Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey

by Chuck Palahniuk

Folks build a reputation by attacking you while you’re alive—or praising you after you ain’t.

“The big reason why folks leave a small town,” Rant used to say, “is so they can moon over the idea of going back. And the reason they stay put is so they can moon about getting out.” Rant meant that no one is happy, anywhere.

“You’re a different human being to everybody you meet.”

What if this? If somebody went back and reworked the past, how would the rest of us know? Don’t we only know the present reality that we know? What if reality gets reshuffled—in little, tiny ways—all the time? Or what if the people in power have already shuffled the past to get on top, and now they’re telling the rest of us not to monkey around with history or we’ll go back and kill our ancient ancestors and every generation after that, and then we’ll never get born? I mean, could the people who control all the money and politics ever invent a scarier warning? Didn’t these same science experts used to say the earth was flat? Wasn’t it really important we should stay at home and be peasants and slaves or we’d fall off the edge?

All I’m saying is: What if time is not the fragile butterfly wing that science experts keep saying? What if time is more like a chain-link fence you can’t hardly fuck up? I mean, even if you fucked it up, even ten hundred times—how would you ever know? Any present moment, any “right now,” we get what we get. You know?

In a world where billions believe their deity conceived a mortal child with a virgin human, it’s stunning how little imagination most people display.