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the overheads and slides as my boss tells Microsoft how he chose a particular shade of pale cornflower blue for an icon.
    The first fight club was just Tyler and I pounding on each other.
    It used to be enough that when I came home angry and knowing that my life wasn’t toeing my five-year plan, I could clean my condominium or detail my car. Someday I’d be dead without a scar and there would be a really nice condo and car. Really, really nice, until the dust settled or the next owner. Nothing is static. Even the Mona Lisa is falling apart. Since fight club, I can wiggle half the teeth in my jaw.
    Maybe self-improvement isn’t the answer.
    Tyler never knew his father.
    Maybe self-destruction is the answer.
    Tyler and I still go to fight club, together. Fight club is in the basement of a bar, now, after the bar closes on Saturday night, and every week you go and there’s more guys there.
    Tyler gets under the one light in the middle of the black concrete basement and he can see that light flickering back out of the dark in a hundred pairs of eyes. First thing Tyler yells is, "The first rule about fight club is you don’t talk about fight club.
    "The second rule about fight club,” Tyler yells, "is you don’t talk about fight club.”
    Me, I knew my dad for about six years, but I don’t remember anything. My dad, he starts a new family in a new town about every six years. This isn’t so much like a family as it’s like he sets up a franchise.
    What you see at fight club is a generation of men raised by women.
    Tyler standing under the one light in the after-midnight blackness of a basement full of men, Tyler runs through the other rules: two men per fight, one fight at a time, no shoes no shirts, fights go on as long as they have to.
    "And the seventh rule,” Tyler yells, "is if this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight.”
    Fight club is not football on television. You aren’t watching a bunch of men you don’t know halfway around the world beating on each other live by satellite with a two-minute delay, commercials pitching beer every ten minutes, and a pause now for station identification. After you’ve been to fight club, watching football on television is watching pornography when you could be having great sex.
    Fight club gets to be your reason for going to the gym and keeping your hair cut short and cutting your nails. The gyms you go to are crowded with guys trying to look like men, as if being a man means looking the way a sculptor or an art director says.
    Like Tyler says, even a soufflé looks pumped.
    My father never went to college so it was really important I go to college. After college, I called him long distance and said, now what?
    My dad didn’t know.
    When I got a job and turned twenty-five, long distance, I said, now what? My dad didn’t know, so he said, get married.
    I’m a thirty-year-old boy, and I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer I need.
    What happens at fight club doesn’t happen in words. Some guys need a fight every week. This week, Tyler says it’s the first fifty guys through the door and that’s it. No more.
    Last week, I tapped a guy and he and I got on the list for a fight. This guy must’ve had a bad week, got both my arms behind my head in a full nelson and rammed my face into the concrete floor until my teeth bit open the inside of my cheek and my eye was swollen shut and was bleeding, and after I said, stop, I could look down and there was a print of half my face in blood on the floor.
    Tyler stood next to me, both of us looking down at the big O of my mouth with blood all around it and the little slit of my eye staring up at us from the floor, and Tyler says, "Cool.”
    I shake the guy’s hand and say, good fight.
    This guy, he says, "How about next week?”
    I try to smile against all the swelling, and I say, look at me. How about next month?
    You aren’t alive anywhere like you’re alive at fight club. When it’s you and one