How To Live Your Life Like It’s A Bret Easton Ellis Novel

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Care a lot about freeways and restaurants and streets. It’s important to note that you took Fountain instead of Sunset to meet your drug dealer because Sunset is usually a nightmare and makes you anxious. Only live in Los Angeles or New York. You can take a break to attend a liberal arts school in the middle of nowhere but you’ll move back right when you graduate because there’ll be nothing to do and you get bored too easily. You’re bored right now.

Follow the script of a typical bourgeois kid. Grow up in Los Angeles and go to some private school on the Westside or the Valley. Maybe you went to Archer or Crossroads or New Roads or Harvard-Westlake or Buckley or maybe even Hamilton, even though it’s public and ew. Become friends with the big bad jerks of Los Angeles who have silver spoons dangling from their mouths and Rich People Names like Olivia and Muffy and Harrison. Decide early on that you won’t care about anything ever. Caring about things must mean you’re poor or something and you’re super rich so why would you ever feel anything besides boredom and disinterest? Every time you spend a dollar, you become more dead inside. Cha-ching = dead. How many soul points did that eight ball of coke cost you? OMG, coke!

Talk about food a lot and where you’re eating it. You’re always eating at Spago with your dad unless you’re eating at Dominick’s or Il Cielo with Stella who you may or may not be in love with. It’s hard to tell because you just don’t care. Who’s Stella? Where’s my drink?

Other things you don’t care about: Whether someone has a penis or a vagina. You’re sort of gay and will sleep with whoever. Chad, Clay, Chrissy, Samantha, and Thomas might as well be the same person because you are so numb. Caring about gender is not only complete BS (fRee SpiRIt), it also would require you to have feelings about something, which is not allowed. Just say NO to having an opinion.

Everyone around you seems to be crazier than you are. Watch your 14-year-old sister snort your mother’s Adderall in the pool house and talk about this guy she’s sleeping with. C-R-A-Z-Y. Someone should get her help…somewhere…somehow.

somewhere
somehow
somewhere
somehow

Repeat this over and over and think you’re having some sort of breakthrough. Maybe you’re experiencing a feeling? You’re not sure. Wait, maybe the valet guy has your feelings. You’ll ask. “Sir, do you have my—” You trail off, exhausted, and just get into the car.

Have this mild sense of awareness that everything and everyone around you is messed up. Go to your friend’s house and find them watching kiddie porn. Think to yourself that this is wrong but get fatigued at the idea of saying something. Sit down and take a ValiumXanaxVicodinOxyKlonopinAmbien with this person and watch the kiddie porn with them. Kiddie porn is really screwed up but also, like, NBD.

This how you live the life of Bret Easton Ellis. Go to lunch with someone and barely speak. Leave lunch and wait until you go to dinner. The three hours you have between dinner reservations will give you serious anxiety and you will have to just drive on the freeway to deal with it. Just be desensitized to everything going around you. Always make sure you look fabulous. All the time you would ordinarily spend on cultivating a personality, you use for grooming. A well-groomed person always gives the impression that they care. It’s a great trick.

Oh, and kill people sometimes if you’re stressed out and can’t get into Barcadia.

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image – Less Than Zero