Survivor

by Chuck Palahniuk

The last part of the controlled descent will be a nosedive into the ground. This he calls the terminal phase of the descent, where you’re going thirty-two feet per second straight at the ground.

for the pilot on his way down. So now I’m flying west on autopilot at mach 0.83 or 455 miles per hour, true airspeed, and at this speed and latitude the sun is stuck in one place all the time.

To stand here and try to fix her life is just a big waste of time. People don’t want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.

the only thing I know is everything you love will die. The first time you meet that someone special, you can count on them one day being dead and in the ground.

People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were too scared of being alone.

Whatever happened in the world was a decree from God. A task to be completed. Any crying or joy just got in the way of your being useful. Any emotion was decadent. Anticipation or regret was a silly extra. A luxury.

In the outside world, Adam said it was a bargain with the devil that powered automobiles and carried airplanes across the sky. Evil flowed through electric wires to make people lazy. People put their dishes back in the cupboard dirty, and the cupboard washed them. Water in pipes carried away their garbage and shit so that it was someone else’s problem.

Churches in the outside world, my brother told me, were just the local stores that sold people lies made up in the distant factories of giant religions.

Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. This is how things get recycled.

Corinthians, Chapter Six, Verse Eighteen: “Flee fornication…. he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body.”

Honest is how I want to look. The truth doesn’t glitter and shine.

We dance past statues of saints in somebody else’s religion. To me they’re just rock shaped into glorified nobodies.

Every phone call I get fills me with joy and terror since this could be the caseworker or the killer. Approach or avoidance. Positive and negative reinforcement for answering the phone.

With all the little facts we learned, we never had the time to think.

This is the way to tell about fabric content. Pull a few threads off a garment, and hold them over a flame. If they don’t burn, it’s wool. If they burn slowly, it’s cotton. If they torch the way the slacks next to us are blazing, the fabric is synthetic. Polyester. Rayon. Nylon.

Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be.

What people forget is a journey to nowhere starts with a single step, too.

every stupid thing in the world, decaffeinated coffee, alcohol-free beer, StairMasters, makes perfect sense, not because you’re any smarter, but because the smart part of your brain’s on vacation. It’s that kind of faux wisdom.

The boring mechanics of how your body works are all too clear, your lungs are sucking air to put in your blood, your heart pumps blood to your muscles, your hamstrings pull themselves short, cramping to pull your legs up behind you, your quadriceps cramp to put your knees out in front of you. The blood delivers air and food to burn inside the mito-whatever in the middle of your every muscle cell.

It doesn’t matter if you do anything. If nobody notices, your life will add up to a big zero.

life is a stage

Since change is constant, you wonder if people crave death because it’s the only way they can get anything really finished.

At most events, those deep inner messages and beliefs went from the writing team to me in the last thirty seconds before I went onstage. That’s what the silent opening prayer was all about. It gives me a minute to look down on the podium and read over my script.

Because the only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is the amount of press coverage.

Down onstage, some local preacher was doing his opening act. Part of his warm-up was to get the audience hyperventilated. Loud singing does the job. Or chanting. According to the agent, when people shout this way or sing “Amazing Grace” at the top of their lungs, they breathe too much. People’s blood should be acid. When they hyperventilate the carbon dioxide level of their blood drops, and their blood become alkaline. “Respiratory alkalosis,” he says. People get light-headed. People fall down with their ears ringing, their fingers and toes go numb, they get chest pains, they sweat. This is supposed to be rapture. People thrash on the floor with their hands cramped into stiff claws. This is what passes for ecstasy. “People in the religion business call it ‘lobstering,’” the agent says. “They call it speaking in tongues.”

What we call chaos is just patterns we haven’t recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can’t decipher. What we can’t understand we call nonsense. What we can’t read we call gibberish.

More and more everything in my life was a fix for an earlier fix for an earlier fix until I forget what the original problem was.

Here I sit all downhearted, tried to shit and only farted.

lol

You know how both life and porno movies end. The only difference is life starts with the orgasm.

ain't this true

“Even the garden of Eden was just a big fancy cage,” Adam says. “You’ll be a slave the rest of your life unless you bite the apple.”

“And if you never have sex,” Adam’s saying, “you never gain a sense of power. You never gain a voice or an identity of your own. Sex is the act that separates us from our parents. Children from adults. It’s by having sex that adolescents first rebel.”

Here are condoms lined with a topical anesthetic for prolonged action. What a paradox. You don’t feel a thing, but you can fuck for hours.

After waiting all my life, I get myself in her just half an inch and it’s all over.