You’ve heard not to mix business and pleasure.

That much is true – the degree that you are amicably entangled with customers or clients, this is the potential for that relation to backfire on you the day a deal goes sour. Likewise, the burn will increase in proportion to the amount of money of yours in limbo.

This includes lending money to friends – which I consider moving into the business sphere. If friends are in need money, and you trust them enough to make sensible use of them, give them as a gift, with no strings attached. On the other hand, if they end up spending them idiotically, or being mostly or entirely unable to pay it back as agreed, your mutual friendship takes a hit, unless you are a very patient or rich man. (But if you are rich, why aren’t you giving them as a gift to him? And if you are rich, how many of your friends are really that friends and not sugarcoated leeches? That aside…)

A case where this is especially true, is in your relation to your bank. Never, never, never stray beyond formally courteous relations with your bank advisers or liaisons. The day that you miss a payment or are late in remedying an unexpected overdraft, that is the day that they will be on the spot, charging you a fee, often wildly out of proportion to the ‘infraction’.

You may be a millionaire one day, the day later your fortune is wiped out by a stock ‘correction’ (as they call a drop), market crash, or a leveraged bid gone bad, and you end up with more liabilities than assets. The month after that, the bank is ready to repossess* your house and your car.

Whatever happens, they will be tough as nails, they will not be negotiated with unless you can sell yourself into a repayment plan at an atrocious interest rate. Whatever feel-good you thought you had with your bank guy will be gone like dewdrops in the sun. Ooohhh, the burn.

*(as they call a merciless grab… do we call it to repossess if I do wire fraud or grab a Slaystation at the high-profile games store?)

I’m going to be obnoxious to some of you here, but bear with me.

You’ve been told plenty of times before why not to smoke. I’ll summarise it briefly:

1. Its bad for your health. Yellow teeth and fingers are the least of your concerns. Your immune defense will be weakened,  your skin will lose its both ability to keep foreign bodies out, lose its ability to retain moisture, and thus you will look 10 to 20 years older than you are (which is why its mindboggling that young women choose to smoke at all!). The smoke contains a “tar” of noncombustible or combustion remains that will build up in your lungs.  These are themselves poisonous, but what’s worse is that they contain traces of Polonium, a radioactive element, and as such is a major contributor to lung cancer.
2. It’s bad for your wallet. Not as much in countries that don’t or barely tax tobacco as in in countries that do (Scandinavia and Western Europe in general).
3. It weakens your physical condition: You’re going to have a hard time on the running track or at your favorite sport.
4. You lose your sense of smell and a good deal of your sense of taste (much of the sense of taste of say hot food, is in fact a combination of taste AND smell). You’re robbing yourself of the delicious taste experiences of your favorite foods. You won’t be able to smell the spring flowers. Youre quality of life drops.
5. It’s harmful to those around you. You can choose not to believe it, but but even low amounts of smoke tobacco fumes put others that inhale it at a risk.  Assuming the wind doesn’t carry tobacco smoke away, the rest of uss can clearly smell it from over 20 metres down the street.
6. Tobacco companies have known that smoking tobacco was carcinogenic for decades, even a decade before the harm of tobacco use came into the public searchlight. Even as it did, they were continually researching how to make tobacco more addictive. A hooked customer is a loyal customer.
7. Worst of all, in re. #1, the tobacco companies knew this all along. The Polonium originates from apatite rock that is ground down to use as a Phosphorous fertiliser for the tobacco plants. They didn’t care, despite being well aware of both the problem and a method of removing the radioactive substances from the fertiliser.

In summary: It’s bad for you, its costly, it robs you of your life quality, and you are the BITCH of the tobacco companies that are killing you all while they’re draining your money out of your wallet!

To paraphrase Neo,: “How about that I give you the finger, and you give me my money back?“

Just in case you had those thoughts:

1) Unless you’ve really, *really*, royally fucked up, a desire for death is a result of problems with your brain chemistry, not a problem with you, your being, your actions or your past as such.

2) Suicide is the way out which is guaranteed to make those who care about you feel like shit. Those who don’t care about you or don’t know you, most likely will stay that way. Those who dislike you are most likely to scoff at your death, or even celebrate your offing yourself.

3) Trying to off yourself isn’t easy, and you’re more likely to fuck yourself up badly without actually dying as a result.

Pills overdose? Will most likely make you pass out, and your body will try to puke it up while you’re unconscious, but not enough of them to avoid your system taking up a lot of the drugs, which will be enough to cause lasting organ damage. You’ll wake up smeared in your own puke to a life of needing continuous medical assistance.

Shooting your own head off? Try with a shotgun under the chin, you’re likely to just blow off your lower jaw, making you an interesting spectacle for the ER medics, and besides you’ll have to be on a liquid diet for the rest of your life. But if Robocop could subsit on baby food, so can you.

Shooting yourself with a pistol in the side of your head? You might just sever your optic nerves and take out a single or two specific brain functions, but survive. You’ll be spending your life blind, but telling the kids about how life without vision and a sense of smell is is kind of informative.

Death by cutting? Won’t work, you’ll have second thoughts the moment the blood starts spraying (even if you do it right), so you’ll just manage to repaint your room, and calling the emergency services while desperately trying to hold your arteries clamped down will prove an entertaining experience. On a positive note, you’ll learn how to multi-task, deffo something to put on your CV.

Death by blades, Japanese style? Forget it. Westerners simply don’t have the guts for that shit.

Jumping from a tall building? Not only is it not certain to end it for you, in case you hit a tree, a bush, a parasol, or some poor fellas poodle dog, and you’re not even going to make a nice mushed-tomato *splat* effect, but most of the way down you’ll regret intensely that you stepped off, in other words, brown panties time. Additionally, you will have a lot of broken arms and legs tho, and be in a *lot* of pain while they wheel you off to the ER (with brown panties).

(But judging from underground snuff video footage of parachute jumpers with defective ‘chutes, in case you manage to do it correctly, you’ll make a pretty neat bounce when you hit the ground, because your body behaves elastically, which is kind of cool, especially if you’re a science geek.)

High-speed motorway solo accident? Same as the building thing. You might not die, just break a lot of shit, or be fortunate to hit a bush, but you’ll have wrecked your car or your parents car. Why do that to the car? What did the car ever do to you to deserve it?!

(Again, from a physics perspective, being ejected through the windshield of a car at 100 mph is interesting and illustrative for your understanding of inertia and conservation of energy. Take notes during the process.)

Hanging? Dude, it takes an expert to do hangings properly. The hangmen of old weren’t just sadists wearing black hoods, they knew their trade *intimately* so that they could do it properly, and not just fuck up their… customers. A hanging done improperly will only break your neck and leave you hanging in the loop for twenty minutes while tearing at the noose, while slowly chocking. If thats your idea of comfort…

Drowning? Nearly impossible, and Uncle Chuck won’t let it happen to those who want it anyway.

Death by fire? A surprisingly slow process, and *very* uncomfortable, but those who clean up your place of departure will appreciate the smell of bacon.

Death by Facebook? Hey, it has pictures of cats.

4) Because dark, aburdist humor is a rare art, and you just haven’t explored it enough.