Freak show

What do you think when you see pictures of yourself? I'm horrified by my own. The internal image of me I carry around conflicts sharply with photographs of myself.

Me holding a Corgi with cabins in the background.

The picture here was taken today (Sunday, January 21, 2018) by a friend in Valley Forge Park. I was walking a sister-in-law's dog (I picked her up just for the photograph). I look so misshapen, a word I seldom use because a) It's antiquated, and b) I'm not sure how to pronounce it, which I know doesn't matter when you're writing something but you should know how to pronounce the words you write.
Soon I'll have my right leg amputated and look even weirder than I do here. (See previous entries for background on this if you wish.) 
This evening, my city's football team, the Philadelphia Eagles, will compete against the Minnesota Vikings in a playoff contest. As with every football game ever played since 1958, I will not be watching.

Party time

The Complete and Total Loser went to his brother's house last week to have dinner with his family. Here, his sister-in-law is taking a picture of her daughter, who's sitting in between two friends, while his brother and nephew stare at their telephones. 
The Loser never had a wife or children and he wonders what it would be like to be a part of a scene like this. He is, however, taking care of the dog at the bottom of the photograph for a week.

Dog tail

A Pembroke Welsh Corgi poses for a portrait.

Once, when the Complete and Total Loser was in bed with the dog he was taking care of, his stomach grumbled so loudly that the dog thought another animal had entered the room. Her head went up and she looked all around.

Last day with the dog

It's been OK, life with a dog. It makes the Complete and Total Loser get out of bed a little earlier, and he's been walking two miles a day. He won't miss picking up the poop, though, and even though he's only vacuumed a few times, and small areas, the filter was clogged with dog hair, despite his frequent brushing.
And this is a small dog, weighing less than twenty-five pounds. 
The Loser will miss having a being to talk to. He's enjoyed hearing her breath in bed next to him. 

Corgi sleep

The dog the Complete and Total Loser is taking care of, a Corgi, actually thinks it's normal to lie down like this. Crazy. 

The Loser has decided that Corgis are the Peter Dinklages of the canine world. 

The dog

Yesterday, the Complete and Total Loser's sister-in-law dropped off the dog he'll take care of for three weeks next month so it could get a preview of where she'll be staying. The Loser knew modern pet owners coddle their pets—he's read that a large percentage celebrate their dog's and cat's birthdays—but he didn't think his sister-in-law was one of them.
The dog arrived at noon and stayed until nearly five. During those hours she gave the Loser new respect for his attention span, which dwarfs the dog's. Clacking toenails on hard surfaces as she sniffed corners and somehow found things to eat on what the Loser had thought was a clean floor. Whether they were edible or not, the Loser couldn't say. 

He took the dog, a four-year-old female corgi, outside hourly. She urinated many times and crapped three times, though she doesn't look overfed and the stools appeared normal. She was eager to approach other dogs as they walked by on leashes. Two attractive women said hello to the Loser as their dogs eyed each other.
When inside, the dog would soon forget that she had just been outside and would whine a little. Passing cars excited her and she hoped they marked the return of her mistress. When that became true, she became frantic with joy. Corgis don't look like the kind of dog that can jump up and down, but this one could. 
Three weeks of this?

A dog

For three weeks this February, the Complete and Total Loser will take care of his sister-in-law's dog, a corgi, while she and her daughter visit New Zealand to celebrate her recent graduation from college. 
The Loser has never had a pet, though he's taken care of a few. Sixteen years ago, he took care of an acquaintance's cat while he was housesitting for his traveling parents in the suburbs.
The cat had a fully developed personality. When you said its name, it answered you. It talked like a person would, except in its own language, of course. It was like the elderly Chinese people the Loser met in remote villages when living in China in the mid '80s, people who would chatter away to the Loser because they had no concept of people not speaking their language. 

This isn't the dog the Loser will take care of but it looks just like her.

One August evening, the Loser let the cat, which lived in the city, outdoors to explore and hunt. It wasn't the first time, but it would be the last. There were weeks of posting signs, calling shelters, making grim drives on local roads looking for a small body. It never showed up, and the Loser was certain it had been killed, though he doesn't usually give feelings and hunches real weight.
He lied to owner, telling her it had escaped and that he was profusely sorry. She accepted this, though she was sad. 
The cat was ten years old at the time, meaning it would have been dead for at least half a decade by now, but when the Loser thinks about it he feels as sharp a pang of sorrow and guilt as he did at the time. 
Since then, he has made it his policy not to have pets or people in his life.
The dog might be fun for a few weeks, but there's no way in hell it's setting an unleashed foot outside. No goddam way. Not even once.

An animal answer

The Complete and Total Loser's neighborhood has changed since he grew up in it in the sixties. 
It's still made up of mostly well-to-do whites, though now they're whites who grew up in the suburbs, not ones who emigrated from the city, like the Loser's parents and neighbors. The population has burgeoned, but the proportion of whites to other races is probably about the same as it was.
The change the Loser's talking about is in animals.
When growing up, you'd hear about people seeing an opossum, raccoon, or skunk, but about the only time you'd see one yourself was when it was dead on the road, killed by a night time driver, a college kid, probably. When the Loser was sixteen, a deer vaulted across the road he and a friend were driving on. They were so excited by the rare vision they went to the area the next day to look for its tracks, as if to prove to themselves it had been real. 
It's different now. 
Since summer, the Loser has caught four raccoons (the most recent just yesterday), two skunks, an opossum and the same feral cat twice. Deer often hang out in his back yard for hours at a time. Last night, the Loser shone a flashlight out back and two pairs of deer eyes glowed back. Both had laid down, ready for a cold November night.
One word explains the change. Dogs.
When the Loser was a kid, dogs were never leashed in the suburbs. They ran free, got in fights, killed animals or, if they found an already dead animal, rolled around on its corpse. Seldom neutered, the males would disappear for days at a time, traveling for miles to mate with a bitch in heat. The Loser's dog did this into his sixteenth year, returning hungry and grinning. His DNA is in a lot of dogs by now. 
Now, of course, everyone's so timid and litigious that the idea of a child being nipped by a dog and the packs of personal injury lawyers has made that impossible. Any dog just roaming a neighborhood is assumed to be feral, maybe even rabid. 
So the animals run free, with no natural predators except maybe a fox or two and, of course, cars, their primary foe.

If the Loser knew how to hunt and butcher deer, he'd have to buy a meat locker.

Pets

A dog.

Why would anyone get a dog? When the Complete and Total Loser was a kid everyone had dogs. He lived in the suburbs. You'd let your dog out in the morning, if the weather were nice enough, and he'd roam all day and return when you got back from school. Sometimes they got in fights with other dogs, which would add drama to a young life. Sometimes the Loser's dog, an un-neutered male, would smell a bitch in head from miles away and be off for two or three days. He'd return famished but smiling. This now would rightly be considered irresponsible pet ownership. The Loser sees dogs in the city and they're miserable. Sure, they jump up and down when their masters come home, but they're filled with nervous energy, unable to run free, penned or leashed for all but as little as half an hour a day in most cases. Bad pet owners let them bark, disturbing their neighbors by shattering the peace.
Even though he lives in a big city the Loser can see enough animals living free to satisfy his link to nature. He sees squirrels, Canada geese and any number of other birds. When he goes to the suburbs just 15 miles away he sees deer, groundhogs, rabbits and foxes.