Dad

Its been a week since I've blogged here. I've been tired or just not able to prod my lazy ass to write what's been on my mind. There's a Star Trek blog coming up soon, I just haven't been up to it.

This time of year is a weird time for me. I am easily distracted, often irritable and yesterday I was reminded it was indeed that time.

11 years ago today, my father's body was found after suicide a few days earlier. It happened in what was a period that seemed to be a step up from a very hard several years for me and served as a major setback, not only emotionally, but spiritually and financially.

In a lot of ways I'm STILL recovering. I've never quite forgiven him for the mess he left behind, both literal and figurative. For the pain he left his granddaughter in who was just shy of turning 8 at the time.

I have, however, come to miss him. As with us all, our father's shape so much of who we are. My love of movies comes from him, pop culture and the like. My political nature is my mother's, my geekdom, entirely from dad.

In the last few years I've thought a lot about how he would have loved the reboots of our old favorites; Battlestar Galactica, James Bond and now Star Trek. He was a big Western fan too. GOD he would have loved Firefly.

I think he would have loved them. Especially Casino Royale. He was in a great deal of psychic pain, obviously, but I can never understand how he shut himself from the experiences he had yet to have. Watching his granddaughter grow and become a college student, the shows she was in...all that.

And as I said, there's Star Trek. I think he would have gotten a big kick out of this last movie. It had a lot of nods to the old sci fi movies of the 40s and 50s that he loved as well as being Trek itself. I can even see tears in his eyes as it brought back good memories of his youth and how so often pop culture comes fill circle for us.

Dad, I hope you are resting peacefully. I hope one day I can forgive you for being so fucking stupid and selfish. And I hope you can watch movies wherever you are and that they have an IMAX.

Below are a couple of old pics of him.

Dad's Headshot from 1963 when we moved from Tucson to New York so he could start his career as an actor. I was a year old. He sold the car and we took the train from Tucson, through Chicago and into NYC.

The only real break my dad's career ever got. This is from an ad campaign from the 70s. Of this particular campaign dad's was the most popular, appearing in more places than any of the others. There's a picture of dad on some highway standing under a ginormous version of this picture... I mean Godzilla big. Alas, it didn't translate into much further work.