The Loser Gives In

The heat in his apartment is the bad, moist kind and it brings out smells that aren't his, sickly sweet ones. Last summer, like every third summer or so, heat records fell to long strings of oppressive days. Meanwhile, the Complete and Total Loser's parents, in failing health, made no trips and the old family friend whose bird and cat he'd tended for over a decade stopped calling on him to do so. (Why? He has no idea.) This made last summer the first one in two decades the Loser spend entirely in his cramped, third (of three) floor apartment. He vowed that it would be his last of not having an air conditioner.

He bought a small unit at Best Buy on a Tuesday and installed it that night. It worked. Now, after years of telling himself that not having an air conditioner made him not a "part of the problem," the Loser presses a button on a remote control device and causes, somewhere, more fuel to be burnt, more heat generated, more air fouled, so he can have cool, dry air flow over his twin mattress while he sleeps. The smells are now chilled versions of the old ones.