Wednesday, August 28, 2019

VHS


(From a Facebook post from June 16, 2019)


When I was a kid my grandfather used to rent us Disney movies from Blockbuster and bring over a huge bag of buttered popcorn. For me those days were better than Christmas. Every Friday night my Dad would bring home a VHS tape from the library, usually an old Jimmy Stewart movie or somethin like that; and he’d make homemade popcorn on the stove. He taught us all how to do that the “secret” way. I would look forward to Fridays every night of the week. Ever since I was a kid I wanted to be an actor, and I’d always be making skits with friends or telling stories and doing all the voices. I did some Shakespeare in high school and wrote and directed original plays in college. I also wrote a little for the producer of Braveheart, but not my own ideas. When I got out of university I continued to explore film and worshipped Pacino, DeNiro, and DiCaprio; and kept trying to get the guts together to write and star in my own film. I picked up minor roles in major films but nothing major. Life happened and my grandfather died in January. I had been sitting on a script I co-wrote with two talented writers from a writers’ group and I realized I only have one life to pursue my dream. The only hard thing my father ever told me was that I would never make movies. Today I had my son take these pictures of me. He tells me all the time how proud he is of his Dad. It’s been a dream of mine for him to see his father pursue his. Over the past 5 months becoming Chad Loos -the lead character in our film- I’ve lost 41 pounds and have gone to some pretty dark places that have made my entire life make sense. I wanna thank everyone for their patience and support- I will be forever grateful; and also those who doubted me- I couldn’t have done it without you. Some jackass producer fucked up the schedule, so we start filming tonight.








Find Me



My son got outta taking a long shower after we went swimming today, his favorite things to do. I was taking my course online when I saw this from my desk chair. I thought he was just tired but he said something I couldn’t hear so I crawled over like a daddy tiger like I do and buried my head in his neck, like I love. He said, “Dad, I was just thinking about how everybody dies,” and then his face broke while he said, “and I just want to stay the same age and you to stay the same age and we can always be together!” And I had to hide the fact that I broke right then and there. I took a moment to feel all that and said, “Puppy, when you were a baby you used to fall asleep on my shoulder, and I wished you never would grow up. But now that you are bigger we go hiking and we go to Starbucks together and we do go on more kinds of bentures together because you’re big; and we don’t even know what kind of bentures we will have together in the future so it’s exciting, you know. And I don’t know what happens when we die but I like to think that since we love each other so much we are gonna find each other.” And he said, “I wanna be buried right next to you so we can find each other.” I love him so goddamn much.