It IS a possum.

Sometimes I look in the mirror and think: Yikes!

And those are the good days.

I've been around for forty years, forty years of jogging outside, forty years of living in Wisconsin with its icy winters (and icy spring and falls, and too-short summers, too) and for a long chunk of those forty years, I also smoked. All in all, my skin looks as though I've been using it for a driveway for a long time. And not one of those driveways that rich people have, where the only cars that ever drive on them are luxury sports cars with tires made of soft, pliable leather. No, my face/driveway is a lot more like one of those driveways you see in front of bad houses in Alabama, where there are tire ruts and there's the remnants of gravel and ... is that a possum?

That's my face.

So I am thinking about that and then I come across this add forObagi Clear, a prescription treatment for skin that improves and evens skin tone -- lightening age spots and liver spots and skin unevenness...

... which, now that I think about it, I have! My skin is totally uneven.

...and all I'd have to do is apply it in the morning and at night, as part of the "Obagi Nu-Derm System," and it'll correct photodamage -- the damage from the sun that causes fine lines and wrinkles and age spots.

Or, as I like to call it, "Driveway Face."

It can even help avoid getting Driveway Face in the first place, which would have been very helpful to know... thirty years ago.

It's physician-dispensed, so I (or you) would have to ask for it, but it's supposed to restore skin cells, especially in people 35 and older (hey, that's me!) And I get a free gift if I spend more than $60 -- so that's something, at least, to help cheer me up. I suppose I could look on the bright side: my skin won't be all wrinkly and haggard, and I'll get a gift, and, it seems, then, that there's a chance that someday soon, I'll look in the mirror and not think Yikes.

At least until I look down at my stomach.