There’s a map of everything to everywhere…..

….on my front porch.

There’s nothing deeper here than that

except

a lesson I may have learned while I was out past my porch running some errands for my in-laws.

My mother-in-law

needed me to dispose of a stiff, dead opossum she had found in her yard.

My father-in-law

needed me to buy him some Duracell 312 hearing aid batteries and three packs of True menthol 100 cigarettes.

So, the opossum ended up in a bag which I tossed into a dumpster behind our local grocery market here in Brisbane,

and I

ended up in a run-down CVS pharmacy just off the El Camino Real in South San Francisco, California.

Cigarettes and hearing aid batteries for the elderly are always in such places. It is the joy of these places.

And they have El Jimador tequila, which I have never tried.

But I have smelled it because of the weaving-drunk man who was behind me, even though I didn’t ask.

We were both in line, and I had

my cigarettes and batteries.

He had his fifth of El Jimador tequila, and a copy of Maxim magazine

(which I found pleasing because it had a picture of a lovely woman with enormous tits on the cover.)

And this guy looked rough, and he was Latino, and that didn’t matter

because he looked my age

and it was Friday night

and the only thing he could weave about to plan and do was to buy El Jimador tequila and Maxim magazine

and go off wherever he had to go in the rain.

My birthday is upon me.

I’ll be 48.

And I don’t pray but I did make a sort of vow to myself that,

for the rest of my life,

I will never be the kind of man who swerves into a run-down CVS pharmacy in South San Francisco, California on a Friday night

to buy

a bottle of cheap tequila and a big-titty-girl magazine

and then shuffle off into the rain and the night.