Make Something Up: Stories You Can't Unread

by Chuck Palahniuk

It used to be this joke constituted a gold-plated, bona fide, sure-thing laugh riot, but the old man just keeps dying.

I’m yelling, “Why’d the Old Lady walk out on her husband and her four-year-old kid?” Nothing kills a joke like asking my old man to explain himself, and lying there in that bed, he stops breathing. No heartbeat. Totally flatlined.

And despite the miraculous, well-documented healing powers of the Comedic Arts my old man dies

I figure out that I wasn’t telling a joke—I was the joke. I mean, I finally Get It. Understand me:

Leastwise, Randy daddy never perception it coming. Postdating a lifetime of setting choke and pulling green chain, Randy daddy already be living on bothered time. One fast move, and all that raw lumber smatter the hairy dome of his thin skull to a billion bloody fractions.

He steer south, exacerbating faster and faster the whole way, like if a pack of vapid wolfhounds be perusing his Randy ass.

one thousand generation remove from anything paid good money for.

She betray a blond sneak thief out to brutalize a fly crib where a dozen bro dawgs capitulate to respire.

A swimming pool fill the backyard, with one edge where the carbonated waters appear to gently spill out into infamy.

Up close, the fake blood on the severed wrist look totally vicarious.

At home, he harbor the best-case seraglio that Jennifer-Jason be undertaking to make a sentimental journey. Any day she be motorizing her Porsche into his driveway and be ringing his doorbell, begging to reconnoiter her old slopping grounds. When that happen, he dream he be seizing Jennifer-Jason in his firm-but-tender apprehension, and Randy be interjecting—like so manly others—to meticulously and thoroughly womanize her.

Respiring there, he feel like a real somebody. Like a museum curtailer or the guard who guard an infernal flame.

The secret truth be the death of Randy daddy, it leave Randy feeling deeply and justifiably defecated.

In salutation of her lifetime achievement, Randy erect a little shrine for display her photo in the front yard. He hope pilgrims pilgrimage, but those Juan Cordobas next door they say his shrine be nasty on account of the photo be showing Jennifer-Jason enjoying her three-day vocation.

Every explicit screen capture Randy mount in his shrine, it absconded.

“Dawg.” She say, “Dawg, we be decimate that tree with colorful glass Christmas desecrations.”

Lathering his strength, Randy be whisper-singing, “Hun abide! Come inside! Sweeten tide! Sugar fried! Kitten spied! Mitten dyed! Signified! Qualified! Genocide! Bonnie and Clyde!” All his words fall to pieces while Randy go to curdle happy never after in the bosom of his antedated daddy.

As fast as her furry feet be carry her, Eleanor be reverberating back up North. And while those Juan Cordoba low-riders be fast, there be no denying that Eleanor the pit bull, lickety-split, she easy, always and forever, she be the fascist.

In a world before she’d feasted on shame and defeat, Monkey paraded her resume into the Human Resources department of Llewellyn Food Product Marketers, Inc.

Blessed was Monkey with charm, and when she smiled at Stag or Panther or Eagle, they smiled in return and sought to buy whatever product Monkey was shilling. She sold cigarettes to Badger, who did not smoke. And Monkey sold beef jerky to Ram, who did not eat meat. So clever was Monkey that she sold hand lotion to Snake, who had no hands!

Without so much as a glance at the product in question, Monkey promised to deliver a minimum 14 percent share in the highly competitive mid-level imported dairy solids market, and Monkey further promised that such success would last at least seven weeks, positioning this new cheese before the forthcoming holiday entertainment season.

However, with everything at stake today she pulled out her heavy artillery: a chemise top

He sat two rows behind me in Organic Chem, the very definition of an evil genius.

The problem with being Talented And Gifted is sometimes you get too smart. My uncle Henry says the importance of eating a good breakfast is because your brain is still growing. But nobody talks about how, sometimes, your brain can get just too big.

what he really wanted to be was happy. Not just not-sad, he wanted to be happy the way a dog is happy. Not constantly jerked this way and that by flaming Instant Messages and changes in the federal tax code. He didn’t want to die, either. He wanted to be—and not to be—but at the same time.

The voltage even cleared up his acne. It’s hard to argue with results like that.

They continue to be young and hot, but they no longer worry about the day when they won’t be.

Officials want a ten-day waiting period on the sale of all heart defibrillators. They’re talking about mandatory background checks and mental health screenings, but it’s not the law, not yet.

No offense to Jesus, but the meek won’t inherit the earth. To judge from reality TV the loudmouths will get their hands on everything. And I say, Let Them. The Kardashians and the Baldwins are like some invasive species. Like kudzu or zebra mussels. Let them battle over the control of the crappy real world.

To have no worries, no regrets, it’s pretty appealing. So many of the cool kids at my school have elected to self-fry that, anymore, only the losers are left. The losers and the naturally occurring pinheads. The situation is so dire that I’m a shoo-in to be valedictorian.

People don’t practice their smiles nearly enough so when they most need to look happy they’re not fooling anyone.

To be or not to be. God’s greatest gift to animals is they don’t get a choice.

Every time I open the newspaper I want to throw up. In another ten seconds I won’t know how to read. Better yet, I won’t have to. I won’t know about global climate change. I won’t know about cancer or genocide or SARS or environmental degradation or religious conflict.

It sounds trite, but only because words make everything true sound trite. Because words always screw up whatever you’re trying to say.

“If you hurt yourself, you hurt me—do you copy?”

We can enjoy it without understanding it. And we can love it without knowing what it means.

Dangling out one sweatshirt cuff, this crumpled scrap of Kleenex looks like leaked-out stuffing, flapping white, like she’s some trashed teddy bear somebody loved too hard.

Like the TV studio is just some dark jungle, and people are just some monkeys just screeching their monkey sounds.

It’s like, if you live a boring-enough life, knowing the price of Rice-A-Roni and hot dog wieners, your big reward is you get to live for a week in some hotel in London?

They should ask you the price of a Long Island Iced Tea. The price of Marcia Sanders’s abortion. Ask about your expensive herpes medication you have to take but don’t want your folks to know you need. Ask the price of your History of European Art textbook which cost three hundred bucks—fuck you very much.

Probably it’s the acid, but—right here and now—fuck declaring a business major. Fuck General Principles of Accounting 301.

his host face looks cracked into a million-billion jagged fragments only glued back together with pink makeup.

That she’d called him “Daddy” wasn’t lost on him.

The car was evil. But it was okay because it was a piece of American history.

Listening, it occurred to Randall that the love people feel for animals is the purest form of love. Loving an animal, a horse, cat, or dog, was always a romantic tragedy. It meant loving something that would die before you. Like that movie with Ali MacGraw. There was no future, just the affection of the present moment. You didn’t expect a big payoff, someday.

A want to please some brand of huge, weighty god. To feel its crushing approval.

It was strange to see someone that happy who wasn’t pretending.

It was impossible to not start spending that money in his head.

When you love somebody, you’re happy to see her happy, but I knew my girlfriend was going to dump me because now guys with careers and health insurance were getting her on their radar.

but for a regulation hottie that’s just textbook being sexy.