RaisingDad

    3       Anthea’s Hope hummed through the void. Its hull gleaming under the faint light of distant stars. Newton sat in the co-pilot’s seat. His frail, alien frame dwarfed by the sleek controls. Beside him, Musk tapped at a tablet. Muttering equations under his breath. Barely beginning their audacious mission of transporting water from Earth to Newton’s drought-stricken planet, Anthea. The ship’s cargo hold groaned with tons of frozen water. Harvested from Greenland and propelled by a fusion of SpaceX ingenuity and Anthean technology.      “We’re ahead of schedule,” Musk said, glancing at Newton. “Fuel’s good. Trajectory’s solid. How about a pit stop? Mars is right on the way. Let’s take a breather. Check out the colony site.”      Newton’s pale eyes flickered behind his sunglasses.       “Mars holds no water for Anthea,” he said, “but if it’s what you wish, I won’t obj...

My wife is on a diet, and when  she's  on a diet,  I'm  on a diet, but this morning, without her having to tell me,  I gathered up my willpower,  showed some restraint,  and  t reated myself   to  a doughnut  without  sprinkles.       I can't blame her for my misery, however. Not completely. The order came down from our doctor, and my wife is good about obeying the doctor's orders. At least when it pertains to me. When it comes to herself, her secret to sticking to a diet is ending the day with a Hostess Snowball.       Hostess. The superfood of snacks.      On a positive note,  m y doctor also determined I was  too old for a midlife crisis , so I no longer have to worry about embarrassing myself in social situations, but it also  means I 'll soon be  wander i ng  around saying things like:      "Where ar...

  I was feeling playful.      "Knock knock," I told my beautiful wife.      "Who's there?" she asked.      "The love of your life," I said.      "Chocolate who?" she answered.      Okay, that wasn't quite the reply I was looking for. I was looking for one thing that might lead to another, but, although beautiful, my wife is a bit of a joker.       So's my father.       For example, we were at a family gathering this past Easter when my cousin's toddler was acting up. Too much sugar would be  my  guess.      "Sorry," my cousin said, "she's a bit spoiled."      "No need to apologize," my father said, wrinkling his nose, "they all smell that way."      But the time I'm actually thinking of is when my wife and I made the mistake of leaving an ongoing Scrabble game unattended, and our dog, who eats  anything  ...

   When things go bad, they go bad quick.       Like weight gain, for example. The last time I asked my wife if my chin looked fat, she told me, “Which one?”      My wife is beautiful… but rude.       Anyway, that’s how I found myself in the hospital ER with my elderly father this past weekend.      He was in the shower when he slipped and gave himself a pretty good conk on the head. It was followed by a nice little lump and, even though he didn’t want to go, my wife insisted I take him to the ER to get it checked out.       “I’m fine,” he insisted. “I don’t want to go.”      “But what if you have a concussion?” my wife argued. “You could go to sleep and not wake up.”      My father, who suffers from insomnia, said, “That would be wonderful.”      It sounded pretty wonderful to me, too. I haven’t gotten a decent night’s sleep since my first kid...

 A sore throat, a head cold, & the flu walk into a bar. Seeing them, the bartender says, “What is this? Some kind of sick joke?”      I start with that because I have bad news.      Let's see:            Sneezing…  check!      Headache…  check!      Congestion…  check!      It’s official, I’m sick.      Man, if it's not one thing, it's ten others.      "The difference between you being sick and me being sick," my beautiful but unsympathetic wife told me when I complained to her, "is  you  get to stay in bed all day."      It's easy to be snarky when you're healthy.      "No," I answered her, "the difference is my being sick is worse because it's happening to  me ."      "There's nothing harder on a marriage than a sick husband," she said, getting in the last word. ...

  2        Elon Musk, ever the visionary with a penchant for detours, had one condition before they plunged into the cosmic unknown. A stopover on the Moon.       He wanted to see the Monolith. An enigmatic, jet-black enigma which he believed might hold secrets to mankind’s place in the universe. Perhaps even clues that might aid Newton’s mission.       Newton, though impatient, acquiesced. He’d learned Musk’s whims often masked a deeper curiosity worth indulging.      They touched down on the lunar surface near the Tycho crater. The desolate gray expanse stretching out beneath a star-studded void. Musk, clad in a custom SpaceX suit, bounded out first. His voice crackling over the comms with childlike excitement.       “There it is, Thomas! The Monolith! The mysterious black slab in the flesh. Or, well, in the whatever the hell it’s made o...