Beauty

This photo of a spider depresses the Complete and Total Loser. 

Look at it. It's hideous. Nubby little hairs, beady eyes, badly proportioned limbs and body. And yet the Loser knows that it's going to get laid within a month, while the Loser hasn't had sex for nearly a decade and a half. Even the fact that whatever it has sex with is probably going to be another spider doesn't make the Loser feel any better about this. 

Advice for Men Seeking Wives

As the Complete and Total Loser's two or three occasional readers know, he's had zero luck with women. An unremembered date late next month will mark his fourteenth year of celibacy, which to the Loser means intercourse. 

Nonetheless, he has one piece of advice for men seeking wives. Here goes.

Avoid control freaks. The Loser's mother is one so he knows the type well. It may seem cute when they plan social engagements and tell you what to wear to this or that event, but as time passes it will morph into something ugly. They'll be old women nagging you about tiny details on things like where you've put the mail and how long it took you to go to a store and get items she's sent you to fetch, items you don't really even need.

One way to spot a control freak early in a relationship is go out to dinner. Women judge us by how we act toward the waitstaff. Are we polite, but not too personable to them? Good. (As an aside, it's never a good idea to be an asshole to someone who will be alone with your food and then have your credit card.) 

How is she about the meal she's received? Is she going on and on about how it wasn't cooked exactly how she asked it to be? Did she have a lot of demands on its specifics in the first place? If so, look out. By the way, if she's really investing a lot of energy into this meal and food in general, she is a foodie and will eventually be fat. 

About Unmarried Losers

"Did I ever tell you why I never got married?" the Complete and Total Loser said to a coworker he's been friends with for several years a few days ago. Moments before he'd had an awful encounter with a horrible, rude woman and the coworker was there to see it.

She laughed. "Oh, I know why," she said.

The conversation was diverted and not continued until today, when the Loser asked her what she was going to say.

Her answer: "You're too set in your ways."

The Loser's heard that before. It's true, of course. At over 50, the Loser can't imagine living with someone else, making the zillion compromises each day that couples do. When is mealtime in the Loser's grimy apartment? When he says it is! Sex tonight? Sure! It's up to him!

But the answer the Loser's friend gave is incomplete. 

The Loser hasn't always been set in his ways. Granted, he may have been a little less tolerant than others, but not so much that a relationship would have been impossible. No. The Loser needed that first girlfriend in his youth that he never had. He needed to be able to overcome his gimp let and oily skin enough to ask a girl out. If he had done that several times and one he liked went out with him, he would have made the usual mistakes, said the dumb things everyone does, and been chastised, maybe even rejected from them. He would have learned from those mistakes and sought companionship again. He would have been comfortable with intimacy, with touching another, with sharing and communicating. 

The gist is this: Single losers aren't single because they have poor social skills. They have poor social skills because they're single.

Europe's Economic Problems Explained

He is not and never been a foodie, but the Complete and Total Loser does know that food is vital to others for reasons other than the Loser's, which is to stay alive. 

With this knowledge, if you can call it that, the Loser is able to explain Europe's current problems. 

• The non-food problem is that the currency is for all, but they're not sharing the same policies.
• The countries failing are ones that value food and good times. They love to have long meals and will go home for three hours to eat lunch. Lunch! The Loser gobbles down half a sandwich in twenty minutes.
• Because they spend so much time on food preparation and dining, they don't work hard, making their entire countries unproductive.
• When an entire country has a problem, it structures itself to hide this. Men in many Arab countries, for example, have the sexual attitudes of 12-year-old boys. This embarrasses them so they blame women and make them wear bulky, all covering clothes. In the case of the European nations facing economic insolvency, they've structured their economies to cover up their love of food and their penchant for sleeping 11 hours a day. This is being unveiled as the interconnectedness of the European Community ripens. 
• The countries in which people work hard have awful food. England, Germany, others. France is the one exception to this finding of the The Loser's, but they're fueled by nuclear energy, cigarettes, strong coffee and passion.

The Loser's Housesitting Charge

The Amazon parrot the Complete and Total Loser is taking care of now as he housesits in the suburbs for an old friend of the family's bites. Hard. He's been called a mean bird. Over the years he's gotten the Loser a few times, causing wounds just short of a trip to an ER. 

He strikes with reptilian speed. Once he bit the Loser's finger as he was offering him a favorite treat. Another time, when out of his cage (the Loser lets him out whenever he's in the house with him) he leaped from above in attack, his beak gouging the Loser's forehead as he tumbled to floor, clipped wings fluttering. 

The Loser doesn't think the bird is "mean," per se, but that he has a memory in his DNA that tells him his life is not as it should be. Though he was hatched in the U.S. and hand-raised by responsible breeders, the Loser senses that on some level he knows he should be flying amid tropical trees with hundreds of his own kind, happy in his flock, eating fresh fruit from branches instead of metal bowls, his droppings falling to hungry earth far below instead of on a newspaper, fulfilling his biological imperative. And that is why he bites any human who comes near enough and always will.

It's 9/11

Unsuccessful in everything, the Complete and Total Loser was an unsuccessful journalist from the mid 1990s to 2002, when he pulled the plug on his career, having reached as his highest level the position of editorial assistant for a wire service. 

On 9/11/01, the Loser was hard at work, doing his menial tasks like cutting his bettors's stories from regional newspapers to put in their mail boxes, a morale-building duty. One of the bureau's four televisions was tuned to CNN, which carried early footage of the first plane's hit. (Over the next 20 minutes the other televisions would carry the same feed.) The bureau chief was on the phone talking to the service's headquarters, which is in New York.

"Amazing, this plan hitting the World Trade Center, isn't it?" he said to a head news editor on the phone he called daily to touch base with regarding stories they may take from the Loser's branch. The woman hadn't heard. She stuttered and hung up.

Not long after the second plane hit, the Loser's superiors told him to go to the airport and phone in quotes from stranded passengers and airport PR. The Loser boarded a train, rode it for fifteen minutes, and spent the next twelve hours at the airport, wandering the long corridors until his feet ached. He got no information of any value, but he was not called back to the branch. The staffers were probably glad to be rid of him for the day.

A few hours into his stint, a woman pushing a cart bearing bottled water and snacks came by. She was handing them out to trapped travelers. The Loser asked her about her task and she told him such things were done by the airport when planes were stalled due to bad weather. 

Reporters are not to take gifts, even small ones, from anyone involved in something they're covering. The Loser was good about this, but he did accept a small bottle of water from the woman. He put it in his jacket pocket in case he got thirsty later. He didn't, and he ended up taking it home, where he put it in his cupboard. The events of that awful day tainted the water, and the Loser never drank it or disposed of it. 

What happens to bottled water over a decade? The water escapes through osmosis and the container begins to collapse. 

A ten-year-old bottle of Poland Spring bottled water on a windowsill much older than it is.

How to Judge Political Candidates

The Complete and Total Loser was a journalist once. Not a good one. He did fine at the level of a local weekly suburban paper but failed during his year in the big leagues, where it became clear he would never rise beyond the editorial assistant level. He's a store clerk now.

Anyway, The Loser finds it interesting how an entire branch of journalists are fascinated by political campaigns. They actually call it a "horse race," only pretending to use the phrase as a slam. The two things the follow, beyond candidates' actual words and actions, are the polls and campaign financing. Which leads to a simple Loser Rule: 

The more money a candidate raises, the more owned they are and the less likely you should be to vote for them.