Son of a doughy white guy here again. The old man called this afternoon. I was home eating chocolate chip cookies, Lays and drinking a Pepsi. I could barely hear him through the phone because it was very noisy wherever he was. I could hear someone grunting in the background and thought he might have been at the gym, but then the grunting turned into more of a hacking cough.
"Hey, son, I only have a few minutes," he said. "It's been a rough week and it's only Tuesday. Lots going on at work, and then I had a little tiff with the ex-wife and had some other things come up with the ex-business partner. I'm just feeling a bit run down, which sucks because I'm really trying to do this beer and hot dog diet. I have to admit, though, that I sat down last night to watch the Daily Show, and ended up munching on half-a-bag of Combos and then a brownie."
Through the phone, I could hear a voice in the background ask, "you wanna nother" and then my dad's beard scraped against the mouthpiece a couple of times.
"Anywho, son, the biggest bummer of all is that I ran the past three days and went to the gym twice. Well, I stepped on the scale today and my weight is back up to 232. It's a bummer. Not so much because I put on three pounds -- hey, it could be muscle -- but because I'm trying to do something for humanity here and it's a setback. But hey, that's science, right? Einstein flunked his college entrance exams. NASA had to scrap the early Apollo launches. And Marie Curie tried hundreds of times before she finally discovered radium. Of course, the exposure to radium did kill her eventually."
It was quiet for a few moments, and I thought I could hear him sipping something.
"Son, I've got to go. Lots to think about. I love you and I'll talk to you soon."
