Beck – "Loser" (1993)

I’m a loser, baby

So why don’t you kill me?

Every Tuesday, I take a little trip up I-270 to to Frederick, Maryland, where my daughter and her two children live.

I pick up my grandson at daycare and take him home, where I spend an hour or so playing with him and his two-year-old sister – my only granddaughter, and the apple of my eye.  After dinner, I say goodbye and head to a nearby brewery for the weekly trivia competition.

Last week, my granddaughter wanted to stay close to her mom and dad – she refused to let me hold her.  I was taken aback by her standoffishness because she’s usually very comfortable with me.

I think I know what the problem was.  After winning at trivia seven times in nine weeks in December and January, my trivia team has hit the wall – we finished out of the money the next four weeks.

My granddaughter could smell the stink of LOSER all over her grandfather.  No wonder she wouldn’t have anything to do with me.

Can you blame her?  Who wants to be cuddled by a BIG OLD LOSER?

*     *     *     *     *

The Diamond Hill-Jarvis (TX) high school football team suffered through a bit of a dry spell between 2010 and 2017, when they lost 77 consecutive football games.

My trivia team’s dry spell isn’t quite as dry as that one.  What makes it feel so bad is that Dynamite! – that’s the name of my team – was a well-oiled trivia machine in December and January, when we won seven times in nine weeks.  (I know I mentioned that seven-out-of-nine streak above, but I cling to it like a shipwrecked man clings to a life preserver.)

Since then, we’ve had ZERO first-place finishes.  

I don’t know about where you come from.  But where I come from, four weeks without a trivia win is UNACCEPTABLE!  (Hell, two weeks without a win is unacceptable!)  

I don’t expect to win every week, but OH-FOR-FOUR?  

You can f*ck your oh-for-four and the horse it rode in on!

*     *     *     *     *

Let me assure you that Dynamite! didn’t gone oh-for-four because I suddenly got stupid.

Ask anyone – I am a trivia GOD!  (Always have been, always will be.)

But as John Donne once observed, no man is an island entire of itself when it comes to trivia.  (Donne wasn’t a bad trivia player himself – if you had a question about the Bible or British literature, Donne was your guy.)  When you’re competing against teams with five, six, or even seven players, you simply cannot win all by your lonesome.  You need help!

My usual trivia teammates are the bartenders at the brewery where I go to play every Tuesday night.  

Occasionally I get some help from the cornhole “widows” – the wives and/or girlfriends of the guys who play in the weekly cornhole tournament that is held in an adjacent room at the same brewery that hosts trivia contests.  (It appears that only males are allowed to play cornhole – at least I’ve never seen a women tossing bags.)

When they tire of watching the exciting cornhole action, some of the WAGs take a break from the games and sit at the bar to have a beer and help Dynamite! out.

*     *     *     *     *

The bartenders and cornhole WAG I played with regularly during that seven-wins-in-nine-weeks streak are named Lauren, Laura, and Lara.  

I have no clue which is which – I’m not very good with names, and expecting me to distinguish women with three virtually identical monikers is unreasonable – so I can’t refer to them by name in this post.  

No matter.  I’ll just call them L1, L2, and L3.

One of the bartenders – we’ll call her L1 – turned quisling on me recently.  (Vidkun Quisling – the Norwegian politician who collaborated with Hitler in World War II – would be a good subject for a trivia question.)  

A few weeks ago, L1’s husband came to trivia accompanied by a couple of friends.  I certainly understand why L1 would want to play with her spouse.  But while the husband hasn’t played trivia since, his companions have become regulars – and L1 has continued to play with them.  

*     *     *     *     *

The cornhole WAG – let’s call her L2 – can’t really be counted on because she doesn’t show until her husband/boyfriend gets eliminated from the cornhole tournament.  (Fortunately for Dynamite!, that’s usually pretty early in the evening.)

And last week, she didn’t show up at all.  (For some reason, the cornhole tournament attracted very few players last week – maybe because they all stayed home to watch the “State of the Union” address on TV? )

*     *     *     *     *

That leaves L3 – based on outward appearances, she looks like just another bartender.  But I think she’s some kind of supervisor because she’s quite a bit older than the other bartenders and also pretty bossy.  

L3 is the most reliable teammate I have, but even she can’t always be counted on.  For one thing, she consistently gives higher priority to serving beer, collecting empty glasses, and closing out tabs than she does to helping me win at trivia.  

L3 also has a disturbing tendency to skip trivia night every so often, claiming that she is “too tired.”  I know that older women like her do tend to get tired quite easily, but I have it on good authority that the real reason L3 skips trivia night is so she can watch episodes of This Is Us.

*     *     *     *     *

L1, L2, and L3 aren’t the only people who play on my team.  There’s usually a third bartender working on trivia/cornhole nights – although that person is usually too busy to help very much.  My daughter and son-in-law occasionally will come to help me out, and I’ve been known to dragoon perfect strangers who happened to be seated at the bar near me to help fight the good fight for Dynamite!

But I’ve gotten no help from family members or random strangers the last month or so – which made the loss of L1 and the unreliability of L2 and L3 costly indeed.

Something had to be done to turn the ship around.  So after our last defeat, I had a heart-to-heart talk with L3.

“When you are hiring new waitstaff, you need to give much higher priority to a potential hire’s trivia abilities!” I told her.  “And when you assigning shifts, you need to make sure the bartenders who will contribute the most to Dynamite! are scheduled to work Tuesday evenings!”

“And it wouldn’t hurt if you scheduled an extra bartender to work on Tuesday nights,” I added.  “That way, the smartest servers can focus on trivia while the ones with room-temperature IQs do all the work.”

I’ve offered to assist with hiring bartenders and scheduling their shifts.  (I’ve never actually owned or operated a small business, so you might question whether I would know what I was doing.  But how hard can it be?  Seriously . . .)

*     *     *     *     *

In the next 2 or 3 lines, I’ll tell you what happened at trivia last Tuesday, when Dynamite! tried to snap its oh-for-four trivia streak.  (Hint: it didn’t end well.)

In the meantime, let's listen to “Loser,” which was a surprise hit for the essentially homeless musician Beck David Hansen – who is better known as simply Beck:

“Loser” was originally released as a 12-inch vinyl single in 1993 by a small independent record label that went by the name Bong Load.  Only 500 copies of the record were pressed.

It somehow enough radio play in Los Angeles to get the attention of an A&R guy at a major label, and the rest is history.  “Loser” eventually sold 600,000 copies in the U.S. alone, and topped the Billboard “Modern Rack Tracks” chart.

Click here to watch the official music video for “Loser.”

Click on the link below to buy the record from Amazon: