Only a Year — Emo post! YEAH!

Ten feet away from me is a fireplace. On top of this fireplace is quite a large mantle. On top of this mantle is a photo of me, my mom & my brother together, pretending to be happy. Behind this photo are my dad's ashes.
The irony of it all is that in this photo, we were on a cruise with my dad when he was extremely ill. This was when my dad had hit the point of no return and everyone who didn't know him thought he was mentally ill with a bad leg. Really, he was an extremely intelligent man who was my fatherly Samson, but what the haircut did to Samson, the cancer and chemo did times 10 to my father. I don't know why we excluded my dad from this photo. Were we shunning him because he looked crazy and not handsome like he used to? I hope it was just because my mom wanted a picture with her children sans ex-husband.
But this photo is in a frame and meant to be hung on the wall — there's nothing to prop it up with on a table. I guess my grandma decided the surprisingly heavy box of my dad's ashes would be a great prop for said photo.
So, he may not be in that photo, but he is holding all of us up.
I feel like I could be a lot more cheesy and annoyingly philoshopical with all of that, but I'd prefer not to. Take from it what you will.
It seems strange that it's been a little over a year since I've seen my dad though.
I live in his house, but he's no longer here. His bedroom is right next to mine, and all of his stuff is exactly where he had it put before he died. Some days it's easy and comforting to be around all those memories of him, but every once in a while, it's the hardest thing in the entire world to sit alone in this big house wishing my dad was here, too.
When I sit on my usual spot on the sofa, it feels so unnatural to not have my dad in his easy chair right next to me.
When I order our favorite pizza — with every topping in the entire world — I still instinctively order a large, and then I have to eat it all week because he's not there to help me with it.
I keep his cologne in a drawer next to my bed. (I almost spelled drawer like droor).
When he first died, I thought I would spray it on my pillow every night or something disturbing like that, but I haven't sprayed it once. I'm not sure why. Probably because I don't like crying, and when I do want to cry, I am just like my dad and want to be driving in my car late at night speeding down the interstate to an unknown destination with some fabulously sad tunes blaring.
I'm not really like my mom or brother, and I never realized how similar I am to my dad until it was too late to ever talk about these things with him.
I wish so much that I could sit down with him and talk about music like we used to. He would show me all the classics (and some new bands he'd discovered) and I would keep him up to date on all the british rock and give him music from all the good concerts I went to.
He was a hypochondriac just like I am. If I told him I thought I had Toxic Shock Syndrome or Malaria, he, unlike my mother who would laugh at my pain, would look up the symptoms in his huge medical book and we would decide what the chances were. We both liked to think we had diseases, so I had some doctor's bills that my mom never knew about because he would take me to the doctor. Before my dad got cancer, I remember he kind of went through a really crazy hypochondriacal phase where he thought he had tumors and spent a long time at Mayo clinic. They didn't find anything wrong with him — but I think somewhere deep down inside, he knew everything was catching up to him and he was paranoid. When he went through that phase, that is when he had started smoking pot and drinking again. He had stopped for a long time before that, I think, althought he had always smoked his Marlboro's.

Some of my friends had an tacky sweater party a few weeks ago. I raided my dad's closet, so everyone could have a tacky sweater. I had a hankering to listen to some oldies, so I blared my semi-oldies playlist, and started going through my dad's closet. I came upon his suitcase, and went to move it to get to the sweaters underneath, but I realized it was full. I was curious, so I had to open it, although I wish I hadn't, because I started weeping as soon as I realized what was in it. All the things in that suitcase were the last few outfits he wore at the nursing home before he died, the moccasins he wore all the time and the blanket he slept with every night — still crumb covered with pieces of bread from his last meal before he choked on his mucous and died.
It wasn't even the cancer that killed him. The nurse on duty at Tabitha wasn't paying enough attention to him, and he had a cold and the mucous was draining into his throat and he didn't have the energy to sit up on his own or cough very much, so he choked to death. It was probably better that way though — he was miserable, and I couldn't stand seeing him in that condition.
So I sat there with my face in that blanket sobbing while the Eagle's song, "Lying Eyes" was BLARING....and then my cousin Melissa walks in.
Hahahaha
How hilarious and sad that was all at once.

Anyway, I hope he isn't up hanging with Jesus and hating me for how much I've been screwing up lately, and making a lot of the same mistakes he made.

And I hope you guys don't hate me for not writing funny things in here lately.
Classes start again soon, so be expecting a great blog comeback in a couple weeks....
Not that anyone is really on the edge of his seat waiting for me to go back to writing posts like my first ones?

YEAH.

Also, I would like to say I wish my living room was smokey and champagne-filled with animal collective records blaring like it was on new years eve/new years.