Amputee videos

Josh Sundquist.

As you'd imagine, there are many YouTube channels featuring people who, like I, have lost a limb. They have great advice. 
The best one for me is Josh Sundquist, who, like me, has lost a leg. Most of his videos were done about nine years ago but they're still useful. Another is Megan Absten. She lost an arm in an accident when she was fourteen and now seems to be around twenty. Her methods of physically coping are ingenious, but what I watch her for mostly is her attitude and how she's mentally coped with her disability.
The problem with both of these is that they're young. Josh is a can-do, bright, optimistic man now in his early thirties. He can go up a flight of stairs faster using his forearm crutches than anyone using only legs could. If not for his loss, he'd be a competitive skateboarder or something, and for all I know he's that too already. 
I, who will turn sixty in a few months, watch him and wish I had his ability.

Megan Absten.

Then I realized how misplaced my envy was. Misplaced to the point of being stupid, actually. Josh, who lost his leg to a cancer similar to mine, would surely envy me for having had two legs decades longer than he had. Granted, my right leg wasn't much of a leg—it was seven inches shorter than the left—but I walked, climbed and bicycled many miles with it and did lots of things I doubt I'd have done without it, like backpacked in countries where there were few amenities for the handicapped. 
I feel like I owe Josh and Megan an apology but of course, for bad thoughts you can apologize only to yourself.

Legacy video: How to cut a sandwich

Whenever I read short profiles of even very successful people, they nearly always cite their raising of good children as the accomplishment they're most proud of. I never had kids so, like many who didn't, I seek other ways. One would be to change the way the sandwich eaters of this planet cut their sandwiches. To that end, I've spent over half a million dollars producing this video, which you can now see for free on YouTube by clicking on the photo below.

Nothing to say

The Complete and Total Loser hasn't written about anything because he hasn't cared about anything at all for over a month now. He just watches comforting shows he's seen before, goes to work, and feels sorry for himself and his permanently aching knee.
Yesterday, a frantic young bird was tweeting outside the Loser's front door. He has taken it in and it's survived an entire day, which is a record in the over half-century of the Loser's bird-rescue attempts. At first, the Loser thought it might be a fledgling on its first day of learning to fly, but it's weeks away from that. It's nest was nowhere in sight. 
The Loser seems to be feeding it correctly. (Do orphaned animals know how many of the owe their lives to YouTube videos?) 
The bird is a pain in the ass. It chirps, the Loser feeds it, it craps then chirps for more food. Still ... imagine if it lives and the Loser teaches it to fly and it takes off to flit through trees, a part of the wild word that we all forget still surrounds us, however corrupt its form? That would please the Loser.
(Note: If you know what kind of bird this is, please leave a message informing the Loser who is, being a loser, too stupid to know.)

The Loser on YouTube

YouTube logo.

A couple of weeks ago, the Complete and Total Loser went to a story slam in his home city. He spoke for five minutes—the allotted time—and although he was the oldest speaker of the nine others, what he said seemed to be well received. A video of his effort was posted on YouTube, as were the others'. The number of hits it has received are the lowest of them all.
The Loser, losing again. It just never stops.

Regrets, he's had a few

You'd think someone calling himself the Complete and Total Loser would have a longer list of regrets than he does, but he really has just two, though they have defined his life and always will.

They are:

1. Not figuring out girls, which would have led to figuring out women. The Loser wishes he'd summoned up an iota of courage as a teen and gone to a few parties so he could meet girls. (He went to an all boys school from third grade on.) He'd have said dumb things, sure, but he'd have learned from them and maybe have kissed a girl before he was 21 and be married now at 52.

2. Not figuring out what he wanted to do in life before he was in his 30s. There are those who make career changes much later than that and have great careers, but they are talented and smart. With the Loser's mild abilities he'd have had to start earlier to succeed in the only job he ever really liked, which was journalism.

In this video, 50 people talk about their regrets. The Loser found it via wimp.com, which he thinks is a thousand times better than Youtube, which is like sifting through a boxcar of newspapers, books and magazines to find something you're interested in reading.

Frank Sinatra