Loser Friendly
5/19/96
LOSER FRIENDLY
The advantage of being socialized, of participating in society and having a family and possibly even of becoming a member of your local and/or national community, is that you participate in a shared lunacy so you don't stick out like a sore thumb.
When you're an unsocialized crank like myself, you reveal your crackpottery every time you open your mouth. It's like the last moments of "Invasion of the Bodysnatchers," in which the final human survivors try desperately but unsuccessfully to hide their human traits from the aliens-posing-as-humans who surround them. But there is this difference. I, a crank, am just as alien, as essentially inhuman, as you the socialized lunatics. Nay, I'm more alien and less human than you. At least you have families. At least you occupy, or occupied before you were downsized, corporate niches. At least some of you spent the better part of your adult lives interacting with your fellow humans in your capacities as lawyers, doctors, military officers, prostitutes, pushers, politicians, above-ground-swimming-pool-installers, race track touts, subway token clerks, portrait photographers, waitresses, and educators.
I, on the other hand, merely played at interacting professionally with my fellow human beings. I didn't have my heart in my work because I either had no heart, or was so out of touch with my heart that it was effectively irretrievable. I was a young eccentric well on his way to becoming an old crackpot, and this is my cautionary tale. Read it to your children at night so that they don't become a crank like me.
The key to being a crank was realizing, in that entity which I laughingly refer to as my heart, though it is not my heart, but a grotesque facsimile that I have manufactured over the years from odds and ends picked up on the street, in storm drains, and between the roots of trees, the key, as I say before I so rudely interrupted my mad burbling with more mad burbling, was to admit to myself what a thoroughgoing loser I was.
When I confessed as much to my friends, they gasped and told me to shut up and to never mention the subject again in mixed company. But I went on, matter-of-factly explaining that I was indeed a loser, that I had lost out on all the things of this world----family, social standing, economic security, self-respect, psychological and physical health and God knows what else. Others had won these things and I had lost them if I had ever had them or I had never succeeded in winning them in the first place and I was tired of pretending otherwise in my private or my public life. I was a complete loser. I stood revealed before the world, though the world doubtless had perceived the truth about me years before, possibly even at the moment of my birth.
I can imagine the obstetrician, seeing me poking my miserable red wrinkled head out of my mother's womb: "What a fucking loser! Who let this fuckhead out of the bag! Go back, go back, there's no future for you out here!" But I heedlessly made my way into the world in order to play out the cruel joke which turned out to be my life.
And eventually, which is to say in early middle age, after a long bout of physical and mental illness, I got the punchline. I'll never be like other people. As a friend said immediately after I announced at a social gathering that I was a loser: "You're not a loser, Doug, don't say that of yourself. You're just.....different." And everyone, myself included, had a hearty laugh. They laughed with relief that I was the loser and they weren't, and I laughed with relief at not pretending to be anything else. But they also laughed at her embarrassment. She clearly agreed with my painful self-assessment. But she could barely stand to spit out that word "loser" in public. It was the worst obscenity she knew, and if she admitted that a friend of hers was a loser then, by extension, she would be admitting that, despite her professional success, she had one foot in loserdom herself. So she groped until she stumbled upon that all-encompassing euphemism, "different," which is almost as dispiriting and politically correct a word as "special."
OK, fine. If your inner editor can't bear to read words written by a loser because you're afraid that they'll somehow rub off on you, and they just fucking might, then think of me as different, as scarily special. Think of me as a major fuck-up, who is constitutionally incapable of obtaining anything he sets out to obtain, whose best laid plans invariably come to naught. I'm Robert Burns' wee beastie, and my humble home is regularly laid waste by marauding plows, so regularly that I've decided it's hopeless to even scheme and dream because that way lies misery.
I never get any of the things I think I want. I'm tired of wanting. It's a very heavy burden. I could imagine it being a lighter burden if I frequently, or at least occasionally, hooked and landed what I was angling for. But I am like a fisherman fishing in a sewer. The best I can hope for is to gaff the odd turd, because that's all that swims around my hook.
Why don't I drop my hook in a different stream? Every stream becomes the Los Angeles River when I drop my hook in it. That's the nature of cranks and losers.
Now you see that I'm equating cranks and losers. And you may object that cranks are charmfree eccentrics, but they aren't necessarily losers. But I say that cranks are necessarily losers. Because cranks don't belong. And what they say doesn't make sense. They may think they know where they are or what they are talking about, but the sensible the world can clearly see cranks have lost their way and their sense of humor about having lost their way. Cranks don't have fun, they are the object of fun. Cranks take life seriously. But life doesn't take cranks seriously.
Cranks are lost to others and to themselves. Therefore they are, in the fundamental sense of the word, losers. You may object that I still have a sense of humor, that I have not lost my sense of humor about myself, that I feel compelled to make myself the butt of most of my jests. But do I feel FREE to mock myself? If my humor, my self deprecation, is the result of a compulsion, is it humor at all? Or am I merely spanking myself in public to gratify the masochist in me?
I assure you, I have no sense of humor. There is nothing free about my spirit. I am thoroughly earthbound. I am all compulsions. Not for me those moments of self-perception which deliver me from myself. I am always lost to myself yet trapped in myself. It's the worst of both worlds and the natural refuge of the true loser.
Loser loser loser. What else is this but the dirtiest label in the American language. Child molestor? Don't make me laugh. Michael Jackson and Roman Polanski are child molestors, but who would dare call them losers? They enjoy the best this world has to offer. They are celebrated by fans as they flit from mansion to mansion with their retinues of sycophants. If they aren't winners, who is?
Is mass murderer a dirtier label than loser? Stalin was a mass murderer of epic proportions and he died a winner's death, in his own bed, a head of state, surrounded by a circle of truly frightening colleagues and ghouls breathlessly awaiting the passing of his final breath. Or let's take a homelier example. Harry Truman. Didn't he order the dropping of the A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Doesn't he therefore qualify as a mass murderer? Yet who would characterize him as a loser? After committing his highly publicized double act of mass murder, he beat Tom Dewey in a campaign for election to the highest office in the land. How can we characterize such a man as anything but a winner? So even if Harry Truman was a mass murderer, he was a winner, which makes him better than a loser. Therefore mass murderers are better than losers.
Can a mass murderer be a loser? Mass murderers are by definition winners, because they won and their victims lost. When the bombs went off, Harry won and the Nagasakians and Hiroshimians lost. When a hunter puts a bullet in the brain of the elephant, who is the winner and who is the loser? The elephant loses his life and the hunter wins a trophy and the self-esteem which comes from knowing he has destroyed something precious and rare and wonderful and beautiful.
That's what makes the name of O.J. Simpson so magical. He pulled himself out of the slums of Oakland to blaze a trail of wins which seems to have no end in sight. He won the Heisman Trophy, he won the admiration of millions of couch potatoes and tailgate partiers, he won the heart of Nicole Brown Simpson. When he went head to head with Nicole and Ron Goldman, he came out of the scrimmage alive, and they didn't. Another win. And when he fled in the Bronco and came back home....who says you can't go home again?....he won or re-won the hearts of millions more fans. Then he and his dream team went head to head with Marsha and Chris, and lo and behold, the endzone! Acquittal!! Another victory to the man who knows not the meaning of loser.
Winners, if they go out at all, go out on top. Look at Adolph Hitler. Sure, things got a bit rough in the bunker in Berlin. But he knew how to end on an upbeat. He married, in the last hours of his life, the lovely, the charming, Eva Braun! And so what if his world was crumbling about his head? He was still in charge, was he not? Didn't the other gangsters and morons in the bunker view him as Der Fuhrer, right up to the moment he fired a bullet into his brain? So what if he wiped out tens of millions, so what he brought Armageddon to his homeland. The man went out on top. He was CEO of a blue chip nation for 13 exciting years. If this isn't a winner, what is?
Likewise, Saddam Hussein. Sure, he seemed to lose Desert Storm. But who's running Iraq? Saddam. And what are you running? Your own household? Or does your spouse wear the pants in your family? So Saddam lost a major war, and you didn't, yet he's a bigger winner than you. So what does that make you?
So you were right in being concerned that my loser-itis is contagious and that reading my words might give you, at the very least, a minor infection. But maybe this article will work like cowpox, which, in times past, protected milkmaids against the ravages of smallpox. That is, perhaps a minor infection of loser-itis will activate antibodies in your system, protecting you from the chronic, terminal loser-itis from which I suffer.
If you do contract a full-blown case of loser-itis as a consequence of reading this article, you have my sincerest apologies. And let me give you some advice: Once you set out down the trail of tears, of losing, don't look back. Set down the burdens of your former aspirations. Drop all pretence of trying to amount to anything, of being a person of value to yourself and others. If you cannot be free of anything else, at least free yourself of that.
There now. Can't you feel something relax in your chest? There's no need to worry any longer, the jig is up! You're a loser loser loser, and all your best efforts to the contrary will simply end in squalid defeat. So why even try?
Real estate with no money down? No Mr. Wu for you! Thighmasters and buttblasters? Who are you trying to kid? You're letting your body go, your finances go, your mind go, your spirit go. You're signing up for a postgraduate degree in Dumpster Diving. The siren song of the gutter is calling, calling, calling to you, and you're answering.
Congratulations, buster. You're not only well on your way to becoming a 14 carat loser, you're also a certifiable crank. Your opinions are now worthless to the rest of us. How can anything you say be of value? You're a loser! You are, by definition, an idiot! And a nutcase!
You no longer need to take thought before you speak, because no matter how much you think, you're going to sound like a crank, a crackpot, a loser, when you finally open your big, foolish, yap. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars, do not take a ride on the Reading Line. Go directly to jail, motherfucker.
You have officially lost. Turn in your funny money to the winners. Sign over your utilities and your hotels and your fancy lot on Park Place. You are on the outside, looking in, for better or worse, in sickness and in health, but mostly for worse and in sickness.
How does it feel? Is it a relief? Do you wonder why you tried so hard all those years to be an insider? Does admitting you're a loser make you feel as if you've found yourself? Are you finally at home? Don't delude yourself. You'll never find yourself and you'll never be at home. That's the story of, that's the glory of, losers. It's why you feel so goddamn cranky. You're a crank, motherfucker, and there's no sense fighting your fate.
Nothing you have to say from here on out will make sense to the winners or the wannabe winners of the world. You're on the downward path, you're a dead duck. They're saying never say die. They know there are only a limited number of brass rings out there, but at least they're reaching for them. They'll reach for them if they have to dislocate their shoulders! They'll reach for them if their arms turn black and gangrenous and their eyes turn to marbles. It's the American Way!
And the last thing they want to hear, unless it's for comic relief, is the ranting of crackpot losers who gave up reaching, who don't even have enough hope to buy lottery tickets! Crackpots are so crazy they don't even have the sense to be desperate. They look desperate to the winners of the world, but they're beyond hope and hopelessness alike.
Crackpots act as if they think they're making sense. They babble like brooks and make no more sense than brooks, than birdbrains. Their chatter is music to the ears of winners, who, as the serious people of the world, feel compelled to make sense. So crackpots, losers, and fools do have a place, a placeless place, in this world. We're here to entertain the winners, to give them a laugh. Our craziness and fecklessness assures winners that their lives make sense and are truly headed somewhere. We are what not to be, where not to go. We are living cautionary tales. And our little lives are such a joke we're good for a laugh! Abandon hope, all ye who enter here!
In this sense, we are found. We are found, by the winners of the world, to be losers. Even if we are lost to ourselves, those who know where they stand know where we lie in relation to them. They know who they are, and they know who we are. They know they are making sense, and they know we are chattering and gibbering like simians.
It's a kind of consolation. Sure I feel cranky all the time, sure I'm lost and defeated and have none of the prizes of this world. But at least I have a function. I'm a signpost. This way madness lies.
--FIN--
LOSER FRIENDLY
The advantage of being socialized, of participating in society and having a family and possibly even of becoming a member of your local and/or national community, is that you participate in a shared lunacy so you don't stick out like a sore thumb.
When you're an unsocialized crank like myself, you reveal your crackpottery every time you open your mouth. It's like the last moments of "Invasion of the Bodysnatchers," in which the final human survivors try desperately but unsuccessfully to hide their human traits from the aliens-posing-as-humans who surround them. But there is this difference. I, a crank, am just as alien, as essentially inhuman, as you the socialized lunatics. Nay, I'm more alien and less human than you. At least you have families. At least you occupy, or occupied before you were downsized, corporate niches. At least some of you spent the better part of your adult lives interacting with your fellow humans in your capacities as lawyers, doctors, military officers, prostitutes, pushers, politicians, above-ground-swimming-pool-installers, race track touts, subway token clerks, portrait photographers, waitresses, and educators.
I, on the other hand, merely played at interacting professionally with my fellow human beings. I didn't have my heart in my work because I either had no heart, or was so out of touch with my heart that it was effectively irretrievable. I was a young eccentric well on his way to becoming an old crackpot, and this is my cautionary tale. Read it to your children at night so that they don't become a crank like me.
The key to being a crank was realizing, in that entity which I laughingly refer to as my heart, though it is not my heart, but a grotesque facsimile that I have manufactured over the years from odds and ends picked up on the street, in storm drains, and between the roots of trees, the key, as I say before I so rudely interrupted my mad burbling with more mad burbling, was to admit to myself what a thoroughgoing loser I was.
When I confessed as much to my friends, they gasped and told me to shut up and to never mention the subject again in mixed company. But I went on, matter-of-factly explaining that I was indeed a loser, that I had lost out on all the things of this world----family, social standing, economic security, self-respect, psychological and physical health and God knows what else. Others had won these things and I had lost them if I had ever had them or I had never succeeded in winning them in the first place and I was tired of pretending otherwise in my private or my public life. I was a complete loser. I stood revealed before the world, though the world doubtless had perceived the truth about me years before, possibly even at the moment of my birth.
I can imagine the obstetrician, seeing me poking my miserable red wrinkled head out of my mother's womb: "What a fucking loser! Who let this fuckhead out of the bag! Go back, go back, there's no future for you out here!" But I heedlessly made my way into the world in order to play out the cruel joke which turned out to be my life.
And eventually, which is to say in early middle age, after a long bout of physical and mental illness, I got the punchline. I'll never be like other people. As a friend said immediately after I announced at a social gathering that I was a loser: "You're not a loser, Doug, don't say that of yourself. You're just.....different." And everyone, myself included, had a hearty laugh. They laughed with relief that I was the loser and they weren't, and I laughed with relief at not pretending to be anything else. But they also laughed at her embarrassment. She clearly agreed with my painful self-assessment. But she could barely stand to spit out that word "loser" in public. It was the worst obscenity she knew, and if she admitted that a friend of hers was a loser then, by extension, she would be admitting that, despite her professional success, she had one foot in loserdom herself. So she groped until she stumbled upon that all-encompassing euphemism, "different," which is almost as dispiriting and politically correct a word as "special."
OK, fine. If your inner editor can't bear to read words written by a loser because you're afraid that they'll somehow rub off on you, and they just fucking might, then think of me as different, as scarily special. Think of me as a major fuck-up, who is constitutionally incapable of obtaining anything he sets out to obtain, whose best laid plans invariably come to naught. I'm Robert Burns' wee beastie, and my humble home is regularly laid waste by marauding plows, so regularly that I've decided it's hopeless to even scheme and dream because that way lies misery.
I never get any of the things I think I want. I'm tired of wanting. It's a very heavy burden. I could imagine it being a lighter burden if I frequently, or at least occasionally, hooked and landed what I was angling for. But I am like a fisherman fishing in a sewer. The best I can hope for is to gaff the odd turd, because that's all that swims around my hook.
Why don't I drop my hook in a different stream? Every stream becomes the Los Angeles River when I drop my hook in it. That's the nature of cranks and losers.
Now you see that I'm equating cranks and losers. And you may object that cranks are charmfree eccentrics, but they aren't necessarily losers. But I say that cranks are necessarily losers. Because cranks don't belong. And what they say doesn't make sense. They may think they know where they are or what they are talking about, but the sensible the world can clearly see cranks have lost their way and their sense of humor about having lost their way. Cranks don't have fun, they are the object of fun. Cranks take life seriously. But life doesn't take cranks seriously.
Cranks are lost to others and to themselves. Therefore they are, in the fundamental sense of the word, losers. You may object that I still have a sense of humor, that I have not lost my sense of humor about myself, that I feel compelled to make myself the butt of most of my jests. But do I feel FREE to mock myself? If my humor, my self deprecation, is the result of a compulsion, is it humor at all? Or am I merely spanking myself in public to gratify the masochist in me?
I assure you, I have no sense of humor. There is nothing free about my spirit. I am thoroughly earthbound. I am all compulsions. Not for me those moments of self-perception which deliver me from myself. I am always lost to myself yet trapped in myself. It's the worst of both worlds and the natural refuge of the true loser.
Loser loser loser. What else is this but the dirtiest label in the American language. Child molestor? Don't make me laugh. Michael Jackson and Roman Polanski are child molestors, but who would dare call them losers? They enjoy the best this world has to offer. They are celebrated by fans as they flit from mansion to mansion with their retinues of sycophants. If they aren't winners, who is?
Is mass murderer a dirtier label than loser? Stalin was a mass murderer of epic proportions and he died a winner's death, in his own bed, a head of state, surrounded by a circle of truly frightening colleagues and ghouls breathlessly awaiting the passing of his final breath. Or let's take a homelier example. Harry Truman. Didn't he order the dropping of the A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Doesn't he therefore qualify as a mass murderer? Yet who would characterize him as a loser? After committing his highly publicized double act of mass murder, he beat Tom Dewey in a campaign for election to the highest office in the land. How can we characterize such a man as anything but a winner? So even if Harry Truman was a mass murderer, he was a winner, which makes him better than a loser. Therefore mass murderers are better than losers.
Can a mass murderer be a loser? Mass murderers are by definition winners, because they won and their victims lost. When the bombs went off, Harry won and the Nagasakians and Hiroshimians lost. When a hunter puts a bullet in the brain of the elephant, who is the winner and who is the loser? The elephant loses his life and the hunter wins a trophy and the self-esteem which comes from knowing he has destroyed something precious and rare and wonderful and beautiful.
That's what makes the name of O.J. Simpson so magical. He pulled himself out of the slums of Oakland to blaze a trail of wins which seems to have no end in sight. He won the Heisman Trophy, he won the admiration of millions of couch potatoes and tailgate partiers, he won the heart of Nicole Brown Simpson. When he went head to head with Nicole and Ron Goldman, he came out of the scrimmage alive, and they didn't. Another win. And when he fled in the Bronco and came back home....who says you can't go home again?....he won or re-won the hearts of millions more fans. Then he and his dream team went head to head with Marsha and Chris, and lo and behold, the endzone! Acquittal!! Another victory to the man who knows not the meaning of loser.
Winners, if they go out at all, go out on top. Look at Adolph Hitler. Sure, things got a bit rough in the bunker in Berlin. But he knew how to end on an upbeat. He married, in the last hours of his life, the lovely, the charming, Eva Braun! And so what if his world was crumbling about his head? He was still in charge, was he not? Didn't the other gangsters and morons in the bunker view him as Der Fuhrer, right up to the moment he fired a bullet into his brain? So what if he wiped out tens of millions, so what he brought Armageddon to his homeland. The man went out on top. He was CEO of a blue chip nation for 13 exciting years. If this isn't a winner, what is?
Likewise, Saddam Hussein. Sure, he seemed to lose Desert Storm. But who's running Iraq? Saddam. And what are you running? Your own household? Or does your spouse wear the pants in your family? So Saddam lost a major war, and you didn't, yet he's a bigger winner than you. So what does that make you?
So you were right in being concerned that my loser-itis is contagious and that reading my words might give you, at the very least, a minor infection. But maybe this article will work like cowpox, which, in times past, protected milkmaids against the ravages of smallpox. That is, perhaps a minor infection of loser-itis will activate antibodies in your system, protecting you from the chronic, terminal loser-itis from which I suffer.
If you do contract a full-blown case of loser-itis as a consequence of reading this article, you have my sincerest apologies. And let me give you some advice: Once you set out down the trail of tears, of losing, don't look back. Set down the burdens of your former aspirations. Drop all pretence of trying to amount to anything, of being a person of value to yourself and others. If you cannot be free of anything else, at least free yourself of that.
There now. Can't you feel something relax in your chest? There's no need to worry any longer, the jig is up! You're a loser loser loser, and all your best efforts to the contrary will simply end in squalid defeat. So why even try?
Real estate with no money down? No Mr. Wu for you! Thighmasters and buttblasters? Who are you trying to kid? You're letting your body go, your finances go, your mind go, your spirit go. You're signing up for a postgraduate degree in Dumpster Diving. The siren song of the gutter is calling, calling, calling to you, and you're answering.
Congratulations, buster. You're not only well on your way to becoming a 14 carat loser, you're also a certifiable crank. Your opinions are now worthless to the rest of us. How can anything you say be of value? You're a loser! You are, by definition, an idiot! And a nutcase!
You no longer need to take thought before you speak, because no matter how much you think, you're going to sound like a crank, a crackpot, a loser, when you finally open your big, foolish, yap. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars, do not take a ride on the Reading Line. Go directly to jail, motherfucker.
You have officially lost. Turn in your funny money to the winners. Sign over your utilities and your hotels and your fancy lot on Park Place. You are on the outside, looking in, for better or worse, in sickness and in health, but mostly for worse and in sickness.
How does it feel? Is it a relief? Do you wonder why you tried so hard all those years to be an insider? Does admitting you're a loser make you feel as if you've found yourself? Are you finally at home? Don't delude yourself. You'll never find yourself and you'll never be at home. That's the story of, that's the glory of, losers. It's why you feel so goddamn cranky. You're a crank, motherfucker, and there's no sense fighting your fate.
Nothing you have to say from here on out will make sense to the winners or the wannabe winners of the world. You're on the downward path, you're a dead duck. They're saying never say die. They know there are only a limited number of brass rings out there, but at least they're reaching for them. They'll reach for them if they have to dislocate their shoulders! They'll reach for them if their arms turn black and gangrenous and their eyes turn to marbles. It's the American Way!
And the last thing they want to hear, unless it's for comic relief, is the ranting of crackpot losers who gave up reaching, who don't even have enough hope to buy lottery tickets! Crackpots are so crazy they don't even have the sense to be desperate. They look desperate to the winners of the world, but they're beyond hope and hopelessness alike.
Crackpots act as if they think they're making sense. They babble like brooks and make no more sense than brooks, than birdbrains. Their chatter is music to the ears of winners, who, as the serious people of the world, feel compelled to make sense. So crackpots, losers, and fools do have a place, a placeless place, in this world. We're here to entertain the winners, to give them a laugh. Our craziness and fecklessness assures winners that their lives make sense and are truly headed somewhere. We are what not to be, where not to go. We are living cautionary tales. And our little lives are such a joke we're good for a laugh! Abandon hope, all ye who enter here!
In this sense, we are found. We are found, by the winners of the world, to be losers. Even if we are lost to ourselves, those who know where they stand know where we lie in relation to them. They know who they are, and they know who we are. They know they are making sense, and they know we are chattering and gibbering like simians.
It's a kind of consolation. Sure I feel cranky all the time, sure I'm lost and defeated and have none of the prizes of this world. But at least I have a function. I'm a signpost. This way madness lies.
--FIN--
posted by mobydoug at 12:16 AM
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