Guide to Everything – More Useless Advice

Six habits of highly successful people

• Cocaine
• Using the rearview mirror to check for shnarf on upper lip while driving
• Talking loudly in public
• Driving slowly in the fast lane
• Not listening when people are talking
• Farting in the Jacuzzi

 Getting the most out of a mid-life crisis

When I turned 30, shortly after marrying Brenda, I suffered a spate of premature mid-life crises. It was terrible. The sweaty palms, blurred vision, projectile vomiting. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. Then, just when I thought I would have to take my own life, a friend pointed out that I had been drinking solidly for a month and that my body was probably rejecting the toxins. I found it hard to believe. After all, what is a mid-life crisis all about if not rejection? How could he be so sure that my body was reacting to the alcohol and not to my having committed an unnatural act by getting married so young when I still had so much to accomplish? Now that I am older, I realise that he was right. I was simply in the throes of a multiple hangover.

The real mid-life crisis is probably far worse. I’m just not sure that I will recognise it when it hits, but I am looking forward to getting the tattoo and belly ring.

How to make casual sex even more casual

For a start, lose the corduroy jacket. You might think it makes you look casual, but all it really does is make you look like a journalist. And nobody wants to be mistaken for one of them these days. Not even really desperate women will sleep with these harbingers of doom and peddlers of pessimism.

The best casual sex occurs when there is no verbal communication whatsoever between the parties concerned. Talking detracts from casual like nudists tripping on acid detract from holy mass.

If you walk into a bar and spot a woman with whom you would like to have casual sex, wink at her several times and motion with your head towards the door. At the very worst, there is an outside chance she will think you have Tourette’s Syndrome and go home with you out of sympathy.

Unfortunately, casual sex has been saddled with a bum rap in recent years. Thanks to a team of French researchers, casual sex is now synonymous with a lingering, painful death. Not much of a laugh in that. Trust the French to spoil everyone’s fun. Bastards.

Surviving foetal alcohol syndrome

First, do not blame yourself. Second, keep your mouth closed when you are not talking. A gaping maw is a dead giveaway. Besides, drooling is unattractive and there are no excuses for having a lazy jaw. If you are unable to control your mandibles, have them wired shut.

At the same time, you may want to consider giving up any ambitions of controlling the world. It is far bigger than your jaw, although fewer things live in it.

Try to control your urge to drink. If you find this difficult, then at least try not to mix your drinks. It is important to remember that you are genetically programmed to drink. Nobody will blame you. Well, some might. But don’t let that stop you.

Know that you are unique. People who watch rugby like to think they are one of you, but they are not. I know one of these imposters. His only claim is having a mother who got drunk and copulated with her brother’s wife’s husband. And that kind of behaviour is nothing uncommon in the gated communities that surround us today.

So I say rejoice in your dysfunction. Go out and make new friends. Just don’t talk to them or try to make eye contact and you will be fine.

How to be happy

Look, it’s really not that difficult. If you are bipolar, take the blue pills. If you are not, take the yellow ones. Happiness is a chemically inspired condition. It is one of those cheap, overrated emotions that achieve nothing at all.

Jealousy, on the other hand, is worth striving for. Jealousy has the capacity to inspire machete fights at dawn, which is a whole lot more exciting than watching someone walking about smiling and humming snatches of song.

But if you want to experience a real emotion, skip Happiness and Jealousy and go straight to Fear. If you’re one of those pathetic suburban lapdogs who are too afraid to go in search of something to terrify the life out of you, then you do not deserve to experience the king of emotions.

Happiness, pah! It only leads to babies and polo neck sweaters. And we have more than enough of both in this so-called world of ours.

How to behave when a homosexual gives you the lazy eye

This happens more often than you might expect, and how to react is fast becoming a question that regularly enters the mind of the heterosexual male, often at the most inopportune time.

Jason, a friend of a friend’s friend, told another friend who told me about a recent incident in which he was lying in a strange woman’s bed waiting for her to emerge from the bathroom, where women on one night stands disappear to for exactly six minutes before they reappear to ravage you so mercilessly that you would have forgotten their names had they bothered to introduce themselves to you in the first place.

Jason said that thirty seconds before she was due to whip the bathroom door open, he spontaneously recalled an incident that occurred two days previously. It’s not like he was dwelling upon it. Or so he says. The incident involved a humdinger of a queen willfully squeezing his buttocks while he was waiting for a mutton roti at an unnamed late-night curry den somewhere between Salt River and Observatory. Jason said the incident disturbed him less than it should have, but that it came back to haunt him at the worst possible moment. So when she emerged from the bathroom and flung herself at him, he was unable to hold up his end of the deal. This led to him questioning his sexuality.

Actually, when I heard the story, the first thing I thought was that Jason is one of those poor bastards who have a little too much oestrogen in their bodies without ever realising it.

I suppose there is nothing wrong with a bit of harmless flirtation. If a batty boy gives you the lazy eye, you could always give him one back. I have never done this myself, you understand. I am always very quick to avert my eyes, although this can also give the impression that you are being coy, so it is important to dart him another stern look before letting your gaze trail away to the nearest woman.

However, homosexuals operate on a secret code of mixed signals so there is a very good chance that you have just told him to meet you upstairs in the dark room in 20 minutes. If you accidentally catch his eye again and he is making flicking movements with his tongue, move quickly to the nearest woman and stand as close as you can to her without arousing any suspicions. If she says, “Fuck off, Batman” and moves away, you may want to try another bar. Or another woman.

• Ben Trovato's Guide to Everything