LOSERIST

The Art Of Losing

and the heaven of finding

by author

After Grandfather died, Grandmother gave me one of his wonderful pocket knives.

The knife was a marvel of folding blades, an ancestor of the Swiss Army Knife.

These Swiss knives are shaped like queen-sized lozenges or torpedoes, but mostly, they look like blood-red space coffins.

The only non-streamline portion is the corkscrew. Even folded down, it still colors outside the streamline with its aggressive shape, which is basically a wiggle dipped in metal, a way of freezing wiggles forever.

Grandfather’s knife, however, was no lozenge, torpedo, or space coffin. It looked more like a gray, soft-shelled lobster that had been rolled to death through fields of stray blades, saws, and scissors. The steel stuck in the softness awkwardly and stayed, causing the dead lob to gain a whole pound. Also, the knife carried a fork and a spoon, both big enough for man-sized mouths.

When Grandmother gave me the knife, I felt the weight of its worth from my birth to my death.

That’s a lot of weight for a nine-year-old to carry.

I had to assemble all the Dans I’d ever been and would be, gathering them into this one moment in order to be alive and sizable enough to endure…