At the shelter where the homeless people live there’s a big shock- proof window, dirty as shit inside and out. In a steel frame. It’s in the hallway where the guys claim a mat to sleep on within an hour after supper, and after sweet dreams get their asses kicked out of the building at the break of day. That’s called lockout. That’s called “rise and shine.” The thick paint around this window and frame combo makes it look like it’s puttied and caulked into the cinder blocks around it. But it’s not. it’s just that a pretty poor workman did the job of painting.

The window looks out on a wire fence around the shelter, and a field of grass beyond, toward memory. Trees and huge tree weeds give the place  shade and make it a pleasant scene as I pick my teeth in the hall inside, and think about the woman I love and the EPO her mother made her get against me.

Sometimes I see a woodchuck moving around in the field near the fence outside the window.

You dumbass southern crackers call him a groundhog. Makes sense since he’s not a hog and a hog doesn’t live in a hole in the ground.  Oh, and good luck outrunning your little sister for a quick date when you go home to visit, before they throw you out again and you end up back here at the shelter. I suppose you country boys call her your “girlfriend” and think you love each other.

This woodchuck isn’t real big but he isn’t real small either. I try to move  discreetly when I peek outside to see if he’s there, most every late afternoon around 5:30. I sometimes wonder how he’d do mixing it up with the cats who live in clans around the shelter. I worry about him a little.

I’m talking about yesterday now. Not wishes, brags or speculation. At 5:30 I looked outside and thought it was the woodchuck. The right color, but it was a cat out in the field. Licking his asshole out. Nonchalant. Getting ready for a night with the ladies. And then I saw him, nosin’ around the fence. The woodchuck. Pokin’ around as if he’s walking his property line or the king of England. Not 30 yards away from that worthless cat.

So now I know the answer to life’s riddle. A tomcat twice as big and thinking he’s the badass of the county won’t throw down for shit on a woodchuck minding his own business. And that’s a fact.

I’m not sure anything else that this life has to say to me really matters.

Now don’t let me get started on the cops….