Haunted - Chuck Palahniuk

That’s the American Dream: to make your life into something you can sell.

Swing it around. The smell beats a bodyguard for keeping people away.

Mr. Whittier says: “Maybe we’re living the exact way we’re meant to live.” Maybe our factory planet is processing our souls. . . just fine.

“Nobody calls Michelangelo the Vatican’s bitch,” says the Duke of Vandals, just because he begged Pope Julius for work.

After you give up television and newspapers, the mornings are the worst part: that first cup of coffee. It’s true, that first hour awake, you want to catch up with the rest of the world. But her new rule is: No radio. No television. No newspaper. Cold turkey.

If you don’t work, you don’t sleep. Day and night, you’re half awake, bored.

Some stories, Mr. Whittier would say, you tell them and you use them up.

“In our secret heart’s heart, we love to root against the home team.” Against humanity. It’s us against us. You, the victim of yourself. We love war because it’s the only way we’ll finish our work here. The only way we’ll finish our souls, here on earth: The big processing station. The rock tumbler. Through pain and anger and conflict, it’s the only path. To what, we don’t know. “But we forget so much when we’re born,” he says. Being born, it’s as if you go inside a building. You lock yourself inside a building with no windows to see out. And after you’re inside any building long enough, you forget how the outside looked. Without a mirror, you’d forget your own face.

This editor tells me readers don’t want a story about somebody born cute and talented, getting paid a fortune to appear on television, then living happily ever after.
No, people don’t want a happy ending.
People want to read about Rusty Hamer, the little boy onMake Room for Daddywho shot himself. Or Trent Lehman, the cute kid fromNanny and the Professorwho hanged himself on a playground fence. Little Anissa Jones, who played Buffy onFamily Affair, clutching a doll named Mrs. Beasley, then swallowing the biggest overdose of barbiturates in the history of Los Angeles County.
This is what people want. The same reason we go to racetracks to watch the cars crash. Why the Germans say,“Die reinste Freude ist die Schadenfreude.”
Our purest joy comes when people we envy get hurt. That most genuine form of joy. The joy you feel when a limousine turns the wrong way down a one-way street. Or when Jay Smith, the “Little Rascal” known as Pinky, was found stabbed to death in the desert outside Las Vegas. It’s the kind of joy we felt when Dana Plato, the little girl onDiff’rent Strokes, got arrested, posed naked inPlayboy, and took too many sleeping pills.
People standing in line at the supermarket, clipping coupons, getting old, those are the headlines that sell these people a newspaper. Most people, they want to read about Lani O’Grady, the pretty daughter on Eight Is Enough, found dead in a trailer house with her belly full of Vicodin and Prozac.
No crack-up, the editor tells me, no story. Happy Kenny Wilcox with his laugh lines, he wouldn’t sell.
The editor tells me, “Find Wilcox with kiddie porn on his computer. Find him with dead bodies under his house. Then you got a story.” This editor says, “Better yet, find him with all the above, but find him dead.”

Poverty, Inky says, is the new wealth. Anonymity is the new fame. “Social divers,” Inky says, “are the new social climbers.” The Jet Set are the original homeless people, Inky says. We may have a dozen homes—each in a different city—but we still live out of a suitcase.

“If you love something,” says the Matchmaker, “set it free.”
Just don’t be surprised if it comes back with herpes...

“What matters,” Sister Vigilante says, “is, people need a monster they can believe in.” A true and horrible enemy. A demon to define themselves against. Otherwise, it’s just us versus us.

“Our all-powerful God got so scared He scattered the human race across the face of the earth, and shattered their language to keep His children apart.” Part female impersonator, part retired U. S. Marine, the Reverend Godless, sparkling in his red sequins, says, “An almighty God this insecure?” Who pits his children against each other, to keep them weak.
He says, “This is the God we’re supposed to worship?”

If there’s any trick to doing a job you hate... Mrs. Clark says it’s to find a job you hate even more.
After you find a bigger task to dread, the little chores will be a breeze. Here’s another reason to have a devil on hand. It does make all the little demons more. . . bearable. Another Mrs. Clark extension to the theories of Mr. Whittier.
We love drama. We love conflict. We need a devil or we’ll create one.

Kids, she says. When they’re little, they believe everything you tell them about the world. As a mother, you’re the world almanac and the encyclopedia and the dictionary and the Bible, all rolled up together. But after they hit some magic age, it’s just the opposite. After that, you’re either a liar or a fool or a villain.

The camera behind the camera behind the camera, Mr. Whittier would say.