Fight Club

On a long enough time line, everyone's survival rate drops to zero.

We don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.

Our culture has made us all the same. No one is truly white or black or rich, anymore. We all want the same. Individually, we are nothing.

You have a class of young strong men and women, and they want to give their lives to something. Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don't need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don't really need.

There are a lot of things we don't want to know about the people we love.

This was freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.

You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug.

Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.

"Getting fired," Tyler says, "is the best thing that could happen to any of us. That way, we'd quit treading water and do something with our lives."

This is how it is with insomnia. Everything is so far away, a copy of a copy of a copy. The insomnia distance of everything, you can't touch anything and nothing can touch you.

This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.

Sometimes you do something, and you get screwed. Sometimes it's the things you don't do, and you get screwed.

It's easy to cry when you realize that everyone you love will reject you or die. On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone will drop to zero.

Only after disaster can we be resurrected.

"It's only after you've lost everything," Tyler says, "that you're free to do anything."

I come dragging in with every muscle bruised inside and out, but my heart's still racing and my thoughts are a tornado in my head. This is insomnia. All night, your thoughts are on the air.

All night long, you're thinking: Am I asleep? Have I slept?

If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?

One day you're thinking and hauling yourself around, and the next, you're cold fertilizer, worm buffet.

Nothing is static.

Everything is falling apart.

I know this because Tyler knows this.

This is why I loved the support groups so much, if people thought you were dying, they gave you their full attention.

If this might be the last time they saw you, they really saw you. Everything else about their checkbook balance and radio songs and messy hair went out the window.

You had their full attention.

People listened instead of just waiting for their turn to speak.

And when they spoke, they weren't telling you a story. When the two of you talked, you were building something, and afterward you were both different than before.

You do the little job you're trained to do.

Pull a lever.

Push a button.

You don't understand any of it, and then you just die.

One minute was enough, Tyler said, a person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.