A friend's mother

"It's a matter of hours now," a friend texted to The Complete and Total Loser about his mother's impending death. 
The Loser has genuine feeling for his friend and his mother, whom he has never met. His sympathy is a little tempered by the fact that she was a smoker and is dying of lung cancer. Also, on some level the Loser, whose own mother and father died in 2011, feels a little glad that what's happening to his friend isn't happening to him.

While awful things are happening elsewhere, happy tourists, in this case from Columbia, smile and pose under the Robert Indiana Love sculpture in Philadelphia.

Tourism

Yesterday, The Complete and Total Loser went into his city to meet with a man who's handling the money his late parents left him.

Afterward, he did things a tourist might do. He went to a large enclosed farmers market, the city's main library branch and, most touristy, he paid $5 to go up forty floors to the top of his city's city hall, which was the highest point of the city until the late 1980s. 

Afterward, he took the commuter train back to the suburbs and wrote emails to his friends about his big day out.

A view of part of the Loser's city from forty stories up.