It had to happen sooner or later. First the tobacco companies were sued for giving their customers cancer. Then the gun manufacturers were sued for selling a product that (surprise) sometimes causes serious injury and death. And now comes the latest development in the Blame-Someone-Else-For-Your-Own-Stupid-Choices Olympics.

A 56-year-old man who suffers from obesity and other chronic health problems as a result of a decades-long fast-food binge is suing McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken for selling him the food that made him fat.

“They said ‘100 percent beef.’ I thought that meant it was good for you,” the man told reporters this week. It makes me wonder whether some of the people who smoke have misinterpreted the phrase “pure tobacco pleasure” to mean that smoking is also a healthy pursuit.

You probably expect me to rip into this guy and join the chorus of editorials addressing this lawsuit that are bemoaning the loss of personal responsibility in our society. But frankly I’ve decided that blaming others for the stupid choices I have made in life is a much easier way to cope with my disappointments than owning up to my own poor judgment, and I have decided to jump on the litigious bandwagon.

From now on, I am going to consider every shortcoming I have and every obstacle to complete happiness I encounter in life to be the result of a vast conspiracy by powerful, malevolent forces allied to bring me down, and I am going to start suing everyone who has tried to hold me back in life.

I’ll start with the public school system. I was a pretty good student, but I am sure I never met my potential and I could have done much better in life if I had only studied harder. But it’s not my fault that I didn’t ace every subject in school. Obviously, the teachers, administrators, and the people who wrote the textbooks failed to make the material entertaining enough to capture and hold my interest, and now it’s time to make them pay for letting me down.

Still, I did the best I could as a student and I did manage to get through four (OK, maybe it was five) years of college and eventually get a job. But I don’t feel I have made nearly as much money as I should have and I don’t think my talents and achievements on the job have been recognized sufficiently by any of my employers. Thus I will sue everyone for whom I have ever worked (including the people who underpaid me to mow their lawns when I was in sixth grade) for pain, suffering, and lost potential wages.

They may very well argue that I haven’t worked as hard as some of their other employees and that I don’t always get along with co-workers, but those things aren’t my fault. If I haven’t worked hard enough it was only because the work was too easy, too difficult, or that the lighting in my office was poor. And I get along fine with other people as long as they agree with me, so the blame for any friction that I might have had with my co-workers must logically be laid at the feet of said co-workers.

Once I have recovered damages for my sub-par education and employment achievements, I will proceed to sue anyone who has ever let me down in any way and thus held me back from achieving a state of utopian bliss old girlfriends, the football coach who wouldn’t let me play quarterback, network television executives, and of course Martha Stewart (because I just can’t resist piling on.)

Suing all of these co-conspirators against my happiness will be supremely satisfying, but the litigation will take years to resolve and in the meantime I will be frittering away some of the best years of my life. So, as a final act of blame-shifting genius, I will sue all of my lawyers for recklessly involving me in these stressful, time-consuming, frivolous lawsuits, thus completing the glorious litigious circle.

See you in court.