A eulogy of sorts

[SkinnyLittleTwig]

all right, this post has been a long time in the making and i need to finally get off my ass and finish it. i need an outlet for all of this, and a written one is probably the most appropriate, considering everything.

on june 30th, i visited the helsinki casino for the first time. i wasn't interested in playing because live poker is super gay, but i hung out with a couple of friends while they were on the waitlist. i hated the place -it was full of asian degens- but the company made it bearable; we were planning a trip to my cabin in the countryside in a couple of days, it was going to be awesome. once their seats opened, i walked home and played online for a bit. i took a shot, won a 2k+ pot and waltzed happily to bed at around 6 am.

three hours later, my mom burst into my room and gave me pretty much the rudest awakening ever. my father had been found dead in london a few hours earlier that morning.

this wasn't a massive surprise, as morbid as that may sound. according to the police, he'd been found passed out next to two bottles of gin and some random pills. we still don't know the official COD, but it's pretty obvious.

my parents split up shortly after i was born. dad wasn't at the hospital during my delivery. he said that he was too much of an adventurer type to fit the role of a parent and pretty much ran off.

that makes him sound like a huge irresponsible scumbag, which might be right, but it could have been much worse for me. we still saw each other, and thanks to him, i've already gotten to travel more than most people do during their entire lives.

he was a journalist, and had been for his entire life. you could say that writing was the only thing he was ever good at. he did several correspondence stints abroad, including a four-year stay in DC. during that time i made several trips to the US, which may be to thank for the english in this post being at all legible [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

he got married to a colleague and stayed with her for about eight years. the divorce was devastating.

this was back in 2005. it was when the excessive drinking first started to become noticeable for me; i'd never had any idea it had been some sort of a problem, even though i've recently learned that it had been one of the main reasons for the breakup. we would go out for burgers and he would look like david hasselhoff. he forgot about my sixteenth birthday. my reaction was primarily confused, then pissed off, then worried. i didn't realize that i had reason to be worried. i couldn't grasp that i should be worried about my father slowly killing himself after just turning sixteen.

i'll write up some more later. i'm posting this in parts because otherwise i would never finish it.