Fight Club

by Chuck Palahniuk

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.

Me, I’m six years old, again, and taking messages back and forth between my estranged parents. I hated this when I was six. I hate it now.

hear Tyler’s words come out of my boss, Mister Boss with his midlife spread and family photo on his desk and his dreams about early retirement and winters spent at a trailer-park hookup in some Arizona desert.

now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And account for every drop of used motor oil.

"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile.”

Everything where I work is floor-to-ceiling glass. Everything is vertical blinds. Everything is industrial low-pile gray carpet spotted with little tombstone monuments where the PCs plug into the network. Everything is a maze of cubicles boxed in with fences of upholstered plywood.

"We are the middle children of history, raised by television to believe that someday we’ll be millionaires 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.”

Until I’m crying. How everything you ever love will reject you or die. Everything you ever create will be thrown away.

Everything you’re proud of will end up as trash. I am Ozymandias, king of kings.