what would jesus not do

I finished my sixth book of the year right on schedule in accordance with my 2006 goal.

Addiction, lunacy and freedom from social definitions are the three top themes that come to mind just after finishing this book. The main character, Victor Mancini, a hopeless sex addict lives by the motto “What Would Jesus Not Do”. I recommend the book. It's a fun read. But instead of a boring review I'd like to present some of my favorite passages.

As in Fight Club, Palahniuk launches an assault on America’s love of consumption:

They should let some people into the library by prescription only. For serious, books about architecture are Denny’s pornography. Yeah, first it’s a few rocks. Then it’s fan-tracery vaulting. My point is, this is America. You start out with hand jobs and progress to orgies. You smoke dope and then, then H. This is our whole culture of bigger, better, stronger, faster. The key word is progress.

There is always a desire for the "new and improved”, the version 2.0, the monstrous transportation vehicle. We are never satisfied. Happiness is always somewhere in the horizon. We are always trying to grasp it but never fully catch it.

His anarchic id shines through in the ethos of Ida Mancini, Victor’s deranged mother:

The laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom. Without access to true chaos, we’ll never have true peace. Unless everything can get worse, it won’t get any better. This is all stuff the Mommy used to tell him. She used to say “The only frontier you have left is the world of intangibles. Everything else is sewn up too tight. “ Caged inside too many laws.

By intangibles, she meant the Internet, movies, music, stories, art, rumors, computer programs, anything that isn’t real. Virtual realities. Make-believe stuff. The culture.

The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it’s only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.

Then Palahnuik channels the Situationists, with a little of Jean Baudrillard’s philosophy thrown in just for fun:

“We don’t live in the real world anymore,” she said. “We live in a world of symbols”.

I dig this writer.