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, December 13, 2012

Your home

One day you'll be sitting in your small apartment in New York City, broke because you just paid your rent and because you're just always broke, and you'll decide it's time to get the hell out and go buy a house somewhere instead of writing obscenely large checks every month to the landlord that doesn't even pretend to care about your vermin problems anymore.

At this point, you should make an impulsive decision to move out of state and find a quiet place to set down your roots. There's nothing particularly fraudulent about wanting to be someplace quiet, or even about making a split decision to move out of the big city and try someplace new. What's fraudulent is how you think having yourself as a landlord would be in any way preferable to the 20-year-old Greek landlord you used to give rent to in exchange for not fixing things.

You should have very grand plans when you first buy the house to learn how to be a real homeowner who does home improvement projects and tracks real estate values and, like, mows the lawn. But not long after you receive a notice that you will be fined by the city if you don't cut your front "lawn" (weeds) to a non-blight height, you will realize that you're just going to have to pay somebody to do this. All of this.

So now, whatever money you've saved by not paying extortion-size rent in the city is now completely spoken for with house stuff. Oh, and don't be surprised by the fact that you now get a bill for EVERYTHING. Including trash pickup. And water. And taxes. It's never ending. Your special account you set aside to put all your masses of saved cash away so you could take a trip to Belize and party with McAfee should have the same $25 you started it with, and nothing else. You should feel like your house is a needy child with a severe handicap that requires constant care, attention, and massive amounts of money and worry.

But, also like a needy, disabled child, your house will give you random moments of surprising happiness. One day you'll realize you can just walk around nude all day, or play guitar and yell (nude), or decide you think one of your dining room walls is ill-placed and drive to Home Depot to go sledgehammer shopping. And again, like a handicapped child, this will be your problem for years to come, until you can swindle someone into taking it from you.