Self improvement is masturbation. Self destruction is the answer.
Fight club is not football on television. You aren't watching
a bunch of men you don't know halfway around the world beating on each
other live by satellite with a two-minute delay, commercials pitching beer
every ten minutes, and a pause now for station identification. After
you've been to fight club, watching football on television is watching
pornography when you could be having great sex.
Fight club gets to be your reason for going to the gym and keeping
your hair cut short and cutting your nails. 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.
Like Tyler says, even a soufflè looks pumped.
I found stacks of Reader's Digest in the basement and now there's
a pile of Reader's Digest in every room... in the oldest magazines,
there are a series of articles where organs in the human body talk about
themselves in the first person:
I am Jane's Uterus
I am Joe's Prostate.
I am Joe's Gallbladder.
I am Joe's Raging Bile Duct.
I am Joe's Grinding Teeth.
I am Joe's Inflamed Flaring Nostrils.
I am Joe's White Knuckles.
I am Joe's Enraged, Inflamed Sense of Rejection.
I am Joe's Boiling Point.
I am Joe's Blood-Boiling Rage.
I am Joe's Complete Lack of Surprise.
I am Joe's Shrinking Groin
I am Joe's Cold Sweat
I am the Pit of Joe's Stomach
I am Joe's Hard Drive
"Remember this," Tyler said. "The people you're trying to step
on, we're everyone you depend upon. We're the people who do your
laundry and cook your food and serve your dinner. We make your bed.
We g
guard you while you're asleep. We drive the abulances.
We direct your call. We are cooks and taxi drivers and we know everything
about you. We process your insurance claims and credit card charges.
We control every part of your life. We are the middle children of
history, raised by television to believe that someday we'll be millionares
and movie stars and rock stars, but we won't. And we're just learning
this fact," Tyler said. "So don't fuck with us."
All night long, your thoughts are on the air.
Am I sleeping? Have I slept at all? This is the insomnia.
Try to relax a little more with every breath out, but your heart's
still racing and your thoughts tornado in your head.
Nothing works. Not guided meditation.
You're in Ireland.
Not counting sheep.
You count the days, hours, minutes since you can rememberfalling asleep.
Your doctor laughed. Nobody ever died from lack of sleep. The
old bruised fruit way your face looks, you'd think you were dead.