Conversations with dad, who died many years ago

When I go to the potty, I take my phone with me. On it, I either scroll mindlessly through facebook and instagram or read a book I’ve been trying to read for like two years. This is not a fact that you need to know but it might be important later, if you stick around reading this.

Neutral Milk Hotel is playing in the house. I am alone, so it echoes.

Two headed boy. You should listen to that song. It’s nice.

I was watching the Godfather this morning. It’s the first thing I did this morning when I woke at 4:30 AM. Then I watched The Godfather Part II. Only my dad would’ve understood such an act of absolute anarchy. I remember watching films with him at absolutely any time of the day. He liked The Godfather a lot! And Brooke Shields was his favorite actress (because my grandfather liked The Blue Lagoon a lot, thinking that it was a soft porn film. I guess my father, like all other fathers before him, couldn’t help but be influenced by his father, even if their fathers made everything beautiful into something cheap. I really should rewrite this last sentence.) Anyway, that’s not what I want to talk about.

Brooke Shields had nothing to do with The Godfather, at least nothing that I know of. It’s just a fact that I remember about my dad and my dad’s dad.

I couldn’t help but think of my father while watching The Godfather. He would make sounds of approval on great dialogue (“I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse”), he would point out when he thought a scene was rather well shot, he would recount life-lessons that he’d thought the film related (this is my father I am talking about here, The Godfather couldn’t’ve pointed out scenes in The Godfather). He (again, my dad) really thought of himself as a hybrid of Vito and Michael Corleone. Sometimes he would look at me as if I was turning into Fredo – this is a reference that only the ones who remember the film would get. And having looked at me, he’d shake his head. I remember his constant disapproval and his constant pride in my existence. I hadn’t done anything to earn either, I had just existed.

I was in sixth grade when I saw the boobies of the heroine in The Godfather. It’s the sex scene when Michael gets married in Sicily. I am told that a George Clooney picture called The American shows the boobies of the daughter of the girl whose boobies we see in The Godfather. My father could not see The American, he wasn’t around. It would’ve been a very weird, very pervy, full circle otherwise. I have.

While watching The Godfather this morning, I was struck by several nuances that Francis Coppola thought of while making the film. The minutiae, like hundreds of extras at a party, so the party feels real, or the man who jumps thrice in the streets as they mock celebrate Cuba’s revolution or Kay’s fight for her freedom and everyone’s disgusting disregard for all the women in the films, or all the scenes where Michael talks to his mother.

When I notice these things, I feel like I want to talk to someone about them. Who better than a die hard fan of the film? Who better than my father?

But he is dead. It’s been six years. He and I used to fight a lot. I was always right, like Kay. He was always wrong, like, I don’t know, Fredo? or like the guy who thought that The Godfather video game was a good idea. Point is I don’t have a good candidate to talk to and point out all the things I found worth pointing out today. And just for this reason, I miss him. He was such an asshole to me and I honestly miss him.

So now I go for a walk in the evening, thinking I have wasted the entire day watching films that I first saw when I was reading Asterix and watching He-Man cartoons. Afterwards, my tummy decides, as it happens with all men who have walked for an hour having eaten a big lunch and have also seen The Godfather, that I must take a shit.

This is where I was for the last 20 minutes. I did not take my phone with me this time. For the first three-ish minutes, my fat ass deplorably trumpeted my lack of dignity, but after that my brain took over.

I have realized, as an outcome of the last approximately sixteen and a half minutes of closed room introspection, that The Godfather is a great film, Part II as well, and that I have not addressed my father’s death, I have denied myself proper grief, mourning, and have brain-blocked all versions of sorrow that such facts ensue. Sometime, I really should deal with it – the dad bit, not The Godfather.

Lost in my thought I forgot to skip Oh Comely, which is such lazy songwriting and I really despise it. Ghost is just done and Untitled is going to start in a second. Untitled is my favorite track in Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Aeroplane Over The Sea. Despite Oh Comely, it’s a great album. You should listen to it, sometime.