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Hazy Days

by DICK CHENEY

Breaking Bad
creator Vince Gilligan

Condi Rice recently lashed out at me because I suggested in these memoirs that she cried in my office. And so what if she did, exactly? I've cried twice this week, and I can scarcely remember seven days that elapsed when I didn't. I cried reading Friday's TR, I cried when Princess Diana first wore a crown (for the death of England, natch) and I cried after reading Ender's Game. For some reason the entire premise of genetically engineered orphans always gets the waterworks flowing.

Here are some of the other times I remember weeping like a baby. (In the Pentagon we called them "wepts", like, "My So-Called Life gave me one hell of a wept last night.")

- When Molly Young deleted her tumblr; I was like, "WHY DIDN'T I MAKE SCREENCAPS"

- Nine times during Brideshead Revisited. Being British, or even knowing a British person, is just about the saddest thing I can imagine. Each time you come to an old townhouse near Shropshire you're overcome, and that kind of vulnerability touches me deeply;

- the homophobic lyrics of Katy Perry;

- The day in 1994 when it was no longer OK to say "Allrighty then" and generally pretend to be Ace Ventura;

- When they freed the West Memphis Three and Eddie Vedder was like, "G chord";

- The idea that Kate Winslet is eventually going to turn into that horrible old woman in Titanic;

- Whenever anyone's an orphan and is taken in by caring parents, especially in the third world;

- Seeing another man cry, especially if he was on CSI;

- Anytime someone reblogs Andrew Sullivan approvingly;

- SIMBBBBBBBBBBBBBAAAAAAAAA!;

- Anytime someone uses the name Robert Downey Jr with a positive connotation;

miss when u weren't trying so hard

- When Jonah Hill got thin and looked like the Scarecrow in Oz and/or the thought of someone caring about his godawful animated series;

- The old West was sad as shit;

- Every single moment Michelle Williams dresses up as a dead or suicided ingenue;

- After the Mission Accomplished banner on that aircraft carrier, but it was tears of joy.

Despite my ample experience working the tear ducts, watching Breaking Bad's Gustavo Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) do the weeping last night came as something of a shock. One disturbingly emotional moment fuels every man's drive for power. Winston Churchill's entire political career happened because one of his young classmates told him to stick a ceramic vase up his fat ass.

Yes, the traumatic loss of Gustavo's first chemist partner, and possibly his Chilean lover, brought on tears we haven't seen from the man in any previous episode. Gustavo, in fact, never seems to break his steely countenance. He never laughs, which is the one universal sign that the person sitting across the table from you is, in fact, human.

The men and women of Breaking Bad usually make a habit of showing us their humanity. Last night's episode began with Walt (Bryan Cranston) at the doctor for a cancer checkup. As a newly diagnosed patient lapses into reverie about the hopelessness of his condition, Walt disabuses him of his sorrowful notions: "Live life on your own terms. To hell with your cancer. Every life comes with a death sentence." This reality check itself is enough to get most men wet and teary, but not Walt. He's fresh out of salty discharge. Like Gus, he's well into the anger and resentment phase that Jesse (Aaron Paul) expresses by playing video games.

If you really analyze it, there is no human experience without pathos. Just watching John Edwards wake up in the morning or try to rationalize a single thing he's ever done is enough to get a hard wept out of Dick Cheney lately. The very sight of the wonderful new home Jesse made possible for his ex-girlfriend and her son, and the way he is unable to credit himself for doing a good thing is sadder than when all the lower class passengers were not permitted in the lifeboats.

Gus was questioned by the DEA last night, and his ample excuses for the fingerprints they found in the apartment of one Gale Boetticher dimmed the suspicion of law enforcement. His steely countenance as he took the elevator up to the place where he might meet his end was also quite moving.

Maybe I've just gone soft. When I wake up on a typical Sunday, I don't even feel the urge to light my neighbor's copy of the Sunday Times on fire. My wife Lynne said, "Dick, when you don't even want to set fire to a newspaper containing the writing of Paul Krugman, I have to worry about our future together." I said, "Quiet, I'm watching a YouTube of Stevie Nicks lip-synching 'Wild Heart'."

DEA agent Hank Schrader's rehabilitation from gunshot wounds, first inspired by a hospital handjob and then by the potential investigation of Mr. Fring, was enough to get most of the conversatives I watch Sunday night TV with ensconced in velvet tears. Usually it's hard to focus on the episode in my house, because whenever Jesse Pinkman shows up on screen, Grover Norquist is screaming, "Stop whining!" or Laura Ingraham is yelling, "Take off your shirt!"

Last week's amazing sequence, which featured Pinkman telling off the director of his Narcotics Anonymous support group, deserves more Emmys than Matthew Weiner has in storage. This was the best theater since Neil Simon's Chapter Two. I'm considering getting a tattoo of this entire scene permanently inscribed on my colon.

Listening to this scene more than once inspires a litany of different reactions. At first, there is stark approval of Jesse's destruction of the entire therapeutic purpose of a support group. Then, astonishment at the honesty of everyone involved, especially the group's alcoholic leader. Lastly, a hatred of everything that exists to bring about such an annihilating moment.

We think it takes one thing to make us cry, that something sad itself is enough to disturb the calm of our face, the twitching of our ears, tension in the cheekbones. But it is our own mental state that takes primacy: a instinct designed for self-preservation. Nothing, then, could be more tormenting than what we ourselves become in the moment of collapse. To overwhelm the gravity of the feeling, we attempt to transcend it through self-importance. When we weep, we're saying, "Me! Me! Me! Me! Me."

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find an archive of his work on This Recording here. He last wrote in these pages about shame.

"Capitol City" - Wilco (mp3)

"Rising Red Lung" - Wilco (mp3)

"I Might" - Wilco (mp3)

The new album from Wilco, The Whole Love, is available on September 23rd and you can preorder it here.