Death?

Death should be constantly on your mind, both torturing and soothing you, as you go through your fraudulent life. Where will you die? How horribly will you die? At what point in the next ten minutes will you die? What part of taking out the trash just now will cause you to die? Your relationship with death should be the alcoholic, abusive relationship you'd be having with your spouse if you had one, which you don't. Some days, it's all about love. Or you convince yourself it's about love. But that's just because you don't know what you'd do without the prospect of death sleeping alongside you every night, holding you tight and keeping you secure with cheap promises of how it will take care of you. On other days ("bad" days), death should leave you feeling small, worthless, and metaphorically slapped across the face and lying to your coworkers about having fallen down a staircase last night, even though you don't have a staircase and a fall couldn't possibly have given you that hand-shaped bruise over your eye.

When it's treating you right, death can be used as your fraudulent panacea. Firstly, it's the easiest solution to everything. Don't want to write a cover letter to a potential employer? Thank god there's always the option of drowning yourself in a shallow reflecting pool instead. Are you slightly depressed and somehow "too good" for doctors or therapy? Just lull yourself to sleep with dreams of accidentally tripping in front of a bus. Do you need revenge? Your own death will make a great revenge against anyone, so long as you leave a note telling them it's their fault you're dead. If you use it correctly, the idea of death solves everything.

But what about those bad days, which often coincide with birthdays, the discovery of other people's successes, or the viewing of any show/news article/bus advertisement about disease, when you can't stop obsessing over your own death? Instead of dealing gracefully with the idea that everybody dies, you should plan for it in increasingly entertaining ways that will shock and confuse the greatest amount of onlookers. Alternately, you can plan to leave behind a conspiracy, or at least the greatest amount of unanswerable questions, like how could a person physically manage to choke to death on a single piece of Swiss cheese, and should the eating of Swiss cheese now be banned from your country's children? Of course, your guilt, fear, and inability to accomplish anything will prevent you from ever following through with these plans, but with any luck, you can at least revive your love of death by dreaming of the future headline, "Commuter Loses Face and, Eventually, Life in Freak Braking Accident, Traumatizing 28."

So you have to go to a party

At some point, probably many, you'll be invited to or expected to attend a party. This could be a holiday party for your job or a birthday party for a friend or even something more heinous like a bachelor party or some type of bridal or baby shower. Don't let the word "shower" fool you, though; you'll feel dirtier after it's over than you did when it started.

The first thing you should do when you find out you have to go to a party is pray that you become devastatingly ill. But since God doesn't exist (and even if He does you're pretty sure, from experience, that He enjoys answering your prayers "No."), you can be certain that no divine help is on the way. You're not going to be sick. You're going to feel great. You're going to feel horribly, shamefully great, and you'll have no true excuse for not going. And since lying about this stuff, for some reason, is difficult/impossible for you, you better get ready for this awful party.

Why do you hate parties so much? What's so awful about free food and drinks? Well, if it was really just free food and drinks, it would be great. But that's just the lure. The party itself will undoubtedly have other people there. And you'll be expected to talk to them and pretend like you care about or are listening to things they say. Essentially, the entire night should be spent making other people around you unaware of your desire to die and/or kill them, and constantly dodging new and more horrible people that will certainly only make it harder to hide that desire. It's pretty much like being in Vietnam.

Obviously, the best thing to do at parties is drink. But you need to make sure that you drink enough so that not only do you not care about what anyone else is saying, but that you stop caring about what you say, as well. At some point, secrets that aren't yours to share should start flowing as freely from your mouth as the vomit from the girl you knew would end up vomiting when you first set eyes on her, either from alcohol or her regular schedule. If you run into your friend that invited you to the party, it would be ideal if you could confess a secret love for him or her. Couch it in things like "Look, you don't have to say anything back, but..." And then stare for an uncomfortably long time at this person's eyes, as though you're waiting for them to say something back. If you don't have a secret love to confess, then begin criticizing something dear to your friend, like their outfit, their house, or their awful friends. Then laugh it off like it was a joke when you both know it was probably the truest thing you've ever said.

If this party is a fraudulent success for you, you can be assured of several exciting things the next day: total embarrassment, a splitting headache, and the near-absolute assurance that you'll never be invited to another one. 

Your politics

No matter what your politics are, you should profess them really loudly whenever asked about them. However, you should also make sure you do little to no actual work when it comes to advancing any agenda whatsoever. In fact, you should barely be able to find the energy to vote once every four years. You shouldn't even consider voting during the mid-term elections. But if you do go to vote during these off-year elections, make sure you know absolutely nothing about any candidate and that you strictly vote down your party line. When it comes to picking judges that don't have party affiliation next to their name, just vote "no" on every one of them. That way, any time a court ruling happens that you don't agree with, you can feel completely absolved of any involvement.

Your inability to make any kind of real decision for yourself should, nonetheless, never stop you from feeling that you can make decisions for everyone else. The fact that you don't actually lead a life, but rather follow it, lemming-like, over the cliff of failure on a daily basis -- this should have no real bearing on your ability to pass judgment on other people's screwed-up ways of life. Keeping this in mind, even when you don't vote or don't go to the rally for the cause you're really interested in, you should heap scorn on other people who don't vote or attend the rally. It sounds like hypocrisy, but really it's just fraudulent living. Other people don't have that excuse, so it's your job to judge them harshly for their socially irresponsible actions. Now that you've coerced someone into voting or doing the political thing you know you should do but won't, you can feel totally absolved for not doing it yourself. 

Since your political views, no matter what they are, are absolutely true, you should feel allowed, nay, obligated, to brutally ear-rape every stranger around you with various pointed rants on controversial topics. The best place to do this is the bus or the subway. Ideally, you should get into a conversation with a friend about something like gay marriage, gun rights, the death penalty or O.J. Simpson. You should spout your utterly true view on the topic just loud enough that anyone within earshot will hear you, while simultaneously enraging and embarrassing the friend with whom you're talking. This is your sacred duty as an intelligent, sometimes-voting member of society. 

Also, you should constantly note how almost every action you take in your fraudulent life should automatically disqualify you from public office in the future, yet nevertheless still believe that some day you will be the President.

Regret

By now, you've probably become one of those people who says life is about learning, and you claim to regret nothing you've done, no matter how painful, maiming, or "Man, I accidentally caused the zombie apocalypse" it was. This is fine, but make sure that while you make this proclamation you're regretting what you did last night, or last year, or maybe even the last ten years. To be fully fraudulent, you should regret every single choice you ever make, no matter how negligible it seems. For instance, when you panic at the deli over what type of bread you want for your sandwich, pick rye bread over sourdough because you think it sounds healthier, then treat the bread and everything inside like poison when it's not what you wanted. And instead of saving the uneaten part of the sandwich, throw it away in defiance, an action you'll later regret when you're hungry and realize you had a perfectly good half sandwich that you paid for and wasted.

Of course, romantic relationships are the easiest and best places to overflow your life with regret. Let's say you meet someone online; make sure you openly profess your admiration and love before ever meeting them for real. Then, when you meet them in person and equate the experience with double-ended food poisoning, think back to the ridiculously glowing emails you sent and regret every action that led to your parents meeting, getting married, and deciding not to abort you. Essentially, you should regret getting into relationships, continuing relationships, and then getting out of relationships. And then, later, getting back into the relationships you already got out of once.

When it comes to the rest of your life, aside from school choices, job choices, and housing choices, your innate guilt and fear should keep you from making any hugely bad decisions, like robbing the preloaded-gun store. Instead, you should focus on regretting smaller things, like the outfit you chose to wear today that you weren't sure matched and are now totally conscious of every time someone looks at (and undoubtedly judges) you. You should also regret buying that plant you saw at Home Depot, because as you watch it slowly die, you realize you already knew you were incapable of sustaining life. As you bury it with tears of regret streaming down your face, promise yourself you will never kill another plant by owning it. Then go out and adopt a puppy.

Guilt, part 2: what you're doing

No matter what situation you're in, you should not be enjoying yourself. You should always feel like your time would be better spent doing something other than what you're actually doing. And because of this, you should always feel guilty about everything you're doing.

You have many talents, but you do nothing at all with them except congratulate yourself secretly about how talented you are. So when Friday comes along and you decide to go out and get drinks with your friends (or by yourself, if you have no friends), you should feel like every moment at that bar and every sip of alcohol you take is like throwing your hands up and giving up on life. How can you enjoy that vodka tonic when you have a book you've been meaning to (and telling everyone you know you are going to) write? How can you sleep at night knowing that those are 8 hours where you could be cleaning your disgusting room or doing your back taxes or just sitting on the computer looking up symptoms for the various illnesses you know you probably have?

The worst thing you could ever do is decide to take a nap in the middle of the day. If you decide to do this, the first 30 minutes of it should be spent completely awake, worried about the horrible, but totally non-urgent, flaws in your personality and upcoming events in your life. Even if you know you would have spent these 2 hours, if awake, surfing the Internet or playing video games, you should still think that every moment you lay in bed getting the rest your body needs is a moment you could be spending saving your life from catastrophic failure. Any nap you take should comprise some of the most stressful, unsatisfying minutes in your entire life. And you should "wake up" feeling more tired and worried about your life than you did before you laid down. 

Then, that night when you're completely unable to fall asleep because your body thinks it already went to bed once today, you should by no means take this time to do something productive like clean your room, do your back taxes or find out on the Internet that mouse droppings can give you hantavirus. Instead, you should just lay in bed, awake, hating yourself and watching the clock inch closer and closer to morning. If you put enough energy into hating yourself, you'll eventually tire and fall asleep. You'll get a solid 90 minutes of fitful "rest" before your alarm goes off and you're forced to engage in your most guilt-ridden activity -- going to the job that pays you more than you deserve for doing only slightly more than might be expected of a pretty intelligent ape.

Buying stuff

When you make up your mind to purchase something you can't reasonably buy without actually checking your account balance, like electronics, music equipment, or a car, there are several things that should happen. First of all, you should admit that this item is something you don't need, but that it's something you really, really want this week. Convince yourself that you've earned it because your week was shitty (this will almost always be true). Next, tell yourself you'll make up for the cost by cutting all dairy, fruits, and vegetables from your diet for a month, which you calculate will save you roughly $5,000. In the meantime, you'll drink Tang to prevent scurvy.

When you finally go to the store, make sure you've done no research into what a good price is, what specifics you're looking for, or even the actual name of the product. Don't make eye contact with any salespeople, because the answers to the basic burning questions you have regarding this product are probably obvious to everyone but you. In fact, rather than ask for help, just examine the fronts and backs of the competing products for awhile as if you're some kind of expert. If a salesperson does approach you, make sure you spout all the product-specific words you've ever picked up from commercials or ads or comic-strip references. For instance, if you're buying a hi-def TV, ask something like, "So I hear this has...1080 lines of...picture, right? Not 1060b." Then, when the salesperson gives you the look that indicates you did a bad job of faking, ask a few useless questions, like, "Oh, this one is made in China? What about that one?" This will make you appear to understand that where the item was made is important to its quality.

If you're really lucky, or if you're at Guitar Center, the salesperson will also have no idea what he's talking about, and the two of you can enter a competition in which the winner spouts the most impressive-sounding fake sentences.
Salesperson: "So you're looking for the best hi-def TV?"
You: "Yeah. I thought this one looked good. Isn't Audio-Visual Integrity a good brand?"
Salesperson: "It is if you want a shitty system. You might as well just spend the extra $300 and get the one with the quad-core reverb upgrade."
You: "Oh... Yeah? My friend who has that said it kind of sucked."
Salesperson: "Well, does he have the gold-plated EGDI cables that go with it?"
You: "No, he has the BFDD cables, which are supposed to be way better."
Salesperson: "Uhhh... Dude, you can't use BDFF cables with quad-core. The picture will look like garbage."
You: "Not when you have the interchanger, I thought."
Salesperson: "What kind of... interchanger does he have?"
You: "The, uh, one recommended by Consumer Report. With the two...outputs."
(brief pause)
Salesperson: "Hey, you know what looks great on this TV? The IMAX scenes in The Dark Knight."
You: "Yeah! Are you glad they gave the Oscar to Heath Ledger?"
Salesperson: "Well, I mean, he was awesome in that role, but I think they gave it to him just because he died, and it wouldn't have mattered if he was great or not. Which is total BS."
You: "I met Heath Ledger once."
Salesperson: "That's awesome!"
You: "Okay. Yeah, I'm just gonna go ahead and buy this one."

After bringing your item home and realizing you're missing several necessary accessories, wait for several weeks, preferably until after the warranty has expired, to try out your item, because you're waiting for sales on the accessories. Make sure you get the accessories for $15 instead of the regular $18, because you didn't even bother comparing prices on your $2,000 item, and since the idea of bargaining cripples you with fear, even in a store where they expect you to bargain, you were happy to pay more than the listed amount for it. Then go out and treat yourself to some fresh orange juice and sushi, because a $20 lunch is nothing next to the amount you just spent.

Breaking up

Somehow you've sustained a relationship with someone else for longer than a month. Don't congratulate yourself over this, though, because now you're really screwed. Now you have to break up. And this process, whether initiated by you or your partner, is deliciously torturous and should be savored like a bite of rancid venison. 

Why do you have to break up? Well, things are probably going too well, aren't they? And what usually happens when things go really well in your life? That's right, someone dies. 

But one of the most important rules to remember when you're living fraudulently is that things that are hard are bad. And usually avoidable for a while. So, with this in mind, stay in the dangerous relationship you know will destroy you or someone you love for a good while after you decide you need to break up. This will allow you to do awesome things like take out your frustration and resentment by snapping at your partner for no reason. Or maybe even purposely getting drunk enough to mentally excuse making out with three people at a bar, none of whom are your partner, but all of whom know your partner and are maybe even your own coworkers. 

The best part about this approach is that, if your partner has any self respect at all, you'll likely get dumped. Being dumped is always preferable to dumping because you don't have to actually do anything but get destroyed, which is passive and something you're quite good at. 

If you're really unlucky, though, you'll have to take the initiative and break up with the other person. You should take responsibility at this point for everything that was ever wrong with the relationship and do your best to make the other person see that for their own mental and maybe even physical safety they should get far away from you. 

After the break up, you should spend about a month lying to yourself about how great it is to be single and how you hated having someone to answer to and how freedom is so valuable to you. Then you should get blindingly drunk, have awkward sex with your ex and begin to doubt everything you've ever believed about yourself. 

As you can see, breaking up is pretty exhausting. Instead of getting into a relationship with a person in the first place, next time try to remember all the free porn sites you have bookmarked. 

Revenge

In your varied dealings with other people, you'll find along the way that someone may rip your heart out and bake it into a pie that makes the cat throw up, or stab your beloved parent, or just sort of really rub you the wrong way at work by constantly stealing your stapler without asking. When these sorts of things occur, the right thing to do is to plan and exact horrific revenge. Now, different problems require different solutions, but the primary thing to remember is that your plan should always either backfire or possibly put you, and not the person you're revenging upon, in danger.

So what sorts of revenge options are available to you? First of all, living well is not the best revenge. Actually, it might be, but living well is not an option for you, specifically. For an alternative, let's look at a scenario: You're driving and a car cuts you off, or someone behind you has honked unjustifiably. They might very well have been honking to warn you about the toddler on the training bike you're about to run over, but it doesn't matter. Another driver has ruined your day and spiked your blood pressure up until you're half-blind with rage. Your natural instinct now should be to follow them and try to make them fear for their lives, even if it means you're missing your job interview or the birth of your child. If you're on a highway, make sure you keep zooming right in front of them, then stepping on your brakes to make them rear-end you, because your being rear-ended and getting whiplash will show them. Or you can drive up alongside them and flip them off over and over again, despite the fact that they're not looking, and in your desperate attempts to get them to look, you should end up rear-ending the driver in front of you, because that will also show them. Alternately, you can roll down your windows and throw gummi bears at their car furiously. Whatever it is you do, make sure no one learns any lessons from the incident.

Now let's look at a different example: You've broken up with your significant other-type person, and you want them to slip and fall Three Stooges-style into a pot of rusty knives and oil. Revenge options worthy of Satan should go through your head for days or possibly weeks, like writing, "You suck!!!" on the wall of their Facebook page (the problem being that you deleted them as your friend the second you broke up (this should have been your first devilish revenge)). Then you should go on a few dates or at least hook up with your ex's best friend or enemy, whom you don't find remotely attractive, and who will give you more imaginary STDs to layer upon your existing imaginary (but probably real) STDs. After plotting several levels of death and writing numerous insulting emails you don't send (or possibly send while drunk or pretending to be drunk) that only make you look stupid, you should finally fall into depressive despair and forget to eat, eventually getting sick. While lying in bed half-conscious, you'll realize that your illness and inevitable death are clearly the best revenge, because you should be deluding yourself into thinking your ex still cares about you. Also, your ex has no idea that you're sick and dying anyway, but you're pretty sure someone will tell them about the funeral, and that's when you'll be vindicated.

When it comes to less urgent daily matters, make sure that you internalize your anger at your annoying coworkers or work extra hard until you give yourself an ulcer, because your pleasant demeanor and hardy work ethic will surely prove to them once and for all that they suck, which, in the end, is the only real revenge you've got.

Family

If you still have any family left that's alive and speaking to you, then you will on occasion have to interact with them. Usually, this happens around the holidays. But there are other times when you'll be forced, obligated or guilted into dealing with them. Here are some acceptable reasons for reaching out to your family.

You need money. You really, really need it. You just got laid off, maybe. Or perhaps the $19.00 that Netflix is about to automatically take from you is going to overdraft your bank account. Or maybe you owe money to someone who has threatened to hurt you if you don't pay it back. Whatever the reason, you really need money. So give those parents a call. They can't deny you, you're their child! All of this (meaning: you) is basically their fault. The least they can do in return for making you alive is to give you some money.

You need advice about something. Usually this will be because you found mouse droppings in your kitchen and have no idea whatsoever how to handle this. This is a good time to panic and seriously consider burning your own apartment down. But what you really need is for someone to yell at you and tell you that you're acting like an idiot and just go to the damn store and buy some traps and stop interrupting Jeopardy. This is exactly what grandmothers are best at doing.

You need someone to fix your car. This might be because you've owned this same car for five years and have changed the oil so infrequently that you don't even know where the nearest place is that does that sort of thing for people. Or maybe you were rolling down the car window to light a cigarette and accidentally veered into the center divider on the freeway, causing your car to spin out and slam into a freeway sign. Or something. Uncles and/or older brothers that didn't go to college tend to be the best at fixing broken cars. Give one of them a call and be prepared with a six pack of domestic beer, preferably in cans. Also, get ready to pretend like you're understanding them or even listening when they try to tell you about carburetors or valves or how a car needs oil.

You're in jail. This seems to be the best reason to call your older brother or sister who did go to college. Just remember, as long as you're in for something non-violent, only a horrible family member will not accept the charges for the collect call. Or not offer up the pink slip of their car to the bail bondsman on your behalf. Hold a grudge for a long time against this older sibling until you end up back in jail. Then simply repeat the above steps, ad nauseum.

If you ARE the older brother or sister who went to college,  your degree in Philosophy or Theatre has probably not prepared you for the constant bombardment of problems from your ungrateful family members. You can look for answers in Nietzsche or in the dysfunctional-family dramas of Edward Albee, but it's probably best to just pack up and move to another city with no forwarding address.

Change

Since you constantly feel that everything in your life is wrong, it's good once in awhile to make changes to show you're "doing something." These changes might include finding a new job, dating someone new, or starting some new diet or exercise routine. When you're feeling exceptionally stagnant, consider moving to a new place. This might mean a new apartment or, when things couldn't be any worse, a new city. To do it the correct fraudulent way, check your reasons for moving; you should be running away from something intangible, like heartbreak or angst, not moving towards something concrete, like a new job or friends/family. Ultimately, you should always be running away from yourself, only to find that, surprisingly, you've followed yourself to your new destination.

Several months (or years) before your move, start by telling everyone how much you hate your current city and how you can't meet people there. Insist that people aren't this shallow in the rest of the world and harp on all the negative things around you. Then talk about how you're thinking about moving to City A, City B, or Portland, despite the fact that you've never been to Portland (but have been told by everyone you know how awesome Portland is, even though half of them have never been there either). If it's close to election time, talk about how you're going to move to Canada if the wrong candidate wins, despite the fact that you'll still be a U.S. citizen under U.S. rule even if you're physically in Canada.

Eventually, you should start focusing on City A more and more, talking about how the ____ scene there is great, and how you loved the city when you visited (though you probably only had a layover there for a half-hour and never left the airport). Begin telling everyone you know that you're going to move there, like it's a threat. Tell them so often that you'll have no way out of it except by looking like a complete asshole if you don't actually do it. Later, when you leave, people will laud your courage for taking a big step rather than realizing you're leaving because you're now too ashamed to stay.

Before arriving, make only the most minimal of plans and gather only a rough estimate of how much money you'll need to get started. Treat this experience like you're tossing yourself into the ocean to see if you can swim, even though you can barely, metaphorically or otherwise, avoid drowning in day-to-day experiences like riding the subway. Laud your own survival skills when you don't die within a week, then realize that without the Internet you would have been dead by the end of the first day.

Once you're in your new home, the rest is easy: Set up your Internet connection immediately, talk to your friends online all day exactly the same way you did when you lived in your last city, then walk around the city listening to your iPod nonstop, complaining to yourself about how you don't meet any new people, for some reason, except the ones who think you're a hooker.

Public bathrooms and you

The problem with you, besides everything else, is that you worry so much you probably have a really awesomely fucked up stomach. You should basically be, at this point, so extremely gastrointestinally screwed that you will develop a minor panic attack any time you don't know where the nearest clean bathroom is. If you live in a city like NYC where there are virtually no public bathrooms except for the ones with queues outside of them in Starbucks that smell like a werewolf just had an abortion inside, then this will make daily life for you almost unlivable.

So, let's say you're out and about and the unthinkable happens--you have an urgent need to use the bathroom (for purposes other than to cry) and you don't know where one is. The first thing you should do is completely panic. You should start sweating profusely and your eyes should begin darting crazily around your field of vision. You should also begin to mutter to yourself. By this point, any person passing by that sees you should figure you are in the middle of a psychotic break.

Next, you need to find a bathroom. Make your way toward the nearest place of business that seems likely to have a public restroom. If you're lucky enough to be near a Target or K-Mart or something like that, you're golden. These places always have large public bathrooms that are totally covered in urine but functional. If not, and you find that your only option is a nearby restaurant, the best thing to do is to compose yourself and act like you're meeting your party at the back of the restaurant. Walk right in, look straight ahead, and make your way directly to the back where, please god, the bathroom has to be.

Once you're in the public bathroom, this is when the fun really starts. If anyone at all walks in, you have to stop. No matter what point you are at in the process. No one can hear your shameful bodily functions. Even if this means you are literally doubled over in pain, your face resting on the putrid bathroom stall wall, and every inch of your body begging for death, you must never, ever let anyone else hear you poop. Ever.

If you make it out of this alive, you deserve a treat. Go to McDonald's and eat a Big Mac and some french fries and a shake and then act surprised when you do this all over again in 45 minutes.

Your taste in things: Food

You already know what your regular diet should consist of when it's only up to you. However, you'll often go out to eat with other people, in which case a gallon of coffee, cheese and gum won't be acceptable. When, say, you go on a date with someone new, one of the first chances you'll have to fraudulate is through your expressed interest in unusual and/or ethnic food.

When your date forces you to respond to "Where should we go for dinner?" make sure you name something generically but obviously foreign, like "Japanese" or "Ethiopian" (or, preferably, "You pick"). Whatever you do, don't specify any meat-related foods, because if you live in a major metropolitan area, your date will likely turn out to be a vegetarian. If they are, make sure you say something like, "Yeah, I'm basically a vegetarian, although I don't know if I could give up fish. I never eat red meat and rarely eat chicken or pork." You should declare this vehemently, even though you recently won a free meal at a steakhouse by consuming their 150-oz. steak in one sitting and then had chicken nuggets later that night. This statement is a good way to start a relationship, because you'll find that every time you go out, you'll be forced into not ordering what you want and you'll develop a bitterness and eventual hatred towards your significant other, who probably doesn't really care that you eat meat anyway. Even if your date isn't vegetarian, you'll have set up a precedent for eating at new and sometimes weird places when all you really want is a piece of pepperoni pizza.

On the other hand, you'll often go out with friends as well. When this happens, make sure you only go to places for kitsch value, like Red Lobster, or Wendy's, or Chuck E. Cheese, where the food is terrible and the people who aren't there for kitsch value are depressing shades of gray or massively overweight. Then, later, when your intestines are bloated and gooey and you've wasted the same amount of money, or more, on what could have been a really good meal not comprised of pure lard, make sure you promise yourself never to pick a restaurant for kitsch value again. Then, two days later, suggest Sizzler when your friend asks you where you want to go out to eat.

Your personal security

Part of being truly fraudulent has to do with being fully aware of the backwards and virulent things you do, but doing them anyway. It's an almost out-of-body experience where you look at yourself from some other plane and watch, helplessly, as your body goes through the familiar and sickening motions of fraudulence. It's like being bitten by a cobra and losing the ability to move your body while you remain fully conscious, feeling trapped by a body that won't obey you, until your heart stops. Only instead of the process taking 60 minutes to kill you, it takes 60 years.

Anyway, one of the things that you'll notice about yourself eventually is how cavalier you treat pretty much every situation you get into, no matter how great the personal danger. In fact, you rarely, if ever, think about how much danger you are in before getting into a given situation. This is always an afterthought. Considering how profoundly fundamental fear is in your life, this lack of forethought should cause you to seriously question your basic mental health.

Take, for example, your insistence that riding the subway to any part of the city at any hour is totally fine and safe and not at all sketchy. You probably feel this way basically right until the gigantic man with the trash bags that are filled with something you can't see but are pretty sure smell just like fetid human remains boards the train. 

Or maybe this manifests for you by doing things like going skydiving, bungee jumping, having unprotected sex, driving drunk over a mountain, doing drugs with people that have rabies, walking barefoot down Ninth Avenue, walking barefoot in your gym locker room, leaning against your third-floor, poorly constructed balcony railing, drunk, not disabling your phone before getting drunk, or any number of other things that could cause you to die.

The important thing with this, though, is to recognize it and then continue on with your life. Like those lucky people who got to see the signs on the freeway that some hacker manipulated to say "Zombies ahead! Run!" Some people might pull over, even just for a second, to think about what that means and maybe to try to find some kind of confirmation or denial of the alleged zombies. Then there were the people that are just like you and just kept driving. And hoping.

Happiness!!!

All your life, you think you've been striving for happiness. Happiness has been your undefined, ultimate goal, where everything will be great for forever and ever and ever with little to no effort. But because you know this state is impossible, happiness is your enemy, in the way that depression, by giving you an excuse to hide under the covers and do nothing, is your best friend. Your attempts at happiness should be flushed down the toilet like an unwanted prom-night baby. Real happiness would mean you'd have to go out and do something with your life because depression wasn't holding you back anymore. Real happiness, to you, would mean waiting for all your happiness to collapse and leave you curled in a ball on the floor mumbling, "Why?!"

If you must go looking for happiness, make sure you look in all the wrong places, like Bed, Bath & Beyond. Here, you'll find your sudden obsession with soft towels can be momentarily sated by paying $11 for a decently nice towel. Then, when you take a shower and use it for the first time, you can think, "Wow, this is soft!" Then you'll think, "Wait, I just paid $11 for a towel?" Your momentary not-unhappiness will be balanced out by your confusion over why you wasted your money, and things can continue on like normal after the incident is over. Another wrong place to look is any fast food restaurant, where you'll pretend french fries will give you happiness, not a raging stomachache after eating two fries.

The truth is, if you live fraudulently, you should never let yourself be overly happy, unless it's for a short moment, and only if it's to show how awful the rest of your life is in comparison. Because as dreadful as a constant, dull, droning existence is, you never really get to see its full glory until you've had that brief moment where you made eyes with the hot stranger from a distance, and for once they made eyes at you simultaneously, and then you got closer and realized the hot stranger was really Don Knotts, only less appealing. At that point you're able to look over the bigger picture and tell yourself, "Oh! Yeah... This is really for shit." And then, as time goes on, you'll find yourself trying to re-create that moment of joy, and the contrast will grow deeper until you finally find that you've fallen secretly in love with Don Knotts, even though he's not attractive and no longer alive.