39 Comments

I was seeing Fight Club twice. Well, I saw it a second time the next day. I was a waiter at the time, so I went during the day. The theater was mostly empty as a result. I remember smoking while watching it, which seemed fairly Fight Club.

Expand full comment
author

This hit me right out of the blue. I first met Kyle when he was a college student, during the 'Fight Club' conference at the University of Edinboro. Poor Dr. Kinch. I sneaked cases of Silly String into the campus theater and told the audience to shoot it all at the film's end. Creating a vast sticky mess that Dr. Jan Kinch was cleaning up until morning. Sigh.

Expand full comment

I was picking chewing gum from underneath classroom tables, with my bare hands, and putting it into a bin bag; while receiving the "such a waste of pptential," speech from the maths teacher assigned to Friday afternoon detention watch.

Some of the gum was fresh. Some had been there 5 years. Some since the 70s. Good times.

Expand full comment

I walked out of the movie in a daze, and bought the book from the bookstore right beside the theater. I stayed up all night reading fight club. The next day I broke the first rule, and talked about fight club to anyone who would listen.

Expand full comment

I was a valet at BabyDolls in Dallas, Texas. Sixteen days later I distinctly remember a regular customer coming in for Halloween dressed as Tyler Durden. I'd heard about the movie, hadn't seen it yet. He was a decent guy, tipped well. He drove a black Porsche 996 Carerra. When he left I had asked who he was dressed as and he gave me a copy of Fight Club, $40 cash, and told me "Tyler Durden".

Expand full comment
founding

It was a Friday so, I must have been in Ms. Wheeler's class. She was my 1st grade teacher, and my favorite activity in her class was book making. We would write stories on stacks of construction paper, and she would then bind them with duct tape. Ms. Wheeler had big, blonde, beehive hair and the highest pitch voice I've ever known.

Expand full comment

I need to watch it (finally!) today.

Expand full comment

October 1999 - I was frantically running Y2K batch updates on computer software to head off the apocalypse. Airplanes didn't fall from the sky and the world's banking systems didn't implode into fiery rubble. My job as a number-crunching superhero drew to a close. Six months later, the Towers fell. I cashed out my internet bubble stocks and options from my California St. software company, sublet my San Francisco apartment, and took off to tour Asia for a year. When I returned in 2002, my husband and I opened 12 Galaxies—a club serving up nightly helping of Dadaist absurdity and bleeding-edge music.

Expand full comment

For me and my friends about to graduate college, it was a life-altering film. I remember a long, late night conversation following the movie where my buddy kept insisting, “there’s so many ants! On the sidewalks! In the dirt! And nobody pays attention to them! We should notice the ants! They’re everywhere!”

Expand full comment

My knee jerk reaction to this was 'fuck off 22 years.' It sounds so ridiculous (and makes me feel ancient).

But all those years ago I was in and out of hospital and reading lots of Stephen King novels. Anything horror actually, anything my grandma would lend me (she was, and is, a horror fan). Anyway, it was a few years later when I eventually saw Fight Club and, as a result, bought the book. I had to buy the movie tie in version to make sure I was getting the right thing. It was one of the first books I'd sought out rather than just stumbling across or being given. It sent me down a very slippery book-buying slope.

Expand full comment

weird… I clearly remember where I was, cause it was 8 days before the first Chris Cornell’s solo show I’ve ever attended. That Friday night I was with my future wife at my bud’s pub, drinking beer and planning to go to that show (that night is a true milestone in my life).

A few weeks after the show I was in a cinema theater (again with my future wife) watching Fight Club. I don’t have the ticket, but still have the page of a magazine of the time with the Fight Club poster that I had hung in my bedroom back in the day.

Expand full comment

Seeing Fight Club opening night in North Haven, CT - fresh out of college and new to adulting!

Expand full comment

In 1999, “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace” and “Fight Club” were both released, and I’ve only now just realised that “The Phantom Menace” is actually a subtitle that’s more applicable to “Fight Club”.

Also, if I recall correctly, David Fincher worked on “Return of the Jedi” back in 1983 as part of the ILM crew. The plot thickens...

Expand full comment

I was thirteen, so... But I feel that if I had seen "Fight Club" at that age, my life would have been vastly diferent - for the better.

Expand full comment

Off topic, but I want to thank you for Greener Pastures! My 10 year old daughter is an avid reader. And to this point the installments have actually been on a level and degree of content that I have felt comfortable reading to her. I’ve only had to skip over one or two sentences at this point. Haha! Just really cool to be able to share the work of my favorite author with her. She is so enthralled by it. We aren’t much of a religious family but she goes to a Catholic school, and so she was particularly drawn to your comparisons of the various saints to magicians, and is captivated by the notion of these kids taking their lives (she’s got a little bit of a dark side to her soul). She asks me every day if we have a new chapter yet. Haha! Again, so fun being able to share your work with her. Obviously I’ll continue previewing it first to make sure this thing doesn’t head the direction of “Snuff”…😂

Expand full comment
founding

Watching Fight Club in a packed theater while chomping on a hot dog and a bucket of popcorn W/ extra butter flavored grease was dope.

Expand full comment