Ten Tips For Losing Your Wife and Child Pt. 2

If that most fiscal of marital bonds, your credit card, is declined by The Days Inn, impulsively visit Seton House men’s shelter. Learn they aren’t accepting new ’bos until sundown. Sulk all stagey-like for the security guard.

One: See the rising sun return. Drink Maximum Ice strong beer amidst Allan Gardens itinerants while getting the inside scoop of your new Setonean digs. Experience personal apocalypse. If you show your lock-screen photo of Marcel_Proust to the dispossessed, the dispossessed will show tattered Polaroids of their own 1978 offspring. Laugh with the dispossessed. Smile with the dispossessed. Cry with the dispossessed. Be falsehearted with the dispossessed. Fight with the dispossessed. Urinate in the Allan Gardens greenhouse bathroom, which reeks of indigence. Eat a sandwich provided by Mormon outreach youths.

Two: Whenever any new social safety netting is unfurled, the redolent and dispiriting love to entangle and befoul that net, making places of respite not-yet-dominated by the redolent and dispiriting tricky to locate! If hell itself seems preferable to the bed bugs, piss stink, and Hep C stabbings of Seton House Men’s Shelter, then the movies will ever be an A1 respite. Cineplex plays second-run movies for $7.99. The corporately-dehumanized teenage staff won’t roust you unless actively provoked by overt double-dealing, e.g. ‘coating your Equality Brand Whole Wheat Bread in free liquid margarine from the dispenser right in front of Ethan, the day manager. ’

Three: Inappropriately seduce any pretty young consumer survivors you encounter in Allan Gardens. What they have consumed and survived is the mental health system. Sit on an Allan Gardens’ bench with the wayward and the winsome and comment upon how Marcel_Proust brought an immensity of meaning into your life. Guilefully quote D.W. Griffith’s, “Cinema is the wind in the trees, ” to console yourself and also to impress upon a consumer survivor that ‘Yes, you have survived the medical model. Yes, I have lost Marcel_ Proust. Yet here we have the wind in these trees. ’ The ponytail of this mentally unhealthful girl will enliven your spirits. Her wild accusations and wilder roundhouse rights will keep you on your toes.

Four: If de-lousing becomes a life priority, hand dryers in public washrooms are a handy source of lice-destructive heat, N.B.: ‘The high-powered Dyson dryer is the Rolls’ Royce of de-lousing dryers. ’

Five: Newspapers work as insulation or ersatz flak jacket while also offering a window into real estate, the automotive realm, and the putative insights of the medium talents tasked with writing the intellectual pabulum of the “Ideas” section.

Six: Assuming you are not some backwards and heteronormative caveman, and assuming most of your sebaceous cysts are draining nicely, inappropriately seduce geriatric men of the light-loafered orientation. If not so light of loafer yourself, spurn their advances and simply eat as much of their Wing Street leftovers as possible before the geriatric men just paw to the extent their Boneless Bites entitle them.

Seven: If after only day three of living rough you have prostituted yourself for not even an authentic chicken wing but only a “saucy nug, ”28 ask hobo chums about the demand for male gigolos servicing the female John population. Learn that the limited number of female Johns are satisfied by a small cadre of well-credentialed and ab-intensive misogynists of the Magic Mike mould.

Eight: Eat people’s leftover fries and things at Burger King!

Nine: Rant and rave of your desperation! Wonder how you became the very ranter and raver you’d always crossed the street to avoid. Remark to a destitute associate how quickly God-fearing men such as yourselves can fall.

Ten: If sucked into a vacuum of purposelessness, weep for all that is gone: weep for your sister; weep for Marcel_Proust and his writhing hands as he endured a diaper change, his shrieks of enthusiasm as the Go Train passed, his facility for picking the records you hadn’t played in years. 28 (Matthews, 2020)