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ChuckPalahniuk
Collection of Short Stories, & Emails
Edited by Paul Poroshin & effoveks
 
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Short Stories
 
Monkey Think, Monkey Do
This summer a young man pulled aside in a bookstore and said he loved how in
Fight Club
I wrote about waiters tainting food. He asked me to sign a book andsaid he worked in a five-star restaurant where they monkey with celebrities’food all the time.“Margaret Thatcher,” he said, “has eaten my sperm.” He held up onehand, fingers spread, and said, “At least five times.”Writing that book, I knew a movie projectionist who collected singleframes from porno movies and made them into slides. When I talked to peopleabout cutting these frames into G-rated family movies, one friend said, “Don’t.People will read that, and they’ll start doing it.”Later, when they were shooting the
Fight Club
movie, some Hollywoodbig names told me the book hit home because they, themselves, had splicedporno into movies as angry teenage projectionists. People told me aboutblowing their noses into hamburgers. They told me about changing the bottlesof hair dye from box to box in the drug store, blonde into black et cetera, andcoming back to see angry wild-dyed people screaming at the store manager.This was the decade of “transgressional novels,” starting early with
AmericanPsycho
and continuing with
Trainspotting
and
Fight Club
. These were novelsabout bored bad boys who’d try anything to feel alive. Everything people toldme, I could sell.On every book tour, people told me how each time they sat in theemergency exit row on an airplane, the whole flight was a struggle not to popthat door open. The air sucked out of the plane, the oxygen masks falling, thescreaming chaos and “Mayday, Mayday!” emergency landing, it was all so clear.The door, so begging to be opened.The Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, defines dread as theknowledge of what you must do to prove you’re free, even if it will destroyyou. His example is Adam in the Garden of Eden, happy and content until Godshows him the Tree of Knowledge and says, “Don’t eat this.” Now, Adam is nolonger free. There is one rule he can break, he
must
break to prove hisfreedom, even if it destroys him. Kierkegaard says the moment we areforbidden to do something, we will do it. It is inevitable.Monkey think, monkey do.According to Kierkegaard, the person who allows the law to control hislife, who says the possible isn’t possible just because it’s illegal, is leading theinauthentic life.In Portland, Oregon, where I live, someone is filling tennis balls withhundreds of match heads and taping them shut. They leave the balls on thestreet for anyone to find, and any kick or throw will make them explode. So
 
far, a man’s lost a foot, a dog, its head.Now the graffiti taggers are using acid glass-etching creams to write onshop and car windows. At Tigard High School, a teenage boy takes his shit andwipes it around the walls of the men’s bathrooms. The school knows him onlyas “The Una-Pooper.” Nobody’s supposed to talk about him because they’reafraid of copycats.As Kierkegaard would say, every time we see what’s possible, we makeit happen. We make it inevitable. Until Stephen King wrote about high schoollosers killing their peer groups, school shootings were unknown. But did
Carrie
 and
Rage
make it inevitable?Millions of us paid money to watch the Empire State Building destroyedin
Independence Day
. Now the Department of Defense has enrolled the bestHollywood creative people to brainstorm terrorist scenarios, including directorDavid Fincher, the man who made the Century City skyline collapse in
FightClub
. We want to know every way we might be attacked. So we can beprepared.Because of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, you can’t mail a packagewithout going to a post office clerk. Because of people dropping bowling ballsonto freeways, we have fences enclosing highway overpasses.All of this, reactive. As if we can protect ourselves against everything.This summer the man convicted of killing my father said, hey, the statecould give him the death penalty, but he and his white supremacist friends hadbuilt and buried several anthrax bombs around Spokane, Washington. If thestate killed him, someday a backhoe would rupture a buried bomb and tens ofthousands would die.What’s coming is a million new reasons not to live your life. You candeny your possibility to success and blame it on something else. You can fightagainst everything-Margaret Thatcher, property owners, the urge to open thatdoor mid-flight, God... everything you pretend keeps you down. You can liveKierkegaard’s inauthentic life. Or you can make what Kierkegaard called yourLeap of Faith, where you stop living as a reaction and start living as a force forwhat you say should be. What’s coming is a million new reasons to go ahead.What’s going out is the cathartic transgressional novel, now that wehave someone to hate more than each other.
Extreme Behavior
A pretty blonde tilts her cowboy hat farther back on her head. This is so shecan deep throat a cowboy without her hat brim hitting him in the gut.This is on stage, in a crowded bar. Both of them are naked and smearedwith chocolate pudding and whipped cream. This, they call the “Co-Ed BodyPainting Contest.” The stage is red carpet. The lights, fluorescent. The crowdchants, “We want head! We want head!”The cowboy sprays whipped cream in the crack of the blonde’s butt and
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