8 Rules of the Fight

What are you buying this holiday season?

Today I was looking at my honeys. I mean my knives. I pet them. I talk to them (hence, “honeys”).
I was considering adding another one to my collection.
I love them as I love my plants. Or my collection of hats.

I selected for you today 8 Rules of The Fight. They are not like the 8 Rules of the Fight Club that you saw in the storied movie and book. They’re from posts across this blog, and it’s nice to put them in one place.

Rule Number One: No fight is ever fair.

The Second Rule of the Fight: Life is brutal. Let no one tell you otherwise.

Rule Number Three: The most emotional party almost always loses.

Rule #4 Periodically declare a truce, to catch your breath.

Rule #5 Don’t be a pawn in somebody else’s game.

Quote of the day: “To know clear purpose of who you are and what must be done -that is what calls to all of my kind.” – Gladiator Gannicus in Spartacus, War of the Damned

Rule #6 Once a dirtbag, always a dirtbag. The dirty always fights dirty.

Rule #7 Crassus sends Julius Caesar to the rebels camp to negotiate the release of his captured son in Spartacus because he’s “someone who’s lived amongst them, and knows their treacherous way.”  You need someone from the enemy camp with you for a balanced perspective. 

Rule #8 You fool the enemy when you periodically fall out of character.

Somebody directed me to a Japanese merchant called Korin who makes handcrafted Japanese knives out of carbon and blue steel. Is that a good brand?

I can’t offer you a knife this Thanksgiving but I will offer you the Book of the Underdog at 30% off, good from now through Cyber Monday, November 26. This the best sale of it, only at Amazon.

There are some inanities in Fight Club, but the good stuff is great. The following is a quote from Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk, referring to the “selection process.”

“I go home, and there’s a guy standing at our front porch....

‘Get rid of him.’ Tyler tells me. ‘He’s too young.’I ask: ‘How young is too young?’ It doesn’t matter’, Tyler says. “If the applicant is young, we tell him he’s too young. If he’s fat, he’s too fat. If he’s old, he’s too old…

This is how Buddhist temples have tested applicants going back bah-zillion (sic) years, Tyler says. You tell the applicant to go away, and if his resolve  is so strong that he waits at the entrance without food or shelter or encouragement for three days, then and only then can he enter.

So I tell mister angel he’s too young, but at lunchtime he’s still there. After lunch, I go out and beat mister angel with a broom and kick the guy’s sack out into the street. From upstairs, Tyler watches me stick-ball the broom upside the kid’s ear, the kid just standing there, then I kick his stuff into the gutter and scream.
Go away, I’m screaming..You’ll never make it. Come back in a couple of years and apply again....

The next day, the guy is still there, and Tyler goes out to him ‘I’m sorry…and would he please go.’

And the guy stays. And his clothes are still in the gutter. The wind takes the torn paper sack away.”

That’s life poetry, my friends. And the selection process is life.

Until next time,

Max