40 Days of Lent: Day Thirty Seven

My final day in San Francisco saw me returning to Kayo Books, a used bookstore that specialized in pulp novel paperbacks and The Magazine, a store that sold old magazines. Mostly porn but there were some other journals, too. I then checked out of the hotel and headed to the Embarcadero area to have lunch by the bay.

I was feeling rather melancholy. Rather than sensing it was time to go back, I was wishing for one more day to revisit some sights, in Berkeley mainly. As I sat there and watched two sailboats in the water moving so slowly they might as well have been still, Olivia Newton John's "Have You Ever Been Mellow?" began playing. Something about the music and how it fit the calmness of the bay was actually causing tears to well up. However, I was damned if I was going to sit there and be sad to some schlocky Olivia Newton John song so I instead focused my attention on my shrimp cocktail, which contained so much cocktail sauce (the restaurant's doing, not mine) that it reminded me of how I prefer my macaroni and cheese bathed in ketchup.

Then it hit me: macaroni and cheese covered in ketchup is the poor man's shrimp cocktail. It was time to go home.