Unending ends

Yesterday, the Complete and Total Loser had hours of scans of his lungs and his leg, either or both which may be harboring a kind of cancer for which there is no treatment and would kill him within a year.
The tests over, the Loser stopped off at a fancy supermarket (Whole Foods) and bought, with a gift card from a dear friend, things he usually doesn't buy. For example, he paid over $3 for a slice of pizza. It had things on it that looked delicious and nice, thick cheese. As he asked for it, the woman behind the counter said, "This one? The vegan pizza?" The Loser nearly changed his mind on hearing that it was vegan but he didn't want to reveal to the woman what a narrow-minded bigot he is so he bought it. 
He took it home, heated it up, and ate it. It was ... excellent! Much better than many regular slices he's had in his more than five decades of eating pizza, with none of the grease regular pizzas have. A nice lunch as a reward for doing without breakfast due to the tests.
Then the phone chirped. The caller I.D. showed a foreign sounding name unfamiliar to the Loser, so he answered warily. It turned out to be a doctor the Loser had never seen calling to see if the Loser was OK because the tests he'd had just a few hours before had been sent to the Loser's knee guy and found that the Loser has a pulmonary embolism. He prescribed medicine to thin the Loser's blood, which the Loser got right away. He also made an appointment to meet with the doctor the next day.
It's unlikely that the embolism will kill the Loser, but still. It's upped his tally of illnesses for 2017. 

A new fare collection device at a suburban Philadelphia train station.

So far, the Loser has or may have:

• Prostate cancer (has)
• Ascending aortic aneurysm (has)
• Sarcoma that will require leg amputation or take root in a lung and kill (may have)
• Eczema (has and it's getting worse)
• Pulmonary embolism (has)

The Loser went to the city via train. He walks slowly now, like an old man. Young people swirled around him, all good looking, dynamic, in charge. Everything is changing around the Loser and even though he's got a few months before hitting sixty, he feels increasingly out of touch and irrelevant. Part of this is the season. As he writes this, just days before the official start of winter, sunlight tilts in ways that cast long shadows and the day's end nears by 3 o'clock.

The old friend

The majority of conversations the Complete and Total Loser has these days are with animals in his back yard.

The Complete and Total Loser got an email today from a friend he's fallen a little out of touch with. She suggested that the Loser go into the city and have dinner with her husband and her, or that they travel to the suburbs to visit the Loser. At this time, however, the Loser can't imagine why anyone would want to see him, or why he'd want to see anyone else.
 

The Loser has a Dream

A few nights ago. In the dream, the Complete and Total Loser is standing in line with his father, who is 89. The line is for obituary submissions at the Loser's city newspaper. The obituary they are submitting is the Loser's mother's.
She is, however, not dead yet in either the dream or reality. But what the Loser and his family knows, though they don't talk about it, is that 2010 will likely be the year in which she dies, even though she is not bedridden or terminally ill. In fact, she still goes out, though not often, to "have lunch with the girls," as his father puts it, get her hair done, shop. Eating is the big problem, due to a nerve cut during an operation years ago that affected her swallowing reflex.

For years the Loser has taken pride in his lack of gluttony, saying half seriously that he eats only to stay alive. It's not entirely true; he has a sweet tooth and will melt butter to pour on toast on cold nights. But it's less true for the Loser than for many, and that seems to include his mother who, now that eating has become a task instead of a pleasure, has gone from being a strapping, broad-shouldered woman of 5' 10" to a frail old woman whose doctor has told her she must get more protein or her recent heart problem will not solve itself. Perversely, she likes the attention she gets from people telling her, after decades of carrying 25 extra pounds, to eat more.
The Loser and his father, while standing in line, go over the documents they're about to hand to a clerk. This being a dream, the documents are the actual obituary. The Loser looks at it carefully. He shakes his head and says to his father, "Shit! We brought the wrong one. This one is mine."