His parents will die sooner rather than later—they're in their 70s and 80s and in failing health—and leave him the house. It's a good house, near a commuter train station, in a quiet neighborhood. Big yard. Trees. The Complete and Total Loser will sell it in the first spring/summer it's his as he's heard that houses fetch higher prices when the gardens are in bloom, and buy a small house far in the sticks, where the cost of living is low.
He'll modify this house so he can be off the grid to the greatest degree possible. He'll keep to himself. He'll work part time at a job in which he needn't interact with people much. Cleaning offices at night, stocking stores. This, only if necessary. He lives in a major city now on less than $20,000 a year after taxes. If his house is bought and the property taxes are low, he can easily live on less than $1,000 a month.
This is how the Loser will live. Reading, exercising when he wants to, eating simply, learning to grow his own food if his property is fertile. He'll make trips into the city every year or two until age makes him ridiculous. More ridiculous than he is. A cane, perhaps. A walker, no. He'll sit on benches in the park and watch the young run by.
When he dies he hopes it will be on his own bed, quietly, in his sleep. The few people who know him will hear of his death and say, "Huh. I thought he died years ago."
He is too stupid to make real money, so he's happy to pay his taxes. Oddly, even though he makes in the $10 an hour range, at the end of the year, when his peers look forward to getting their returns, the Complete and Total Loser actually owes money. He has gone to an accountant who assures him this is because he isn't having the money withheld during the year like everyone else is.
The Loser wonders about this. When he started his meaningless job at the place he works he filled out the tax form the normal way—single, no dependents, loser—and he assumes everyone else in his position does that too. So why is he the only one he's ever known in his income bracket to owe instead of expect?
But pondering this and trying to decipher tax forms with his tiny, loser brain does nothing but make his big, greasy head spin. He gives up and decides to trust his accountant and take a nap.
The Complete and Total Loser quit a pack-a-day cigarette habit at age 25 in 1984 knowing he'd never stop if he put it off. The effort succeeded and to this day he breathes clean air deep.
Yesterday, inexplicably, he craved a cigar. This is odd, especially considering that he had never smoked one in his entire miserable, failure-ridden life.
He had won one in a jocular office raffle in 1998 and he knew that unlike the job he still had the cigar. After a little digging through drawers of the worthless crap he saves he found it. It's a Montenegro, "made in Mexico with the finest tobaccos selected leaf by leaf supreme quality," the box said. Inside, wrapped in thin paper, was a well-constructed sealed glass tube holding the cigar which did indeed look handmade. It was the kind you have to cut (or bite, if you're a 30's-era gangster) the end off of. The Loser cut a little with his Swiss Army knife, surprised that it didn't have a little attachment made for the purpose. He lit it and puffed.
 |
| Suck hard. Harder. |
Within five minutes his tiny, dank apartment smelled like a men's club and his mouth felt like a wet ashtray. An inch-long ash clung to the burning end. He resisted inhaling, knowing you don't do that with cigars and that he'd vomit if he did more than once, though he was tempted to do so and experience the dirty kick burning tobacco gives you.
For a moment, he fantasized that the cigar, a large one, would somehow imbue him with the arrogance of those who smoke them and that success would would follow. No such luck.
He doused the ember, let the remaining seven inches dry, and returned it to its home, where it will remain for another decade, give or take.
Like many of his ilk, the Complete and Total Loser likes science fiction. It lets him escape into fantasy worlds in which his meaningless existence has meaning. Perhaps his life and only his is being studied covertly by an advanced civilization that will spare the Earth because they like the way he sings in the shower, or the nuances of care he shows when cleaning his bicycle.
Science fiction—often called speculative fiction these days by its fans—has also tipped the Loser off to possibilities he may not have considered without it.
One that intrigues him these days is the melding of brain and computer.
Inevitably, computers will be able to replicate exactly the human brain. Just as surely, the human brain will be able to be scanned in some way that will permit its electronic duplication. Hook the\at machine up to a voice synthesizer and camera and the Loser and everyone else would live again long after the body has expended itself.
By why stop there? Why not have elaborate computer generated worlds in which the Loser could live lives he's never dreamed of living, with all outcomes ones that leave him quivering with delight and hailed by many worlds.
Those computer programs will interact with others, just as the Loser will add things to his brain he lacked in life. Wisdom, talent, and IQ in the thousands. Of course after awhile the person he is won't be the person he is but an entirely different entity. And eventually, nirvana achieve many time over in this binary heaven, he will decide to simply switch his consciousness off, perhaps with a setting to awake it for a time a century or two later to see how certain things in the material world turned out.
Sadly, neither the Loser nor anyone reading this will witness these events. If you are alive today, you're just too damn old.
