The Burden of Dreams

"Yes," I replied patriotically. "Yes, I shall."

My father is gone now, but he is remembered as a man whose dreams flew higher and farther than any other ever born. Americans even have a Tuesday off in his memory, every year on the anniversary of the day the rocketship that launched him and an unknown female companion into outer space unexpectedly burned to a crisp. His final dream-to deflower a thirty-nine-year-old virgin on the surface of the sun while playing 'The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald' on the pipe organ-was tragically cut short, breaking the hearts of an entire oversexed generation and those of the legions of engineers he had hired in secret two years before to build a craft that could sail to infinite lengths. He died on August 9, 2003, his wangie most likely still in his pants, where, like a majestic bald eagle, it should never have been caged for any reason.

Scientists the world over are still trying to figure out why that spaceship became hotter and hotter the closer it got to the sun, until it was finally engulfed in deadly fire. No matter. Some think it romantic that my father died for what he wanted most in life. Sure, billions of men strive to gadoogle girls in strange places and spew their Italian syrup in bizarre situations, but precious few of them are willing to bankrupt the most profitable company in the western hemisphere and totally deplete their only son's trust fund to actually make those twisted sexual longings come true. He and his desires were larger than life.

Now it has fallen upon me to keep his dreams alive. Oh, I am not the adventurer or risk-taker my father was, and I am pretty much penniless these days. But everyone has to begin the road to immortality somewhere, and so tomorrow, I begin my own journey of a thousand miles with a single step. This single step shall hopefully consist of me sliding my rigid penis into a near-sighted grocery checkout girl's candy mountain in the cereal aisle of the local Safeway. It's always been a little goal of mine. We shall see if I and my forty-six dollars can make a little magic happen-but not for me, you understand. For my father. And for history.