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.
 

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.

The City (Poem)

The country is great, nice and quiet,
A place to hear you think.
In second come suburbs, such a riot,
You can sit on a porch and drink.
But cities are tops, in everyone’s book,
They’re where you want to live life.
Search a little, and find your nook,
An escape from noise and strife.
Life’s great spent in a really big town,
It’s to city life that I’m wed.
Excuse me a sec, I’ve got to get down,
A bullet whizzed past my head.

City Girls

In his teens, the Complete and Total Loser visited the city just once or twice a year, if that, despite living just a short train ride or drive away. 

That was suburban life in the 1970s for the unadventurous types; cities were dangerous places where the likelihood of being a crime victim was high. It was far safer to stay trapped in the suburbs, with its lawns to mow, leaves to rake and rides to shopping centers and movie theaters to be had. 

When he did journey to the city, it was the girls that impressed the Loser most. 

Suburban girls were gentle and soft. They spoke in modulated tones and had no accents. Their clothes were expensive and staid. They dressed like younger versions of their mothers, who knew your parents or your parents' friends.

The city girls wore halter tops, smoked openly and used double negatives with thick accents, dropping their g's, swallowing vowels and swearing. Their breasts were firm and you could see their nipples. Their cheeks were scarred by acne but their arms and shoulders were smooth and muscled, powerful. They were daughters of men who worked with their hands and they'd fight other girls for dates with men who wore uniforms. 

They were so far from anything the Loser knew they may as well have been Ming Dynasty concubines for all their mystery.

A tough, city girl holds a baseball.

The Loser Goes to Town

How amazing is travel? You can sit in a giant metal tube that flies through the air and a few hours later be in an entirely different place, where the weather is different and you'll be surrounded by human beings who don't understand a word you're saying and vice versa. We think nothing of this, yet in the time of the Complete and Total Loser's grandfather if you had said "I'm going to fly to England tomorrow," they would have locked you in a room with soft walls and drilled holes in your head until you were better.
Today the Loser went by train from the suburbs, where he's housesitting this month, to the second-rate city he lives in. This train ride took under an hour and cost only five dollars, yet it took him to a place where things are in some ways as different as they'd be in another country.
In the suburb he's in, none of the houses touch each other. People could go in their houses and just holler at the walls and no one would know. When they want to go anywhere, they get into cars, even if it's just to get one doughnut. Walking would be dangerous; there are no sidewalks, and many of the people drive SUVs and talk on cell phones.
Their mailboxes don't have locks on them, and when they leave mail in them to be picked up, they raise cheerful little metal flags attached to the boxes, alerting anyone who might be driving by that there is mail in there that might be full of money or personal information that could lead to stealing money somehow.
Even though the people drive everywhere, they are thin. Almost all of them are white or Asian. Blacks and Hispanics in this suburb are nearly always driving service trucks of some kind or their in white people's cars on the way to the train station. In grocery stores, the people are polite to each other if they bump or cut off someone accidentally with their carts. They are demanding and fussy sometimes with the store clerks, but the clerks are only occasionally one of them and when they are they're usually fresh-faced high school students who are eager to please.
It's different in the city. There are many cars in the streets there, of course, but they're just passing through en route to other parts of the city, where they usually live in rowhouses. If they live in the residential areas downtown, they have the means to park inside indoor garages. Cars are mostly moving, dangerous obstacles in the city or, when parked, barriers between pedestrians and cars in the street. You seldom make eye contact with their drivers. But that's O.K. There are plenty of people to look at as you walk.
If you're not out around lunch time, most of the people you see will be black or Hispanic. They are poor, and fat, yet they wear new clothes and large pieces of jewelry. Where the Loser shopped today was an indoor mall that has seen better times and may soon be demolished for another structure. Most of the stores there sell high-calorie prepared foods or clothes. If the stores sold anything that could be stolen, they had a uniformed security guard on duty and security cameras. This was true even in small stores. Carts sold imitation designer clothes and accessories, jewelry and cell phones. People shopped for necessities in dollar stores.
The people were in groups, and had rules they followed amongst themselves about who could bump into whom without apologizing. When they spoke to each other they spoke very loud, even if they were standing just twenty inches away. They swore openly while talking on their cell phones, something they do for hours at a time. The batteries these days cell phones have must be great!
There were a large number of teenagers in the mall. This is not a surprise as the Loser's city has a very high dropout rate, and kids in school are known for cutting classes and getting in fistfights with other school kids.
Around four, the Loser caught his train home. He took out his pass, careful not to wedge it into the little pass holder on the seat until the first few stops had gone by, knowing to wait until the rough trade has disembarked. They're known for stealing passes. The farther the train got from the city, the larger the trees got and the bigger the houses, those which you could see near the tracks. He walked the half mile to the house, closed the door, deactivated the burglar alarm and spent the rest of the evening in quiet isolation.

The Country Squire

A deer, seen through a window.

The Complete and Total Loser works on Sundays, doing the bidding of those who he feels are dumber than he but somehow have skills that produce enough money for them to frequent the retail establishment he works in.
With his parents gone for the month as of yesterday, he heads after work for the train station, where a train will bear him to a suburban town fifteen miles from the city.
The train, packed, arrives to its destination on time. The Loser disembarks. The first thing he notices while walking the half mile to the house is the drop in temperature. It's at least five degrees colder, and he considers putting on his gloves. Second, he looks at the sky and sees a field of stars. Light pollution has made American cities frosted-glass terrariums, where inhabitants are unaware of any space beyond that defined by its tallest buildings with occasional interruptions from helicopters and jets.
He enters the house, silencing the burglar alarm's warning beep. There are notes from his parents; nothing he doesn't know. He downs a beer quickly, makes a sandwich, and drinks another while eating it. Tipsy, sated, he turns to something he doesn't have in the city, the great teat of the American public: Cable TV.

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.