So Messed Up It’s Good

Excerpt #25:
Don’t expect this to be the kind of story that goes: and then, and then, and then, and then.
What happens here will have more of that fashion magazine feel, a Vogue or Glamour magazine chaos with page numbers on every second or fifth or third page. Perfume cards falling out, and full-page naked women coming out of nowhere to sell you make-up.
Don’t look for a contents page, buried magazine-style twenty pages back from the front. Don’t expect to find anything right off. There isn’t a real pattern to anything, either. Stories will start and then, three paragraphs later:
Jump to page whatever.
Then, jump back.
This will be ten thousand fashion separates that mix and match to create maybe five tasteful outfits. A million trendy accessories, scarves and belts, shoes and hats and gloves, and no real clothes to wear them with.
And you really, really need to get used to that feeling, here, on the freeway, at work, in your marriage. This is the world we live in. Just go with the prompts. (20-21)

When on top of the space needle in Seattle, I want to do what the characters in this book do.

Excerpt #26:
“Tell the world what scares you most,” says Brandy.
She gives us each an Aubergine Dreams eyebrow pencil and says, “Save the world with some advice from the future.”
Seth writes on the back of a card and hands the card to Brandy for her to read.
On game shows, Brandy reads, some people will take the trip to France, but most people will take the washer dryer pair.
Brandy puts a big Plumbago kiss on the little square for the stamp and lets the wind lift the card and sail it off toward the towers of downtown Seattle
Seth hands her another, and Brandy reads:
Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.
A kiss, and the card’s on its way toward Lake Washington.
From Seth:
When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?
A kiss, and it’s off on the wind toward Ballard.
Only when we eat up this planet will God give us another. We’ll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.
Interstate 5 snakes by in the distance. From high atop the Space Needle, the southbound lanes are red chase lighst, and the northbound lanes are white chase lights. I take a card and write:
I love Seth Thomas so much I have to destroy him. I overcompensate by worshiping the queen supreme. Seth will never love me. No one will ever love me again.
Brandy is waiting to take the card and read it out loud. Brandy’s waiting to read my worst fears to the world, but I don’t give her the card. I kiss it myself with the lips I don’t’ have and let the wind take it out of my hand. The card flies up, up, up to the stars and then falls down to land in the suicide net.
While I watch my future trapped in the suicide net, Brandy reads another card from Seth.
We are all self-composting.
I write on another card frmo the future, and Brandy  reads it.
When we don’t know who to hate, we hate ourselves.
An updraft lifts my worst fears from the suicide net and sails them away.
Seth writes and Brandy reads.
You have to keep recycling yourself.
I write and Brandy reads.
Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I’ve ever known.
I write and Brandy reads.
The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.
(102-104)

-Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk