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, December 28, 2009

So this is the New Year (again)


Well, Fraudulent Living has been up on the Internet for over a year now. Seeing as how it's still (only) on the Internet and still being (infrequently) updated, it must mean you have a lot more to learn. Also, being the New Year, it's a really great time to remember how very short you've come up in almost everything you've attempted to do this year. It's also the right time to make fake promises to yourself that you outwardly say you'll try to keep, but inwardly can't even find a part of you that's alive enough to pretend to believe it.

At any rate, this arbitrary date in the middle of the winter is when society has decided to start counting years; and so, to celebrate the passing of one year to the next, you should attend or host a New Year's Eve party. Here are some things to remember about this party: First, you need to build up expectations in your head for it to be non-heinous, just so that when it turns out to be heinous, it will be that much more so. Also, as with anything, you need to make sure you're totally wasted throughout pretty much all of it. If you're hosting the party, this is especially important, because unless you get wasted, you'll spend all your time worrying about whether other people are having fun or are at least comfortable. If you get totally, awesomely wasted, you won't care about what other people are doing, or what they're breaking, in your house. If you're attending a party at someone else's house, it's important to be very drunk because you're drinking someone else's liquor that you didn't pay for. This type of liquor is the tastiest, so drink up.

When the midnight hour approaches, be sure to make everyone be quiet and then turn on the TV and awkwardly watch the ball drop in New York. Then, watch the people partying in the streets and take a good look around you. You're not having that much fun. You've never really had that much fun. Even if they're faking it, you'd never be able to fake having fun that well.

Get another drink and make an embarrassing toast to the New Year that's funny enough to be tolerable but sad enough that everyone who drinks to the toast will feel dirty and guilty.

Then, pass out and call it a year.