Fight Club revisited

I was watching "Fight Club" on F/X the other night. This film has really held up well over the last few years giving me the impression that it will always hold up.

When Fight Club came out, I was stoked. This movie really spoke to me. I've been high coming out of movies before, usually action pics when I was a kid where the good guy beats the bad guy with explosions going off in the background. But nothing relly jazzed me as an adult like "Fight Club."

Like most people, I didn't realize it was based on a book until I saw it so I didn't read the book until much later. When I did, I read it twice in the same summer. I don't do that. I NEVER do that. "1984" and "Brave New World" are two books I've reread every few years because they inform my ideology and have so much that is worth revisiting. But the language and the message of "Fight Club," book and film, make it a real man's film in a unique and liberating sense.

A lot of women I knew at the time hated it largely because of one line. "We are a generation of men raised by women, somehow I don't think another woman is the answer we need." I didn't take this to be any more sexist than when women wears shirts that read "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle." Probably less sexist if anything because they weren't hateful of women, they just didn't think that getting married would make them men.

To me, this was just stating the obvious. Men today aren't men the way men used to be. We are waiters and office boys. Mechanics and telemarketers. That's not what we should be.

I was raised by my mother and sister alone after my parents got divorced. So were many of my friends. It didn't really help me become a man. Far too often, women think they will make a better man than the society of men can and they inevitably end up making men who are boys. In many ways, I am just a boy who doesn't have a clue. I can't fix a car; I'm not particulary tough; I'm not good around the house; I can't fix jack shit, and I'm sensitive like a chick. I'm more sensitive than a lot of women I know. I think spitting is disgusting. I have no game. I've actually missed good opportunities to get laid because the women I was with didn't pull my pants right off of me.

Is it any surprise that in the midst of life, men find themselves grasping at their lost youth and opportunities? I want to be civilized, but not at the cost of my soul. I don't want to give up all control of my life to other, lesser men who's only skills are kissing the ass of some jacked up tool who's only skill is kissing someone else's ass and so on.