There's a sleeper hold that gives somebody just enough air to stay awake, and that night at fight club I hit our first-timer and hammered that beautiful mister angel face, first with the bony knuckles of my fist like a pounding molar, and then the knotted tight butt of my fist after my knuckles were raw from his teeth stuck through his lips. Then the I, id fell through my arms in a heap.

Tyler told me later that he'd never seen me destroy something so completely. That night, Tyler knew he had to take fight club up a notch or shut it down.
Tyler said, sitting at breakfast the next morning,
"You looked like a maniac, Psycho-Boy. Where did you go?"
I said I felt like crap and not relaxed at all. I didn't get any kind of n buzz. Maybe I'd developed a Jones. You can build up a tolerance to fighting, and maybe I needed to move on to something bigger.
It was that morning, Tyler invented Project Mayhem.
Tyler asked what I was really fighting.
What Tyler says about being the crap and the slaves of history, that's I n >w I felt.
I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I'd never have.
Burn the Amazon rain forests.
Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up o > 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 n ) eat, and smother the French beaches I'd never see.
I wanted the whole world to hit bottom.

Pounding that kid, I really wanted to put a bullet between the eyes every endangered panda that wouldn't screw to save its species and every whale or dolphin that gave up and ran itself aground.

Don't think of this as extinction. Think of this as downsizing.

For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And account for every drop of used motor oil.
And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born.

I held the face of mister angel like a baby or a football in the crook of my arm and bashed him with my knuckles, bashed him until his teeth broke through his lips. Bashed him with my elbow after that until he fell through my arms into a heap at my feet.
Until the skin was pounded thin across his cheekbones and turned black.



I wanted to breathe smoke.



Birds and deer are a silly luxury, and all the fish should be floating.
I wanted to burn the Louvre. I'd do the Elgin Marbles with a sledgehammer and wipe my ass with the Mona Lira.

This is my world, now.
This is my world, my world, and those ancient people are dead.