I’m the first to admit I’m no oil painting. The calendar has been  hard on me. I’ve been in some fights. I’ve had months where everything I ate came out of a can or a foil pouch. Years, really.

I started out skinny. A lot of guys do. But then I got older, which also happens to a lot of guys.  I am no athlete and never was. During all that high school football stuff I was the dude under the bleachers who sold weed. It was a miracle I ever got out of high school. It’s no mystery that I never went to college.

I worked at low jobs for a long time. I still do. I’m too ham-fisted to make much good at construction, and I can’t do restaurant work since all my charm is in these notebooks (not much there, either, and that’s if you can even read my penmanship. It looks like a cat wrote it).  I don’t like people and they generally don’t like me.

And I have a felony conviction. Think what you want, but our justice system is pretty heavily tilted toward the rich. If you don’t got the scratch, you’re gonna hear the latch. A poor man has a poor man’s pleasures, namely getting drunk whenever he can. And that can lead to more police and more tough times.

Last off, my teeth are shit. I haven’t been to a dentist since the Reagan administration. Seriously, who has time for that? I’ve been lucky because my teeth seem to be made of some kind of granite. They don’t hurt, anyway, but they don’t look good. I quit smoking, but the damage was done long ago. Plus my big front incisor got a chip in it, so there’s that.

Taken all around, I am what you might call “weathered.” I have all my hair and both eyes and all four limbs, but that’s about the best you can say about me. I dress in secondhand clothes that were cheap to begin with and haven’t had the best of care.

But of course I don’t say any of that in my Tinder profile. I figure by the time a girl sees me it’s likely too late.

I hear this blog might make me rich. Who can say?