The Bards Blog

Some of you might recognize the name of the site Paper Street Brigade as being a reference to both the movie and novel Fight Club. I can’t remember if I ever listed my favorite movies of all time, but Fight Club and Sin City pretty much share the #1 spot. I also thoroughly enjoyed the Fight Club novel, but I believe some of Chuck’s later writings are better. I’ve watched Fight Club with people and I’ve talked with people who have seen it. It’s pretty amazing that it seems like people either love it or hate it with no middle ground. You can take multiple messages from Fight Club, but I think they all tie into one point: Your relationship with your father. It seems like if the person had any decent relationship with their dad, Fight Club just doesn’t tie together.

I’m not saying my father wasn’t there for me or I struggled growing up. I was in a relatively comfortable middle class upbringing. But I don’t think my dad ever wanted kids. He most likely got my mom pregnant by accident, especially considering he was 27 and she was 19. He was doing a good amount of drugs and drinking for the first few years of my life. I actually ended up saving his life because when he passed out into a drug induced coma, I showed my mom what he had been taking which she gave to the cops and they saved his life. From then on he changed into an almost Born Again Christian for anyone that has had to put up with their silliness first hand.

My dad though actually had it pretty good at his job. He worked a 4 day 10 hour a day shift. So that means he was off three days a week. But the reality is that I don’t have many good memories of him. For example, he hated all sports and I liked them. Even so you think he could have taken time once in a blue moon to throw a ball around with me.  When we used to go to baseball games he would always want to leave in the 7th inning so he could beat the traffic. Oh and don’t get me started on his insanity when we would get lost on the way to Shea Stadium. So we’d get to the game sometime during the 3rd and leave by the 7th. I guess one time I complained about this, and he got tickets to a double header. We got to the first game in the 3rd and left the second game in the 7th. When I said something about leaving early, he said “Well you’ve seen a whole game”

Most of my memories are more like this one. Growing up my room was really crowded and small. So I would play board games in the living room, trying to find out of the way places so that it wasn’t in the way. Day after day though, my dad would come home and find a way to accidentally stomp his way across anything I had setup. The only time he didn’t was when I was playing with my mom and she told him not to. Far be it from him to actually show interest and want to join in the games I was playing. Even to a point that my dad when I was young would love playing arcade games and some of the early NES games. But he never showed any sort of interest of playing those same games with me or getting to know me.

Instead what I remember is someone who always in the background seemed to be angry with me and blame me for such things as getting sick on his days off from work. When he was looking to blame me for something he would commonly get in my face and say “If I didn’t do it, if mom didn’t do it, if your brother didn’t do it, who could have done it?” which worked for a bit until I pointed out that “If I didn’t do it, mom didn’t do it, my brother didn’t do it, who could have done it?” which infuriated him and destroyed his arguments.

Am I making a big thing out of the little? Maybe. But I think of reading Artie Lange’s book and nearly crying when reading about his relationship with his dad. I look back, and maybe I’m making mountains out of molehills, but it seems like I just can’t bring up any particularly good memories. He always tended to be combative, and for example when I got my first job he told me my car insurance cost 300 bucks a month. I paid him the first two months, despite the fact that I was only making 169 a week (40 hours a week at Min Wage) but I eventually stopped paying because I asked to see the bill and he refused to show it to me cause it was none of my business. A few months later I started giving him 65 bucks a week (once again, out of 169 a week I made at min wage) for my mom to pay for my health insurance. Well once I got my health insurance I decided to stop paying for it. Well he goes and informs me that I was paying just to live there. Then I find out years later from my mom that he never gave her a cent that I was giving him.

The line in Fight Club goes

If you’re male and you’re Christian and living in America, your father is your model for God. And if you never know your father, if your father bails out or dies or is never at home, what do you believe about God?

And so in a healthy relationship with your father, your going to love him as a young boy, hate him as a teenager, and eventually as an adult realize he was right. It’s sort of the same arc with people and religion, you believe it as a child, question it as a teen, and come back to it as an adult with a new understanding. In both situations though I still look at it the same way and as I grow older I fail to see in both situations a new perspective.

Tags: Failure, Father, Fight Club, God, Lies, Religion, Tyler Durden