icebluenothing

I keep forgetting to post a link to this -- !

The other day, I was down at my mom's house, doing a little work on my TARDIS prop, and on my TARDIS console prop. Here's a photoset of them.

Basically, I updated the signage on the TARDIS to match the prop as seen in the 2005 series. Also, I finally added a Time Rotor to the console (that's the tall, clear cylinder in the center). I'm very excited about that. The main body of the console I built with my dad when I was thirteen, fourteen years old -- sometime around then. Finally putting something I'm happy with in the center of it was kind of like putting the last spike in the Transcontinental Railroad. It was a neat moment of collaboration between past and future.

My mom's reaction was, "It's too bad your dad can't see this." On consideration, she added, "Or maybe he can."

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For those of you who have wondered, yes, I am still going to make the film, even though he's not still here to see it. It'll be a tribute, at this point.

(I'll admit, I stopped being in a big hurry to get it done when my dad told me several months ago that he was having a lot of trouble following television shows and movies. It really, really would have sucked if I'd finished it in time for him to see it, and then he wasn't able to enjoy it.)

"I wanted to breathe smoke.

Birds and deer are a silly luxury, and all the fish should be floating.

I wanted to burn the Louvre. I'd do the Elgin Marbles with a sledgehammer and wipe my ass with the Mona Lisa. This is my world, now.

This is my world, my world, and those ancient people are dead."

I have here, next to these keys, the silver cigarette case my father gave me, some months or years ago. It's really very pretty. An odd size, by my modern standards; I've never found cigarettes that will fit it. It has a map embossed on it of the British Isles, where he and my mother met during The War, where his lifeline and hers had crossed and merged, half a world away.

My father had given it to me a little apologetically -- he thought I might like to have it simply because it was his, even though, as he said, I wouldn't have a use for it. I lied and agreed that I wouldn't. I wouldn't want him to know I smoke myself, on occasion. He wouldn't approve.

It's foolish of me, I know it is. I do it in moderation. Once a month, if that. It makes me a rarity in a world where everyone around me smokes constantly or not at all, as if the world were divided into alcoholics or teetotalers.

It was something I tried for the first time when I was -- eighteen? Nineteen? On the theory that I would try it once, wouldn't like it (no one does their first time, right?), and would never be curious again. Practice differed from theory. I didn't mind it at all. Years later, when the Goth scene led me to clove cigarettes, I found I liked them quite a bit.

I still have nightmare-like images burned into my head -- my Uncle Jack, my mother's brother, in his cancer bed in the hospital, not long before he died. Arms and legs like sticks, like a starving man, his torso bloated like a corpse pulled from the river. By all rights, I should never have started.

My father quit smoking. Before I was even born, if I recall correctly. He was in the hospital himself for some weeks -- I forget what for, but I think he may even have been in an oxygen tent for a while. At any rate, he hadn't been allowed to smoke, of course. When he was released from the hospital, he started to light up a cigarette, and then thought -- "What the hell am I doing?" He was past the cravings, past the need he'd built up. He was just giving into habit, and decided that was stupid -- here was his chance to quit, so he took it. That was decades ago, and he never started again. A very sensible thing to do.

We do sensible things, most of us. We try to eat right, get some exercise, get the right kind of sleep, do what our doctors tell us. Whistling in the dark, thinking the whole time that maybe, just this once, death won't come for us.

My father is a sensible man, and lung cancer came for him all the same.

The night he dies, I'm almost certainly going to be drinking. I'm going to have enough drinks to numb everything out to soft white noise. Enough drinks, and, almost certainly, some cigarettes.

My father has cancer. Lungs and liver. The doctors don't know how long he has, but it doesn't look good.