092502
a collection of some of my favorite passages from chuck palahniuk novels.

choke:

you gain power by pretending to be weak. by contrast, you make people feel so strong. you save people by letting them save you. all you have to do is be fragile and grateful. so stay the underdog. people really need somebody they feel superior to. so stay downtrodden. people need somebody they can send a check at christmas. so stay poor. i mean, i'm just tired of being wrong all the time just because i'm a guy. i mean, how many times can everybody tell you that you're the oppressive, prejudiced enemy before you give up and become the enemy. i mean, a male chauvinist pig isn't born, he's made, and more and more of them are being made by women. after long enough, you just roll over and accept the fact that you're a sexist, bigoted, insensitive, crude, cretinist cretin. women are right. you're wrong. you get used to the idea. you live down to expectations. even if the shoe doesn't fit, you'll shrink into it. she said, "you have an enormous capacity for love in you." the old woman sat there smiling and said, "i can tell you have the most generous of hearts." and fast as sneezing, i told her: "you're a fucking wrinkled old lunatic." people had been working for so many years to make the world a safe, organized place. nobody realized how boring it would become. with the whole world property-lined and speed-limited and zoned and taxed and regulated, with everyone tested and registered and addressed and recorded. nobody had left much room for adventure, except maybe the kind you could buy. on a roller coaster. at a movie. still, it would always be that kind of faux excitement. you know the dinosaurs aren't going to eat the kids. the test audiences have outvoted any chance of even a major faux disaster. and because there's no possibility of real disaster, real risk, we're left with no chance for real salvation. real elation. real excitement. joy. discovery. invention. the laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom. "dude." i say, "you don't think i'm a good-hearted person, do you?" and denny says, "hell no, dude." after a few blocks, all those backyards of beer, i know denny's being honest. i say, "you don't think i'm really a secretly sensitive and christlike manifestation of perfect love?" "no way, dude," denny says. "you're an asshole." and i say, "thanks. just checking." she twists back into my grip. then she walks us over to the towel and says, "wait." she goes to the dresser and comes back with a pink plastic vibrator. "hey," i say, "you're not using that on me." gwen shudders and says, "of course not. this is mine." and i say, "so what about me?" and she says, "sorry, next time bring your own vibrator." "no," i say, "what about my penis?" and she says, "what about your penis?" some woman writes about how she's started a prayer chain for me. a spiritual pyramid scheme. as if you can gang up on god. bully him around. the fine line between praying and nagging. love is bullshit. emotion is bullshit. i am a rock. a jerk. i'm an uncaring asshole and proud of it. what would jesus NOT do?

fight club:

on a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone will drop to zero. all her life, she never saw a dead person. there was no real sense of life because she had nothing to contrast it with. you buy furniture. you tell youself, 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. me, i knew my dad for about six years, but i don't remember anything. my dad, he starts a new family in a new town about every six years. this isn't so much like a family as it's like he sets up a franchise. after tyler and marla had sex about ten times, tyler says, marla said she wanted to get pregnant. marla said she wanted to have tyler's abortion. "at the store, they have one-hundred-percent-recycled toilet paper," marla says. "the worst job in the whole world must be recycling toilet paper." watching white moon face the stars never feel anger blah, blah, blah, the end "if marilyn monroe was alive right now, what would she be doing?" the headliner hangs down in shreds from the ceiling, and tyler says, "clawing at the lid of her coffin." marla's cold and sweating while i tell her how in college i had a wart once. on my penis, only i say, dick. i went to the medical school to have it removed. the wart. there are a lot of things we don't want to know about the people we love. marla's philosophy of life, she told me, is that she can die at any moment. the tragedy of her life is that she doesn't. i wanted to destroy everything beautiful i'd never have. burn the amazon rain forests. pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone. open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells. i wanted to kill all the fish i couldn't afford to eat, and smother the french beaches i'd never see. "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. "we don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. we have a great revolution against the culture. the great depression is our lives. we have a spiritual depression. "we have to show these men and women freedom by enslaving them, and show them courage by frightening them. "napoleon bragged that he could train men to sacrifice their lives for a scrap of ribbon. "imagine, when we call a strike and everyone refuses to work until we redistribute the wealth of the world." "the people you're trying to step on, we're everyone you depend on. we're the people who do your laundry and cook your food and serve your dinner. we make your bed. we guard you while you're asleep. we drive the ambulances. we direct your call. we are cooks and taxi drivers and we know everything about you. we process you insurance claims and credit card charges. we control every part of your life. "we are the middle children of history, raised by television to believe that someday we'll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won't. and we're just learning this fact," tyler said. "so don't fuck with us." we are not special. we are not crap or trash, either. we just are. we just are, and what happens just happens. and god says, "no, that's not right." yeah. well. whatever. you can't teach god anything.

invisible monsters:

shotgunning anybody in this room would be the moral equivalent of killing a car, a vacuum cleaner, a barbie doll. erasing a computer disk. burning a book. probably that goes for killing anybody in the world. we're all such products. give me lust, baby. flash. give me malice. flash. give me detached existentialist ennui. flash. give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism. flash. she says that if you can't make a certain sound without using your lips, substitute a similar sound, the therapist says; for instance, use the sound eth instead of the sound eff. the context in which you use the sound will make you understandable. "i'd rather be thishing," the therapist says. then go thishing, i write. "no," she says, "repeat." my throat is always raw and dry even after a million liquids through straws all day. the scar tissue is rippled hard and polished around my unharmed tongue. the therapist says, "i'd rather be thishing." i say, "salghrew jfwoiew fjfowi sdkifj." "no, not that way," the therapist says. "you're not doing it right." i say, "solfjf gjoie ddd oslidjf?" she says, "no, that's not right, either." she looks at her watch. "digri vrior gmjgi g giel," i say. "you'll need to practice a lot, but on your own time," she says, "now, again." i say, "jrogier fi fkgoewir mfofeinf fcfd." she says, "good! great! see how easy?" on my pad with my pencil, i write: fuck off. only when we eat up this planet will god give us another. we'll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create. she says, "don't do what you want." she says, "do what you don't want. do what you're trained not to want." brandy tells me, "do the things that scare you the most." how embarrassing. give me needy emotional whining bullshit. flash. give me self-absorbed egocentric twaddle. christ. i want out of the labels. i don't want my whole life crammed into a single word. all god does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. we must never, ever be boring.

survivor:

i tell her the story about my fish. this is fish number six hundred and forty-one in a lifetime of goldfish. my parents bought me the first one to teach me about loving and caring for another living breathing creature of god. six hundred and forty fish later, the only thing i know is everything you love will die. whether you clean a stain, a fish, a house, you want to think you're making the world a better place, but really you're just letting things get worse. you think maybe if you just work harder and faster, you can hold off the chaos, but then one day you're changing a patio lightbulb with a five-year life span and you realize how ou'll only be changing this light maybe ten more times before you'll be dead. i can see something is different about the girl. it's something european. something malnourished. it isn't the daily recommened allowance of food and sunshine that make you beautiful by any north american standard. there's something waxy about how her arms and legs come out of her dress looking raw and white. you could see her living behind barbed wire. and coming up inside me is the desperate hope that maybe she's dead. a guy's calling to say he's failing algebra ii. just as a point of practice, i say, kill yourself. a woman calls and says her kids won't behave. without misssing a beat, i tell her, kill youself. a man calls to say his car won't start. kill yourself. a woman calls to ask what time the late movie starts. kill yourself. she asks, "isn't this 555-1327? is this the moorehouse cineplex?" i say, kill yourself. kill yourself. kill yourself. "how come you can wear shirts with buttons?" somebody at the hardware store would want to know. because i'm not amish. "do you have to wear special secret undergarments?" i think they were talking about mormons. "isn't it against your religion to live outside your colony?" that sounds more like the mennonites. "i've never met a hutterite before." you still haven't. "and he's a terrible dancer." right now, me getting killed would be redundant. "and his teeth are weird, not rotten, but crooked and little." you could stab a knife right through my heart and you'd be too late. "and he has these gross little monkey hands." right now, getting killed would be a breath of spring. "that's supposed to mean he has a little wiener dick." if fertility keeps talking, my caseworker will have one less client in the morning. "and he's not obese," fertility says, "he's not a whale, but he's too fat for me." in case there's a sniper outside, i open the blinds and stand my gross obese body in the window. please, anybody with a rifle and a scope. shoot me right here. right in my big fat heart. right in my little wiener. "he's not anything like you," fertility says. oh, i think she'd be surprised how much we're alike. "you're so mysterious." i ask, if she could change any one thing about this guy at the mausoleum, what would it be? "just so he'd quit pestering me," she says, "i'd kill him." well, she's not alone there. be my guest. take a number, and stand in line. "forget about him," she says, and her voice is sinking deeper in her throat. "i called because i want to get you off. tell me what you want me to do. make me do something terrible." opportunity knocks. here's the next part of my big plan. this is something i'll go to hell for, but i tell her, that guy you don't like, i want you to go screw his brains out and then tell me what it was like. she says, "no way. no day." then i'm hanging up. she says, "wait. what if i call you and lie? i could just make the whole thing up. you wouldn't know." no, i say, i'd know. i could tell. "no way am i going to sleep with that geek." what if she just kissed him? fertility says, "no." what if she just took him out on a date? they could just go out for the afternoon. get him out of the mortuary and he might look better. take him on a picnic. do something fun. fertility says, "then will you get together wih me?" definitely. artificial men and women are posed in the windows wearing clothes. smiling. laughing. pretending to have a good time. i know just how they feel. this one time, the agent asked me where i saw myself in five years. dead, i told him. i see myself dead and rotting. or ashes, i can see myself burned to ashes. i see myself dead and in hell, i said. i told the agent, i figured i'd spend my first thousand years of hell in some entry-level position, but after that i wanted to move into management. be a real team player. hell is going to see enormous growth in market share over the next millennium. i wanted to ride the crest. people ask all the time why i'm not married. do i have impure thoughts? do i believe in god? do i touch myself? do i know what a paper shredder does? i don't know. i don't know. i have my doubts. i won't tell. and i have the agent to tell me all about paper shredders.

090502
i've made my final update on my asianavenue community page, aa_punkrockers, today.

the past two-and-a-half years running the community have been wonderful —it was a real privilege. thank you so much to all those involved—there would be just way too much people to name—in making the community the great community that it was.

thank you, all. take care.

oh, and thank you to all those members who wrote in with your kind words, also:

even though i havent been part of this community long, i feel as if i have entered one big happy family and made wonderful friends. and for me, mark is like a grandfather kind of a guy, he's leaving because of his old age, yes thats right, mark is maturing *tears*, or dying, im not sure which one. but he's part of this growing "family" and it saddens all of us that he's shutting down his page and for that I'M GOING AFTER UR ARSE!!!!!!!!! =), lol... catcha around! and live a nice and "long" prosperous life, or whats left of it. i'm jk =) hey mark, i haven't really gotten to know you as many of the punkrockers on aa have...i don't understand why you're leaving. i guess i'm out of the loop...i haven't been on aa in awhile and i guess i missed the update on the page when you announced ur goodbye. i just wanted to let you know that your page was my favourite on aa...and thanx for posting up my article once upon a time :-D. lol i think that you are honestly one of the most important people in the community. and aa is gonna suck now without aa_punkrockers...so i think that once u leave, i'll probably stop logging on as frequently. anywhoo, though we never talked i always felt i understood where u were coming from from your webpage. and i am geniunely sad to see this page die. you know what sucks? it sucks that aapunkrockers is "goin' out of business" (so to speak). why? i'm not gonna try to be all sentimental, cuz it's not like i had any REAL personal cnnection. to be completely honest and yet completely frank: i liked the page. i liked the music being represented on that page. i liked the layout(s). i liked that other people with similar musical tastes as me found via that page. i liked that it stood out from the rest of the aa pages. i liked that it lasted for as long as it did. and successfully. it sucks. i wish things were different, but i can't do anything about it so i won't pout. this is as much as i'll do about it. whoa, wow, havent been to your page in awhile... why you leaving? and when did you decide? im guessing you either dont have time or just hate aa so much that it soils your integrity evertime you log on haha... your page was nice while it lasted man, i enjoyed contributing, this community within the community you've created is really sumthin. later dude mark is the bestest of the best. your page is the bestest of the best. you've made a BIG difference here on asianavenue.. and all the punk/emo lovers love YOU for it. take it easy dude. what happened with the punk news reports, album reviews, and stuff? it was cool seeing how others contributed to the page. anyways, rock on! hi mark, why are you leaving aa? jack, gi, and your site are like...our main pages to go to..lol..it really sucks that you are leaving. a community that has been going around for like..two years just shuts down. it sucks. lol. ok. i'll stop with my nonsense. bye. good luck. rock on! \m/ (>_ ahh the horror of it all!! u CANT LEAVE.. u havent stayed long enough.. because.. i didnt know ur page existed and it hasnt even been a year for me!! AHH!!!!! dammit.. oh well, i guess grandpa mark needs to go to a retirement home.. be nice to the nurses anddont wet the beds grandpa =), we'll miss u mark!! yo whats up mark yo man i just wanna know one thing why did you stop?... i mean it was so much these non-punk bastard could have learned from you... in a world riddle with panzy ass ravers and soft ass pop boy toys. common man you gotto bring the page back... you're leaving...??? NOOOO... mark you can't go!! crap...i'm gonna miss ya dude.. and your updates, reviews, etc. so are you really gone for good? aw... please don't leave. i'm gonna miss you dude, your page; the reviews, photos, news, links...crap, please don't gooo... that sucks, man, i really liked your page. can't wait for the last layout. (how depressing) rock on. hey... just have to say that i alwayz enjoyed coming bak to this page and it'll remain on my friends list 4eva peace sad to hear that aa_punkrockers is no more. you will be missed. wah wah wah? why do you only have one last update coming up?? where are you going?! *tears* did i miss something? why good bye?! this saddens me. - whimper - well, thanks. ^_^ -a fan are you quitting ur own site??? you were starting off real good & a sudden good-bye & a thanx. why? geesh! i hope it's just temporarily.... dont leaaaavvvvveeee!!! *cries* awwwwwwww!! awww i can't believe your leaving now. . . ! well i jus wanted to say i've always loved your aa punk rockers page :) and i wich you could stay and not close the site down !! :( whoa.....hey, are you leaving aa for good or something? what's going on? AHH! whats happened??? what happened? why're you leaving aa? say it ain't so! ok goodbye. why are you giving up duties as owner of the page? last update? my aa world is coming to a crashing end. dear aa punkrockers: keep on punking. the force is in you. what's happenin' to the page dude...? this was the best fuckin' page on aa... exctept mine of course. aaayyyy! hey hey mark. blahz...it's gonna be a total bitch here on aa if i won't be able to visit your page anymore. you always rocked my world with your daily dailies of the punk world. we're all gonna miss you when you leave!! especially me and x_rain_x!! we're your number ONE fans! *throws a rippin' sex pistols poster @ mark* love you oi oi *sniff* this is the most horriblest thing in the history of asianavenue. so it's official--you're really going to abandon us huh??? what can i do to make you stay =/ ... i will TRULY miss you to no end ..haha...i'm over doing it aren't i ?!? but no seriously i will MISS it all... well all good things must come to an end---sad it had to be your page!!! =( ... i wish YOU the BEST mark!!! on and thanks for the awesome updates you've always provided us!!! hope you keep in-touch!!! PEACE OUT BUDDY. much love and respect. GOD BLESS!!! you're leaving? punk rock is really dead then isnt it? well i just wanted to thank you for all the help and recommendations you've given me over the past year and a half. you have really great taste in music and you opened my eyes to alot of groups that i otherwise wouldnt had thought of checking out. heck, i'll list some of them out: fugazi, the vandals, minor threat, the descendents, the dead kennedys, afi, brody (heh) and alot lot lot more. you were always gracious and never demeaning with your tremendous knowledge of all that is punk. damn, you were one of the very first pages i visited here on aa. damn. you'll be missed, man. take care. NOOO!! oh shit man i can't believe this.... well man it has been an honour to be on your members list and thanks for the mention. i must say this is my favorite page ever since i joined aa and by far it still is. i guess we all have to move on sometime. adios MARK!! why are you leaving?! WHY! WHYYYYY! you're suppose to stay put!! dun you wanna stay side by side running this page while gi and jack got aa-headbangers?! *tears* you're breaking my heart...as well as x_rain_x's!! we love you! hmm...iono...just to sum it all up for all those who are aa-punkrockers members...mark....WE LOVE YOU SO FRIGGIN' MUCH MUCH!!!! hey man sucks that your leaving aa!!! you were one of the first sites i visited and i know for sure that your site will be my favorite till the day i fucking leave aa! hey who would have known, you left aa first. adios wow, i don't know how long you're left, or if you're ever coming back to check your messages... i feel so outdated :( anyway, i guess i'll say what everyone else is saying, it was great while your page lasted :) i had something to look at when i hopped onto aa. yep, and i'll miss you and this page.. haha.. remember the first email i ever sent you? isn't that funny, and we never ever even wound up talking except through guestbooks and whatnot. this was certainly an interesting relationship we had. ;) well take care, do you ever update your markkim.com page? i'll be around, send me a message sometime. :) shit. how am i gonna know what to download without you around????? :) happy retirement. ahhh... what a sad day for aa punkrockers.... a sad sad day... yes, that sucks so much. aa punkrockers was always a great page. and mr. punkrocker himself was always a nice guy. he'll be missed. at this moment i'm holding a one lighter memorial for the aapunkrockers. GO BACK, AND GO BACK FOR GOOD, until all of us punkers here get tired of aa (hopefully by the time we get married or have kids, whichever one goes first). you are such a cool dude (i mean that SINCERELY) and you are our leader!!!! do not abandon us now!!!!!! how many rants do we have to write for you to get you back here for good???? goodbye! we love oi oi oi!