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.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Your awesome apartment


Most of your living situations throughout your life should be absolutely wretched. You should almost always be paying far more in rent than you ever believed you'd be able to pay, or if not, you should be living in the kind of squalor that would make for a great Charles Dickens novel.

But at some point in your life, you'll end up living in an awesome apartment. It will be the kind of place that everyone wants to visit, where parties will almost constantly be held, and where, for once, you won't be ashamed to bring someone home to. Once this happens, you're really fucked.

Everything that is good in your life now rides on this apartment. The only reason anyone likes you is because of your neat paint job in your kitchen. The only reason you have a boyfriend/girlfriend is that they like sleeping in your house better than in their own. If you ever lose this apartment, you'll lose your life with it. Every moment you spend not thinking about how you're about to die from throat cancer should be spent wondering how soon it will be before the one good thing in your life, your apartment, gets destroyed.

To this end, you should develop severe OCD about things like the iron and the stove. Even though you never use either of them, you must constantly worry that they're on and burning down your apartment. Also, every window in your apartment should be viewed only as a Thief's Entrance. A Thiefway, if you will. They should remain closed at all times, no matter how hot this makes your apartment or how much the air starts to smell like halitosis. If any of your Thiefways don't have locks on them you should think about lining the floor under them with broken glass and upturned nails. These will obviously only cut your own feet and give you tetanus, but in the end, getting lockjaw would probably do you good.