The Tyler Durden Restoration Project
Welcome to Chino’s Midnight Meanderings, a stream of consciousness exposition illuminating the thoughts that go on inside my pretty little head (and it is pretty—it’s my world, you can’t have it). I cannot promise that what you’ll see will be funny, informative, profound, offensive, crude, crass, intelligent, or belligerent, but it will be something—a permutation of all of them, perhaps. You’ll never know. Hell, even I won’t. Well, most of the time.
In any case: let’s crack on, shall we?
If you listen to our podcast—the aptly named Chino & Homeboy Podcast (creative, isn’t it?), you’re probably aware that I had a rather severe COVID-19 infection. While the sickness itself wasn’t all that bad (I mean, I’m still here—alive and breathing precious air and taking up valuable space), a baleful post-ailment syndrome put me in the hospital and nearly killed me. I have since recovered, thank Satan, and have recovered quite well, and I feel, as they say, 100%, or as close to full health and capability as I did pre-COVID. This flirtation with Lady Death (there was LOTS of heavy petting, let me tell you—she’s a frisky minx, Death) pressed me to be acutely aware of every little thing that is happening in my body. From heeding minor aches, pains and discomforts, to monitoring heart rates, breathing pace, and everything in between, I am now keenly au courant of what is going on in this decaying bone mech that is my body. With that sort of au fait body awareness, I decided several weeks ago to start hitting the gym again in a concerted effort to get fit (again) and stay alive for as long as I can. I lift, I run, I watch what I eat, and I stay active at work. Now, because of the exalted position that the book/movie Fight Club has in the oeuvre that is my life (yes, I am a work of art—haha!), I chose to label this attempt at my salubrious redemption as The Tyler Durden Restoration Project.
In case you’ve lived under a rock in the last 20 to 30 years and have no clue what I’m on about, Fight Club is a Chuck Palahniuk literary masterwork of nihilism, mayhem, and self-discovery (that sounds contradictory, doesn’t it?). Adapted into a feature length film in 1999, it starred Edward Norton as the unnamed depressed insomniac protagonist/narrator and Brad Pitt as his anti-hero cohort and alter ego, Tyler Durden. Now, this may read controversial, but for many people, Tyler Durden is the embodiment of who they aspire to be: a Nietzchean Übermensch without compromise, unencumbered and unfettered by the traditional ethical shackles imposed by the society he finds himself existing in. He is Harrison Bergeron on steroids, just…shorter, and without the impeding appurtenances. Seriously, read a book. Now, in arguably the most important line of the film (well, most important to the scope of this post, anyway), Tyler tells his everyman counterpart, “All the things you wish you could be, that’s me. I look like you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck, I am smart, I am capable, and most importantly, I am free in all the ways that you are not.”
And fuck me, he is.
Now, Tyler is, for the lack of a better word, fit. Detractors might say otherwise (and I’ve heard all the objections, but I don’t give shit—it’s my world, remember?), but
that motherfucker was ripped. And I used to be fit like Tyler was: every muscle group in my body was defined and striated. That’s what happens when you conquer the weakness in the soma, push past your limits, and fill that deficiency out of your body—you’ll look like fuckin’ Adonis. Shit, I even had the same hair and chipped tooth, I was so much like Tyler. I dove into combat sports, and I played ball every day to supplement the already insane fitness regiment I was crazy enough to put myself on. I was intense, and I was even labeled crazy. Then, fucking complacency happened. Injuries followed, begetting even more laziness and an over-arching sort of unhealthiness that was incredibly difficult to get out from under. Ad rem, I was still eating like I was running a fucking triathlon everyday. I consumed everything (except for bananas. Fuck those terrible things. Did you know they produce antimatter? Fuck those things). Look, I could blame any number of existential upheavals as to why my life suddenly became sedentary and morose, but I’m not going to do that. I just fucked off and got lazy.
As a result, I got FAT.
The trouble with complacency, I found, was that it became so easy to sit around and waste away. True story, man. I mean, on a biological level, we are evolutionarily predisposed to conserve as much energy as we possibly can. That’s why machines were invented: to make our goddamned life easier. Pair that prime evolutionary objective with the ongoing battle with Father Time and it becomes very easy to find excuses to not do anything. Fuck man, even sitting around became exhausting after a while. Here’s the thing: in this sweet, fragile splendor that we call life, the little habits that you do (or in this case, the ones you don’t do) make you who you are, and for a while, all I did was eat. I morphed from a disciplined, biomechanical wonder carved from wood and granite to a pudgy mess of gluttony, corpulence, dourness, and insufficiency. I was still handsome as fuck, though, so I had that going for me. And my hair was magnificent.
Still is.
You know what’s funny? In that retrospective, I’ve decided I dislike that corpulent version of me more than fucking COVID. Funny old world, innit?
It took an extreme case of COVID essentially kicking my ass into oblivion (well, almost) and destroying my blood (watch/listen to the pod for the full story) to finally shake me awake enough to resolve kicking my own ass like I used to. If anyone is gonna be kicking my ass, it’ll be me. I’m my own bitch, god damn it. I do what I want! I joined a local gym, forced myself to go everyday until it became habitual again, and…here I am now. My inner Tyler Durden is coming out of torpor and re-emerging. I guess the point that I’m trying to make is this: go get COVID, almost die, and re-evaluate your life…. No, I’m joking. Get your ass to the gym, go for a walk outside, go play tag for fuck’s sake. Go do something. Just make sure to follow your local community mandates and cover your face holes. And watch what you eat. Have a serving of steak, not the whole cow, you fucking animal.
Keep tokin’.