stuff
there’s nothing like packing up all my earthly belongings to trigger an internal debate on my (and by extension humanity’s) relationship with stuff. there’s a lovely scene in fight club that i feel is pretty representative.
TYLER
Do you know what a duvet is?JACK
Comforter.TYLER
It’s a blanket, just a blanket. Now why guys like you and I know what a duvet is? Is this essential to our survival? In the hunter-gathered sense of the word? No. What are we then?JACK
You know, consumers.TYLER
Right. We’re consumers. We’re by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty — these things don’t concern me. What concerns me is celebrity magazines, television with five hundred channels, some guy’s name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra.JACK
Martha Stewart.TYLER
Fuck Martha Stewart. Martha’s polished on the brass of the Titanic. It’s all going down, man! So fuck off, with your sofa units and your green stripe patterns. I say never be complete. I say stop being perfect. I say let’s evolve and let the chips fall where they may. But that’s me, I could be wrong, maybe it’s a terrible tragedy.JACK
No, it’s just stuff.TYLER
Well, you did lose a lot of versatile solutions for a modern life.JACK
Fuck, you’re right.Tyler offers Jack a cigarette.
JACK
No, I don’t smoke. My insurance will probably cover it, so…Tyler stares at him
JACK
What?TYLER
The things you own, end up owing you. But do what you like, man.
By Jack do you mean Narrator?
um, well, not to spoil the plot or anything, i pulled that from one of the scripts online. jack was edward norton and tyler was brad pitt.
fucking right man! Forget the freight option. Give all that shit away. Go to California with the shirt on your back, your laptop, and your mountain bike. All that other shit is just weighing you down!
is the clock on this thing wrong? what the hell were all of you doing up (and posting!) at the crack of dawn?!
yes, when i moved it over to dreamhost, i realized it’s set to west coast time (the time on the server). for some reason wordpress won’t let me change the UTC offset.
time should be correct now.
we’ve already thought about this option (throwing everything out) but realize now that we will only end up taking another, more copious trip to Ikea (oops, I said it).
i was having these exact thoughts during my own movingsturm over the weekend. our new home is bigger than the one i grew up in with 4 kids. i miss the days when i could grab all my stuff and leave on a whim. a benefit of our new house is that we are next to the pta. hmm..
You mean edward norton was the narrator.
Stuff is, sad to say, basically bad for you. The more you have, the more you worry about it. If you don’t own anything, you can’t worry about anything bad happening to it!
kansas, i mean that the converstation above occured between jack (ed norton) and tyler (brad pitt), sans any narration. the actors were talking on screen. yes, in other parts, ed norton did the narration when jack was thinking, but this was an actual conversation. hehe.
In the world I see – you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.
fight club is SO good.
justin. Edward Norton’s character doesn’t have a name. He might have been refered to as Jack in scripts, but if you actually read the book he has no name. He is the narrator of the story.
kansas, gotcha.
His nametag says jack in several scenes when he’s faking in the support groups
[…] So now there is a dead lemon-scented cockroach on my kitchen floor in a pool of 409. And I still don’t have my belongings, so JWatt, I don’t think you truly understand what living on a mattress without even a table is really like. […]
I don’t think the point is you won’t worry about the stuff if you don’t own it. The point is that stuff is pointless. It serves no purpose other than to make our lives that little bit more convenient or comfortable. Who wants to go get a beer from the kitchen anyway? Keep it in that mini fridge right next to the armchair… You don’t even have to stand. And why bother cooking when the phone’s right there! It’s easier than actually going shopping or growing your own veg… (Although realistically no one does that these days). All you really need is yourself, the clothes on your back, a tree to shelter under and the knowledge of how to find your own food. Sadly I think only Ray Mears knows how to do that these days…