10 Rules for Being Trash By Sean Conforti

10.  Make sure that your car is an ecosystem.  Coffee cups, moldy mason jars, sun-bleached parking passes, a small beetle infestation.  The beetles, or something like them, are key.  You want shit crawling on people who enter your car, because then they are also trash, and you are not alone.  One of us, one of us, one of us.

9. Bedbugs, you want these.  Ideally, have them in your home AND your car, so you can overlap numbers 10 and 9- the key is both diversification and and cross-fertilization.  And try to get them a few times, because if you’re even half as neurotic and paranoid as me you’ll be left permanently scarred, and for the rest of your life will be scratching your limbs and torso, waking up and tossing off your bedsheets in the night to check, causing your current unfortunate romantic interest to shrivel in the sudden cold and look at you with that night-time loathing that no one ever really gets over.  Added benefit: you’ll be tired all the time, giving your eyes that sunken look that says destitution like nothing else.

8.  Repeatedly dodge chlamydia.

7.  Be middle class, but so lazy and resentful of our capitalist skull-fuck of a world that even your privilege barely gets you anywhere.

6.  Complain constantly about how capitalism is skull-fucking everyone (it’s not untrue, but you’re going to look like a disingenuous douchetrain, you white-ass fuck.)

5.  Make sure to tell people about how you don’t subscribe to the social mores that they do and that you’re different and you “don’t give a fuck what people think” while actually just being a misogynist suckbag.

4.  Have a graduate level education paid for by your parents which barely gets you a barista or a bar-back gig.

3.  Coke.  Molly.  Ket.  And FUCK Pabst, that shit is for hipsters, if you’re trash going out pound $8 litres of sackwine for that Bukowski level of persistent nausea.  Red wine, too, not white: that’s the grimace you want all night, like you’re constantly on the verge of being on the verge of puking.

2.  Shitty stick ‘n pokes.  All over your damn self.  At least one alien head, at least one pseudo-academic word (“surface” tattooed on the surface of your skin, you poetic piece of garbage.)

1.  Make sure you’ve actually almost been something in the past, like a social worker or an publicity person or an editor or some shit, but now you’re choosing not to participate in this tire fire world we’re living in because nothing really matters anymore (since that 24 year old MA Fine Arts student dumped your ass, at least.)