Fight Club

This isn't about love as in caring. This is about property as in ownership.

What Marla loves, she says, is all the things that people love intensely and then dump an hour or a day after. The way a Christmas tree is the center of attention, then, after Christmas you see those dead Christmas trees with the tinsel still on them, dumped alongside the highway. You see those trees and think of road kill animals or sex crime victims wearing their underwear inside out and bound with black electrical tape.

This is insomnia. All night, your thoughts are on the air.
All night long, you're thinking: Am I asleep? Have I slept?

You know how they say you only hurt the ones you love? Well, it works both ways.

The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is: you DO NOT talk about Fight Club!

And this week the insomnia is back. Insomnia, and now the whole world figures to stop by and take a dump on my grave.

And the fight goes on and on because I want to be dead. Because only in death do we have names. Only in death are we no longer part of Project Mayhem.

Crying is right at hand in the smothering dark, closed inside someone else, when you see how everything you can ever accomplish will end up as trash.

The charm of traveling is everywhere I go, tiny life. I go to the hotel, tiny soap, tiny shampoos, single-serving butter, tiny mouthwash and a single-use toothbrush. Fold into the standard airplane seat. You're a giant. The problem is your shoulders are too big.

We have sort of a triangle thing going here. I wantTyler. Tyler wants Marla. Marla wants me. I don't want Marla, and Tyler doesn't want me around, not anymore.

The last time we went out, Tyler said the loud music made him constipated. This, and the club is too loud to talk, so after a couple of drinks, everyone feels like the center of attention but completely cutoff from participating with anyone else.

"When you're twenty-four," Marla says, "you have no idea how far you can really fall, but I was a fast learner."

All a gun does is focus an explosion in one direction.

A tiger can smile
A snake will say it loves you
Lies make us evil

The gyms you go to are crowded with guys trying to look like men, as if being a man means looking the way a sculptor or an art director says.

Tyler says I'm nowhere near hitting the bottom, yet. And if I don't fall all the way, I can't be saved. Jesus did it with his crucifixion thing. I shouldn't just abandon money and property and knowledge. This isn't just a weekend retreat. I should run from self-improvement, and I should be running toward disaster. I can't just play it safe anymore. This isn't a seminar.