Choke

by Chuck Palahniuk

If you’re going to read this, don’t bother. After a couple pages, you won’t want to be here. So forget it. Go away. Get out while you’re still in one piece.

It seemed that moment would last forever. That you had to risk your life to get love. You had to get right to the edge of death to ever be saved.

For serious, the Mommy told him, “Art never comes from happiness.” Here is where symbols were born.

bright. Picture anybody growing up so stupid he didn’t know that hope is just another phase you’ll grow out of.

So if you think this is going to save you … If you think anything is going to save you … Please consider this your final warning.

All these people you think are a big joke. Go ahead and frigging laugh your frigging head off. These are sexual compulsives. All these people you thought were urban legends, well, they’re human. Complete with names and faces. Jobs and families. College degrees and arrest records.

All those scary cautionary tales. We’re all here. Alive and unwell.

The truth is, every son raised by a single mom is pretty much born married. I don’t know, but until your mom dies it seems like all the other women in your life can never be more than just your mistress.

Plus the sexaholic recovery books they sell here, it’s every way you always wanted to get laid but didn’t know how.

For sure, even the worst blow job is better than, say, sniffing the best rose … watching the greatest sunset. Hearing children laugh.

I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a hot-gushing, butt-cramping, gut-hosing orgasm.

The minute something better than sex comes along, you call me.

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

The magic of sex is it’s acquisition without the burden of possessions. No matter how many women you take home, there’s never a storage problem.

You gain power by pretending to be weak. By contrast, you make people feel so strong. You save people by letting them save you.

I tell them, heap it on me. Make me play the big passive bottom in your guilt gang bang. I’ll take everybody’s load.

All the pieces are the same basic shape, liquid crosses. Melted swastikas.

This will forever change the way I think about puzzles 😂

“The cerebral cortex, the cerebellum,” she said, “that’s where your problem is.” If she could just get down to using only her brain stem, she’d be cured.

Language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and the glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. She said people can’t deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can’t be explained and understood.

Without access to true chaos, we’ll never have true peace. Unless everything can get worse, it won’t get any better.

If you can change the way people think, she said. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. If you do that, you can change the way people live their lives. And that’s the only lasting thing you can create.

I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. He’s taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of his death from being a total surprise.

In a way, being an addict is very proactive. A good addiction takes the guesswork out of death. There is such a thing as planning your getaway.

In America, if your addiction isn’t always new and improved, you’re a failure.

“I don’t need help,” he says, “but you can help if you want.” Never mind. What I want is to be needed.

What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction.

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.

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

“Why do I do anything?” she says. “I’m educated enough to talk myself out of any plan. To deconstruct any fantasy. Explain away any goal. I’m so smart I can negate any dream.”

the longer we can keep building, the longer we can keep creating, the more will be possible. The longer we can tolerate being incomplete. Delay gratification.

“Because the only frontier left is the world of intangibles, ideas, stories, music, art.”

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. And maybe it’s our job to invent something better.

Where we’re standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything.