Long days and ants

There is a five-hour, forty-one minute difference in the longest and shortest days of the year where the Complete and Total Loser lives. It seems like these summer days will never end. The Loser likes dark nights. They signal that it's time for him to stop trying to accomplish anything, which means they tell him that he can stop losing. 
Meanwhile, ants are in the Loser's upstairs bathroom. They're small and everywhere. He has poison out for them. They drink it and take it to their queen, the Loser hopes, and she'll drink it and die. The entire process takes several days.

Ants drinking Terro ant poison, which should destroy their civilization soon.

"Where are we going?" "Swimming!"

The first lap went well and the Complete and Total Loser felt like he could swim a mile nonstop, like he had when he last swam regularly.
That was twenty-five years ago, however, and after four laps in the twenty-five yard pool the Loser had to stop and spend several minutes catching his breath. After that, he had to stop after every two laps and recover. He is that old and out of shape.
The Loser has always loved to swim. The feel of water giving support. The forced rhythm of breathing once underway. He got serious about it when he spent a few months living in Western Australia in 1989. He lived near an Olympic-size pool where for a dollar he could swim all day. It was an outdoor pool, which suited the climate around Perth. He went every day.

The men's locker room the Loser uses at the pool.

There’s a cliché about learning that says you can’t learn how to swim by reading a book. That’s only partially true. A book about swimming the Loser found at a library in Perth taught him that his freestyle stroke was all wrong. He modified it and began to swim faster and for longer.
His favorite form of exercise—bicycling—is out now because of the painful knee of his crippled leg. The Loser has wanted to swim for ages but, poor and unemployed, he didn’t think he’d be able to find a place to swim that he could afford. He was wrong. A local college offers lap swimming year round in the mornings for just $30 a month. It’s closed on weekends, but that’s not a problem for the Loser in his current unemployed situation.

If it's been awhile, those first laps can be tiring.

The other swimmers are middle-aged, like the Loser. There are only five lanes, but so far he hasn’t had to wait for one. (He gets there by 6:30, which helps.) Swimming seems easy and it is in terms of impact and force, but after doing it the Loser realized that swimming is like lifting a light weight hundreds of times and he felt a pronounced but pleasant ache from it the next day. He still does. Today, his third, he swam six laps nonstop several times. He’ll never be the swimmer he was twenty-five years ago, but he hopes to get in some kind of shape again soon.

The Loser's latest obsession

The Complete and Total Loser has watched this clip more times than he wants to admit.

There's a longer version of it showing what happened before, which is that Martha Raye, Peter Lawford and Judy Garland are making fun of the then current teen culture of 1964. This comes at the end of it. The male dancer who will catch and keep your eye is Bobby Banas, who everyone's seen before in numerous movies, like West Side Story. He choreographed this to the Shirley Ellis song, The Nitty Gritty, but one of the male dancers didn't show up so

Banas had to dance it too. As you can see, he goes all out. The other dancers are fine, especially his female partner, who is great, but Banas steals it all nonetheless. 
You could write a thesis about this clip—an essay, anyway. A mild technical foul up after the intro, when the podium moves faster than anticipated makes Garland and the others stumble a little when getting off camera.

Martha Raye, Peter Lawford, Judy Garland get swept aside.

It's like you're watching the older generation literally get swept aside in favor of the new.

The weaker sex

The Complete and Total Loser likes it when magazines on display have an element of social commentary like this one at his local library does at the moment. In the magazine on the right, the man, Chris Pratt, displays attributes of masculinity, while on the left is Zooey Deschanel, busty, delicate, unmuscled.

The three magazines in the top rack have differing views.

The magazine in the middle, The Economist, is, of course, not referring to physical strength, but it's a nice juxtaposition nonetheless.

Never bored

Kids now. Never bored, always with something to do or someone to talk to. Sure, when the Complete and Total Loser was that age he might have had a comic book with him (but that's might, and no one did in a grocery store; not cool), but even with those you look up once in awhile and see what's going on around you. This boy didn't budge until it was time to leave.

A boy plays a game on his smart phone while at a grocery store.