Fight Club

Og hits it out of the park. Go and read Fight Club:

The first rule of fight club
is you do not talk about fight club.

James Burnette has a good post here about that very subject, ignoring the first (and second) rules.

Look: Violence and death are an integral part of life. Humans have known this for ages, and that knowledge, I believe, is the reason we play games, and hunt, and race cars, and etc.

Men, by their nature, want to test themselves. Against themselves, against other individuals, other counties, other states, other nations. They do so peacibly by playing games, they do so un-peacibly by going to war. It is an integral part of masculinity, and to attempt to separate masculinity from the contest is probably bad, possibly very bad. Everywhere guys get together for a pick-up game of baseball, or hockey, or go hunting in a group, or shoot in a competition, they are testing themselves and one another, measuring themselves against each other and against themselves. Am I better at this than he is? Am I cleverer? Am I stronger? Have I improved? Am I better than I was last week? Can I kick his ass? Can I shoot more hoops? Can I hit the X ring more often?

Tyler Durdin attributes the �Lostness� of the generation. And in the main, he�s right. No, I am not anxious to go out and get pummeled, but I have had more than my share of that already. And I am not lost.

You see, if you look at Fight Club, you don�t see many guys who got off their tractor to join. Or put down their rifle to join, or parked their stock car to join. That is because the people riding that tractor, or hunting those deer, or driving that car, see, they already belong to Fight Club. They pit themselves daily against the hard soil, to make it fertile. Or the wiliness of the whitetail, or the abilities of their fellow drivers. Men- real men- have known for ages the need to brace themselves against something- some, like crab fishermen, or farmers, do so against their jobs. Some, like hunters, do so against their quarry. Some do so on the baseball diamond against other players, or on ashalt courts all over the place.

Go and read the rest. What he said...