The Loser on Sports

An athletic woman on top of the "Rocky steps," Philadelphia.

Never, not even once, live or on television, has the Complete and Total Loser watched a football game.
As a child he realized he'd never play the game or many others, even for fun. Even now he doesn't understand why his fellow cripples and the old, the blind, and women watch the game. He's seen bits and pieces of football games over the years as he watches the local news and channel surfs. He sees a series of meetings punctuated by television commercials and brief action sequences in which a man catches or carries a ball a laughably short distance.
The Loser likes non-team sports. He watched things like tennis and Olympic sports until the announcers decided there can never be a five second period without their voices telling the viewer what he's seeing. He is not against exercise. He bikes, swims and lifts weights.
Once, in his early 20s, he decided to sit through a football game and learn a little about it. It would help him bond and socialize with other men, the powers that be. The week before he was to watch a game, he read in a newspaper that during televised games there's an official on the sidelines whose sole purpose is to call timeouts so more commercials could be shown. Disgusted by this kowtowing to corporate greed, he didn't watch the game that weekend and has kept the streak going ever since.

Kids These Days

In February, the Complete and Total Loser will live in the suburbs, tending his elderly parents' house while they bake like turtles in the Florida sun. Therefore now, at noon on a Friday (he works a later shift Fridays) he's bicycling to a train station to buy a monthly pass. The savings and convenience will be considerable.

He's waiting at a light to cross a busy intersection that has several cars waiting to head east, but none waiting to head south. There are teenagers in Catholic school uniforms milling around a food cart on the corner, talking, waiting to get a plate a greasy food, a bag of potato chips, a soda. The Loser sees that there are several pigeons in the middle of the intersection. They will be in jeopardy if the light changes. They are feasting on a mostly intact, large soft pretzel someone has dropped or tossed into the middle of the intersection.

The light changes. A minivan, the first in line, floors it into the half dozen pigeons, who are distracted by their competition for the bounty. The van's driver knows exactly what's happening.

One pigeon doesn't make it. It sits on the road, it's lower half crushed, wings splayed, blood seeping out from beneath it. Its head is erect, alert, as its avian brain tries to comprehend why it is not flying through the air, free and safe.

This amuses the teenagers, who laugh and shout at the injured animal.

The Loser waits for two other cars to pass, then dismounts his bike and limps over to the remaining pretzel, which he picks up and throws away from the street, onto a strip of cold grass. The children laugh at this, too. He knows there's nothing to be done for the bird. Best to leave it to another car to crush it and end its agony.

Years of being mocked and derided have taught the Loser to ignore the jeering of the kids and say nothing. Teenagers will learn nothing from a deformed middle-aged man in the street, his face red and pinched by the freezing wind.

The Loser does eat meat, though very seldom beef, which he hates himself for eating when he does. He knows pigeons are not well liked in cities. Yet he has just seen the act of cowards and bullies, and it stirs a tenderness in him toward the victim and feelings that will intrude on his sleep this night. He wishes it weren't so. He wishes his heart were as hard as the one he presents to the world (he hasn't cried since the age of 12). He wishes people were kinder. He wishes cars and cities and crowds didn't grant people anonymity. He wishes he had chosen a different route to run this errand.

Sex and the Single Loser

Last night, near midnight. The Complete and Total Loser is in his bed, reading Henry James's "The Portrait of a Lady." He's surprised that he's able to read this book. A dull student with a short attention span, reading until just the past few years made him sleepy. Even now, as he reads this book, his eyes have to rewind back over sentences and paragraphs to understand what he's been reading.
He hears a sound. High, rhythmic. It's coming from under the iron steam heat radiator under one of the two windows in the main room of his tiny apartment. The sound is of a woman having sex.
The Loser is surprised for a moment. Not that he can hear this sound, which drifts up from the apartment below like a light smell; the building he lives in is a rowhouse converted cheaply years ago into six small apartments. He's surprised because he forgets that among a huge swath of humankind there are people who regularly, enthusiastically, have sex with each other.
He has had sex. With four women. The first time was in college, during his junior year, September, 1979. The girl was also the first one he kissed. She had pale, soft skin. She was 19, he 21. The relationship did not last past Halloween. The next was in 1981, in Minneapolis. The woman was 22, had a daughter age five who lived with her parents several miles away. The woman wore tube tops, smoked, drank, accepted money for sex from some people and had never finished high school. It was a tawdry affair which lasted from late August until sometime early October. Two years later she called the Loser from Fort Dix, New Jersey and told him she had joined the Army and was in basic training. He was overjoyed for her.
Then there was a gap. Of fifteen years.
In 1997 a woman who'd been a platonic friend since the mid 1980s contacted the Loser from her small house in Cardiff, Wales. There were phone calls, a visit was arranged, she flew to America for a week's stay. He was freelancing and work was light. They drank gin, watched television, talked for hours, went to Washington, had sex. She was a lovely woman, bright, kind, funny and had a musical laugh. But the Loser felt no spark and after months of expensive phone calls after her return what was left of their relationship died. In 2002 they resumed talking by phone and, a new thing for the woman, emailing. Another visit was on the verge of being arranged. Then the woman died. A systemic infection of some kind. He never got a clear reason. He flew to Wales for her funeral. He spent a week there—the way to get an inexpensive flight—walking the streets of Cardiff, going to museums. At night he slept in the tiny bed of one of her friend's.
She remains his most recent liaison.
He's had a few close calls since then. No, one. A woman at work a year ago. He thought the world of her but the passion needed to sustain anything beyond two months eluded him. In bed his lack of ability to sustain an erection came as a new disappointment to him. Age and anxiety. The woman was a recovering alcoholic and he didn't drink when he was with her despite her permission. Some wine, he thought, would help him forget his issues with his body (the deformity) and succeed. Before long she told him he didn't know what he wanted and that she'd been no more than an experiment to him. She cried. A lot. As if her head was full of water. They made a clean break over the course of a week and she found someone new. The new guy takes her places (Paris, Las Vegas) and out to dinner often, something the Loser hated and couldn't afford.
At 15, the Loser would hitchhike home from school often. Once a man in a big car gave him a lift and, as they were driving through a town the region's main suburban drag that hosted a women's college on a warm spring day, the man said, "What is it about a woman's jugs? I'm 64 years old and I'm still looking."
The Loser, now 50, gets that now. The feelings he once had—the orgasms that sent semen whizzing past his head—faded in his 40s and the moment now is an echo. And yet still he looks, and wonders, and hopes.

How to Lose Weight

He's getting fat, the Complete and Total Loser. He was fat before, and lost it. This was eight years ago. Now his weight has crept back up and he's had to loosen his belt a notch. His clothes don't fit. When he walks down the hall at work he feels parts of himself rubbing together. His aging knees hurt. Three flights of steps leave him panting.

An overweight man struggles to fit in a train seat.

So much is known about weight control, how to lose weight, the right foods to eat. He wonders in his stupid loser head how he let twenty pounds of fat adhere to his never svelte frame.
He'll lose this weight. His motivation is high; he has so many strikes against him he can't control (bald, short, poor, crippled, bad personality) that this one thing he can control, he will.
When dieting he remembers the best advice about food he's heard in his life. It was in China, when he lived there for a year in the mid-1980s, and came from a Chinese man who was in his mid 50s yet had a physique he envied as a 25-year old. It is this: "Better always to be a little bit hungry."
A dozen years later he bought an early Arnold Schwarzenegger movie most laughed at derisively, yet it has one scene in which the future governor talks about eschewing comfort and luxury and how wanting to accomplish more makes you live life more fully. The movie is "Stay Hungry."

Updike is Dead

A pack of Marlboro cigarettes.

The Complete and Total Loser read John Cheever which gave him no room for John Updike so the Complete and Total Loser didn't read him. And now he's dead of lung cancer.
Smoking will do that to you. Hard to believe a guy that smart would smoke himself to death.
The Loser learned to smoke at 13 from a summer friend named Richard.
“Take a small drag,” Richard said. "When you get used to that, take bigger ones.” One night, girls present, the Loser took bigger drags than he was ready for, blowing out impressive clouds. Later, as he and Richard headed for the small sailboat Richard's family owned to sleep, he vomited.
Many stop forever at that point. By summer's end, the Loser was addicted. He found he could buy cigarettes from most stores and that vending machines were unsupervised. Only once in his teens was the Loser refused a pack of cigarettes. You had to be 16. He'd get 50 cents daily to take the bus home from school and then hitchhike, saving the money for cigarettes.

John Updike, smoking.

 The Loser's mother smoked. There’s nothing a teenage smoker likes more than a smoking parent. It covers the smell and provides a source of free cigarettes. If you knew how to roll a joint, you could get butts from a parent's ashtrays and use the leftover tobacco to roll your own. She smoked L&M’s, an awful brand. The package used to have graphics like Marlboro’s, but not as bold. In the 70s they went for a hip look—a photo of a couple, smoking of course, surrounded by trees in full autumn color.
Marlboro was the preferred brand. They came in crushproof boxes, which meant you could put the pack in your blue jeans pocket and still have unbroken cigarettes after a day of bicycling and running around.
The Loser's older brother took up smoking at boarding school. “You’re not a real smoker,” he said, “unless having a cigarette’s the first thing you do in the morning and the last thing you do at night.” Smoking in bed was hugely pleasurable. There are times even now, decades after quitting, that the Loser wakes up from a dream in which he was smoking and searches the sheets for a burning ember.
He quit in high school, an all-boys school where he was unpopular. Not going to parties meant few opportunities to impress girls. Even though his tobacco use was withering on its own, it still required a conscious effort to quit.
He went to college in rural Ohio, miles from any city. The isolation was good. The only TVs were in lounges, there were no VCRs, the campus had one computer in the physics department.
The winter of 1977-78, his freshman year, broke records with its snowfall and cold. Even though the campus was small and neatly contained, lying along a level spine-like path less than a mile long, classes were canceled during the worst of the storms that season. From women's dorm rooms came popcorn, cookie dough, hot chocolate, decks of cards and board games.
One reason people start smoking is for a feeling of social togetherness. That winter, as the Loser played backgammon and hearts, he began to borrow cigarettes from friends, first as a joke, with mocking cool. He was soon hooked again and bought packs for those he’d borrowed from. Eventually he skipped that step and bought his own. Winstons.
The late 70s were a smoker’s paradise. You could smoke almost anywhere; dining halls, hospital waiting rooms, libraries, airplanes. Cigarettes cost about 75 cents a pack. In big cities, young people on street corners promoted new brands by giving packs to passersby. You could smoke anywhere. Only once in four years of college did anyone ask the Loser not to smoke while they ate. There were fold-to-assemble ashtrays made of coated paper, a dull aluminum, at library desks and study carrels throughout the campus. Even parties at the jock frats were thick with smoke.
The Loser majored in art. Much of art involves waiting. For gesso to dry, for film to develop, for plates to etch, for ideas to form. A cigarette, held and smoked the right way, was an indispensable part of being an art major.
The Loser didn't quit till he was out of college for three years. At age 25 he knew that, being a loser, he would never be able to quit at age 40 and that he would be the type to get lung cancer or heart disease by 50 if he didn't. It took several attempts but the final one took and now he lives smoke free. When he thinks of how he could simply walk into a store and buy a pack at any time, the idea surprises him a little. He sees smokers standing outside in the cold, the heat, the rain and pities them.

Sundays, Bloody Sundays

The 5:50 out of the city is always on time Sunday evenings. On it with the Complete and Total Loser are tourists with tired feet who have ventured into town to see a concert, a lecture, an art exhibit; college students connecting from Amtrak or the airport, heading back to the half dozen private colleges in walking distance of a train station after a weekend home.

Philadelphia's 30th Street Station at night.

The Loser is on his way to have dinner with his elderly parents, a weekly event. One of three offspring, he's the one who never married and has no family of his own. Over the past decade his parents have gotten increasingly frail. He knows the meal will be something previously prepared. A rotisserie chicken with stuffing from a box, vegetables steamed for many minutes. His mother, once robust and an enthusiastic cook, had a nerve cut during an operation nine years ago and swallowing and eating is a challenge now. She has lost dozens of pounds, her balance is bad, she aspirates food often and contracts pneumonia. She loved to sing. Now, her voice is an ugly rasp.
It's not the quality of the food that bothers the Loser. It's the fact neither parent can glide about the kitchen easily as they once did. Immediately on entering the house through the kitchen door he goes to the refrigerator and gets a beer, which he downs fast. It helps mask his parents' great age and their approaching feebleness and deaths. Halfway through his second beer his mind is level with theirs. It is the only time during the week that he drinks.
Dinner is in the dining room and there are cloth napkins, candles, silverware. The Loser asks about his siblings and their children. They discuss the topics of the day. His mother, always highly defensive and easily slighted, has dropped any pretense of manners and anything his father says in opposition to her is met with cruel scorn and mimicking far out of proportion to the imagined offense.
At the end of the evening, the Loser's father drives him the short distance to the train station. Here they talk. The father tells stories from long ago. His parents, what they and he did during the Depression, the war, early jobs, his ad agency work in the 1950s, his parents. The Loser prods him as he has countless times before to write this down, at least the bare bones, who was born when and where, what they did and when they died. His father brushes this off, saying all the information is in the large collection of papers in the attic and that if he were to write it down it would take forever.
Both know the real reason which is that if he did he fears he would die on dotting the last sentence with a period.
A glow down the tracks means the train is coming. The Loser tells his father to have a good week, leaves the car and boards the 8:45. The train back is a negative image of the previous one. The majority of those on it are older, poor, uneducated, black. They are the ones who work in the kitchens and clean the halls of the colleges or the area's nursing homes and supermarkets. They are headed to the city where they live in badly kept rowhouses in decaying neighborhoods. They don't take out laptops or books but generic MP3 players and cell phones. Some fall asleep as the train sways on the tracks. Others stare into space.
The trains pulls into the station. The Loser disembarks, goes to the bike rack and is back in his rowhouse apartment in minutes. He has no work the next day so he has a cup of coffee. He turns on the TV, reads the paper, checks his email. Before he knows it it's late, after one. He showers and gets into bed where he reads for a bit then falls asleep.

The Loser and Craigslist

Losers often underline their loser qualities. They honking at women while driving. They sabotage the work of others. They start rumors. They take advantage of the inebriated.
While the Complete and Total Loser may revel in his loserdom, he has always refrained from these things. They are the actions of losers who think they're winners. It's bad enough to be a loser. Why magnify it?
Then there is craigslist.org, the cyberdock for fleets of losers lost at sea, in search of a harbor full of listeners to their loser rants and raves. In the Loser's home town, a large northern city, craigslist's rants and raves board teems with racists. To them, life would be a series of enjoyable events, with free money and lasting love around every corner, good health and fulfilling careers for all behind every door, if only ... black people went away. They sound trumpets to warn of the dangers of the dark skinned, publish links and paste essays on the inferiority of the African peoples, smear illustrations and poorly structured sentences not seen post 1950 outside the bathroom walls of a Mississippi boys room on their blank computer screens. Blacks are dirty. They spit on sidewalks. They litter. They kill. They—gasp!—undertip.
While they decry the problems of the race, not one has mentioned solutions actually possible in a democracy. As in most cities, this one has an active Big Brothers association, where men with free time can take a boy to a sporting event, an art museum, the zoo. He can tell the boy what he does and how he did it, encourage a love of learning, and be on the lookout for signs the boy is headed down an dangerous path and intervene if necessary. But that, to the craigslist racist, would be work.
The Complete and Total Loser, i.e., me, refuses to post negative things on craigslist save for his posts opposing exhortations of violence and meanness.
He gets each year the Zen Calendar, a collection of 365 quotes fitting the Zen view. He posted them on craigslist daily. A year or so after starting that, the Loser had a minor operation (hernia) which required general anesthesia. The morning following the operation, small poems on minor and major topics (pets, current events, death) flew through his head. He jotted them down and, perhaps still addled by the drugs, decided to share them them with the craigslist crowd. It became a challenge to him, like doing crossword puzzles to others, to publish one a day. He did so for about two years. Always after lasting fame and glory, he decided to publish them not only in his town but on the boards in New York and Los Angeles.
The reactions puzzled the Loser. He received over the years several complimentary emails. Yet on the board reactions were vituperative and vulgar, often encouraging him to commit suicide. They reacted as though they'd been mocked and duped, yet the Loser never failed to label his posts. Improved screening to prohibit posting in multiple cities put the kibosh on his efforts and he now only posts the Final Jeopardy! answer/question each weeknight in his home town and New York City.
A sample poem (you were wondering how bad they were), from May of 2008:

Squirrels

Squirrels are the rodents smartest,
They’re clever little creatures.
If they could talk they might be artists,
Painting, directing features.
Many say they’re big-tailed rats,
Both the girls and the fellas.
’Tis a notion spread by cats,
All of them insanely jealous.

The Loser's Tom Swifties

He is a tremendous dork, the Complete and Total Loser. A lover of dumb jokes, puns and wordplay. A coworker brought up Tom Swifties, sentences in which the adjective describing how the speaker says something refers to what is being said, and the Loser's bald, large head catches on fire. He makes up one every few minutes. They're awful, funny to him, but get only polite laughter from his coworkers, who are bored and would listen to anything.

• "I can't click my fingers!" he snapped.
• "There's moisture on the windows because it's cold outside," he said condescendingly.
• "I have a new light bulb!" she said brightly.
• "I'm worried about the situation in the Middle East," he said seriously.
• "And I also don't like arithmetic," he added.
• "Your frog's dead," he croaked.
• "Sure, I'll try some venison," she said gamely.
• "I'm the best phlebotomist there is," he said vainly.
• "The hairdresser did a good job," he said dutifully.
• "Have you traveled in France?" he asked nicely.
• "You're a son of a bitch," she sobbed.
• "I got caught shoplifting in Saudi Arabia," he said offhandedly.
• "Frog legs taste like chicken," he croaked.
• "Your pencil's dull," she said pointedly.
• "But global warming is real!" he said heatedly.
• "I love evergreens," she opined.
• "It's time I put my gear away," he said stoically.
• "I ... used to be ... in ... a circus," he said stiltedly.
• "I may cut off your electricity," he said darkly.
• "Don't forget the rock salt," she said icily.
• "I don't think that shellfish meal is sitting well," he said clammily.
• "Go easy on potato chips," she said wisely.
• "I can't afford more duct tape," she said tearfully.
• "If I pay cash, how about a discount on these beads?" she said craftily.
• "Get that dog out of here!" he barked.
• "Piglets!" she squealed.
• "Feathers!" he chirped.
• "We're out of preserves!" he said jarringly.
• "I didn't get into Colgate," he said, crestfallen.
• "That's a nice toupee," he said peacefully.
• "Tom and Dick are the only ones here!" he said harriedly.
• "It's a porn movie!" he ejaculated.
• "I've got to get to Ketchum!" he said earnestly.

Alcohol

A drunk girl sits on a dirty train station platform.

Twelve years old. Summer. New England. Vacation. The Complete and Total Loser learns to ride a horse, which soon sizes him up and goes very much where he wants to go. The Loser doesn't mind much as where the horse wants to go is often more interesting to him as well as to the horse. A man named Frank often stops by the stable where that horse and another are housed. A telephone lineman, he shoes horses in his free time. He wears denim and a cowboy hat and is having a love affair of sorts with the girl who owns the horses. His wife was in a terrible car accident years before and is in a coma. Loyal to her, he does not let the affair come to full fruition until her death some years later.
Frank smokes unfiltered cigarettes and talks as if he was from Montana, which he may have been. The Loser is too dim to ask. Frank does not, however, drink alcohol. He sums up his reasons simply in sentences the Loser remembers nearly four decades later.
"If a man's got to drink to live with his environment, there must be something wrong with his environment. He's got to change it."
As he goes into his teens the Loser drinks nonetheless, but less often and less vigorously than his peers. He likes to think it's the wisdom of the man who spoke to him on a summer day long ago and that is part of it. Another part is what drinking does to him: It magnifies his loserdom. His jokes are unfunny and coarse, his approaches to women clumsy and lead only to humiliation.
Losers should keep their drinking to a minimum. It will not make them succeed, nor will it help them cope with failure. It will only make them fail more often.
Winners can drink but, when older, should limit their drinking to proper venues. The woman in the accompanying photograph is drunk in broad daylight and sitting on a train platform at a busy station. The platform is often marked with globs of mucous and bits of food. Pigeons walk on it freely. No sober person would sit there. Yet the girl is young enough, pretty enough and enough of a winner to make this rare discretion bearable to witnesses. She boarded the train with a man several years older than she and debarked by chance at the same station as did the Loser. They entered a nice bar, in a hurry because the girl had to urinate immediately, and presumably enjoyed their evening together.

The Loser's Sartorial Splendor

The Complete and Total Loser is physically deformed. Not that all losers are deformed or that all deformed people are losers. There are many one-armed people with good careers and loving spouses. (The Loser has both arms. His deformity is not interesting or touching. It's the kind that causes ill-mannered school children to laugh and shout to alert their friends.) But deformities can nudge personalities. The confident deformed man will swagger a little less; the shy one may withdraw from social settings completely. Spurned and ridiculed, he will try to connect with others in his youth only to surrender and make attempts fitfully into middle age. When they fail, he retreats into a world of his making that makes sense to only him.

When you look different, you dress in ways to hide your deformity and draw as little attention to yourself as possible. For the Loser this means black pants, always, after learning during his travels in developing countries that they make his deformity, which is below the waist, slightly less striking from a distance. For shirts he wears long-sleeved button downs, solid colors usually.
Undergarments are a T-shirt and briefs. Although when in college his older brother told him that the two necessities for getting laid were Brooks Brothers boxers and a car, he's more comfortable in briefs and has no hope of anyone save emergency room workers seeing him depanted.
No jewelry. Sweaters are out; he fears they make him look weak and effeminate.

Ten things the Loser has learned from Flickr

The Complete and Total Loser is a voyeur, peering into the lives of the successful and happy. In the past he stared at the photos coming down the little slide on the photo machines in pharmacies while pretending to peruse the batteries. Now he needn't leave his apartment. He can go to flickr.com and click the reload section on the home page and bring up photos from all over the world. He can click on those and enter the photostream of a complete stranger. It is as if he has broken into an apartment building for the United Nations and is entering the apartments where all he does is thumb through their photo albums. He has learned the following:

It's not supposed to be, but this photo is sexy as hell.

1. South Americans are sexy. Europeans are stylish. Americans are fun-loving but often overweight. Asians are cute.
2. You can never take too many photographs of: Parties, weddings, your baby.
3. Provocative: Girls taking pictures of each other in come hither poses. Creepy: Men taking pictures of women from behind in public spaces.
4. Cats are calm and often half asleep. Dogs are eager to please and as active as the people they're with. The result: Cats are easier to photograph than dogs so there are many more cat pictures.
5. When young people, especially men, are photographed they make fake gang signs in the belief this makes them witty yet mildly threatening.
6. There are hundreds of photographs of wool. Or is it yarn? Is there a difference? Is yarn just wool that's been turned into string?
7. Professional photographers take the least interesting photographs.
8. Photos of the elderly are usually sad.
9. Never show your friends photographs you took of: Sunsets, flowers, interesting cloud formations, most landscapes, interiors of the room you stayed in while on vacation. In fact, limit most vacation photos. Getting drunk on a beach was fun then. The memory of it is pathetic.
10. Very few people look good while singing or playing musical instruments. Never photograph someone while they're eating.

Final Thoughts

The New York Times published an article January 18 about the survivors of the US Airways Flight 1549 water landing January 15 in which all survived but for the birds whose bodies clogged the engines. (Why can't they make a shield to prevent that?) The article was about what goes through the minds of survivors of similar accidents as they head toward an uncertain fate.

"All I could think about," said a 50-year old nurse who'd recently been in a plane that lost an engine, "was my garage. How I hadn't cleaned it, and how messy it would be when someone came in and saw it. It's crazy what you think about."

That would be the Complete and Total Loser. I hope that if I don't die in my sleep I at least have a nice thought as I do. Chances are, with my being a Complete and Total Loser, that won't be the case.
Did I flush the toilet? Why isn't my dirty underwear in my laundry bag instead of near it on the floor? Why didn't I make a simple will to prevent what little money I have going to the state? Who will clean out my stuff? What will they make of my reading choices? And the pornography? There's not much of it, but what's there they might find ... 

questionable. Why didn't I go out more? Take more chances in life? At least I wouldn't be about to die in coach. What will happen to my Netflix account and all the other automatic withdrawal things I have? Why didn't I vacuum my apartment? It only takes five minutes. Will the shirts I left at the laundry be dontated to charity someday? I wonder if I have time to write a note before the plane hits. If I do write one, where should I put it? Under my sock? In a pocket? Tuck it down my underwear? That'd be weird. Would people think I'm some kind of pervert if I do that? Who'd want to touch it? Maybe I should put it—
Crash.

The Loser's Guide to Cooking Beans

We losers are poor and being poor means eating beans. Losers are also socially inept and being socially inept means that what's wanted from beans is protein, not gas. There are two ways to cook beans, one which reduces the amount of gas, the other that does not. Dried beans are available in bulk at most wholesome places and even at their priciest they're still a bargain. When losers buy lots of beans and cart them home in their sad little bags they feel good knowing they have a huge amount of food stored. In back of their little, loser heads they think how if there were some kind of apocalyptic event they'd be able to hole up in their cramped and dingy abodes and live on their beans for weeks to come while others starve. This makes them feel they have a chance of being, for once in their lives, winners.
Short Soak/Boil Method
Boil beans in water for 3 minutes in a heavy-bottomed pot. Cover and set aside for 2 to 4 hours (soaking longer doesn't help or hurt). Drain and discard water. Rinse beans. Cook for two hours or until beans are soft. Use 3 to 4 cups of water for every cup of dried beans when cooking. Keep water about an inch above beans. Drain when done. Don't add salt till done. This method reduces the hard-to-digest complex sugars by 80 percent.
Long Soak Method
Soak beans for 8 hours or overnight. Drain and discard water. Rinse beans and proceed with cooking.

 

Pets

A dog.

Why would anyone get a dog? When the Complete and Total Loser was a kid everyone had dogs. He lived in the suburbs. You'd let your dog out in the morning, if the weather were nice enough, and he'd roam all day and return when you got back from school. Sometimes they got in fights with other dogs, which would add drama to a young life. Sometimes the Loser's dog, an un-neutered male, would smell a bitch in head from miles away and be off for two or three days. He'd return famished but smiling. This now would rightly be considered irresponsible pet ownership. The Loser sees dogs in the city and they're miserable. Sure, they jump up and down when their masters come home, but they're filled with nervous energy, unable to run free, penned or leashed for all but as little as half an hour a day in most cases. Bad pet owners let them bark, disturbing their neighbors by shattering the peace.
Even though he lives in a big city the Loser can see enough animals living free to satisfy his link to nature. He sees squirrels, Canada geese and any number of other birds. When he goes to the suburbs just 15 miles away he sees deer, groundhogs, rabbits and foxes.

Chewing Gum

Do not chew gum in public if you are an adult. It looks horrible. The only people who look good chewing gum are teenagers with their minds elsewhere, staring into space. The Complete and Total Loser quit late, at age 30. "I'm too old to chew gum," he said to himself, and stopped immediately. If you think you look good chewing gum hire a private detective to follow you day and night and video you chewing gum when you think no one is looking. Then watch that video.

You'll see.
If you must chew gum for health reasons, dispose of it properly. Do not spit it out on sidewalks. If you put it in a trash can, even a lined trash can, wrap it in something first. The only time you can spit it out is when driving if it is sure to go on the road. There, it will be mashed into the road, strengthening it. The Federal Highway Administration has estimated that if all America's gum chewers spat their gum onto paved roadways the annual savings on state and federal highway repairs would total approximately $4.1 million. This is a provable fact that the Loser made up.

Taking Stock

Things I haven't figured out even though I am half a century old:
Women
How do you talk to them? They say they want to be treated like anyone else but if you talk to them like you do to men they flee. I've never had a long-term relationship. I came close once but it didn't work out. After six weeks things dissolved. I've read that as a rule if you haven't had a committed relationship by the time you're 40, you're probably not cut out for it. Reading this brought me relief in a way. Free from the obligation of trying, I can do what I want to do. And yet ... there are those nights when lying on my twin mattress with a book isn't enough. I see others unite with ease while I am like a dog at a closed door, frustrated, leaping up and scratching the wood with my claws, unable to turn the knob.
Career Success
I make less than a third of what the average man my age earns. I have a master's degree yet I work retail, my feet aching at the end of each day, my pocket knife dulled from cutting open boxes. Most of my coworkers are half my age, there for a short while en route to other positions. I made more, years ago. Then I overreached, crashed.
Money 
Investing, planning, buying real estate. Never did it. Perhaps I'm better off given the current state of things. Two years ago I opened an account at ingdirect.com and I put any extra money I have in it and have money transferred out of my account weekly. Small amounts here and there but it's added up. I could live for over a year on what I've saved. Years ago, while traveling in Indonesia, I met a Russian who escaped from Russia when that was hard to do. He fled to Canada, played professional ice hockey then went into business for himself. He was in his 50s, wore a Rolex, had a French Canadian girlfriend who was interesting, smart, gorgeous and half his age, and a stack of $50 traveler's checks an inch thick. He traveled with a backgammon board and played for money when he could. "Playing backgammon without using the doubling cube," he said, "is like playing chess without the kings." I played chess with him once. I'm unschooled in the game, but not bad for a casual player. Or so I thought. He moved out all his pawns just for fun, let me take few key pieces, grew bored after some minutes and checkmated me in five moves. He and his girlfriend were headed in a few days to Bali by ship. "You want to learn to make money? Come with us. I'll tell you everything you need to know in two days." I didn't and have wondered ever since what he knew that I could have learned.
What I have figured out:
I am a complete and total loser.