Your life is an exercise in balance. How close to rock-bottom can you hover without ever actually getting there? This is a question you strive to answer every day as you make your way clumsily through life. It’s a question that underlines all the decisions you make, both big and small, from who to date to how to manage your meager finances to what poisonous substances to consume. It’s what keeps you up at night and what feeds your generalized anxiety disorder as well as your myriad, troubling addictions. This question is really the ultimate goal of your whole life.

Lucky for you, Fraudulent Living is here to show you the way. The true way. The way of the neurotic, self-obsessed, success-avoiding loser. It’s time to quit pussyfooting around and do this for real.

That’s right, “pussyfooting.”

Welcome to Fraudulent Living.

Monday, September 14, 2009

Your vermin


So, since you live in a city, you have vermin in your house. But don't think that it's just because you live in a city. Don't think that somehow your infestation isn't your fault. Because it is. It's your fault. You're to blame for not only your own mouse/bedbug/cockroach/silverfish/snake infestation, but for everyone else's that's ever come into contact with you. Because obviously you are now a carrier. You're a vermin carrier. You're like a kangaroo, but instead of your pouch containing a cute little kangaroo kid, it carries a variety of terrifying insect eggs and spores. You're like Noah's arc, if God wanted the world to just be shit.

You don't leave food lying around and you tend to bathe somewhat regularly and do your laundry as much as the next slacker, but you'll find that none of this matters when it comes to how much vermin love you. You can maintain the cleanest little home with various bug- and mouse-killing devices located in strategic places, and none of this will help you. You're just a magnet for awful. And this is especially evident with your various vermin infestations. There's no rhyme or reason here. Just fraudulence.

One thing you can try to do to stop the problem is continue to poison everything around you, especially your own bloodstream. If you can barely survive having your blood in your body, then the bugs don't have a chance, right? This is a great strategy because it will make you drunk, high or just almost dead pretty much all the time. This is necessary if you plan on ever being able to sleep in your terrarium of a bedroom ever again.

You can also try asking your land/slum lord if he or she will please bring an exterminator to your apartment, but since you only pay this person half your monthly income for the privilege of living in their gigantic, non-functioning game of Mouse Trap(tm), they will probably just put on a fake moustache and hat, come up to your apartment with a spray bottle full of Raid, and you'll thank them profusely. Because spraying Raid in the corners of your bedroom is what you've become to accustomed to accepting as a solution to most problems in your life.


Friday, September 11, 2009

Your 9/11


Every day is like 9/11 for you.

Your life is a gigantic, melodramatic tragedy that seems to repeat the same images, over and over, ad nauseum, with no regard for taste or anyone's sensibilities. Really, the only difference between your life and a terrorist attack is that no one cares about you. No one remembers where they were when you stopped by. The only ones who commemorate your anniversary are you and the liquor shop owner who nods, sadly, when you tell him it's your birthday and that's why you're buying Jameson instead of your normal $4.99 bottle of red wine that's just called "Red Wine."

Your autumn


As summer fades away and you realize that you did absolutely nothing of interest to anyone, you should embrace the coming autumn as a fresh chance to waste yet another season. If you live someplace that has real seasons, you should get excited by the idea of going to do autumn-y things, like watching the leaves turn, or going for a hike in the forest, or paying attention in that class you're taking, knowing full well that you won't do any of that. The fall television lineup should be the only thing that you're reasonably sure you might take advantage of.

You should also reflect on how sweet the death in the air tastes and what that might say about you as a person. You hate the spring because of allergies; you hate the summer because it makes you feel fatter, more lonely, and decidedly more sweaty and smelly than you normally do. The only time you come close to a feeling of happiness is when the world is literally dying all around you. This, among countless other things, is what makes you awful.

Autumn also brings new opportunities for fraudulence that are weather-specific. The clothing you wear can now be layered and used over and over. If you have a light jacket you like to don when it gets a little nippy outside, make sure you never get it dry cleaned and that it has never been dry cleaned in the past. There should be split-pea soup stains on one or more of the lapels of your jacket and these stains should be from at least one year ago (preferably two). If you smoke, now is a good time to increase your intake, like when bears binge on food before the winter, since when it gets really cold you'll obviously stop smoking because going outside to smoke will be too painful. Yeah. You sure will quit smoking this winter. Mhm.

Speaking of winter, as you prepare for it, be sure not to use any of your time or money this autumn to buy anything like a winter coat or boots. These should only be purchased after the SECOND snow storm of the winter. Why second? Because only by then will you be desperate, cold and bruised enough to finally drag yourself into a Filene's Basement to spend money on a coat that will certainly not fit you since all that will be left on the racks are coats that could cover an entire house or be snug on a squirrel. Your coat should always make you look like you have severe mental problems.

The only preparation for winter that you should do this autumn is to go to the bar and set up 182372187 online dating accounts in the desperate hope of finding someone to keep you company in the winter. If you've done autumn right, by the end of it you'll be broke, still sadly single, own nothing but shorts and tank-tops and have come one step closer to full-blown alcoholism.