The Complete and Total Loser, being a loser, fell hard on his gimp leg today while walking on hard-packed snow and is in extreme pain as he writes this.
The Loser has fallen before. Always the same way: left foot goes shooting out from under him, body goes down on bum right leg, which bends and twists ways it shouldn't. Much soft tissue damage followed by swearing, then swelling. For some days the Loser will walk like an amputee with a new prosthesis.
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| Snow-covered grill. |
Ah, pain. The Loser has met women who enjoy being spanked. Not by him, of course; he is a loser with women as he is in all aspects of life. The desired puzzled him at first. Then once, while alone (this was years ago), he spanked his own buttock cheek. It felt refreshing. Invigorating. It's not something he pursued in any way, but if he ever did become half of a couple and she wanted to be spanked, he'd understand.
The kind of pain he feels at the moment is not that kind. It's a sharp ache, not a bright slap. The Loser has had worse pain. At 12, he had an operation which surgically broke large leg bones ten times to slow the growth of his "good" leg. This was in the late 1960s and doctors feared getting kids hooked on painkillers, so they were stingy with relief. The Loser howled in pain off and on for two weeks, while blood seeped through his thick body cast.
Odd, how you can think when in some kinds of pain but not others. If the pain the Loser feels now were in his head, he'd be writing this. If it were in his stomach, he'd be curled into a ball, whimpering.
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| Meat. |
Every few months the Complete and Total Loser thinks his ever waning energy level might get a boost from a meal of mammalian meat.
Last night, he ate one of those meals. The meat was ground beef. The Loser's plan was to put it in spaghetti sauce but, tired after a day of work in which he did nothing, he opted for a simple hamburger.
Two slices of bread, an onion, oil on the little frying pan he'd had to wash dust of before using. The gas burner poofed on and the Loser washed his hands and began making a patty. He put the meat in the pan and it began to sizzle. It had been months since he'd done this and as it cooked, filling his tiny, cluttered, stale apartment with oily sounds and odors, he saw what he was doing in a different light.
A large animal, huge, had been propelled through alleys and ramps after standing in a lot eating for some months. Humans forced it into a large room where it was stunned, killed and slit opened. Its muscles where hacked off its skeleton and ground and mixed with other dead cows from other similar places.
Now the Loser stood in his apartment, applying heat to the ground, dead muscle, adding salt to it when cooked to make it taste the way he'd been raised to like such food.
A Philadelphia suburb, fall, 1975. The Complete and Total Loser and his classmates are on a college campus across the street from his high school. There's a small pond there, home to some fish, other unknown water dwellers and a jumble of ducks of varying sizes and colors. On one side of the pond is mowed grass. On another an acre or so of ungroomed woods.
The Loser and two other ninth graders, all boys (the school is single sex), are working on a biology class project assigned by a progressive teacher who has severe diabetes and has the distinction of being one of the longest surviving people to receive dialysis. He will die by the end of the academic year and is seldom well enough to teach his class now. This gives the Loser and others permission to go off campus, where they smoke pot and cigarettes and swear at full volume. Boys with bumpy skin wearing sport coats and neckties, sitting on rotting logs smoking Marlboros.
These many years later, though, it's the assigned work the Loser remembers. Each group picked a square meter of ground and examined it in detail. They dug a foot deep, took plant samples, and swept a net repeatedly back and forth over the site, grazing the grass and other fauna, to collect whatever insects lived on it.
The Loser doesn't remember the exact number, but it was in the double digits. Dozens of species, living together even as they competed on land that was not remarkably fertile.
Human beings are the only species on earth that could voluntarily, peacefully, bring about their own end. Imagine what a beautiful planet this would be in just a few centuries if we did. The seas, teeming with life. The land rich under clear skies.
Usually when the Complete and Total Loser reads descriptions of bad people that he thinks apply to him too, the people he's reading about—homicidal maniacs, serial killers, hoarders—are, despite the similarities, clearly not him. Does he live by himself and have no intimate relationships? Yes. Is he underemployed? Check. Does he think he's smarter than those who supervise him? Yup. Does he feel he's been cheated out of many of the good things in life by circumstances beyond his control? You bet! Is his refrigerator used to store the body parts of his victims? No.
Phew!
In the Up Front section of the Nov. 15, 2009 New York Times Book Review, however, the Loser read a description that fits him. He is, it seems, an academic. This surprised the Loser. His image of academics is of men and women with no fashion sense, which is fine as they wear dark robes over their clothes, and spend their lives surrounded with laboratory equipment or books, seldom cognizant of the outside world even when they leave it for their sabbaticals, not rich but successful thanks to raw brainpower and the ability to apply it.
It's not, however, the trappings of academia that make an academic. It's the attitude. And the Loser has the worst of it. Here's the pertinent part, quoting Steven Pinker: "Academics lack perspective. In a debate on whether the world is round, they would argue 'no,' because it's an oblate spheroid. They suffer from 'the curse of knowledge': the inability to imagine what it's like not to know something that they know. That makes them underestimate the sophistication of readers and write in motherese rather than explaining concepts from the ground up."
This explains much of the Loser's social interactions and responses he gets from others. It explains, to him anyway, why he's so often regarded as "patronizing" and "condescending," adjectives he's too dense to get how they could possibly apply to him, though he's heard them again and again.
Is there a remedy?
