I don’t make it a point to celebrate my birthday, usually, because birthdays just make me feel older and closer to death, and I love life. But this year, because I’m doing this writer-in-residence, I’m celebrating. I’m posting a story of my own, on this, the day of my birth. And that story is a sad one.

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There’s a ten minute window, maybe fifteen. There’d be more time but you waited till late in the day to get to work. Now. You’re pushing it if you’re going to pick up the kids and get home in time to cook dinner for them, which you prefer to do, rather than feed them prepared foods, because that’s just you.

Part of the trouble was that you spent an hour this morning debating the merits of going to the bar versus going to work. This is, you know, a ridiculous argument. In fact there should be no argument. You know this. You say to yourself, it feels so good, you get so much accomplished, when you don’t spend an entire day drinking. But today is overcast, blustery with rain. The boys wouldn’t be working today, anyway, with the jobsite all tarped over. It’s the kind of day you love to spend in warm confines with the taps shining in neon and the low lamp glow, while out the window the clouds pass overhead and drizzle the streets. You said, no. You said, I’m staying home. I can save money. Maybe I’ll buy beer at the store. Then again, you said to yourself, I don’t feel like making myself lunch and they have that delicious chicken soup at the bar. Today’s a good day for soup. You could buy a can of chicken soup at the grocery store. But then that would be a prepared food, which of all things you hate. It went like that until you drove to the jobsite anyway, for the trailer and next week’s payouts to file and you felt good doing so, productive, and you were happy to have made a healthy no-bar choice. Good for you, you said to yourself.

But because you couldn’t make up your mind it interfered with work. There were Garcia’s hours to enter into the spreadsheet. You cannot stand spreadsheets. Everyone says they make life so easy, but you hate making them, entering data into them, having to move the cursor every time you want to enter data into a new frame. Second to that, it’s moving your eyes from the time sheets to the computer screen and soon your head ached. Outside in the rain somewhere a dog barked and kept barking and wouldn’t stop and you wished you had a gun for either the dog or yourself you couldn’t decide. You finally gave up after only two hours.

Now you’re off to the grocery store. You ended up going both bar- and soup-less and so you have not eaten at all today. Your hunger’s driving you. But you’re feeling good about your choices, despite the lack of accomplishment. You feel healthy and invigorated. Life pulses through you, evident in the way your hands feel strong when you flex your fingers. You do this as you drive down the Interstate from the jobsite back to your neighborhood, to the supermarket, which sits but a block away in your rapidly modernizing medium-sized Midwestern city.

On the same block as the supermarket sits a bar. You see it there on this gray day, the lights of its beer signs glowing through the scant and tinted windows. You think, Haha, overcame you today. But as you pass by you feel its tug. It is almost literal, as if the bar had some X-men force on your brain, making you think, You could just stop inside for a quick whiskey. But you know what’s really going on and that’s the whole dilemma isn’t it? Still, you force your way past and this generates an odd feeling of combined sadness and empowerment.

In the store. Rows of products, most of them prepared foods. It’s odd that you both love and detest the grocery store. It is a time of day when the grocery store is packed with those just off from work. They’re in business suits. Some are college students in sweat pants with NAME OF COLLEGE printed across their backsides. These people make navigating the grocery aisles a nightmare. How many are on their cellphones? 70%? 90%? They ARE NOT AWARE OF THEIR SURROUNDINGS. They cover the entirety of an aisle so that you cannot squeeze around to get past them. And most of them are buying processed food: boxes of cereal and bags of potato chips, cans of chili. You weave around them in your knit shit, tucked into your jeans, the tight roundness of your beer belly.

You walk through the dairy aisle first: pick up chocolate milk as a treat for the kids, that sickly-sweet coffee creamer your wife loves. You try to remember if there’s milk for cereal in the morning. Most mornings you’re tired, needing coffee, not food. The kids grab those goddamn poptarts and they’re out the door for the schoolbus. The milk lingers, curdles. Cereal goes stale. All of this is, you admit, prepared food. If only you had a cow. Fields of grain waving in the wind like hair.

After the dairy there’s a meal to plan. You step through the fowl and cured meats, past the pork and beef, the seafood. You try to decide. It’s not so easy. You want what you want, but you try to eat healthy and cook well-rounded meals for your family.

You walk into produce. You know you could easily make potatoes. Mashed, fried, baked. The kids will eat potatoes the way you can go through beers. You try to avoid this comparison. Buy lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber, all salad makings.

Back in the meat you eye the chicken breasts: $7.86 for three breasts. It’s not the best deal, but it’s not bad. You go with it. Chicken breast and salad. Safe. Pedestrian. Healthy.

It is only natural that your circumnavigation of the grocery store be a circumnavigation: you avoid the middle—full of processed food. Thus it is only natural that your particular orbit takes you through the sections of the grocery store that they do in the order that they come. You mean—so you tell yourself—that the entrance that’s closest to where you always park your truck makes you perambulate the grocery store in a southeast to southwest, head due west to northwest corner, then due north back to the front of the store manner.

However you hit the grocery store, you know that you’ll hit the beer aisle last. It’s always the last item you pick up. Why? Maybe you say to yourself, like you are today, that you can get through the shopping without buying beer at all. Maybe it’s just that you always buy cold beer and you want it to stay as cold as possible as long as possible. It’s true that whenever you buy ice cream you actually will pick that up last—even after the beer. So there’s that. Another goddamn processed food. You think about purchasing an ice cream maker and think about the hassles that must entail.

But you pass the beer aisle now thinking about the inevitability of buying beer but knowing that if you worked very hard at it you could not buy any beer at all. You know how good you feel when you don’t drink. Why do you keep drinking? It doesn’t make any sense and you know this. You also know what the problem is here: why you keep drinking.

But then you think about the cheese and crackers waiting for you as a snack back at the house, once the wife and kids are home, and how you’ll all decompress your days over these snacks before you serve dinner, and how those cheese and crackers will be so much better with an ice cold beer. It’s okay, you say, to have a couple beers, and for the convenience of it you might as well get them in one can, so the twenty-four-ounce can will work nicely. It’s cold in your fingers as you think about how cold and bubbly it will be going down and how good it will be with those cheese and crackers.

You’re on your way. There are the checkout lanes, most of them closed and desolate. The lines at the open checkout counters snake into the aisles (those housing the dreaded processed food) and you wonder why they don’t just open them all up. Isn’t there a struggling economy? Don’t people need jobs? You get into line to wait.

While you’re standing there learning about what celebrity has gotten so fat, and what other celebrity is breaking things off with his or her celebrity significant other, and how the President is not really an American at all, and six easy healthy recipes for family dinners, you’re thinking about that single twenty-four-ounce beer, and how quickly you’ll drink it, and how you’ll want more, and how you won’t be able to sleep later that night because on those days when you don’t drink enough you can’t sleep, and you know why that’s the case, but you try not to think about that and instead think about how nice it would be to have a beer over dinner, even after the cheese and crackers. There’s only one person ahead of you now in the checkout lane. It’s now or never. You can be disciplined. You’ve done it so many times. You know how weak you are, though. The checker’s greeting the girl in front of you now. If you jump out of line now, no harm.

Back at the beer aisle you pick up another single twenty-four-ouncer. That’s it. No big deal. Two beers. Well, really, four. You’re just about leaving the aisle for the checkout lanes when, again, you turn around, thinking about how quickly that second twenty-four-ouncer will disappear. Back in the aisle there’s a couple college-aged kids selecting a twelver. You think about high school, all those years ago, how you never even studied for the SAT. You think about your father’s red and wrinkled neck, his, I’m a working man. You think about the reek of his beer breath when he’d kiss you goodnight and tuck you into your bed when you were a kid. You think about the sports cars on your bedsheets. You think you remember that one of them was blue, but probably not. They were probably all of them just as red as your father’s nose.