Death (Poem)

Death

Death can come so quick and fast

We never see it coming.

We try to make life last and last

We eat right, take up running.

When loved ones die we soon regret

The things we never said.

What they wanted was for us to get

Nearer their death's bed.

Tips for the Elderly

1. Cover up. You are old and your body is repulsive now. It may be in fine condition for someone your age, but the people who now make the world go around—the young—find it disgusting. Cover up as much as possible. Nothing sleeveless, no sandals, no shorts, loose fits, always. Your skin is horribly wrinkled and mottled. Scrotal. (You spent, cumulatively, months in the sun. On purpose. Idiot.) On the bright side of this, as grim death nears you are always cold, so covering your skin will help you stay warm. The Complete and Total Loser has been an ugly gimp since his early youth. He knows what of he speaks. The obese are more aesthetically pleasing to look at than you.

2. Don't grunt when you move. Virtually all movement causes you pain. That's understandable; you've been moving for decades, working hard, toiling away at some meaningless job to keep you alive and make the rich richer while raising children in a grossly overpopulated world, consuming as much as possible as you did. You have done what you were told to do. Being old, your mind isn't as sharp as it once was and your ideas are stale. People have to talk a little louder and more slowly than before and, being honest, they'd rather be elsewhere, doing something else. So when you move, don't grunt in pain. It makes you even less pleasant to be with than you already are.

3. Don't listen to your kids when they tell you not to drive anymore. Sure, there's a chance that you'll mistake the gas pedal and the brake, but the odds of you plowing into a group of school children as they wait for the bus are very small. It does happen, but just a few times a year. That's why you hear about it in the news. You're more likely to run into a neighbor's bush or hit something else and the only person hurt will be you. Besides, there are plenty of schoolkids.

4. Make your will specific. Remember that Civil War sword you promised to your middle son when he was seven? He still thinks he's getting that. So do you. But two weeks after your funeral, as your sons and daughter are rifling through your house your eldest son will pick it up and casually announce that he'll take it. This will bloom into conflict that will cause bad blood between him and the middle son, with others taking sides, that will last for years. One sentence in writing and it could've been avoided. One goddamn sentence.

5. Be careful about what you throw out. Those photographs from the '60s may be junky snapshots to you, but to your kids and grandchildren they're historical artifacts. People don't keep bad photographs anymore, they delete them from their camera memory cards without printing them. A shame. The bad pictures—the family portraits with one kid scowling at another, the father looking away from the lens (at what?), the dog's bright, pink erection—these photographs tell more than others. The only studio family portraits of any interest are those of families in which one member has murdered all the others.

6. Avoid falls. At some point, those close to you will want to see you die sooner rather than later and falls hasten the end. However, you are enough of a burden already and with the immobility that comes with a fall you will be even more of one, unless you have the resources to hire someone to help you. You may have wiped your children's asses when they were infants, but your revolting, shriveled anus is a far different matter.

7. Accept that your children don't like you now. You've been of no value to them for years and they look forward to your death, after which they will love you again. You're a diminished old thing but you're still capable of pushing their buttons and they hate you for that and they feel awful about hating you. They wish you had died years ago in a plane crash, asleep after a nice meal, on your way home from a pleasant vacation when the jet slams into a mountain. The only reason they value your continued existence is that it marks their own timeline. ("Mom and Dad both made it 90? Then I will too!") They think that when they're your age they won't be at all like you but will be dignified founts of wisdom and information. Ha!
8. Lie. When someone asks you how you are, don't make some "I'm-so-sick-sound" like "uhhheehhh!" Lie and say, "Fine, how are you?" It makes being around you easier to take.

The Loser Kind of, Sort of, Saves a Life

At some point children think about what it would be like to kill someone. Not out of anger or revenge, just to have an impact on events. This is true of boys more than girls, who think more often of creating life more than ending it, and the age it occurs is around 10 and into the early teens.

The Complete and Total Loser began thinking of it when he was ten. His older brother, age 12, was sitting at his desk doing homework and The Loser realized he could smash his head with a heavy object and kill him. His brother would never grow up and have children and those children would never have children. Something so simple would have huge effects that would reverberate, even increase, as decades, then centuries, passed. Wow, thought the young Loser.

The Loser didn't hurt his brother, of course, and the two get along fine, though he did throw a fork at him four years later, hitting him in the hand.

Saturday, June 11. The Loser is headed for his low-level retail job. He's on his bicycle waiting for a red light to change at an intersection that is not the one pictured but near it and similarly a site of a fair number of accidents. Traffic is extremely light. A woman in her early 20s is across the street and waits to cross, having completed her morning run. An SUV approaches from the Loser's left, in the right lane, its right turn signal on. The woman glances in both directions, assumes the vehicle is turning and starts to trot across the four lane road. The car doesn't turn and the two are headed for a one-sided conflict. The Loser, not a fast thinker, nonetheless shouts "Stop! Look out!" to the woman, who stops abruptly. The car swerves, misses her by a yard or so and continues on. The danger over, the woman finishes crossing the street. The Loser, having a paternal streak, chides the woman, saying, "At least look!" She looks at him mutely, her mouth open, and continues on, wordlessly. 
The Loser hopes the woman has a long and happy life.

Eight Views in One Day

As unworthy of attention and love as he is, the Complete and Total Loser hasn't lost his instinctive want for attention so, as sad a thing as this is, he checks his blog statistics every day or two to see whether anyone's looked at it.

Yesterday, eight people did. The only statistic this site seems to indicate is that someone, possibly from India, viewed a page that had the word "sex" in the title.

Still. This shatters The Loser's record by 600 percent.

In the 874 days since he began this blog, eagerly posting daily, waiting for feedback, advice or at least commiseration, just 348 people have viewed The Loser's pages. And viewed doesn't mean read, of course. (Not that he expects anyone to; there is nothing of value here.)

The Loser is flummoxed by this new uptick. His only explanation is a scenario The Loser dimly remembers from "On the Beach," the 1957 post-nuclear apocalypse novel The Loser knows from the 1959 Stanley Kramer film, in which an overturned soda bottle is pulled by a window shade loose in the wind on and off a telegraph key, sending a random signal from Seattle, bringing a submarine crew there in search of survivors. 

Somewhere a cat on a keyboard hit the right succession of keys to access The Loser's posts. 
If only the cat would comment ...

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.