Fight Club


You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.

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Maybe self-improvement isn't the answer.
(...) Maybe self-destruction is the answer.

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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.

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My father never went to college so it was really important I go to college. After college, I called him long distance and said, now what?

My dad didn't know.

When I got a job and turned twenty-five, long distance, I said, now what? 

My dad didn't know, so he said, get married.

I'm a thirty-year-boy, and I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer I need.


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I say let me never be complete. I say let me never be content. I say deliver me from Swedish furniture. I say deliver me from clever arts. I say deliver me from clear skin and perfect teeth. I say you have to give up. I say evolve and let the chips fall where they may.

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This is why I loved the support groups so much, if people thought you were dying, they gave you their full attention.

If this might be the last day they saw you, they really saw you. Everything else about their checkbook balance and radio songs and messy hair went out the window.

You had their full attention.

People listened instead of just waiting for their turn to speak.

And when they spoke, they weren't telling you a story. When the two of you talked, you were building something, and afterward you were both different from before.

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You have a class of young strong men and women, and they want to give their lives to something. Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don't need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don't need.

We don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.