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.

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.

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.

Feelings

If you should know anything about yourself, it's that your feelings are crap. This doesn't mean you should feel crappy all the time (which you do), but that in a broader sense all your non-feeling-like-crap feelings are also crap. Which is just to say that when you feel something, you're probably totally wrong. If you feel sad, you're probably actually excited. If you feel like you're happy, you're probably about to die from self-inflicted peanut and bee-sting poisoning. Your feelings are all sorts of wrong, so you should learn how to ignore them. Better yet, you should rid yourself of them completely.

Let's say you feel like you're in love. In actuality, you're about to be run over by a rusty train that goes just fast enough to kill you but not fast enough to kill you immediately upon impact. Any real person would be feeling fear and dread at this moment. But not you. You're all giddy and goofy and smiling, even though soon you'll be purpleberry goo on the tracks, and not in nearly enough shock for it not to hurt worse than group anal raping. This is how fraudulent your feelings are.

Or let's say you're supposed to meet up with a fantastic person at 8:00, and that ridiculously awesome person happens to be a minute late. Instead of doing what a real person would do, crying with gratitude and happiness that this other person even remembers your sad little name, you probably feel unjustifiable hatred. And when the person arrives five seconds later, instead of holding on to them for dear life for agreeing to be associated with you, you'll probably stab them in the stomach with a pointy stick for ruining your life with their lateness.

To counteract these potential issues, you should block out every feeling you have. If possible, you should also ignore things like hunger and thirst and maybe your need to urinate. For all you know, that need to urinate could just be another trick your body is playing on you to distract you from a pain worse than group anal raping. Also, when you accidentally slice off your thumb while cutting a bagel, that distress is nothing more than your body lying to you. Once you realize and accept that every automatic response your body gives is wrong, you'll be well on your way to creating a long, loveless existence with some person who's perpetually late.

Your sleep schedule

Since the inside of your body is like the Middle East, with all the chemicals fighting each other and everything always on the verge of total collapse, you'll find that sleep is unpredictable and usually only comes when you don't want it.

You load your body full of caffeine in the morning, to stay alive, and then you slowly add more and more chemicals to the mix throughout the day: nicotine, antacids, analgesics, alcohol, anti-depressants, sedatives, and more caffeine. You've become so adept at managing this balance, that you probably know instinctively when your body needs a little pick-me-up, or put-me-down. But when it's time to sleep, all this better living through modern chemistry is going to complicate things. Also, since the power of everybody's livers is slightly different, like microwaves, it's impossible to know exactly how much of any one chemical you need to take in order to have its effects kick in or wear off in time for sleep.

You have a couple of choices now, the best of which is obviously to take over-the-counter sleep aides, no matter what else you've put into your body. Look at it this way: it's over-the-counter, so it can't possibly hurt you. It doesn't matter that your blood is more man-made at this point than natural--WalMart would never sell you something that could possibly hurt you if you take the recommended (or just slightly higher) dosage.

Another choice you have is to try to flush out your system with a bunch of water or maybe charcoal. But the problem with this idea is that it might work. And then you'll be left with a body in its natural state. And that's sick.

You can also just resign yourself to never sleeping well at night and spend most of your time during the day trying to find a place where you can take a 10-minute nap. Some good places for this are: your car, the cold linoleum tile of the office bathroom, the spot under your desk where you're pretty sure no one can see you, a nearby park, any vacant lot, a relatively clean dumpster, the roof of a building, the cold linoleum tile of the gym bathroom, and the subway.

Your hopes and dreams

As dead as you are inside, which is quite dead, you still have hopes and dreams. You still somehow, against all odds and evidence, think you're going to be rich, famous, or just moderately happy one day. You still pretend like your life is headed down a general path toward these hopes and dreams, and that one day you'll be the success that you've been telling everyone you're going to be (but that everyone has stopped believing you about for some time now).

But at some point, you need to start rethinking these dreams. You need to refocus your aim. That day should be today. Or tomorrow, if you're really hungover today. But then definitely tomorrow. And you've really got to pick a new hopes-and-dreams basket into which you can pour all of your rotten eggs.

And that dream should be the lottery.

You should start playing the lottery compulsively. You should know which days the Mega Millions is drawn, and you should have a set of numbers you play every time, in addition to spending ten extra dollars on computer-generated quickpicks. Your regular set of numbers should have extremely thought-out significance to you and should border on psychotic numerology.

You should also have recurring nightmares that involve your forgetting to buy a lottery ticket, and then your regular set of numbers turning out to win. In these dreams, your depression should be so deep and palpable that you walk around the entire next day looking like you just got diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

You should begin to talk to all of your friends about how you're going to win the lottery. But then, you should start to become horribly reclusive and never mention the lottery to anyone, since you're sure that once you win, they will all be begging you for money, and you'll eventually have to hire a bodyguard and change your name and your appearance just to get away from your former, awful friends.

It's important to remember that your belief in your eventually winning the lottery should be so intense that you have already basically spent all the money. Also, every time someone wins who isn't you, you should feel exactly the same as if that person had come into your home in the middle of the night and robbed you of everything you own, leaving nothing but a urine stain where they decided to pee all over your living room carpet.