Red Paint on Quarters

Since he was a teenager in the 1970s the Complete and Total Loser has noticed in change quarters with varying amounts of red paint on them. This always baffled him. Was it counting marker of some kind at the mint or a bank? Were quarters used in some kind of laboratory exercise by high school students in classes everywhere except his own? Did just one crazy person spend his days doing this?
This is the kind of thing the Loser thinks about, even today. When he finds one in the presence of friends, he points it out, only to be met with shrugs.
His curiosity led the Loser spend the late 70s and most of the 80s developing the Internet singlehandedly. "If I do this," he said, "I'll be able to one day use it to search far and wide from the comfort of my own apartment and find out why quarters sometimes have red paint on them."
Sure enough, after hours of hard work making the Internet what it is today, he was able to find, if not the answer, a possible explanation a few years ago: Hobbyists.
There are people in the United States of America who, when given free time, paint quarters and other coins with various designs. The Loser figures the red paint is the result of tests of paint.
But this isn't good enough. Why quarters? The Loser has half dollars, which provide a far larger canvass. And why red? A deep blue background would look as nice. All the coins he finds with paint on them are quarters from the seventies. And the one pictured has paint indiscriminately applied; note the paint on Washington's eye.
More research is required. Much more.

Light Fixtures

The Complete and Total Loser has done it again. Broken something that cannot be replaced. The cover of a ceiling fluorescent light. Oh, he tried. Hard. Many phone calls to many places.
You'd be surprised how many people say, "Bring the broken one here," and were suspicious of the idea of getting an email with photos and measurements. They don't say it, but the Loser can sense what they're thinking: That's not how it's done. Men get in cars and drive all over for this kind of thing, spending time and gas to see for themselves.

The Loser said to some, in a friendly way, "C'mon, let's be twenty-first century and do what we can by email." Sure enough, none had what he needed. At last, hope. A place online in Minneapolis. Measurements sent, photos too. Confirmation over the phone. Arrives two weeks later. Not a fit and the Loser, being a Loser, breaks it while trying to put it on.
Oh, to live in a totalitarian society where all cars, houses, mailboxes, suits and goddamn lighting fixtures are identical!

Chairs

Chairs.

They sit empty. Waiting, inert, unable to know their purpose. At some point people will come and sit on them. Plastic will bend, metal will flex. After some time passes, feet will shuffle and bodies rise. They are again empty, exposed to the air and the incandescent light above. A man will come to gather them. He will fold them and stack them on top of each other on a large cart with wheels. He'll push the cart into a room used for storage. He'll turn out the light and close the door. The chairs will wait in the dark silence for weeks or longer to be used again.

The Loser Gets it Where He Can

The sad thing about being the Complete and Total Loser is that he does have an ego, however bashed and reduced. At the same time, he also has a brain, so he knows that just because he's in a car he is not better than, nor does he have more rights than, pedestrians or cyclists.
So how does he get his tiny ego stroked and fed? From dumb stuff, of course.
Today had a good example. Outside, cold, crossing a street in a shopping mall parking lot. The sign was on the Loser's side. As he approached the intersection a car reached it, too. The Loser, in an adventure cartoon Masters-of-the-Universe-type voice heard only by him, says, "You will stop for pedestrian crossing," without slowing down a step. The car stops as if at his command, and the Loser, standing a little taller now, walks into the store.

The Loser Goes to Town

How amazing is travel? You can sit in a giant metal tube that flies through the air and a few hours later be in an entirely different place, where the weather is different and you'll be surrounded by human beings who don't understand a word you're saying and vice versa. We think nothing of this, yet in the time of the Complete and Total Loser's grandfather if you had said "I'm going to fly to England tomorrow," they would have locked you in a room with soft walls and drilled holes in your head until you were better.
Today the Loser went by train from the suburbs, where he's housesitting this month, to the second-rate city he lives in. This train ride took under an hour and cost only five dollars, yet it took him to a place where things are in some ways as different as they'd be in another country.
In the suburb he's in, none of the houses touch each other. People could go in their houses and just holler at the walls and no one would know. When they want to go anywhere, they get into cars, even if it's just to get one doughnut. Walking would be dangerous; there are no sidewalks, and many of the people drive SUVs and talk on cell phones.
Their mailboxes don't have locks on them, and when they leave mail in them to be picked up, they raise cheerful little metal flags attached to the boxes, alerting anyone who might be driving by that there is mail in there that might be full of money or personal information that could lead to stealing money somehow.
Even though the people drive everywhere, they are thin. Almost all of them are white or Asian. Blacks and Hispanics in this suburb are nearly always driving service trucks of some kind or their in white people's cars on the way to the train station. In grocery stores, the people are polite to each other if they bump or cut off someone accidentally with their carts. They are demanding and fussy sometimes with the store clerks, but the clerks are only occasionally one of them and when they are they're usually fresh-faced high school students who are eager to please.
It's different in the city. There are many cars in the streets there, of course, but they're just passing through en route to other parts of the city, where they usually live in rowhouses. If they live in the residential areas downtown, they have the means to park inside indoor garages. Cars are mostly moving, dangerous obstacles in the city or, when parked, barriers between pedestrians and cars in the street. You seldom make eye contact with their drivers. But that's O.K. There are plenty of people to look at as you walk.
If you're not out around lunch time, most of the people you see will be black or Hispanic. They are poor, and fat, yet they wear new clothes and large pieces of jewelry. Where the Loser shopped today was an indoor mall that has seen better times and may soon be demolished for another structure. Most of the stores there sell high-calorie prepared foods or clothes. If the stores sold anything that could be stolen, they had a uniformed security guard on duty and security cameras. This was true even in small stores. Carts sold imitation designer clothes and accessories, jewelry and cell phones. People shopped for necessities in dollar stores.
The people were in groups, and had rules they followed amongst themselves about who could bump into whom without apologizing. When they spoke to each other they spoke very loud, even if they were standing just twenty inches away. They swore openly while talking on their cell phones, something they do for hours at a time. The batteries these days cell phones have must be great!
There were a large number of teenagers in the mall. This is not a surprise as the Loser's city has a very high dropout rate, and kids in school are known for cutting classes and getting in fistfights with other school kids.
Around four, the Loser caught his train home. He took out his pass, careful not to wedge it into the little pass holder on the seat until the first few stops had gone by, knowing to wait until the rough trade has disembarked. They're known for stealing passes. The farther the train got from the city, the larger the trees got and the bigger the houses, those which you could see near the tracks. He walked the half mile to the house, closed the door, deactivated the burglar alarm and spent the rest of the evening in quiet isolation.

The City in Winter

In winter the city bares its body, an aged woman in bright, sober light. A cold drizzle coats concrete and asphalt, turning the grime into a slick, dirty skin. People stay indoors with friends or travel in cars to meet them. The day lengthens but still feels short.
All this, to the Complete and Total Loser, feels entirely appropriate.

Father's Day, 2008

The man waits for his parents in his ninth floor apartment which overlooks his city's museum and part of its largest park, long a source of pride. The day is bright, clear, a perfect June day that carries no hint of the Mid Atlantic state mugginess that will stifle the city in the weeks to come and now, at five in the afternoon, the sun hovering high in the dry sky, visible through the open glass door leading to the man's balcony, is still a welcome presence.
The man is young, in his early 20s, and in turmoil. A month ago he received his B.A. and he has been waiting ever since to hear back from the graduate school that he wants most—more than anything, ever—to enter. He learned Friday that he had not and now, this day, this Sunday, he must face his parents and tell them. His parents emigrated to America and he is their great hope to assume powerful positions in this beacon of meritocracy. They worked so hard at jobs beneath them to enable him to study long hours from childhood to his last year of college without having to sacrifice study time to perform similar menial labor.
And for nothing! the man thinks. His admission to the school that would have made so much of a difference has been declined! You're not good enough. There is no alternative plan acceptable to him or his parents. There was only this, and he has failed.
It is five minutes after five. His phone rings. The building his parents have paid so much money for him to live in is a good one. It has a front desk and the halls are clean, light bulbs are replaced, the plumbing system maintained and reliable.
It is the front desk, telling him his parents are here. He tells the clerk to admit them.
The man waits. His heart pounds. They are having dinner not to celebrate so much this bizarre American holiday, which he has heard was invented as a way to spur department store sales long ago but what his parents think is the man's good news.
He hears his parents' voices through the door. The sounds of the simple doorknob mechanism. A click. The door opens. His parents begin to enter. The man stands in the narrow living room, watching them. They are nicely dressed, his father in a tie, his mother wearing a dress. They smile when they see him.
The man turns away from them, a clumsy pivot, and runs. It takes only a few steps and just three seconds pass until he is at the railing of the balcony. He sees his hands as he vaults over it, a graceful move he does without thinking. He falls. Every sense is magnified. He sees each leaf in the tree across the driveway. He feels the air buffeting his body with more and more force as his speed increases. He notices there are differences in how it feels against his clothes and his exposed skin. His parents' shrieks are muffled, barely escaping the carpeted interior, but he hears the sound of car tires, children shouting as they play a block away, a car door being slammed shut. These sounds start below him rising as he falls, gaining presence as they near his plane.
It lasts seconds. When his head is as far from the ground as it would be were he standing—too short a time for any real processing—something seems as natural as it does wrong.
He lands on concrete. Bones shatter, internal organs rupture. His brain is severed from its stem, rendering the other damage and attendant furious nerve endings mute. His heart, pierced by knives of broken ribs, shivers for a moment, and stops.
The building is near a police station and a car is dispatched in minutes. An officer does a quick check, makes a call, and covers the body with a sheet. The officer knows by the way the body has fallen several feet from the building that it was likely a jump, not a fall, and takes comfort knowing that the dead man, just a boy, really, at least for a moment, wished to die. Still, thinks the officer, who is no stranger to what he's seeing, Who would want to die on a beautiful day like this?
At twenty after five the Complete and Total Loser is returning to his apartment from work and he sees the sheet-covered body. The sheet is white. It is marked by blood, a growing stain of about a square foot. He is astonished by what a vibrant, cheerful shade of red it is. That color will haunt him for months. Years.

These are Just Examples

An egg and a banana.

You know what the Complete and Total Loser can't do? Peel a banana. Not kidding. He sees others doing it perfectly, but seven times out of ten when he grabs that fibrous tip and yanks it backward all it does is mush the first inch of the herb (bananas are an herb, not a fruit) making the first bite one best done quickly without too much thought.
His solution is to use a knife (he always has a pocket knife with him) to get it started. A little nick is all it takes. Still, it saddens him that he has so much trouble, and it reminds him of how much better his life would have been if he had somehow in his life obtained the magic quality of confidence. He knows what an immense turn on it is to women and employers, and he thinks of what his life would have been like with a wife and a house instead of a twin mattress and a studio apartment.
He also has trouble cracking open his morning egg. He hits it sharply with the side of a fork and half the time it just dents the shell; the membrane remains intact. He hits it again but now he's hitting only the membrane, covered now by a little mosaic of shell. By the time he succeeds and deposits the innards into a bowl or pan, there are little bits of shell in it, which he either has to pick out or hope for the best when he eats it. Sometimes, wary of this, he'll give the egg a good, self-assured whack but that will turn out to be a bad idea; the white will ejaculate from its home, leaving a thin trail of slime in hard-to-clean places. Even the goddamn egg can see through his act.
Let's forget about the egg for now.

What the Loser Eats for Breakfast

Coffee, toast, eggs, juice, cottage cheese.

Being a Complete and Total Loser means your coworkers will be much younger than you are, and while the young know many good things, like how to get around paying ninety-nine cents for a song on the Internet, how to stretch earlobes, and where to buy cheap beer, they don't know how to eat breakfast. They think a doughnut and a cup of coffee passes for breakfast and that a granola bar or a bowl of cereal is a wholesome breakfast. By 11:30 in the morning they're ravenous and irritable, unable to focus on simple tasks.

The Loser knows how to eat breakfast. He always has, in fact, thanks mostly to his father, who spoke often of having a good "farm breakfast" despite being born in raised in a big city and never having a connection to a farmer save a grandfather he never met.
The beauty of breakfast is that it's not dinner, meaning that you can have the same breakfast every day for many years without being told you have no zest for life.
The Loser has flirted with other breakfastses. There was a Cream of Wheat phase after college, when the nickel-a-bowl dish filled his destitute stomach for hours. When he lived in China he'd have a piece of steamed bread and a hot cup of rice milk. In Japan, it was a bowl of rice with a raw, beaten egg poured into it, a small piece of dried fish and a piece of a pickled vegetable. Yum! Finally, there was the bagel craze of the 1990s. The only good thing the Loser remembers about that is that while he cut hundreds of bagels during that decade, he never once cut himself.
Here is what the Loser now eats for breakfast almost daily. It is the breakfast he would eat if he were to be shot at dawn and offered a last meal that morning, which would be kind of waste of food, if you think about it. The protein keeps him going and this breakfast is the reason why he schedules his lunches at work cheerfully for 1:30 p.m.:

1 egg Scrambled, fried, poached, boiled. Who cares? The Loser beats his, pours it in a small bowl he bought in Chinatown and nukes it for one minute. It turns out perfectly. The scares printed over the years about cholesterol and eggs have always been proved false and his level is fine. The Loser puts a generous dollop of spaghetti sauce on it, as tomato products are said to be good for his prostate gland, which is the size of a man's fist.

1 scoop of cottage cheese About a heaping tablespoon full of a fat free type. Dairy is said to ward off gout, which the Loser thinks of now that he's 50.

1 piece of toast Whole wheat, of course. Why would anyone eat white bread? Instead of butter, the Loser sprays his with one of those vegetable oil hand-pumped sprayers you can buy in supermarkets (Misto is the best one he's used). A woman he was seeing, sort of, a year ago thought this was crazy for some reason, even though he uses high-quality olive oil, the kind she would dip bread into in restaurants. The relationship didn't last long enough for him to ask her why she felt this way and it would seem even crazier if he were to ask her now.

1 glass of grapefruit juice The white kind, not ruby red. It stimulates his mature palette. The tang wakes him up. And you get more out of medications and vitamins you take when you wash it down with grapefruit juice.

1 cup of coffee Many won't drink coffee because of things they heard years ago about caffeine. They were overblown reports, long ago discredited, but they are now the perceived wisdom on it so they go the rest of their lives never having a decent cup of coffee. What is the point of decaf?

The Loser Ponders the Sun

It is big. And it burns, emitting an enormous amount of energy that powers the conversion of dirt into edible plants, making the Loser's life possible.
It makes him miserable. Bright light, warmth, bringing people together in young groups of tanned skin and firm muscle, groups that exclude him and his deformity. Through his teens his oldest brother nagged him to sit in the sun more. Yet the Loser made no mention of this when this brother developed melanoma which is, thankfully, cured.
Basic science still intrigues the Loser. He wonders how normal it is for a 50-year-old to lie in bed contemplating the planets, infinity.
A thing he could not find the answer to is this: Everyone knows the approximate relative proportions of the Sun and the Earth—one often heard is a basketball compared to a pea—yet how far apart would that basketball and pea be, if put to scale? It took some searching, but he found an answer.
Picture the Sun a ball with the diameter of a quarter hovering in your room right now. The Earth would be the size of a period on this screen and be about nine feet from it. Every day that tiny speck would rotate once and move about 1/365th around the ball. Doesn't sound fast, but if memory serves the Loser the Earth moves about 19 miles a second. Stay out of its way!

The Loser Gets Playboy Magazine

Every two years or so, the Complete and Total Loser gets mail from Playboy Magazine offering a year's subscription for a dollar an issue, with three dollars added for delivery costs.
Fifteen dollars is low compared to all the other subscription services (cable TV, cell phone contracts, Internet hook ups, weekly magazines, burglar alarms) and the Loser doesn't have cable or a burglar alarm so one time out of two he'll take them up on the offer and write Hugh Hefner a check.
It was in Playboy that the Loser saw his first photograph of a nude woman photographed specifically to titillate. He doesn't remember where or exactly when. He was 12 years old and would be a late bloomer, his first orgasm two years in the future. Owning a Playboy was a coup. Slick, with numerous photographs of several different women, the Loser figured it was all he would ever need to satisfy his growing sexual curiosity. The concept of men requiring novelty at all times was a nascent one. In his early teens there was, briefly, a late-night show once a week hosted by Hefner in a smoking robe, pipe lit, cocktails served by Bunnies, celebrities mingling. It promised sex and glamour and the Loser would stay up late to watch it, volume low, on a small black and white television. All he remembers now is one episode featuring an archer shooting the spade out of an ace of spades from across the room. It'd be great to be that good at something.
Playboy sometimes made news, as when they did their first pictorial of Ivy League women sometime in the 1970s. It made news to the Loser and his friends when barriers fell. They couldn't wait to see the first pictures with pubic hair. They all had great desire to see women's vaginas, which few could accurately picture but that would come to other venues first.
He's been getting the magazine recently. More often than not, he doesn't open it. He has at least twenty of them in his cramped apartment, hidden in their black plastic covers, the Playboy Adviser silent, vibrant nude women unseen, party jokes waiting to have their punch lines read. Last night he opened the current issue, his first in several months.
It is their March issue and the topic is Sex and Music. Last night, in bed, the Loser read the letters, which praised the magazine for running nude photos of 48-year-old Carol Alt and had advice for the new president ("The chief executive should make hybrids the standard for the entire federal car pool, not just the White House"), The World of Playboy ("Hef sightings, mansion frolics and nightlife notes") and Playboy After Hours, a collection of brief pieces (on women's body language: If "things are going well" on a date she will lower her drink from its "initial defensive posture."). He read Mantrack, which advises men on gear and technology, and learned that you can upload your iTunes collection onto the Web and download them anywhere in the world, and that there is a GPS device that shows elevation as well as location.
Playboy is known for their lengthy interviews. This month's is with Kenny Chesney, a country singer. The Loser has never heard of Mr. Chesney, so he skipped it. Of more interest to the Loser, a troubled loner, was My Brother Ted, an account of growing up with Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, by his brother David. This, the Loser read in its entirety. After an hour or so he put the magazine down and went to sleep.
The next morning it occurred to him that he is passing the midway mark between growing old and being old. The proof; he hadn't looked at any of the pictorials.
Today, to show himself his libido hasn't fled completely, he opened Playmate of the Month part.
This month's Playmate is a very pleasant woman named Jennifer Pershing, of Somers Point, New Jersey. Ms Pershing is 28 years old. She is five feet, eight inches tall, weighs 125 pounds and her measurements are 35-27-37. It's quaint, the way Playboy publishes the height and weight of its Playmates, but the Loser likes it. It makes them real to him. Barefoot, Ms. Pershing would see eye-to-eye with him, as he's just an inch taller than she, and be 55 pounds lighter. Now if he met her he'd be able to buy her a garment of some sort that would be her size. He also would be prepared to converse, knowing that her ambitions include being a stay-at-home mom ("I think motherhood would be immensely rewarding"), run her own daycare center ("Isn't it fascinating to see how children behave in groups?") and follow Dave Matthew's tour bus ("To truly appreciate Dave Matthews, you'd have to follow his tour bus"). She likes bald heads (Hope!), concerts, motorcycle riders (No hope!) a nice smile and cologne "that smells good—not strong!" (Can do!).
Sadly, when the Loser learns an interesting fact in Playboy, he's reluctant to share it with others unless he can quote a different source. If he mentions that BBC News has found that people are walking 10 percent faster than a decade ago, that's fine even though he learned it in Playboy. But as the magazine doesn't give a source for the finding that women buy four out of every ten condoms sold, he won't mention it to others.
Playboy. Once daring, subversive, forbidden. Now it's Bush's smirk, an ascot, a toupee, a 50-year-old in his first sports car, an airbrushed reminder of a gentler time. And the Loser gets it once a month.

The Loser Has Lunch with Friends

A man sleeps while his female companion shops.

He calls them The Girls but N's in her 30s, M is 43. He does this because it reminds of the way men of his father's era spoke, and still do, those living, though the women they speak of are in their 70s and 80s.
On President's Day the Complete and Total Loser has met with the two for several years running. They shop first in places they like, then join him for lunch. He has known M since the mid 1990s and N only a little less. The women get along well though they are very different. M is type A—competitive, successful in the business world, sophisticated, witty and won't eat vegetables. N is artistic, a painter, and eats no animal products, believes in reincarnation, drinks no caffeinated beverages, does yoga regularly and is a teetotaler.
They gave the Loser a bar of soap and a disposable thong women wear while trying on bathing suits or lingerie, late Valentine's Day gifts. Before going to an upscale Chinese restaurant the three went to a beauty supply store. The store carried nothing the Loser had seen before in his trips to chain pharmacies, which he sometimes ventures into searching for something to smooth his 50-year-old skin, occasions that leave him melancholy nearly to the point of tears. He is a never-married middle-aged crippled man alone in a store reading labels on bottles and tubes.
The girls bought cleansing pads and hair conditioner.
During the meal they talked about politics, movies, work, M's mother's new foundation, which M finds too orange. M handles the finances of an insurance licensing company and is good at explaining the world of business to the Loser, who knows nothing of it. Today she talked about tests given to prospective employees, tests the Loser would like to take and have analyzed. M and the Loser had similar chicken dishes and a glass of wine. N had chrysanthemum tea and a plate of steamed vegetables.
Afterward, they went to a women's clothing and accessories store. The Loser likes such stores in small doses. There are soft colors, pretty women and pleasant smells. In twenty minutes he's bored. Today he looked at a book the store carried, 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die. The list seemed to be in no discernible order. Not alphabetical by title or author, not chronological or by genre. He imagines it's meant to be picked up and browsed through. Perhaps, he thought, if you read the books in the order they're presented your mind will be programmed in new and wonderful ways, its wiring made phenomenally efficient. Every day would be a magical new thing filled with insights and ideas few have ever had.
He took the photo at the top of this entry.
After they were done shopping they hugged in the parking lot. The Loser is not a casual hugger—physical contact is rare and intimacy nonexistent for him so he avoids what he sees as the tease of hugging hello and goodbye. This has earned him a reputation for disliking being touched, which is fine with him. With The Girls, who he's known for so long, it's different. So they have long hugs punctuated with laughs whenever they meet. He must admit that it's nice.

The Loser Knows the Time

Good watch. Works well, keeps the time.

Men and watches. They love them. The question is why? For nearly five centuries men have worn them, beginning with primitive boxes worn around the neck which required winding twice a day and had just one hand guessing the time, yet watches are redundant now, with digital readouts on every computer screen and cell phone, inexpensive quarts wall clocks, digital television boxes, and news radio stations.
Yet the Complete and Total Loser has this in common with successful men: he wants a timepiece strapped to his skinny wrist during most of his waking hours.
This isn't a new desire. He's liked watches since boyhood. Then it was a diver's watch with a rotating bezel and a rubber strap. It was mechanical; this was some years before quartz watches became available to the public and several more years before they were affordable. Eleven years old, he loved the device, wearing it to bed. At night he would hear a faraway ticking sound that only years later he would deduce was the sound of the watch coming through the pillow.
By his senior year in high school light emitting diode watches became affordable. Ridiculous pieces, you had to push a button to see the dim glow of the numbers for a few seconds. Battery power was limited and woe to he who needed the time in bright sunlight. The Loser, however, spent most of his weekend hours in movie theaters, alone of course, watching at times several movies a week. If he liked them, he'd stay and view the same film three times in a sitting. The LED watch was a good friend, visible and clear in the dark.
He's had many watches through the years, each one either a perceived upgrade or, in the case of a no-frills Timex, a statement of a return to simplicity. He abandoned digital faces in the early 1980s, preferring the circular zen quality of analogue roundness.
In 1997 the Loser bought what he assumed would be his last watch: a Pulsar solar-powered model. Leave it in direct sunlight a few hours two or three times a year and it would keep time indefinitely. Years went by and he was happy with it but among failed jobs and career attempts he found he could get a watch with more bells and whistles. Sentimental about things, he had to make excuses to rid himself of the Pulsar. The metal band grabbed wrist hairs. The inside of the crystal fogged on cold days. The calendar wasn't perpetual and required adjustment on some months.
Next, a Casio, again solar powered. This one had an alarm and other features in a tiny liquid crystal diode screen at the bottom of the face. The problem with this watch, which cost just $35, was that it would sometimes go on strike for no discernible reason. The hands would freeze. There was no crown—buttons on the side were pushed to set the time, but pushing them in any combination failed to return the hands to life. After two hours or so, or less, the watch would wake itself, the hands would race forward and all would be well for weeks or longer. Or did it do this at night while the Loser snored on his twin mattress? He'll never know.
It and the Pulsar, both still working, sit on a shelf in a sunny part of his cluttered apartment.
His latest watch which he, ever the optimist, again thinks will be his last, is another Casio, also solar powered. This watch receives a radio signal late at night from an atomic clock in Colorado and is supposedly as accurate as a watch can be. The watch came with instructions printed with a micrometer-high font size and a steep learning curve. It seemed to think it was in Japan, telling the Loser the days of the week in kanji and was on Tokyo time. Its accuracy, though good, is not supreme. Although he's seen the little icon of a satellite dish receiving radio waves on the LCD part of the face—a modern, miniature version of the old RKO Pictures logo—it is often as much as ten seconds off the time on other devices.
The Loser likes this watch nonetheless. But he likes all watches. The way they make him feel independent, able to know a thing with some certainty with only a small piece of metal and plastic strapped to his wrist. How they tell him where he is in his day, a reminder of how long he has to complete an act, even rousing him from sleep. He hopes to have a working solar-powered watch on his wrist when he dies in an uncharted desert, the watch exposed to sunlight keeping time for only itself until the Sun dims, darkens, then vanishes into blackness.

Canada Geese and Valentine's Day

A girl feeds Canada geese.

Today the Complete and Total Loser stood in a supermarket parking lot listening to Canada geese honking overhead in the slate-gray winter sky. The birds fought strong headwinds, remnants of a fierce storm that hit much of the country earlier in the week.
In his youth more geese migrated. Now they settle in cities where people feed them bread and where they defecate on golf courses and in parks. As a boy the young Loser would play outside on autumn days, throwing stones, searching for the perfect stick, peering under rocks and fallen wood at bizarre colonies of pale, living things.
Once, at dusk, several minutes after a flock of geese passed, he saw a lone goose flying low, honking wheezily as it tried to catch up. He found this humorous. It was, he assumed, one that had taken a little too long at the last food source, perhaps diving for a morsel of food. Decades would pass, aging him, before he realized that a more likely reason was that the goose was old, weakened by time, destined to never rejoin its flock but roost alone where it would be prey to foxes and feral cats, subject to nature's ruthlessness, abandoned by a group that likely included its own descendants.

The Continental Airlines Crash

Oh, those poor people. The Complete and Total Loser has coping mechanisms when it comes to times when death comes in bulk. But they fail.
He tries to think the people on the plane aren't like him. They are simple, dimwitted, reacting to stimuli like amoebae, retreating from what hurts, enveloping what nourishes. When speaking of meaning life has beyond basic needs and shallow wants, it's a mouthing of platitudes heard on television or read in best-selling books.

Family members react to sad news.

In fact, at least some of the passengers—maybe all of them—were no doubt at least as mindful and appreciative of life as the Loser, probably more so, living lives with passion and meaning he can only glimpse, with lovers, friends and family deeply involved in their lives.
And the man on the ground. Not that a short commuter plane ride is a dangerous venture with death a likely outcome, but to be in your home, miles from an airport, living your life, and then this, is even worse, though far quicker, the plane a missile hitting too fast to comprehend.

Groups and The Loser

An open toolbox.

The Complete and Total Loser is not a joiner. There were no Boy Scout retreats, no frat house antics for him in college, no men's groups in the 1990s, sitting in fake sweat lodges, banging synthetic drums and crying about the good things his father did or didn't do for him. No yoga classes now, becoming one with his body and the cosmos while patting himself on the back for not judging the inferior posers around him.
Part of the Loser wishes he could do such things. How nice it would have been to have support in college, to have "brothers" to offer him a beer after a day of classes, to hold parties with, parties girls would attend. Then later, to move up the ranks as the college years passed, garnering responsibility, instructing freshman in the ways of the fraternity as they stood before him at attention with pillowcases over the heads hoping that they may one day be ... him.
It's been shown that those who join groups early in life do better in the workplace. They're more more comfortable in social settings, backslapping at gatherings, exerting leadership. Most success at a company, they say, depends on political skills rather than talent and ability.
All fair enough. But the Loser cannot, as people have advised him to over the years, fake it till he makes it. He is to this day stunned when he imparts information to coworkers and it is absorbed and followed. He wants to shout, "Don't you know what I am?" at them.
Part of why he doesn't join is fear of rejection. Not a new fear. He experienced it when young. The derisive laughter at his attempts to be knowing and cool. The labeling by his brother as a tag-a-long and a dummy as he limped after he and his friends. The torsos of older children angled away from him as they shared secrets. His deformity kept him from the jock crowd. His group was the future homosexuals, computer geeks and poets. But they were smarter than he was and barely tolerated him.
Another reason is one he seldom admits, even to himself. It's that what if he did join a group, have the strength of legions behind him, yet still failed? The Loser's life is devastating enough as is.
His favorite memories now of his youth follow this: Age 10, home from school on a Friday afternoon. It's four in the afternoon. He's eaten two bowls of Cheerios, drinking the sweetened milk from the bowl. His big brothers aren't home and his mother has gone shopping, which promises bags with cookies and cereal with prizes in the boxes later. He has found in the trash or the basement a complex device that interests him. An alarm clock. A miniature reel-to-reel tape recorder. He dissects it with small tools from one of his father's several toolboxes, marveling at its intricacy, the little gears and transistors. Rare moments of concentrated exploration pass. Dummy that he is, he can't figure out the workings, but it doesn't matter; it's the journey that he enjoys.

The Loser's I.Q.

He's an idiot, the Complete and Total Loser. And getting dumber. Honestly, it's all he can do to figure out how to put the DVD back in the Netflix envelope when he mails it back. He assumes the bar code is supposed to show through the little window in back, which will make it easier for the workers at Netflix warehouse, which will in turn may expedite getting his next movie.
He's always been dumb. Any road directions with more than two turns only get him two turns away, where he asks someone new. Simple household repairs like installing a fluorescent light bulb or fixing a leaking faucet end in tears of frustration. It takes him long minutes to compose simple emails. He'll write words he commonly misspells dozens of times and a week later misspells them again. He has trouble pronouncing simple words like "citizenry." There is no such thing to him as a "user-friendly" electronic device. While he likes getting new things -- a watch, a digital camera, a recording device -- he buys them with trepidation as he knows the learning curve will, for him, be long and steep. He's always been poor at math and learning new languages is impossible for him. He lived overseas for three years and studied the nation's language diligently, getting good books, taking classes and hiring private tutors (one of whom quit outright). Despite this, he never progressed beyond the level his associates achieved in a matter of a few months, and got little out of the experience.
The average I.Q. is 100 -- that's how it's set -- but no one says their own is less than 120. The Loser is honest about his and he'll say it's about 100. He's never taken a legitimate test, but it is, perhaps, a few points lower.
The Loser does stupid things all the time. Because he's stupid, he has adapted some things others never think of to help him cope. Here are a few:

• Some years ago he shut the door to his apartment with the key inside. The landlord chargee him $35 to just lend him a key to get back in. Now he has a key well hidden outside his apartment far enough away from the door to thwart burglars finding it.
• Speaking of keys, he bought a small canister with a rubber seal at a camping supply store for his keychain. Inside he put a $20 bill and a small slip of paper with his name and cell phone number on it. This serves two purposes. It is emergency money (he often forgets his wallet) and a reward to anyone who finds his keys.
• In his series of low-level jobs, the Loser has found address books and day planners filled with addresses and phone numbers except the owner's. His own small book has his prominently on the front page.
• He knows how bad he is at doing things fast in the morning and how hard it is for him to find work, so he has always had two alarm clocks, one by his bed, the second across the room. The second is set for five minutes after the first. He aims to get to work half an hour early. With all the stupid things he does in the morning ("Now where did I put those socks?") he shows up five minutes early. Better than late.
• He takes one round-trip train ride a week at about the same time. Sometimes it's on weekdays, sometimes Sunday evenings. He can't remember the simple difference in schedules, so he has copies of the train schedule everywhere. In his bag, on his refrigerator, on the refrigerator at his destination, in his coat pocket.
• He has a table next to his door and hooks on the door's frame for his wallet, keys, watch, pen and other things he'll need. When he's washed his pants he hangs his belt on the doorknob so he won't forget to put it on. He will lean other things against the door to make forgetting them less likely.

There are probably many more examples, but he can't remember them. He is, after all, just that dumb.

The Loser Sees Diana

It had been 40 years. They were childhood playmates, next door neighbors in the suburbs. She is less than a year younger than the Complete and Total Loser, he thinks.
She was the youngest of three, as was the Loser. Italian. When the Loser visited their house different aromas filled the air. The house had more wood and smelled of ironing. A grandmother who spoke no English eyed him warily.
Diana's father was a carpenter, bald, muscular. He wore undershirts and work pants when working around the house or outside while the Loser's dad wore short-sleeved shirts and Bermuda shorts. Her mother hung clothes out to dry. Other mothers had dryers and used them exclusively.
These superficial differences in style may have reflected slight class differences, but the Loser's family and Diana's got along well. Never once did one neighbor complain about the other.
Diana and the Loser learned to ride tricycles together. When the older children tired of their skateboards—then lethal, small toys with steel wheels that slipped out from underneath their riders on turns—they would lie on them and ride down the slope of their street, dragging the toes of their PF Flyers to keep their speed low.
The two were friends. "Wanna play a game?" one would ask. "Yeah!" the other would say. "Let's ride tricycles!" The youngest of the neighborhood kids, they couldn't run fast enough or throw far enough or do anything well enough to play kickball, kick the can, tag or have snowball fights with everyone else.
They played in what they called the woods—a never tamed half acre of the Loser's back yard. At the time kids could still find turtles and garden snakes in back yards. Once, after catching a turtle, the Loser, then seven, teased Diana by holding his hand in front of it, blocking her view. The turtle extended his head and bit the Loser's palm. He shrieked, letting go, yet the turtle held on firmly until shaken off. An early lesson about teasing others.
They never played doctor. Do all kids? The Loser had no interest in girls' bodies at the time. Having any would have had little practical use. He does remember one day in the woods, when Diana had to urinate. She pulled down her pants and squatted. This was a new and different thing to the Loser.
As happens with children the Loser made friends with Stevie, whose house was within walking distance. He saw less of Diana.
A summer day, the Loser straddles his bicycle, which he has recently learned to ride. He is eight now. He's on the street. Diana is standing near him. "Wanna play a game?" he says. "Yeah!" she answers. "Run away from Diana!"
A blank, wounded look. She reaches out and pushes him. He falls, tangled with the two wheeler. He's unhurt but now, when he thinks of this, he wishes he had been and had visible scars to match those etched by guilt.
When he was ten the family moved to a larger house. They didn't need one and the one they moved to was only a mile and a half away. That was too far, however, to walk or even bike, and they never saw each other again until today.
She wrote the Loser a letter when he was home from college for summer asking to get together to "see how we turned out." The Loser, bad with women, bad with the past, considered it until too much time had gone by to respond.
Now she manages a convenience store. A large one, constantly busy. She has a teenage son. They live in a nice house half a mile from that of her birth. She is doing better than the Loser. He saw her today behind the cash wrap, putting cigarettes up while the cashier rang him up. He'd known of her employment there for years. She wore a name tag. He liked that. The boss, but egalitarian enough to do manual labor and follow rules she enforces on others.
The Loser also works in retail, but at a lower level than Diana. Lower level, but a classier place, which is defined in this case as selling things no one needs.
Diana looks good for 50. Shortish hair, a good weight. The same Mediterranean complexion she had as a child. Black eyes. She edges nearer the cashier, a high school girl, who's asking the Loser if he'd like to contribute a dollar to charity with his purchase of half-and-half.
"Not today, thanks," he tells her, looking at Diana.
Their eyes meet. Time has not been kind to the Loser and there's no spark of recognition from her. He doubts that even if she'd seen his deformity, which is below the waist, she'd place him. It has been too long.

Barack Obama and the Loser

He likes Obama.
The Complete and Total Loser notes two things about the new president: He's the first president in his lifetime who's younger than the Loser and he's the first one in eight years who's smarter.
He likes the name. Barack. Exotic, a true 21st century American name reflecting, finally, the U.S.'s great diversity. But look at the last two letters: ck. If the name had been spelled "Barak," it would seem alien, slightly threatening. Like the name of a bad guy in a science fiction movie. But the "ck" is conventional English spelling, as in "back," "track," "Jack" -- any number of everyday words. The first name says, "I'm not just like all of you; I'm a little different. But I'll work with you. I'll compromise."
And the last name. It's as if someone added the "O" to "bama." Whenever you add an "o" to a name like that and they're not Irish it sounds like you're rolling your eyes in disagreement or amused exasperation with someone you like, someone who's being a little ... silly. "Oh, Peter." "Oh, Susan."
Overall, it's a good name. Hard consonants, unambiguous vowels, easy to pronounce. Musical, even. The Loser finds himself substituting the name in that irritating song, "Macarena" when he's biking or doing something mundane. "Heyyy, Barack Obama!" A curse.
The Loser is, like many losers, immature. He envisions himself as president, a position he would never have the ability or intelligence to achieve even if it had been his life's goal. Inauguration Day. The Loser is sworn in. The enormous crowd, waiting for words of hope, settles and waits for his inaugural address. He approaches the podium, grips its sides, looks down the mall, opens his mouth and says ...
"Marco!"
________________________________________
About the photo: It's a car ad at a train station. Ford hopes to get commuters to abandon mass transit and buy an SUV. The Loser's hunch is that their effort will fail.

What the Hell Is This?

When the Complete and Total Loser sees things on streets and sidewalks he, magpielike, picks them up and keeps them. He horrified a female friend once by retrieving a rollerball pen from a sidewalk.

His apartment is cluttered and dingy and many square inches of counter and table space as well as various drawers are home to items scavenged over the years. In the 1990s he found a surprising number of gold items that are now in a little bag in a kitchen drawer. He also likes heavy pieces of iron and steel. Tow truck hooks. Large bolts.

The object in the photograph falls under the Loser's curiosity pick ups. He cannot imagine what its use could possibly be. It lay across the street from his local police station where police officers often park their cruisers but it's not sharp enough to be a weapon -- it would barely puncture a tire, and its points were blunted by design, not use.

When you are a Complete and Total Loser and you have no friends, no spouse, no children, an unstimulating job and your mind is too dim to engage in interesting pastimes, you spend hours wondering about things no one else cares about.

The Loser and His Ego

One sad thing about being the Complete and Total Loser is that while he knows what he is there are parts of him that don't fully accept it, even after a lifetime of experience.

An overweight man sits on a train.

So when he tells a new hire at work how to do something a little faster, which he's learned in the six years on his simple job, and the advice is ignored, it stings a little. Likewise with the lack of responses to his greetings from other employees he sees during the course of the workday. And earlier this evening, when a young man on the train who, not wanting to share a brief ride with the Loser, suggested he take a newly emptied seat, the Loser got a small thrill when a man as disgusting and old as he is, but fatter, sat next to the man after he'd taken the suggestion and moved.

The Loser Drives a Car

The Complete and Total Loser has owned cars. He got his first just before his senior year in college, a ten-year-old 1971 Ford Torino. Not a Gran Torino like in the Clint Eastwood movie (that was a '72) but similar in most ways. They were always pea green. It was a monster, the Complete and Total Loser's first car. Four doors, a V-8 engine that took regular gas, which was still at the pumps in '81. Friends once tuned it up with nothing more than some simple tools, a timing light, eight spark plugs and new filters. They charged only for parts, enjoying the easy access the old engine granted.
His second, and last car, was a used 1990 Toyota Tercel he needed for his job in 1995. Horrible. They made half of them with carburetors, half with fuel injection systems. The Loser had the former. It had nothing but problems and he sold it for $100 a few years ago.
While he's never been able to afford good cars, he drives them sometimes when he housesits and he isn't a bad driver. This is because knowing he's a loser he drives carefully, eschews cellphone use, learns to operate radio buttons without looking, keeps his speed with the majority of traffic's, wears his seat belt. In the early 80s, in the Torino, he blanked at a traffic light and just missed hitting a couple on a motorcycle. The Loser can't imagine how he could have ever enjoyed a sunset, a child's laugh, a good joke if he had permanently injured -- or worse -- innocent people through his stupid carelessness. He hasn't let it happen again.
He has figured out road rage. Everything he sees written about it talks of the general decline in civility, busy, impatient, angry, selfish people. All true, to a degree, but what the Loser sees them leaving out is important: The traffic never stops. In his early years of driving, in the late 70s, suburban roads were largely empty by eight and in the wee hours you could, as he did, see if you make a common three-mile drive at night without turning on your headlights. Fun! The traffic would get bad sometimes, but there would be relief.
Now, it's different. The Loser's former home turf is ringed by roads connecting larger roads that office workers, working for companies that long fled the city and its high wage tax, use to get to their condominiums. The night roads teem with parents driving their over-scheduled offspring home from play rehearsals, sports practice, study sessions, music classes. Later the legions of service workers with shifts ending at night hie home from jobs in restaurants, supermarkets, community centers. The number of cars, many of them far longer and at vision blocking heights, has ballooned while the increase in paved roads has risen only slightly over the last 30 years.
When the Loser pulls out of his old driveway now even at midnight on a weekday he has to look both ways lest he be broadsided by someone zipping along while talking on a cell phone.
Earlier this decade, an old friend of the family's was walking her dog at night, around eight. She was killed by a car as she did. They never found out who did it. The Loser has proposed that it could have easily been a college student in an SUV, a little tipsy, music blaring, cellphone in hand, who thought only a pothole or debris had been hit. TV news didn't pick up the story and college students don't read the local papers.
The dog was fine.