My Sunday Afternoon with Dead Batteries and Bryan Cranston

The battery in my 2008 Toyota Carola just died (again). I’ve written about my car troubles before in Humor. But this time I’m not laughing.

I am on my way to take my number 1 daughter to a Girl Scout thing and the car starts dragging. The battery light is on. That should have been my first tip off that something is wrong.

I call my husband to take the kid to her destination while I wait for AAA roadside assistance to tow my car to the nearest garage.

My phone only has 20% battery left and with my car battery dead, I have no way of charging it. The AAA operator is speaking slowly and making me repeat myself. I ask him in the nicest way possible if we can speed up the conversation lest I lose my ability to communicate with the tow truck driver. These AAA rescues are usually pretty long.

That’s the reason I am writing this in the tiny notebook I keep in my purse for emergencies. I want to conserve my phone battery. I manage to get the driver’s side window down with the last second of battery life. Although it’s September, the temperature is still in the eighties here in Virginia. Opening the passenger door, the one away from the flow of traffic gives me the cross ventilation I need to stay sane.

Maybe I am forcing a literary construct here, but my car battery and phone battery dying on the side of the road would make a good metaphor for how I’ve been feeling lately. I haven’t been writing much.

My family has recently started watching Malcom in the Middle, a sitcom from the 00’s, while we eat dinner on the couch. I’m not sure when we strayed from the table, but nobody’s yelling, so I’ll call it a win.

Our biggest issue is the dog trying to snatch our food. We have to lure him to his kennel with treats and lock him in for the duration of the meal. I’m sure there is a better way, but we are TIRED and HUNGRY, and the little stinker already got his dinner. Why is he after ours too? We turn up the sound on the TV to drown out his barking.

Enough about the dog!

Malcom in the Middle is a great show, but I never watched it when it originally aired because I was away at college. It is nice to have a family sitcom we all find funny. I also enjoy watching Brian Cranston flex his comedy muscles after watching him play a ruthless drug kingpin in Breaking Bad. Cranston is as funny in ‘Malcom’ as he is scary in Breaking Bad.

Cranston always has such fascinating stories when he’s interviewed. And those of you who’ve followed me here know how much I love a good memoir, so I figured his memoir was probably worthwhile. And it is!

This guy has a ton of lived experience. He traveled cross country on a motorcycle and had a variety of odd jobs. He learned so much from it all, insights that eventually would inform his acting choices.

That is something that actors and writers have in common, taking that combination of lived experience, talent, and imagination to tell a story. I was on the acting track all through school, but pivoting to writing is not all that different. You still must get into the character’s mind deciding what the character would or would not do in a given situation. The writer has even more freedom because the world is our oyster. We can build the world, set up obstacles, challenge the character to grow. Broad strokes. The actor is for the most part stuck with the words on the page. It is the interpretation of the words and the character’s physicality that they get to play with. Subtleties.

Cranston’s memoir made me miss acting yet solidified my desire to keep writing more characters with depth and complexity. Something an actor like Cranston might sink their teeth into.