Stories of my father

He's been dead a week now...

I love my father … He’s been dead a week now…

When they were filming It's Complicated at St. John's University, where my father teaches philosophy, they parked the Kraft tent in the parking lot he came in. While he parked elsewhere, he still had to cut through the tent in order to get through his usual door.

While my father cut through the Kraft tent, he encountered one of the leads for the film. Specifically, he ran into Alec Baldwin.

My father, being the smart ass he was, gave him a big broad smile, and said, "You know, Adam is my favorite Baldwin brother.”

Alec Baldwin sighed and said "Yeah, I get that alot.”

In case you don’t know, Adam Baldwin has nothing to do with the tribe of the Baldwin brothers, and is actually on the opposite end of the political spectrum from said family of left-wingers.

My father can be just a bit of a troublemaker.

Once, at the Great Irish Fair, in Coney Island, New York, my father came across NORAID — a “charity” for Northern Ireland, dedicated to helping the widows and orphans of the violence in Northern Ireland.

In reality, they took the money and dedicated it to creating more widows and orphans.

When Noraid hit my father up for money, he told them, in his clear, second tenor voice, "I don't support cop killers."

My father did catch the attention of every police officer within earshot.

... Okay, more than a bit of a troublemaker.

My father is about as responsible for my writing career as J. Michael Straczynski.  When I told him I had an idea for what basically turned out to be Fanfiction from Hell, he told me to write it down ...

A million words later, and it turned into something so completely different, I had to rewrite it from the bottom up.

Now, I’m selling it as White Ops. Remember how book 3 of White Ops was basically taking over Disney Planet? My father came up with that idea before Tom Clancy wrote it in a few chapters of Rainbow Six.

My father is responsible for my Catholic education, more than any of those ignorant morons in Catholic school.  As a student of Thomas Aquinas, my father has applied reason and rationality to religion, and has taught me to do much the same … which is usually why atheists confuse me when he says that “no one uses their brain about religion and believes in it,” and why Protestants say that Catholics don’t even read the Bible. All I can think is: Where do they find these people?

There was this one time, back in college, my father worked with a hydrogen generator … remember those? If you don't, there's a wiki entry for that somewhere, I'm sure …anyway, my father once, by accident, added the wrong acid. His professor took his generator and tossed it out the window, destroying part of a construction site outside. The profess then informed the lab that using the wrong acid results in the more unstable cousin of TNT. There’s a tree there now.

It's going into a novel somehow.

Another story he told me was of ether … apparently, ether tends to give off a lot of vapor. It is also very flammable, so to heat it, people in a lab use a water bath, heated by a hot plate beneath the water. So, of course, someone used a Bunsen burner, the ether vapors caught fire and ...

As my father told it, "When you see the air catch on fire above your head, you hit the ground fast."

Anyway. Here's to my father. I’m not sure what I’m going to do without him.