even got to know her, she was a very distant memory.
Recently I came across a show on HBO called The Righteous Gemstones. I don’t know how I missed it, but damn did this show hit a cord with me. I’ve never been too into Danny McBride content. I’ve seen a bit, but he’s not an actor or screenwriter that I’ve really seen a lot of. I think one time I saw an episode of Eastbound & Down and it just didn’t really appeal to me.
This time of year is the anniversary of my father’s death. When my father passed away, I felt a lot different about it than I thought I would. I imagined myself not caring at all, feeling free from the guilt I felt to talk, text, or help him. For over two decades after he was released from prison, a year didn’t go by that he wouldn’t hit me up for money or some other favor. Whenever I went home, I always felt that I should visit him even though I knew it would be difficult, time consuming, and leave me feeling drained.
It wasn’t until I was older that I could really understand a lot of what happened when I was younger. I have this feeling a lot when I watch Seinfeld. This is a show my father loved and I remember watching it with him back in the late 80s and early 90s. It started in 1989, so when I was 12, and it was really the early episodes over the first few seasons that bring back a lot of memories for me.
Guilt. It’s a vital tool for a person, political party, religion, or any other group to control people. It’s not just guilt about doing something wrong. It’s also guilt about doing something potentially wrong. Or potentially disappointing your leaders. You could be faced with leaders that claim a direct connection…
Watching Better Call Saul has been really strange for me. In one sense, as a fan of Breaking Bad I just really love the show. I started watching the first few seasons during the initial Covid lockdowns and it was a lot of fun. It's one of those shows that really gets you to binge, with the endings set up just perfectly to keep you wanting more.
There's a darker side to the show for me, though. The simple fact is that Saul Goodman reminds me a lot of my father. My father was a lawyer who also was a lifelong grifter and was always trying one scheme or another. The end goals were slightly different but still similar. Money. Prestige. Power. A love of all things gaudy. All fueled by arrogance and a desire to be better, at all costs, than others and to proove to all the naysayers just how much better. Saul was a bit more into women and less into drugs than my father was. But the resemblence is striking - even the attempt to cover up losing hair - that the show has resonanted with me in a lot of ways that I didn't expect.
A few scenes show a typical scene in Saul's office. A waiting room packed full of people, many of whom some may view as unsavory characters. People were waiting for hours to see Saul, but when the camera moves into his office you can see that he's not helping a client or working. Instead, he's using a leg masager, talking to one of his criminal accomplices, or bouncing a ball on his desk while he's thinking. People in his waiting room are agitated, but perhaps no one more than his secretary, who obviously loathes everything about the job but for some unknown reason stayed.
It was the same way at my father's law office. He would always double book clietns but then never see anyone until he kept them waiting at least a few hours. Most of the time while they were waiting, he wasn't actually doing anything. I got called in to his office to give him a foot, hand, or face massage on more than one occassion (something I hated to my core as a teenager at the time). If it wasn't me, there would be someone else in there doing it. Or he would be sleeping. Or claiming to be praying. Or doing anything but actually see the clients he had booked all day long.
My father had his office at a few different locations, and the second location was laid out so that the office where the waiting room was in the middle of the floor plan. At one end there were two offices with two people per office. My brother and I stayed in the far office. In front of the waiting room, there was the receptionist's office and my mother's office. Moving down a long hallway would find one office on the right, one meeting room, and my father's large office on the left. At the end of the hallway was the filing and copy room.
This was the 90s, so there was a lot of filing and copying and printing going on. Whenever I had to print or file something, I had to get up out of my office, walk through a packed waiting room, go to the end of the hall, and then walk up back through the waiting room to get to my desk. The same was true if I had to go to the restroom. Many times I just could not show my face in the waiting room because I would be accosted by angry clients wondering why they took off of work to spend three hours in a waiting room.
These scenes in Better Call Saul brought back vivid and visceral memories of the long days and even longer years I spent working in my father's law office. Instead of going to middle or high school, I was there, many times six days a week and working late almost every day. If ever I left at 6pm, my father would make me feel guilty.
But never as guilty as I felt for those poor souls stuck in the waiting room of eternity.