I’ve been to the bottom of my soul, and I liked it.

I love this shot.

So I believe that there are serious life lessons to be learned in Fight Club — book and movie. The movie is practically the only thing in which I’ve ever found Jared Leto tolerable. That scene where Jack absolutely destroys Leto’s angelic face and Tyler looks at Jack and says, “Where’d you go, Psycho Boy?” and Jack replies, “I wanted to destroy something beautiful” — you know that scene? It speaks to me, kids. On so many levels. Jack’s desolation is an attempt to feel something, his degradation an affectation assumed to absolve himself of his empty life full of the material. He finds a spirituality in self-destruction, and as self-absorbed as it seems, I hear that siren song. The drive towards spiritual self-immolation may be a direct result of original sin, but I think it is the origin of sin itself. I’ve been to the bottom of my soul, kids, and it’s really peaceful there.

I could go on from here, but I don’t know how you’d react.

Now that I’ve thoroughly disturbed you, I must surface for a bit of celebrity banality. There’s a reason I’ve brought up the aforementioned Leto, and it is that I recently sat through a 13 minute video for one of his band’s songs, “Hurricane.” Google it. What surprised me is that the song isn’t bad at all. I actually liked it quite a lot. Leto’s got a great voice. The video itself is apparently very “explicit”, (I think I saw maybe one nipple), and shocking, but I didn’t see anything I haven’t seen before. It was sort of like Eyes Wide Shut meets Donnie Darko with a splash of something starring Jared Leto. He wrote and directed it, of course, and the high school girls will love it, but I came away from it unmoved. S&M doesn’t shock me, oddly (or not so oddly) enough.

I guess the fact that I started thinking about Fight Club is reward enough for sitting through that video. I’m also going to download that album, just for fun.