Tuesdays With Dad

Dad was already perusing the wine list when I arrived.

"Thirsty?" I said wittily.

"What? No, this is a catalog for Learjets. It's pretty important to have a jet these days. Have you thought about one for yourself?"

"Hm! A jet would really cut down on my commute time. How much do they cost again? A dollar?"

The server came by with a bottle of Chateau La Pape Neuf de Rothschild. We were at Cucina Colore where the tables were made of gold and the linguine was spun from the bones of extinct marmots.

"The oil people came by yesterday," Dad said, sniffing over the menu. "I spent nearly the whole day signing forms. Pretty soon the completion will be finished, and we'll be signing off on the division orders. There will be fracking and horizontal drilling and straws stuck in the ground for migrant workers to suck through. Should be a game changer."

"Great. I'm sick of this game anyway. So how much would--?"

"Meanwhile, Bob Swenson of the Orange Crush Broncos came by the other day. He's just a big teddy bear. His wife is doing charity work in India. He told me he'll buy our farms for cheap, and when I objected to his price he told me it was for charity. That's when I told him I wasn't in the charity business, sorry. Steve Foley then tried to tackle me, but I was too quick for him!"

"Good. But anyway..."

"After he left I started my new revision on the essay. It's about the financial markets and the inequalities of financial finance. Money, too."

"Speaking of which, when will we--"

"But I've also added sex, a lot of it. The main character, Harold, gets mixed up with a young woman who teaches him the way of the sex, so to speak."

"Right. But--"

"Harold has an aching bullet for this one young lady, and he plunges into life's source again and again. Together they take the most dangerous chance of all by learning how federal deficits are sustainable for economic growth. It should definitely put a lump in my readers' pants."

"Da--?"

"My friends with PhDs told me how hot my stories make them. There's no lack of throbbing doctorate boners, if you catch my meaning. My characters make the beast with two backs and do the horizontal honky all night long. After they hydrate, they go back to bumping bearded bacons and frosting their salads and spinning the meat wheel and mapping Magellan's triangle and biting the ol' poop apple...."

"I....!"

"Dipping the fondue spoon in the pud basket..."

I was already running out the door. But in related news, I think I have found the perfect cover for my novel.

"Cat's in the cradle..... *sob*....."