Humbling

Bicycles are of of the good things. They're vehicles you can ride long distances in heavy city traffic and then just pick up and carry into your house, apartment or room. They save money, provide free exercise, and can be as safe as any other mode of transport when ridden with care.
The Complete and Total Loser has used bikes on and off, mostly on, as his primary means of transportation in cities since the early 1980s. He doesn't credit bikes with keeping him slim, but they're part of why he is and tries to remain so. 
As good as bikes are, however, they are still too easily felled by flat tires and no matter how good your tire is or durable its Kevlar bead, the right angle and amount of force will still work its way to an inner tube and turn your elegant machine into twenty pounds of inert junk. 
The Loser researches tires every year or so, waiting to see if any progress has been made. When he sees anything that looks good, further reading leads to the real reasons it isn't. 
The Loser patches his own tires, of course. Easy to learn but no matter how careful you are things go wrong and you have to do it all over again.
The photo here is of the piece of metal that gave him his most recent flat. Tiny, isn't it?

The Loser's Shadow

Shadows are powerful metaphors but we think little of our own as we go around every day, casting them everywhere. Shadows are proof we exist. If anyone ever makes a convincing holographic projection of a human, I bet a hard problem will be making a good shadow. My shadow has touched thousands of people in my lifetime, most of them unknown to me and never encountered again. And their shadows have touch me. Often, our shadows mingle, overlapping. Intimate, but meaningless.

Thanksgiving Day, 2013

The Complete and Total Loser feels like this hawk does on such days: Harassed by crows.

All he wants to do is spend the day quietly alone, sipping coffee, reading magazines, eating the sugar-free lifesavers he loves. 
But no. 
He must go to his brother's and endure an awful meal with a dozen people he doesn't really like or care about about.

Where I was, 1963

On November 22, 1963, the Complete and Total Loser, age five-and-a-half, rode in a car driven by his mother in Philadelphia's western suburbs. She heard the news on the car's radio, pulled over and cried for a few minutes before resuming the drive home.

Fast Runner

She's running so fast because she forgot to wear her clothes!

Adrienne Herzog, 28, of Boulder, Colorado, runs in the 2013 Philadelphia Half Marathon. Her time of 1:12:59 had her placing 32nd among women. Herzog was accused of blood doping in a magazine article, but is in the National Testing Pool, and has been tested dozens of times, always with negative results. She hopes to compete in the 2016 Olympics full marathon.

Incorrect thoughts

The Complete and Total Loser doesn't say this to anyone in the real world, but when he sees notices of lesbian weddings a part of him thinks, what a waste.

His inappropriate crush

There are women and there are women. Most of them are the same. Then there are the two out of a hundred who enter your psyche and stick. You know you'll never have them and it hurts, almost physically. You also know that the guy who gets them will be some big, aggressive, insensitive dick who's too dumb to see their quality, and you know, further, that that's why the girl picks them. 
You can work at getting them but it's like grabbing something slippery; the tighter the grip, the faster it leaves you. Then someone who doesn't care whether he gets it or not just reaches out and takes it with a soft clasp.
The lead singer in this video makes The Complete and Total Loser remember his youth and those women. She's not the prettiest of the women singing, though she's up there. But she has a life force and a charisma that comes out at you, through the shitty lens used to record the video and from an auditorium at a tiny liberal arts college in central Ohio. See how all the others are wearing heels? Not her. Doesn't need them. She's fine with her body and how her legs look. And she smiles as she sings. I love that.

Welcome to Google Double Plus!

Google Double Plus is up and running thanks to our belief that all gmail users want to share everything about themselves and want it to be easy!

Don't worry about complicated signup procedures -- you're already a member a Google Double Plus. Google Double Plus offers numerous products all under one simple name. Among the ones we'll make known are:

• All your email from all accounts ever used while a gmail user, present, past, sent, received and deleted is now searchable by anyone by name, topic, date and keyword. Now, all anyone who knows your email address can enter it into google search with his or her name and have instant access to emails containing that name
• Your location can be found by anyone if you have a mobile device of any kind, regardless of carrier or plan.
• Any comment a Google user has ever made will be searchable by anyone.
• Any site accessed or topic searched for will be known to all, whether you were logged into your Google account or not.

Speaking of logged in, all users will be unable to log out of Google. This will make using Google easier for you! No more passwords or log-in names to remember.
For Google users wishing to opt out of Google Double Plus, doing so is easy. Access Account Settings, Account Management, Security, Security Settings, Advanced, Google Double Plus, Password Management, Password Settings, Password Verification, Change Password Settings, Password Settings Change Verification, Google Double Plus Privacy Settings, Privacy Settings Verification, Change Privacy Settings, Settings Change Verification, Accept Verification.
It's that easy!
Then wait two to six weeks for the new settings to take place. You will receive an email notifying you when the settings are set to occur, after which you will need to re-do the process above for your security. Any variation in order or entries will delete a change request and require that you start again after a ten-day waiting period. If you are successful in changing at any time, a second email notifying you of the settings change will be sent. You must respond to this within two hours, again for security reasons. If at any time in the sixty days after your successful change you mouse over the words Google, Google +, Google Double Plus, Google ++, or Gmail, your full benefits of Google Double Plus will be reinstated. 
Thank you from the team at Google for joining Google Double Plus!

Two years to the day

It's been two years exactly since the Complete and Total Loser sat next to his freshly dead mother at a nearby hospital. Last year he wrote on this site about how he turned on all the lights in the house, hers and his father's, also deceased, to mark the day. His mother and the Loser always bickered about her use of lights. Today, he took the day off to think of her and ran errands. One specific place he went was a local farmer's market he seldom visits as it's open just a few days a week and ones he works on.
He went because the market used to a regular supermarket and it was the only place to buy groceries anywhere near where they lived. There were no Trader Joes, Whole Foods, Walmarts, Acme's, Superfreshes ... you get the idea. 
The market back then was called the Penn Fruit. In the past, parents didn't live in constant fear of having their children snatched away and tortured to death by perverts if they didn't hover over them every second of the day, and as a little boy the loser would roam free in the market, small by today's standards, until his mother retrieved him and drove home.
Once, when he was five or so, he saw his mother perusing the produce and went up to her to signal that he was there. He tugged on her skirt and she turned and looked at him but ... it wasn't her!
Terrifying. The skirt and other clothes were close if not the same. Not that the Loser went berserk with fear or anything and the incident lasted for only a few seconds. But they're memorable seconds even now, and the event happened in 1962, maybe early 1963.

It was right around where these people are standing that the Loser had an inkling of what it would be like to lose his mother.

We are so fat

We are all so fat now that they actually have to have kits to give extra support to toilets. Just think. We break the things we sit on to get rid of the shit all that food produces. 

A simple observation about whistling

If you're in a quiet place, like a store or something, and you whistle, the Complete and Total Loser has noticed that someone

else will often start whistling too. When you look at that person you notice two things: One, it's a man. Two, he's anything but cool.

How to Lower your PSA

Prostate Specific Antigen is the stuff that liquifies your semen so you can inject women with your filthy, dirty DNA and make this hopelessly overcrowded world even more stretched for precious resources than it already is. It's what rape kits look for and is produced by your prostate gland. When you have prostate cancer the goo leaks into your bloodstream and a measurement of it indicates whether or not you have prostate cancer. Or not. 
A variety of things can make more of it show up. Having sex, a vigorous bike ride, being fucked in the ass. If you have your PSA level checked annually, like the Complete and Total Loser does because his father had it, the Loser is over 50 and he is a loser, one thing to look for beside the number is the velocity of it. How much did it rise over a given time period?

No one really knows how anything works.

The Loser had it checked in May of 2012 and it was 3. He had it checked in June of this year and it was 4.5. Uh-oh, said his doctor. Zero is great; 4.5 is shitty if you're under 60, which the Loser is, and means a biopsy is warranted. For those, they shove stuff up your ass and take tiny cores. After them, there's blood in your piss and ejaculate.
"If you go to a urologist," the Loser's doctor said, "he'll tell you what I'm going to tell you which is to get it checked in three months and see where we are."
OK, said the Loser. In between he read a big book about it that gave him enough info to bore others with, which he has mercifully confined to this site (he's told no friends or family). 
When you get a book on medical stuff what you look for is the most current one written by someone who works at a hospital you've heard of. The Loser found The Whole Life Prostate Book, which came out last year.
The book went on and on about diet, which many medical books do. Dull, nagging reading, but it reminded the Loser of what he's long known but wasn't acting on: The American diet is a bad one. The most telling fact about this is that when people emigrate from countries with different diets and low cancer rates to America, their rates of cancer match ours within a generation or two. 
The Loser's ready to die, but he doesn't want death to come from his own cells going apeshit and eating him from inside. No. He wants to die by diverting a terrorist attack of some kind. To avoid death, the Loser took some steps. Three months later he went back to his doctor and had blood drawn. Two days later, his doctor called.

Bend over and spread 'em, Loser.

"I have wonderful news!" he ejaculated. "Your PSA level came back at 2.9. The thing to do now is nothing until your next annual physical when we'll do another test." 
Here's what the Loser did to lower his PSA level;

• He bought those bags of lettuce you see at supermarkets and ate salads every night. Leaves, a few cubes of tofu, a handful of walnuts, oil and vinegar salad dressing = dinner. He always ate a decent breakfast and lunch. He now eats almost no meat. Fish about once a week. Never beef, never lamb, seldom chicken. Pork? Are you kidding?
• He cut a lemon in half every morning and squeezed half into his smoothie and half into his nightly beer. Lemon juice is supposed to be good for you blood. It changes its PH level. Not that doing that has anything to do with cancer. 
• Speaking of that nightly beer, the Loser bought a case of 7-ounce bottles and limits himself to one a night, two on days off. With less booze and the salads, he lost 15 pounds over the first two months and gets on the scale every day now to keep an eye on is weight.
• Before his last test, he stayed off his bicycle and didn't jerk off for three days. That last part, the jerking off, is very easy to do for him, by the way.

The Loser has no idea if this reversed anything or made him less likely to get cancer, but until June of 2014 he doesn't have to worry about it and that's enough for him.

Why learn the English you should!

Learning the English is very difficult to me! And I must learn the English, yeah! Only if I learn the English can I trick the American to open my secret attachment most cleaver and take the American dollars. So many dollars in America! Where are my American dollars? I am waiting for these dollars but I do not see these dollars! 

The elderly

If you work in a store and you see an old person coming you know you're usually in for something unpleasant. 
Here's why:

• They are often often unattractive and depressing to be around
• They're in physical discomfort so they're in bad moods
• They probably haven't made money for awhile so they're tight with what they have
• They can't control the aging process that's making them more and more shriveled and achy by the day so they exercise what control they can over you, a clerk
• If they are friendly they're talk to you forever about things that don't interest you and their need to talk to strangers will make you sad

Then there's the couple in the picture below. They didn't demand anything of anyone in the store and were pleasant to all they encountered. They came in, looked around, perused a few books, then left. They walked slowly, both on their way from frail to feeble. As they left, the Complete and Total Loser heard the woman say to the man, "You'd better hurry up if we're going to catch the bus." 
Catch the bus. Loved that.

Gravity

The Complete and Total Loser saw the movie Gravity today. Good. Kind to his middle-aged bladder as it was short, not one of those two-and-a-half-hour comic book movies. 
About the only technical error that interfered with the plot is when George Clooney was hanging on to Sandra Bullock by a lifeline and said he had to let go. It was treated as if there were a continuing force being exerted on him, pulling him away. 
That wouldn't happen in space. In space even a small woman could pull a man all over with just a tug. 
Most of the dialogue is over radio. George Clooney's voice is just the voice you'd want to hear if you were in space with a suit running out of oxygen and you needed someone to tell you what to do.

Bullock was fine, but it would've been better if they had found someone new who no one's ever seen before. It's hard to explain why, but it would've been. 
(There are scenes, by the way, in which Bullock is wearing just a shirt and shorts. She looks great. Why don't more 49-year-old women eat right and exercise? Sure, not everyone has as much time to do so as she does, but when the Loser looks around at most women that age he thinks, holy shit, do they do nothing but eat?)
The Loser saw the movie in an Imax theater in 3D. He's not supposed to like that, a man his age. He's supposed to sniff at it and call it a gimmick. But he doesn't. He likes it. There's this part where Bullock's crying and a tear floats away from her toward the camera, toward the viewer. The camera focuses on the tear. It was moving.