Fight Club Friday: It happens

Friday night’s all right for all kinds of fighting.

via.

Look, when you are being banged like a screen door in a hurricane, things just kind of get said.

Fight Club Friday — Daily Batman: Punching toupees off edition

Friday night’s all right for fighting.

Another from when Batman gets clocked and thinks Bruce Wayne is his secret crimefighting identity.

…And the eighth and final rule: if this is your first time at Fight Club, you have to fight.

Bruce Wayne knocked that guy’s toupee off.

Fight Club Friday: From the annals of XKCD by way of Big Ben

Big ups to my old friendoh for bringing this XKCD comic to my attention.

Fight Club Friday: The one you love

Friday night’s all right for fighting.

Fight Club Friday: Little life lessons from loveable Aunt Marla

via.

Friday night’s all right for fighting.

Fight Club Friday: The course of true love did never run smooth

Boy meets girl. Boy fucks girl in guise of self he wishes he could be, then forgets.

Story as old as a time.

Fight Club Friday: Catch you on the flip

Spendin’ the day with Big Ben, homies.

via.

See you jive turkeys tomorrow.

Fight Club Friday: It Happens, the shit that came out of Marla’s mouth edition

Oh, hey: how’s the judging, Judgey Judgewell?

via.

Look. In Marla's defense. We ladies? Sometimes we just say things and aren’t so much aware of what those things are, such like any person might do after getting banged like a screen door in a hurricane. It Happens.

Fight Club Friday: Everything you ever love

Everything you ever love will reject you or die.

(Chuck Palahniuk. Fight Club.)

Do I believe this? I don’t know. I’m not sure I’ve had it proven otherwise. But I know that I don’t want to believe it. I’m just afraid that it is true and even though I am most often the author of my own solitude, sometimes loneliness still takes my breath away. I came so close to the end last year, and thank god pulled through, but how much would I have left unsaid, precisely because of my deep-rooted fear that, indeed, everything we love rejects us or dies? No more dwelling on it. No more sudden pricking in my eyes and cold wind sweeping through my chest.

E’s first resolution for 2011: No more tears for fears.* No crying buckets, nor glasses — not even a shot full. If I’m afraid that continued surrender to my impulsive fear of others will leave me lonely, then it’s up to me to keep on loving more: my friends, my family, and whatever else comes my way.




*But always more Tears For Fears. Everybody wants to rule the world, so if you’re head over heels, you’d better shout (let it all out).

Fight Club Friday: Destroying something beautiful

Painting by Danae8 on the d.a.

You take lymphoma and tuberculosis —

No, you take tuberculosis. My smoking does not go over at all.

Destroying something beautiful: sometimes Marla feels like doing it, too. I can say I mean to quit smoking cigarettes, I can say I know I should, I can say I don’t know how, and that everyone should have a vice and I’m banking on them discovering a cure for cancer by the time I get it, and a million other excuses or clever deflections, but it’s all lies, and worst of all to myself. I just don’t want to. I’m not ready.

So I guess that’s what I’ll tell my lungs when they decide to try and fail me, too. Sorry, guys — I wasn’t ready to quit.

Fight Club Friday: the Calvin and Hobbes connection

via.

Picture this: a hyper, self-absorbed child initially concocts an imaginary friend as the ideal playmate, to whom more realistic qualities soon become attributed. This phantasm becomes a completely separate personality, with his own likes, dislikes, temperament — and the imaginer and the imagined clash and argue constantly, though remaining fast friends.

(Chow, Galvin P. “Fight Club: the Return of Hobbes.” March 11, 2001.)

Marla Singer = Susie Derkins, who Calvin hates and Hobbes sends valentines.

Daaannnnng.

Spread the word.

Fight Club Friday: Rule 8

Friday night’s all right for fighting.

Rule 8: If this is your first night at Fight Club, you have to fight.

On a re-read. Doesn’t stack up. His never do (commence hate mail from rabid fans) other than Invisible Monsters. All my library books are overdue, including this. There is a robot who calls now to tell you so, and called me yesterday. I picture this robot coming to my door in another week and breaking my back over the unreturned books. Thanks a lot, the future.

Auden October and Fight Club Friday: All that we are not

When I woke in to my life, a sobbing dwarf
Whom giants served only as they pleased, I was not what I seemed;
Beyond their busy backs I made a magic
To ride away from a father’s imperfect justice,
Take vengeance on the Romans for their grammar,

(Auden, W.H. The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. 1944.)

Usurp the popular earth and blot out for ever
The gross insult of being a mere one among many…

… I am that I am, your late and lonely master;
Who knows now what magic is; — the power to enchant
That comes from disillusion.

(Ibid.)

All that we are not stares back at what we are.

(Ibid.)

The speaker is Prospero, addressing Ariel.

Fight Club Friday: Advice

Honesty is the best policy.

via Jackie and Arlene on the tumblr.

It’s Friday! Do what feels right and make your own fun.

Fight Club Friday: You still have your balls

via bloodandmilk on the tumblr.

Fight Club Friday: Enter Marla

Better check her, dude. It’s the only way to be sure.

Fight Club Friday: Warning

Friday night’s all right for fighting.

Tyler, I will quit excessively masturbating when you pry the internet out of my cold, dead hands.

The usual warning on the VHS/DVD release of Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999) has been … altered. In many ways it’s a far superior and more dire warning than the normal: less materialism, more connection to one another — no threat of jail time, but rather the threat of an empty life.

Is this little fun tidbit also on the Blu-Ray? I assume yes, but haven’t seen it personally.

Fight Club Friday: Lost generation

I see all this potential, and I see squandering. An entire generation wasted. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t.

(Tyler Durden, Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999).)

Well, Brad Pitt will. But you and I won’t.

E.E. Cummings Month: a total stranger one black day knocked living the hell out of me

a total stranger one black day
knocked living the hell out of me —

who found forgiveness hard because
my(as it happened)self he was

— but now that fiend and i are such
immortal friends the other’s each.

(E.E. Cummings, “Poem 58”. 95 Poems, New York: Harcourt, 1958.)

“It is the curse of mankind that these polar twins should be constantly struggling.” — Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Perfect for the issues dealt with in this poem, am I right? Have you ever roundhoused yourself and been totally gobsmacked by your own behavior? I should think we all have, at some point (not all of us as acutely as Mr. Anon. and Tyler Durden, here). You think you have it under control but you have that Other You that just up and emerges. Look out for That Guy.

If you let him out a bit at a time, then he is mainly manageable, but, if you shut him down everytime he has something he wants to express, and you’re constantly repressing him, then when he gets out, there’s no telling what he’ll do and say. The harder you hold That Guy back, the worse That Guy behaves when he gets loose. I’m not pulling this from the air: I’m speaking from experience. If you want to befriend the fiend, you’ve got to first want to do it, and second do it by degrees. Any other method ends badly. Very badly.

I’m thinking of starting a “Fight Club Friday” feature. But I apologize in advance if it doesn’t get off the ground right away. I’m both cautious and lazy.

Mean Girls Monday: “Sex ed” edition

It feels weird to put “Monday” up because I’m actually cobbling this together late Sunday night after finishing cleanup from a family barbecue, and will be gone tomorrow (today) to my aunt’s for a jazz festival and another barbecue.

Anyway, I took these screencaps a bit ago and wanted to use them to illustrate one of many Awkward Moments that fills up E’s wonderful life.

I was on my first day of a long-term sub job in the fifth grade at the private Catholic school where I’ve been working. I love those kiddos now and I call them the Scamps. More on that when I have more time cause it’s spun out in to a buttload of unexpected summer work. Anyway, I was glancing over the frankly shoddy lesson plans that’d been left for me and wondering why the teacher had noted on the agenda for Science in the afternoon, “Boys will go to room 8 with Mr. V—, girls will stay with you. Video is cued up.”

“Video? What—” I had not even finished thinking it when I realized, oh, man. It was That Day. I think you remember That Day, you know, the day when you split in to gender groups and learn about Each Other’s Bodies. First it is all menstruation and growing leg hair, and then you switch tapes and learn about the boys’ testes and why their voices are changing, and the kids are ten and this is mainly the first they’ve heard of all this, so absolute hell is on the verge of breaking loose with every nuance of the voice-over and tick in the animated shot of the vas deferens.

I only remembered that day from the girl’s side of it. A flickery screening of some kind of Reader’s Digest, “I am Mary’s Fallopian Tubes,” type-film, a stumbling conversation about how periods don’t hurt and it’s really no big deal, the assurance that boys are changing too, nobody breathes a word this first time through that all this body stuff is in preparation for SEX, like it is totally absent from the conversation, and at the end everyone gets a single pad. THAT DAY.

I was in charge of That Day!

It was a session every bit as nerve-wracking and filled with giggles and shaky, mumbly questions as you might imagine and at the end I felt like I’d been hit by a truck and I wasn’t really sure if any of the things I’d said in my answers to their questions had laid their nervous minds to rest, but at least I knew I tried, even on pretty much zero preparation.

Keep it under your hat but I actually love my job. (“I am Joe’s Soaring Job Satisfaction.”)