Make Something Up: Stories You Can't Unread

by Chuck Palahniuk

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? You get to ride on some airplane to Rome. Rome, like, in Italy. You fill your head full of enough ordinary junk, and your payoff is giant supermodels giving you a snowmobile?

She’d married him for all the reasons she might hire a long-term employee.

That might be the best any generation could achieve: to pioneer its own brand of corruption.

Found: one bedraggled placenta, partially decomposed. Gnawed on by every curious animal within a two-mile radius. Call to claim.

“For the first hundred years of American history it was illegal to teach blacks how to read. These days, people still ridicule them for being ignorant.” Exasperated, he added, “Now we deny homos the right to get married, and at the same time we criticize them for whoring around.”

he’d say that the nature of happiness is that we only recognize it after the fact.