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.

Your lottery winnings

Sometimes, when all the reliable news sources (Yahoo!) tell you about how enormous the lottery jackpot has become, you should start feeling like you'd be pretty stupid not to spend the money you were saving for your "lean" Christmas on a lottery ticket instead.* After all, God owes you for that crippling depression He gave you, right? He'll probably pay you back in some sort of spiritual legal settlement with this particular lottery. At least, that's what you should tell yourself as you stare at the lukewarm oatmeal in your coffee cup that's congealed like some half-digested brain because you never really learned how to make oatmeal properly.

Anyway, it's time to take a trip to 7-Eleven and buy yourself $500 million dollars!

As you walk down the street to 7-Eleven, you should seriously consider how you'll spend those millions. First off, you guess you've got to shovel a bunch over to your family, which should hopefully fulfill your familial obligations for life and act as a money-rich salve for all those weddings and funerals you failed to attend and feelings you failed to emote. Then you think about how you can reward the four people in your life who let you call them friends by paying off their house loans, student debts and car payments, even though you haven't talked to most of them in months and even though everyone involved would probably feel incredibly awkward about the situation: them because you're trying to reward their friendship with money when they'd probably just prefer to know you're not actively ignoring them and you because you feel like they feel like you're not giving them enough money.

Once that's over, you have to figure out what to do with the rest of that $200 million or so after taxes. You should probably give it some charity or something, but then you think maybe it'd be better to give it to individual dying people or something, since then you'll be able to see the results of your fantastic generosity, and as far as the reliable news sources (Yahoo!) have told you, every charity ever is a gigantic fraud. But how do you find those dying people, and isn't it sort of gauche to go up to grieving people to try to throw money at them? Also, the more you think about it, the more you realize money doesn't buy off death or even, really, illness, and that winning the lottery will probably cause you to contract (more) cancer in some horrible cosmic irony.

As you find yourself standing in the 7-Eleven, looking more lost than the homeless guy looking lost by the hot dog spinner, you should come to the realization that the only reason you want to win the lottery is to buy off guilt as some cheap (well, spiritually cheap) way of making yourself a happier person. Then you should go ahead and buy a Slurpee instead, and find that that sort of works too.


*Actually, if you've been living a fraudulent life, you should have been buying them all along anyway.

Your vacation

Running away is always your goal, so one great thing to have on the horizon at all times is a vacation. You should make sure you plan enough of your vacation beforehand so that you have transportation to the destination and back home, but everything else about your trip should just be sort of hopes and fears. You should make sure to tell people that you'll definitely go to whatever museum thing they recommend you do while you're there, just so you'll have the opportunity to feel bad about the fact that you never even tried to do that.

Going out of the country is always preferable, because for a few moments during your trip, or for several days, you'll concoct schemes to stay in that country that involve all kinds of fraud and shit. You should briefly consider just becoming a weird outlaw living off the land, or a panhandler with a knapsack on a stick, and then realize that you'd die so fast in that situation that you'd be better off selling your body for money. You should start to wonder what it takes to get into the prostitution biz. Do you need a pimp, or is that more of a suggestion? Maybe some good, sturdy hooking shoes? Since you're new to this, you're going to have the novelty thing going for you, and you'll probably get a ton of business in the beginning. You'll probably also make friends with a scrappy hooker who seems like she has a heart of gold but ends up backstabbing you at some point, probably with a knife. This will give you street cred, though. Which is like regular credit except easier to get with a bad FICO score. Maybe you'd eventually meet a generous John who comes around pretty frequently and never makes you have sex, but instead asks you to talk about your life, but really you're sort of doing this because of the sex, which is something you'll awkwardly realize one moonless night on the corner and then never think about again. But you'll need the money, so you'll do this "talk" thing.

And why will you need the money? To run away, obviously. But this time it's running away from your life of danger and hooking, and that's what you really want. You want a reason to run away that makes sense and isn't just that your life is meaningless and comfortable and suffocating you with its lack of apocalypse. Also, you really want a reason to finally wear those hooker shoes. 

Your impending professional demise

At the end of each work day, you are one work day closer to being fired. So this is sort of bittersweet, because on the one hand, you've made it one more day! You pulled that wool over the world's eyes one more time like a real master wool puller, you. But on the other hand, you're probably going to be alive tomorrow. So, there's that.

If you're doing it right, every work day should be filled with the dread that you're going to massively fuck something up, or that something you've done in the past that was massively fucked up will be discovered. It doesn't really matter if you know you've done something wrong or not. In fact, in most cases, you'll be pretty certain that you've done everything exactly right. You filed that report thing right on time. You touched base with all the right people. You've made sure everyone was tracking. You've even circled back and synergized and looped in and performed other acrobatic wonders. But that's not what matters here. Oh no. What matters is that living fraudulently is like walking across a tightrope that's held on both sides by people that don't really know/like you.

So, since you're bound to be fired sooner or later (sooner), it's best to begin planning (worrying) about how you will survive (become homeless) in your new unemployed situation. You can live without cable by stealing from the Internet, so that's an easy one. You can probably sell a lot of your old stuff, like your video games or jewelry or semen. You can even get by without food for a while. And then there's always food stamps, which you'd never get out of some completely undeserved sense of pride, but just knowing that you could get them is almost as satisfying as a sandwich. The very last thing to cut out of your budget should be your Internet. Why? You'll need it to look for a new job or whatever. But more importantly, what's the point of being unemployed if you can't spend time writing blogs or stalking Facebook or online dating? You might as well just continue having a stupid job so you can use the Internet.

And then it becomes clear why if you ever lose your job, you'll lose your life. It's just the Internet. There isn't anything left of you that isn't tied into the Internet. So, better get back to work and make some $$$ for your Internet connection (entire existence).

Your search for meaning

Well, here you are, almost four years later and still alive, somehow. Annoying. With your youthful certainty that you'd be dead by [17, 25, 30] now a part of your golden past, you've come to realize that you need to find some stupid meaning in your life, or at least a thing you do that you can pretend is some sort of "purpose." The work you do obviously has nothing to do with that purpose, so what else is there? Smoking e-cigarettes? Playing board games? Driving aimlessly? Watching TV shows you hate? Considering (but not realistically) becoming a doctor or lawyer? It's probably none of those things. Which is too bad, because you don't do anything else, except sometimes write some shitty shit or play a shitty thing or two on the guitar.

So what are the things you should do to find this missing meaning? Your first thought will probably be to volunteer and help some people who live less fraudulently than you. Maybe you'll join the Red Cross. Or even the Peace Corps. Maybe they'll even send you to some distant place that will end up changing your entire perspective on life and make you one of those intolerable people who talk about being sent to another country and having life-changing experiences. Briefly excited, you should begin to fill out forms for one of these programs before you realize two things: 1) You'll probably be sent to an aidsy-type country where you won't be doing anything except showing people who weigh 25 pounds that you objectively have one of the greatest lives on earth and don't appreciate any of it, and 2) You'll need to get a tetanus booster, and that's just probably not going to happen because you're lazy.

That's okay, there are many other fraudulent ways to look for meaning. One is continuing education. Remember how you liked learning things at some point in your life? Yeah! Well, that will cease to be a possibility once you remember it requires asking old professors for recommendations and filling out applications.

As the more realistic possibilities, including the army, close before you, you should begin to grope around for any old thing, like god. Truthfully, you're envious of people who believe in god, because god is a great replacement for having any actual meaning. Plus, He's a great excuse for doing a lot of things that would otherwise look crazy, like talking to thin air or genocide. You should fully plan on going to church or mosque or temple or whatever. But, man, they sure meet early on weekends.

When god has failed you, you should just give up and fall back on old faithful: waiting for the apocalypse and being secretly jealous of people caught in the frankenstorm.

Your dead dad

So, yeah. At some point recently, or maybe a while ago, your dad decided to fuck up your year and die. Which is pretty typical of him, and really would you have expected him not to do something like that? No. That's his style. Or it was, rather.

Well, now what? Your first reaction post death should be to briefly question your grip on whatever belief system you have. You're an atheist? You should debate becoming a believer briefly because you were thinking about your dad once the other day and the wind kicked up and rustled some tree branches and that was definitely your dad giving you a sign from beyond and not just the sound leaves make. But this will be brief, and the only times you will consider believing in God again will be when you win $280 from a $5 scratch-off lotto ticket when you really, really needed a new goddamn iPhone. Thanks, God.

The first anniversary of the death will be bizarre, and you'll go to some grave, or maybe someone's house, and have a good laugh at some dumb shit your dad used to do. As you go along, you will start to only remember the hilarious stuff your dad did and not the times he drunkenly swore at you or refused to pay for your AP English textbook because it wasn't a baseball glove. Instead you'll just remember the times when he drunkenly wore a beret and biking shorts with a hole in the crotch to the supermarket and showed everyone his balls. Or maybe the time he drunkenly fell down. That once.

Eventually, you'll get to a place where you can see all of your dad for what he was. You will see the good things a little better than the bad things, because they're easier to look at, and that's been kind of your rule of thumb regarding what to look at in life anyway. You'll blame the appropriate character flaws of yours on your dad; but you'll stop blaming the obviously wrong ones on him. You'll be able to talk about him honestly, and when people apologize about bringing up dads when they find out yours is dead, you'll be able to truthfully tell them it's no big deal. And then, one day, you'll resurrect a two-year dead blog to write a post about him that no one will read and it will feel like a step toward something non-fraudulent.

And then you'll realize just how fraudulent that is.

Chatroulette and you

It's some evening of some day of the week and, surprise, you're bored. You've heard about this Chatroulette site and are at the point in your night where it's either talk to random strangers on the Internet, or go to bed. Since it's always a good idea to force yourself into mind-numbing exhaustion before you go to sleep, and god forbid you actually get more than five hours of sleep in a night, you should probably go ahead and fire up the Chatroulette.

One of the first things you'll notice, besides all the penis, is how terrifyingly bored everyone else looks, too. Except the ones jacking off. Because you can't see their faces. Just their penises. But, let's be honest, if you're jacking off on a webcam for everyone on Chatroulette to see, you pretty much take the bored cake. 

You should make sure to never be the one to click "Next," even though you'll always want to be. Others will always Next you, and even though there's no way you'd actually want to have a conversation with any of these people, it should always make you feel a little defeated each time someone looks at you for less than two seconds and decides you're not worth talking to. 

At some point, you may find someone with whom to have an actual conversation. Try to make sure this is a 17-year-old Colombian that speaks no English but tells you you're "muy bonito/a." After talking for about 30 minutes, give the Colombian child your email address as well as your physical address, last name and perhaps a little money. Then, try to find information on the Internet about Colombian laws to see if you're going to end up in jail when this is all said and done.