For Your Consideration

It's a century or so ago. A mime gets a severe blow to his head and is unconscious. He is wrongly pronounced dead and put in a simple wooden coffin with many gaps, allowing an air supply, and buried after a short service. The mime regains full consciousness after the last clump of dirt has been tamped down on his grave. Question: In his last minutes, as he he gropes about for an exit in total darkness, does the mime see the humor in this?

The Loser and his Parents' Will

They know, the Complete and Total Loser's parents, that their ends are near. The Loser's father has made a point of telling him where important documents are stored. Things crop up in conversations and it's no longer with the jocular air it used to be ("Ten years from now! Ho! Ho! I'll be dead!") and they're resigned to their canes and walkers.

Two weeks ago, in one of the conversations with his father, he mentioned that the will divided up their money among the Loser and his two older brothers equally, but that the understanding was that they'd mete it out to the Loser in portions as his life continued.

That's right. They want the Loser's brothers to remind him for the rest of his life that he is, indeed, a loser who, even though over 50, cannot be trusted to behave as an adult with a largish sum of money. 

The Loser let this get under his skin for a week, then blew up at both parents. He made it clear that they should divide whatever they have equally among the three sons and realize that the Loser will neither ask for nor accept money from either of them. The Loser further noted that he has lived well without a handout since shortly after graduating college when, admittedly, he had some trouble getting a job that paid him enough to pay his rent for a year or so. 

The Loser Takes a Class

The Complete and Total Loser is taking a class. It meets downtown, a ten-minute bike ride from his filthy, cluttered apartment. It's in web writing.

The Loser is the oldest in the class, which has surprisingly few students: Four. The teacher knows his stuff and the others in the class seem bright and have specific goals.

Not the Loser! He can't imagine anything beyond rewriting prose he finds slightly more dreadful than his own.

He shopped today. He bought a new pair of sunglasses, having stupidly broken the right arm of a perfectly good pair last month by pulling them down while wearing a tight hat to better see cheap books through a widow. That's what he gets for being too lazy to take them off. He also bought an exercise wheel in the hopes of tightening his aging, sagging abdominal muscles.