Suburban Life

The guilt gets worse with time. The longer the Complete and Total Loser stays in the suburbs, keeping his parents' house in order, the more he forgives his parents for the way they lived and the worse he feels for condemning them for it.

When they were alive, the Loser would come to the house on winter nights and turn off the outdoor lights. A waste of electricity, he'd say to his mother. And light pollution, besides.

He'd get exasperated at the way his father would leave the refrigerator door open for long minutes while making a simple sandwich. Look how easy it is to just close it, he'd say. See? Open, closed.

The trashcans overstuffed with yard trimmings at the end of the driveway. Idiotic. You're putting what would have been topsoil in an incinerator or landfill.

Amazing that his parents put up him, but that's parental love from non-hardass parents.

Now the Loser turns on the outdoor lights when it's dark and turns them off before he goes to bed, often long after they could light the way of any neighbor out for a nighttime stroll. He leaves the door of the refrigerator open for nearly as long as his father did. He's only recently begun to do yard work, and he does keep the trimmings, but only because there's a small fence-enclosed area for it. He's too lazy to learn how to compost them. Eventually, the pile will be removed and put into the trash.

The longer the Loser stays here the worse it gets.