Going Chuck

Reads: I am happy today has turned out fine.

Even when I'm chubs.

Photo by the Lesley Choa

This is Gerard's happy meter, hitting the ceiling.

This is Gerard's smile, honest and at times forced, cause he knows he looks better on camera when he's showing some semi-pearly whites.

This is Gerard on a Monday, wanting to be as productive as productive could get, but half-way quitting.

This is Gerard, going Chuck Palahniuk and realizing, it sounds pretentious, when he's writing it.

I still couldn't get over Fight Club and how cool the movie is with its brilliant twists, Brad Pitt and Edward Norton (whom I think is the sort of peg for James McAvoy's character in Wanted...Shia and Joseph Gordon-Levitt could be reincarnations of Norton). I've been a fan of Palahniuk since, oh I don't know, 2007? I remember flipping through my black, glossy copy of Haunted---to Jerich Eusebio, you have to give that back to me...that was one of my favorite books---on a dark plane ride to Memphis and just feeling limp after every details he's penned. He's an excellent, writer who's just bursting with imagination and disguises deep life lessons in all his slice-through-the-throat masculinity. I tried, once, going Chuck, but it's really not my style. He has this slant on science and a penchant for anatomy, like Diary. I'm glad we get to take him up for the Stream of Consciousness discussion this Thursday for Western Literature. Along with it would be American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis and some (brace yourselves) Virginia Woolf. That's, so far, the reading line-up and the moment we hit the contemporary period, I realized something quite disturbing about this period.

Well, it started with Realism and Naturalism, you know, Crime & Punishment, Guy de Maupassant (spell check please) works, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Tennessee, all those "realistic" works. And then symbolism comes in with great writers like Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Katherine Mansfield (whose The Fly just stuck eternal in my head). After that, we go into The Theater of the Absurd, Confessional Poetry which is incredibly depressing and at the same time acts like this invisible vacuum inside your core, and then this Thursday's Stream of Consciousness works. All these pieces and movements have that looming cloud over them...Like if you'd read them you'd feel like the world has gone mad, or the people have gone to dying as an art. I understand that it is because of the war. I mean, I am generations post-war and it still bothers me like a ghost blowing up my nape.

I guess that's one of the finest reasons why we have to study history. Far from checking out human intentions and just looking at the subject at a superficial point of view, it makes you mindful of what man was, what man is capable of and what has become. And it scares me, actually. I mean, what with technology and wealth and these new giant countries up and about...You know how we are. We're all sensitive beings and when we do get hurt, we hate. Imagine multiplying that to a bigger magnitude, countries against countries. That's millions of possibilities versus millions of possibilities. That's souls pitted against souls. And then right before you get all small and dead terrified that maybe the new world war would be the battle of biological diseases---like 28 Days Later---you realize that that's why you have history in school, and literature and theology and philosophy. They don't necessarily provide you with how-tos when it comes to war or whatever, but they do prepare you to meet what you really are, and what your own kind is, has been and will be. Right?

So I was checking out my readings and that thought crossed me (above). I do hope education and experience serve us our guides to the future. And after this class, Western Literature, I want to burden myself with the responsibility of writing like Chuck Palahniuk...Only this time, not gory, but hopeful. Don't you think our generation should raise the next in light of hope and resilience? Aside from good taste, of course.

Well, I'm getting too deep again, I guess this is what I get from all the reading. But you have to love it. Check out this Palahniuk quote I found. It has to be one of the best quotes there is out there, cause you have VOGUE in it AND Chuck Palahiuk AND life. Beautiful yet slightly pessimistic.

"Just remember, the same as a spectacular VOGUE magazine, remember that no matter how close you follow the jumps: Continued on page whatever. No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention. Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel someday. This is all practice. None of this matters. We're just warming up."

quote: Thinkexist

.Gerard