Choke

by Chuck Palahniuk

How torture is torture and humiliation is humiliation only when you choose to suffer.

“Sobriety is okay enough,” Denny says, “but someday, I’d like to live a life based on doing good stuff instead of just not doing bad stuff. You know?”

“The Enlightenment is over. What we’re living in now is the Dis-Enlightenment.”

After you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life becomes less about living and more about waiting. For cancer. For dementia.

I mean, in a world without God, aren’t mothers the new god? The last sacred unassailable position. Isn’t motherhood the last perfect magical miracle?

You can’t even hammer a nail with a phallus.

“Just supposing,” I say, “she’s going to scramble its little unborn fetus brain and suck the mess out with a big needle and then inject that stuff into the head of somebody you know who has brain damage, to cure them,” I say. Denny’s lips hang open a crack. “Dude, you don’t mean me, do you?”

“Thanks for the baby idea,” Denny says. “People see a young guy with a baby, and they’re sweet to you,” he says. “They see a guy carrying a big rock, and they get all tensed up. Especially if you want to bring it on the bus.”

“I don’t know. But rocks are like, you know, land. It’s like these rocks are a kit. It’s land, but with some assembly required. You know, landowner-ship, but for right now it’s indoors.”

“What I think happened is when God wanted to make the earth out of chaos, the first thing he did was just get a lot of rocks together.”

The way Denny thinks, he’s probably got plans to start his own planet.

“That’s the big goal,” she said. “To find a cure for knowledge.” For education. For living in our heads.

The laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom. Without access to true chaos, we’ll never have true peace.

Running down the aisle and out a fire exit, she’d yelled, “We’re so structured and micromanaged, this isn’t a world anymore, it’s a damn cruise ship.”

Denny hands me the beer, and I drink. Denny spits out a dead slug and says, “Better drink through your teeth, dude.”

“No,” she says. “That would be stabbing. Hitting someone with a knife is stabbing.” She says, “Put the knife down and use your open hand.”

“All women have to do is get

naked, and we give them all our money. I mean, why are we such slaves?”

‘Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it’? Well, I think those who remember their past are even worse off.”

It’s the same way a drug can be something good and something bad. You don’t eat. You don’t sleep. Eating Leeza isn’t really eating. Sleeping with Sarah Bernhardt, you’re not really asleep.

You don’t need to file a plan to write a book. There’re books that do more damage than he ever could.

It’s pathetic how we can’t live with the things we can’t understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed. Even if it’s for sure unexplainable. Even God.

My stomach hurts, but if it’s guilt or impacted stool, I can’t tell. Either way, I’m so full of shit.

“Anything you can acquire,” she says, “is only another thing you’ll lose.”

Because I can’t save anybody, not as a doctor, not as a son. And because I can’t save anybody, I can’t save myself. Because now I’m an orphan. I’m unemployed and unloved. Because my guts hurt, and I’m dying anyway, from the inside out. Because you have to plan your getaway. Because after you’ve crossed some lines, you just keep crossing them.

We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heros or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves.