justnick's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tell your friends! I remember when Fight Club came out. Or rather, I remember watching it. I was with my friends Tom and Gareth. We were inseparable back then. Tom was big, and good at basketball. Being good at a sport was a complete identity in the ninth grade. Gareth was more complicated. He was a tempest of rage and love. He was quiet, and angry, and a complete sweetheart. He was on the wrestling team and the water polo team. I was... well, I've never thought about it much. I mean, don't get me wrong, I've spent many a sleepless hour dwelling on those formative days come and past (though never entirely gone), I just spent a lot more time thinking about all the things I wasn't back then. Wasn't an athlete, or popular, was too gangly and skinny to be good looking, didn't have any particular fashion sense, and always said the wrong things. I tried making music my identity, that program was just cultish enough to appeal to an adolescent struggling valiantly to find an identity, but that didn't really do it. Wes taught me to play, and he was a genius. I was alright. I suppose I was invisible. I was certainly trying to be. I needed to be invisible at home, and I wanted to be invisible at school, especially gym class. And that's why Fight Club hit all three of us so hard. We were certainly too young to really understand the message at its core, none of us were converted into card carrying anarchists as a result of the viewing. But it did give us all one terribly destructive, wonderfully adolescent idea. That's right, we beat the living snot out of each other. Them more than me, admittedly. And when we were tired of that, we terrorized the neighborhood. Sorry mom, but it's more common among suburban teenagers than you might like. We weren't doing drugs, we were relocating detour signs, sneaking into golf courses, and finding all kinds of wonderful things to throw stuff at. I know you must think less of me right now, but try to understand. In the suburbs, we were all living the nuclear life without any of the nuclear fear to give it all meaning. Our parents had provided for us, and protected us. We had no struggle, and no enemy. All we had to focus on was going to school. And when that's all you have, you start to notice things. The cogs behind the machine. And you start to notice that the suburbs and the schooling system were just breeding healthy little capitalists, one just like the other. This one is good at math, this one is good at football, this one is good for nothing. But for eight hours a day, we're going to sit them in a room and punish independent thought. We're going to make them write essays instead of stories, they're all going to read the same books, and everyone eats from the same menu. That's why we all tormented each other all the time. If you weren't one of the social elite, you were teased or ignored; pick one. And the reality was, the elite were just the kids who had discovered either too early or too late that the whole system was full of shit. The ones who had given up in elementary school and smoked their first joint at eleven, or the ones who still thought it mattered if they skipped English class. Because we were suburbanite leftovers. We were the boomers kids. Their generation's great battle was proving that all men were created equal, which I suppose means that ours was to realize that all men are not exactly the same. So we hit each other. We didn't know why, really. We just knew it was cool when Brad Pitt and Ed Norton did it. But when I look back now, it's all pretty obvious. They would hit me, and they were bigger than me. They didn't pity me, they didn't let me off easy, they didn't treat me like a handicap, and they didn't make fun of me either. I got to hit them back without fear. I got to tell them to stop when they hit something too sensetive, and they would. Yes, I was skinny. Yes, I was awkward. But they didn't pull any punches from pity, and they didn't treat me badly because of the labels I did or did not have. We were just idiot teenage boys beating the snot out of each other for no good reason. Tom was not the basketball player with parental issues and too much pressure to live up to at home. Gareth was not the explosive young man, too full of repressed anger and unrequited love to know what to do with it. And I was not invisible, or a social curiosity to be ignored, tormented, or pitied. Watching it now, its a lot easier to understand the messages in it. But I don't think it'll hit me quite as hard as it did the first time. It's a boy thing. Excelsior. 3:48 a.m. - 2008-10-14 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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