Regrets, he's had a few

You'd think someone calling himself the Complete and Total Loser would have a longer list of regrets than he does, but he really has just two, though they have defined his life and always will.

They are:

1. Not figuring out girls, which would have led to figuring out women. The Loser wishes he'd summoned up an iota of courage as a teen and gone to a few parties so he could meet girls. (He went to an all boys school from third grade on.) He'd have said dumb things, sure, but he'd have learned from them and maybe have kissed a girl before he was 21 and be married now at 52.

2. Not figuring out what he wanted to do in life before he was in his 30s. There are those who make career changes much later than that and have great careers, but they are talented and smart. With the Loser's mild abilities he'd have had to start earlier to succeed in the only job he ever really liked, which was journalism.

In this video, 50 people talk about their regrets. The Loser found it via wimp.com, which he thinks is a thousand times better than Youtube, which is like sifting through a boxcar of newspapers, books and magazines to find something you're interested in reading.

Frank Sinatra

The Loser has a Memory at Work

He's not without some gift for meaningless chatter, the Complete and Total Loser, and has miniconversations with the wide variety of customers he rings up during his dull days at the store he works in.

Today, one customer the Loser spoke with was a young Malaysian woman, college age, probably. The Loser mentioned having traveled to the peninsula's east coast, where on a beach called Rantau Abang he and other tourists witnessed a female leatherback turtles struggle to climb from the sea, dig a hole and lay her eggs in them. The woman was surprised to hear the Loser had seen this as it seldom happens now. "Just once last year," she said.

The Loser was surprised to hear this. When he'd seen this, 1989, the people in charge were doing it responsibly. No flash photos or flashlights. No blocking the reptile's path to or from the nesting grounds. The eggs were to be gently dug up and moved to a protected area to prevent animal and human predation.

Some Net search taught the Loser that it's what happens after the turtles are released that's put them on the verge of extinction during the decades they need to live before reproducing. Pollution, boats, long fishing lines, nets.

Their custom of laying on that beach, intact for many millions of years, is coming to an end.

Later in the evening the Loser remembered that his trip there 22 years ago happened to be on his birthday, which is today. There was a fetching English woman he spend some Platonic time with. The Loser doesn't remember her name, only that she loved Greece and was five feet tall and weighed 85 pounds, which is light but she simply looked like a miniature normal woman. She probably has the beginnings of osteoporosis by now, though.

The Loser deals with a lost girl

The museum where the Complete and Total Loser works is hosting a special exhibition of colorful clothes. To accentuate them, all surfaces but the floor in the large gallery have been painted black. As with any exhibit of textiles, the lighting is dim for conservation reasons, but direct. The pathways are at odd angles, merging, circling, forking. Most leave the gallery and enter the exhibition store pleasantly dazzled.
Not the lost girl today.
“I can’t find my parents,” she told the Loser. She’d made it through the crowded store and reached the final register, weaving through giants, when she realized she’d exhausted all spaces. She was around seven or eight and couldn’t have been more than four feet tall. Cute, though the tiny face was scrunched in misery, eyes brimming with tears. Light sobbing had started.
The Loser, childless, of course, guided the girl in reverse through the exhibit, distracting her with comments about how dark it was and its similarity to a movie theater he worked in as a teenager and other tales, all with that heightened delivery those not used to talking to children use, thinking it will maintain their interest (“You know what happened to me once?”).
After a few minutes—long ones for the child—Josh, her brother, darted by and just after there was Mommy, lost in her audio tour.
Girl melded to woman, face pressed into soft, maternal abdominal muscles. The Loser gave the adult a little wave, a smile and shrug and retreated to his register. He glimpsed the girl some minutes later as they exited the packed store.
Later the Loser realized that chief among things he said to the girl were assurances that her lost state (or was it the parents who were lost?) was a common one. This isn’t true, at least to the degree it had reached for her. The Loser realized his goal was to relieve her of embarrassment, to help her not come away from the experience feeling dumb.