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."