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THE FIRST RULE ABOUT FIGHT CLUB IS YOU DONT TALK ABOUT FIGHT CLUB
THE SECOND RULE ABOUT FIGHT CLUB IS YOU DONT TALK ABOUT FIGHT CLUB
THE THIRD RULE OF FIGHT CLUB IS TWO MEN PER FIGHT
THE FOURTH RULE OF FIGHT CLUB IS ONE FIGHT AT A TIME
THE FIFTH RULE OF FIGHT CLUB IS NO SHOES, NO SHIRTS IN THE FIGHT
THE SIXTH RULE OF FIGHT CLUB IS THE FIGHTS GO ON AS LONG AS THEY HAVE TO

AND THE SEVENTH RULE IS IF THIS IS YOUR FIRST NIGHT AT FIGHT CLUB, YOU HAVE TO
FIGHT

A DAN ROWE AND ZACK MALITZ PRODUCTION (D&Z)

Shell................................................................................................................................................ 2
Shell................................................................................................................................................ 3
I asked to use the lobby phone....................................................................................................... 4
Shell................................................................................................................................................ 6
EVIDENCE BEGINS HERE................................................................................................................. 8
Impact extension/perfection........................................................................................................... 9
Self destruction............................................................................................................................. 10
Ballot OV....................................................................................................................................... 17
2NR OV.......................................................................................................................................... 18
Line by Line OV............................................................................................................................. 19
AT Counter-Ks................................................................................................................................ 20
AT you say X (their harms) are ok................................................................................................. 21
Framework OV............................................................................................................................... 22
Fairness......................................................................................................................................... 23
J23................................................................................................................................................. 28

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Shell
Round one, your neg strat is T, FX, RMA, Offsets and case. The introduction of
competing policy option diminished the market value of the aff, and the judge was
forced to invest elsewhere. You pick up.

Youre Aff round two. The 1AC is an 8 minute infomercial for 1NC is a smear ad against
your product, your 1AC. According to the Negative, your plan isnt as smart, or as
new, or as innovative and unique as you thought it would be. The 2ac is damage
control. Your products gotten a bad name. luckily, your product hits the market with
great successA WIN.

But soon, your 2AC, your big, 8 minute ad, disappears. The judge votes for you, it
doesnt matter why, and by the time round 5 is over, youre 4-1.

You flip neg in octos; quarters, semis and finals are all the same. Different arguments,
same round. You watch yourself watch the judges, the corporate executives of
debate. The judge signs the ballot--- pay to the order of_____________. You watch
yourself nod and smile and absorb the applause when they announce that its a 3-0
for you. Youre going to state. You try so hard to care.

You wake up in Houston and drop in semis. They werent in a buying mood.

You wake up in San Antonio and win the tournament on a 2-1.

You wake up in Chicago and miss breaking on speaks.

You wake up in Atlanta, waiting for a decisionYoure not sure how the presentation
was received.

You wake up in Dallas, and watch yourself not care about the tournament you spent
the year qualifying for.

You wake up in Dallas, Texas and watch yourself go through the motions that you
were taught from day one. You plug your arguments into the formula that every
judge will vote on. Youre lost.
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Every weekend you debate as a single serving policy maker, a single serving activist,
a single serving revolutionary, a single serving whatever-the-hell you say you are.
Each time the round is irrelevant before it even ends. Each time you have nothing to
show but a win-loss record and a story you tell yourself about education, fun,
preparation for your career or whatever.

Then, its practice, or its camp. Its late nights, early mornings. Its pizza and
Subway, Its practice debates. Its rebuttal speeches. Your redoes. Your redoes
become redoes of redoes, everything you say, everything you practice, everything you
lost sleep for, Its just a redo of a redo of redo of a redo. Until nothing you say does or
means anything anymore.

This is your life and its ending one speech at a time.

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Shell
In Chuck Palahniuks Fight Club, Our Insomniac hero realizes that the only place he
can find any solace is in the weekly support groups for cancer patients, the living
dead. But as with any drug, this soon loses its effect. The Insomnias back. Along
comes Tyler Durden, the most interesting Single Serving Friend that our hero will ever
meet. Instead of pornography, our heros world consisted of the monthly IKEA
furniture catalog and all he had to worry about is the next worthless piece of German
shit that will furnish his apartment. In the blink of an eye, its all gone. Everything
he has worked for, his apartment, his endless struggle for perfection has now been
blown into the night sky, into the windshields of the cars below. This is when Tyler
asks him to hit him as hard as he can. Fight Club becomes a cultish gathering of men
from all walks of life. What once was a drunken attempt at self-destruction has
become a nation-wide organization. Project Mayhem. The end goal of Project
Mayhem is to destroy the major credit card companies. You mix x an y and you get
enough dynamite to blow up the world. But if you have too much of x, it goes wrong.
Fight Club ends with a promise to continue project mayhem. Front row seats to the
beginning of the cultural Ice Age.
Home was a condominium on the fifteenth floor of a high-rise, a sort of filing cabinet for widows
and young professionals. The marketing brochure promised a foot of concrete floor, ceiling, and
wall between me and any adjacent stereo or turned-up television. A foot of concrete and air conditioning,
you couldnt open the windows so even with maple flooring and dimmer switches, all seventeen hundred airtight feet would smell like
the last meal you cooked or your last trip to the bathroom.
Yeah, and there were butcher block countertops and low-voltage track lighting.

a foot of concrete is important when your next-door neighbor lets the batter on her hearing
aid go and has to watch her game shows at full blast. Or when a volcanic blast of burning gas
and debris blows out your floor-to-ceiling windows and sails down flaming to leave just your
condo, only yours, a gutted charred concrete hole in the Cliffside of the building.
Still,

These things happen.

Everything, including your set of hand-blown green glass dishes with the tiny bubbles and
imperfections, little bits of sand, proof they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working
indigenous aboriginal peoples of wherever, well, these dishes all get blown out by the blast. Picture
the floor-to-ceiling drapes blown out and flaming to shreds in the hot wind.

Fifteen floors over the city, this stuff comes flaming and bashing and shattering down on
everyones car.
Something which was a bomb, a big bomb, had blasted my clever Njurunda coffee tables in the
shape of a lime green yin and an orange yang that fit together to make a circle. Well, they were
splinters, now.
My Haparanda sofa group with the orange slip covers, design by Erika Pekkari, it was trash, now.
And I wasnt the only slave to my nesting instinct. The people I know who used to sit in the
bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue.
We all have the same Johanneshov armchair in the Strinne green stripe pattern. Mine fell fifteen
stories, burning, into a fountain.

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We all have the same Rislampa.Har paper lamps made from wire and environmentally friendly
unbleached paper. Mine are confetti.
All that sitting in the bathroom.
The Alle cutlery service. Stainless steel. Dishwasher safe.
The Vild hall clock made of galvanized steel, oh, I had to have that.
The Klipsk shelving unit, oh, yeah.
Hemlig hat boxes. Yes.
The street outside my high-rise was sparkling and scattered with all this.
The Mommala quilt-cover set. Design by Tomas Harlia and available in the following:
Orchid.
Fuchsia.
Cobalt.
Ebony.
Jet.
Eggshell or heather.
It took my whole life to buy this stuff.
The easy-care textured lacquer of my Kalix occasional tables.
My Steg nesting tables.
You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa,
then for a couple years youre satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least youve got your
sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug.
Then youre trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.
Until I got home from the airport.
The doorman steps out of the shadows and says, theres been an accident. The police, they were here and asked a lot of questions.

The police think maybe it was the gas. Maybe the pilot light on the stove went out or a burner
was let on, leaking gas, and the gas rose to the ceiling, and the gas filled the condo from ceiling
to floor in every room. The condo was seventeen hundred square feet with high ceilings and for
days and days, the gas mustve leaked until every room was full. When the rooms were filled to
the floor, the compressor at the base of the refrigerator clicked on.
Detonation.
The floor-to-ceiling windows in their aluminum frames went out and the sofas and the lamps and dishes and sheets sets in flames,
and the high school annals and the diplomas and telephone. Everything blasting out from the fifteenth floor in a sort of solar flare.
Oh, not my refrigerator. Id collected shelves full of different mustards, some stone-ground, some English pub style. There were
fourteen different flavors of fat-free salad dressing, and seven kinds of capers.
I know, I know, a house full of condiments and no real food.
The doorman blew his nose and something went into his handkerchief with the slap of a pitch into a catchers mitt.

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You could go up to the fifteenth floor, the doorman said, but nobody could go into the unit. Police orders. The police had been asking,
did I have and old girlfriend whod want to do this or did I make an enemy of somebody who had access to dynamite.
It wasnt worth going up, the doorman said. All thats let is the concrete shell.
The police hadnt ruled out arson. No one had smelled gas. The doorman raised an eyebrow. This guy spent his time flirting with the
day maids and nurses who worked in the big unites on the top floor and waited in the lobby chairs for their rides after work. Three
years I lived here, and the doorman still sat reading his Ellery Queen magazine every night while I shifted packages and bags to
unlock the front door and let myself in.
The doorman raises an eyebrow and says how some people will go on a long trip and leave a candle, a long, long candle burning in a
big puddle of gasoline. People with financial difficulties do this stuff. People who want out from under.

I asked to use the lobby phone.

A lot of young people try to impress the world and buy to many things, the doorman said.
I called Tyler.
The phone rang in Tylers rented house on Paper Street.

Oh, Tyler, please deliver me.

And the phone rang.
The doorman leaned over my shoulder and said, A lot of young people dont know what they
really want.
Oh, Tyler, please rescue me.
And the phone rang.
Young people, they think they want the whole world.
Deliver me from Swedish Furniture.
Deliver me from clever art.
And the phone rang and Tyler answered.
If you dont know what you want, the doorman said, you end up with a lot you dont.
May I never be complete.
May I never be content.
May I never be perfect.
Deliver me, Tyler, from being perfect and complete.
Tyler and I agreed to meet at a bar.
The doorman asked for a number where the police could reach me.
It was still raining. My Audi was still parked in the lot, but a Dakapo halogen torchiere was speared through the windshield.

Tyler and I, we met and drank a lot of beer, and Tyler said, yes, I could move in with him, but I
would have to do him a favor.
The next day, my suitcase would arrive with the bare minimum, six shirts, six pair of underwear.

There, drunk, in a bar where no one was watching and no one would care, I asked Tyler what he
wanted me to do.
Tyler said, I want you to hit me as hard as you can.
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The affirmative is one small part in an infinite drive for perfection. There is a perfect
world out there, they say, a world without war and famine and pain, and we can at
least get closer if you buy the plan. Just sign your ballot, made out to ______________,
then all the problems, all the extinction, everything, just go away. This is the logic of
consumerism. Arguments, ballots, wins and losses are all capital. They want to be
smarter, stronger, fasterbetter roleplayers, policy makers, activists, Americans,
revolutionaries or whatever. We debate arguments we know are dumb so we can learn
things we dont care about. To do this, they advertise the plan as well as they can, the
one must have item that will bring us closer to perfection. We tell ourselves lies to
ward off this undeniable truth, but its always in the back of our minds: these
arguments are meaningless and vacuous, preserved only because our lives are so
permeated by cultural images that we literally know not what we do.
You have a class of young strong men and women, and they want to give their lives to
something. Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they dont need. Generations
have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they dont really need
We dont have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great
war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our
lives. We have a spiritual depression
Debate is our piece of the great depression of the spirit. Were so caught up in the
plan and the draft and rma, and the bomb and what politicians thinks about it, that
weve lost touch with authentic human interaction. When the value of our time here
becomes defined by how recent our evidence is, and all interaction between me and
you is just a play, an image, what are our lives but spectacular dramas played out
against the green screen of culture? We are moving images on a TV screen. Culture
and Truth are frozen out there somewhere, embedded in a historical context that it
seems impossible to affect. All we know is alienation. Alienation from each other,
alienation from our-selves, alienation from our desires, alienation from life itself. We
are historys middle children.
When Tyler invented Project Mayhem, Tyler said the goal of Project Mayhem had nothing to do
with other people. Tyler didnt care if other people got hurt or not. The goal was to teach each
man in the project that he had the power to control history. We, each of us, can take control of
the world.
It was at fight club that Tyler invented Project Mayhem.
I tagged a first-timer one night at fight club. That Saturday night, a young guy with an angels
face came to his first fight club, and I tagged him for a fight. Thats the rule. If its your first night
in fight club, you have to fight. I knew that so I tagged him because the insomnia was on again,
and I was in a mood to destroy something beautiful.
Since most of my face never gets a chance to heal, Ive got nothing to lose in the looks department. My boss, at work, he asked me
what I was doing about the hole through my cheek that never heals. When I drink coffee, I told him, I put two fingers over the hole so
it wont leak.

Theres a sleeper hold that gives somebody just enough air to stay awake, and that night at fight
club I hit out first-timer and hammered that beautiful mister angel face, first with the bony
knuckles of my fist like a pounding molar, and then the knotted tight but of my fist after my
knuckles were raw from his teeth stuck through his lips. Then the kid feel through my arms in a
heap.
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Tyler told me later that hed never seen me destroy something so completely. That night, Tyler knew he
had to take fight club up a notch or shut it down.
Tyler said, sitting at breakfast the next morning, You looked like a maniac, Psycho-Boy. Where did you go?
I said I felt like crap and not relaxed at all. I didnt get any kind of buzz. Maybe Id developed a jones. You can build up a tolerance to
fighting, and maybe I needed to move on to something bigger.

It was that morning, Tyler invented Project Mayhem.

Tyler asked what I was really fighting.
What Tyler says about being the crap and the slaves of history, thats how I felt. I wanted to
destroy everything beautiful Id never have. Burn the Amazon rain forests. Pump
chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone. Open the dump valves on supertankers and
uncap offshore oil wells. I wanted to kill all the fish I couldnt afford to eat, and smother the
French beaches Id never see.
I wanted toe whole world to hit bottom.
Pounding that kid, I really wanted to put a bullet between the eyes of every endangered panda
that wouldnt screw to save its species and every whale or dolphin that gave up and ran itself
aground.
Dont think of this as extinction. Think of this as downsizing.
For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean
up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And account for every drop of used motor oil.
And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was
born.

I held the face of mister angel like a baby or a football in the crook of my arm and bashed him
with my knuckles, bashing him until his teeth broke through his lips. Bashed him with my elbow
after that until he fell through my arms into a heap at my feet. Until the skin was pounded thin
across his cheekbones and turned black.
I wanted to breathe smoke.
Birds and deer are a silly luxury, and all the fish should be floating.
I wanted to burn the Louvre. Id do the Elgin Marbles with a sledgehammer and wipe my ass with
the Mona Lisa. This was my world, now.
This was my world, my world, and those ancient people are dead.
It was at breakfast that morning that Tyler invented Project Mayhem.
He wanted to blast the world free of history.
We were eating breakfast in the house on Paper Street, and Tyler said, picture yourself planting radishes and seed potatoes on the
fifteenth green of a forgotten golf course.
Youll hunt elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center, and dig clams next to the skeleton of the
Space Needle leaning at a forty-five degree angle. Well paint the skyscrapers with huge totem faces and goblin tikis, and every
evening whats left of mankind will retreat to empty zoos and lock itself in a cage as protection against beats and big cats and wolves
that pace and watch us from outside the cage bars at night.

Recycling and speed limits are bullshit, Tyler said. Theyre like someone who quits smoking on
his deathbed.

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Its Project Mayhem thats going to save the world. A cultural ice age. A prematurely introduced
dark age. Project Mayhem will force humanity to go dormant or into remission long enough for
the Earth to recover.
You justify anarchy, Tyler says. You figure it out.

Like fight club does with clerks and box boys, Project Mayhem will break up civilization so we can
make something better out of the world.
Imagine, Tyler said, stalking elk past department store windows and stinking racks of beautiful rotting dresses and tuxedos on
hangers; youll wear leather clothes that will lsat youy the rest of your life, and youll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the
Sears Tower. Jack and the beanstalk, youll climb up through the dripping forest canopy and the air will be so clean youll see tiny
figures pounding corn and laying strops of venison to dry in the empty car pool lane of an abandoned superhighway stretching eightlanes-wide and August-hot for thousands of miles.

This was the goal of Project Mayhem, Tyler said, the complete and right-away destruction of
civilization.
Wed be foolish to believe we can escape this endless drive for perfection by simply
re-adjusting our path. The alternative isnt to buy a new type of sofa, but to blow up
the condo and move to the toxic waste part of town and make soap with our
schizophrenic alter-ego. We have to disappear from culture. We have to hit rock
bottom. We have to kiss our hand, pour lye on it and know that one day we will die.
Its only when you lose everything that you are free to do anything. Our alternative is
a lens for viewing this round. A round should not receive its value because it feeds
into some larger standard or goal, but should mean something in and of itself. Harms
and solvency are cultural images used to keep us chasing images of what we SHOULD
be. We have to form a new relationship with life, we have to realize that we are NOT
our advocacies, we are NOT our win-loss records, we are NOT our state points and we
are NOT how many tubs we roll into round with. Our redemption will come the
moment we have nothing, in that moment of perfect self-destruction where we give
up the world as we know it and find out just what its like to hit rock bottom. When we
find out just how much blood we can swallow before we get sick.

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EVIDENCE BEGINS HERE

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Impact extension/perfection
The first time I met Tyler, I was asleep.
I was tired and crazy and rushed, and every time I boarded a plane, I wanted the plane to crash. I
envied people dying of cancer. I hated my life. I was tired and bored with my job and my
furniture, and I couldnt see any way to change things.
Only end them.
I felt trapped.
I was too complete.
I was too perfect.
I wanted a way out of my tiny life. Single serving butter and cramped airline seat role in the
world.
Swedish furniture.
Clever art.
I took a vacation. I fell asleep on the beach, and when I woke up there was Tyler Durden, naked
and sweating, gritty with sand, his hair wet and stringy, hanging in his face.
Tyler was pulling driftwood logs out of the surf and dragging them up the beach.
What Tyler was creating was the shadow of a giant hand, and Tyler was sitting in the palm of a
perfection hed made himself.
And a moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.
Self destruction
The first fight club was just Tyler and I pounding on each other.
It used to be enough that when I came home angry and knowing that my life wasnt toeing my
five-year plan, I could clean my condominium or detail my car. Someday Id be dead without a
scar and there would be a really nice condo and car. Really, really nice, until the dust settled or
the next owner. Nothing is static. Even the Mona Lisa is falling apart. Since fight club, I can
wiggle half the teeth in my jaw.
Maybe self-improvement isnt the answer.
Tyler never knew his father.

Maybe self-destruction is the answer.

When we invented fight club, Tyler and I, neither of us had ever been in a fight before.

If youve
never been in a fight, you wonder. About getting hurt, about what youre capable of doing against another man. I was the first guy
Tyler ever felt safe enough to ask, and we were both drunk in a bar where no one would care so

Tyler said, I want you to

do me a favor. I want you to hit me as hard as you can.

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I didnt want to, but Tyler explained it all, about not wanting to die without any scars, about being
tired of watching professionals fight, and wanting to know more about himself.
About self-destruction.
At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make
something better out of ourselves.

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2NC OV
The affirmative is an 8 minute infomercial for a shiny new product. Youll never have
to buy another one, never have to page through another IKEA magazine slash camp
file looking for one. Their logic is one of consumerist perfection. This logic is
fundamentally alienating. Remember, the things you own end up owning you. Were
so concerned with cultural needs that weve forgotten that we create history, that we
create culture, that we are the State we criticize. Even traditional kritiks are trying to
sell you their alternative. It is for this reason that we do not offer one, rather, we offer
a framework for evaluating this round. Through this framework harms and solvency
are just facile attempts at perfection, doomed to further alienate us from our life. We
have to hit rock bottom. Its only when youve lost everything that youre free to do
anything. Its in the absolute, rock bottom, end of the world giving up of signing the
ballot negative that we can find our redemption, our one, fleeting moment of
perfection.

<32-33>

How I met Tyler was I went to a nude beach. This was the very end of summer, and I was asleep.
Tyler was naked and sweating, gritty with sand, his hair wet and stringy, hanging in his face.
Tyler had been around a long time before we met.
Tyler was pulling driftwood logs out of the surf and dragging them up the beach. In the wet sand,
hed already planted a half circle of logs so they stood a few inches apart and as tall as his eyes.
There were four logs, and when I woke up, I watched Tyler pull a fifth log up the beach. Tyler dug
a hole under one end of the log, then lifted the other end until the log slid into the hole and stood
there at a slight angle.
You wake up at the beach.

We were the only people on the beach.

With a stick, Tyler drew a straight line in the sand several feet away. Tyler went back to straighten
the log by stamping the san around its base.
I was the only person watching this.
Tyler called over, Do you know what time it is?
I always wear a watch.
Do you know what time it is?
I asked, where?
Right here, Tyler said. Right now.
It was 4:06 P.M.

After a while, Tyler sat cross-legged in the shadow of the standing logs. Tyler sat for a few
minutes, got up and took a swim, pulled on a T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants, and started to
leave. I had to ask.
I had to know what Tyler was doing while I was asleep.
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If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?

I asked if Tyler was an artist.

Tyler shrugged and showed me how the five standing logs were wider at the base. Tyler showed
me the line hed drawn I n the sand, and how hed use the line to gauge the shadow cast be each
log.
Sometimes, you wake up and have to ask where you are.
What Tyler had created was the shadow of a giant hand. Only now the fingers were Nosferatulong and the thumb was too short, but he said how at exactly four-thirty the hand was perfect.
The giant shadow hand was perfect for one minute, and for one perfect minute Tyler had sat in
the palm of a perfection hed created himself.
You wake up, and youre nowhere.
One minute was enough, Tyler said, a person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection
was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.
You wake up, and

thats enough.

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Link OV

The scenarios the aff talks about produce and compartmentalize events and ideas into
clean cut, shiny scenarios. Quick sales pitches that make sharp appeals to the core.
These are symptoms of a disease. Their single serving advocacy and their rhetoric of
harms and solvency are all the by-product of our media culture. Just as underwear
ads portray an impossible image of what a man should look like, they promote a false
attempt at perfection. Weve become lost in a world of warrants claims and cites that
project capitalism and every other idea as something out there, entirely removed
from ourselves and from this round.

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Impact OV

So, apparently, if you vote for us, (insert their impacts) will happen. So what? Let it
burn. Let the economy collapse and let our soft power go down the drain. Their
endorsement of this utopian world without violence, without bloodshed is steeped in
a utopian drive for perfection which traps us into a cycle of trying to solve problems
and to fix everything, everything, that is, but ourselves. Everything they say is
nothing new. Its just a copy of a copy of a copy. Every argument they read is a
representation that projects perfection theyre not advocating change; theyre
plugging arguments into a formula, trying to sell you the plan. This projection of
problems and conflict as something OUT THERE is alienating; it sinks us into the worst
type of torture: spiritual depression. Our actions and advocacies are so far removed
from what is really happening in this round that weve ignored the way these
arguments manifest themselves in the debate. Their impacts dont matter at the
point in which they cant articulate any value to life or their framework outside of how
it feeds some larger goal. I guess you could call this a case take out.

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Alt OV
The inevitable question that is running through the head of everyone in this room is
What must be done? The answer is to stop asking that question. This round should
not be about the plan, or international politics, or even about how this round effects
the next. The only chance we have is to run the other way. We need to hit rock
bottom, and then we can begin to asks questions. You need to realize that buying the
affirmative and placing it in your apartment is never going to redeem you. They may
say that you have a moral obligation to vote for them. That God will not like you if
you dont help the starving, tortured people of whatever. You need to realize that
God might not like you. This is not the worse thing that can happen. Self destruction,
not perfection is the answer. Vote negative to reject cultural standards of perfection:
the same kind of cultural projections that cause anorexia, and depression.
<74-76>

Tylers saliva did two jobs. The wet kiss on the back of my hand held the flakes of lye while they
burned. That was the first job. The second was lye only burns when you combine it with water. Or
saliva.
This is a chemical burn, Tyler said, and it will hurt more than youve ever been burned.
You can use lye to open clogged drains.
Close your eyes.
A paste of lye and water can burn through an aluminum pan.
A solution of lye and water will dissolve a wooden spoon.
Combined with water, lye heats to over two hundred degrees, and as it heats it burns into the
back of my hand, and Tyler places his fingers of one hand over my fingers, our hands spread on
the lap of my bloodstained pants, and Tyler says to pay attention because this is the greatest
moment of my life.
Because everything up to now is a story, Tyler says, and everything after now is a story.
This is the greatest moment of our life.
The lye clinging in the exact shape of Tylers kiss is a bonfire or a branding iron or an atomic pile
meltdown on my hand at the end of a long, long road I picture miles away from me. Tyler tells me
to come back and be with him. My hand is leaving, tiny and on the horizon at the end of the road.
Picture the fire still burning, except now its beyond the horizon. A sunset.
Come back to the pain, Tyler says.
This is the kind of guided meditation they use at support groups.
Dont even think of the word pain.
Guided meditation works for cancer, it can work for this.
Look at your hand, Tyler says.
Dont look at your hand.
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Dont think of the word searing or flesh or tissue or charred.
Dont hear yourself cry.
Guided meditation.
Youre in Ireland. Close your eyes.
Youre in Ireland the summer after you left college, and youre drinking in a pub near the castle where every day busloads of English
and American tourists come to kiss the Blarney stone.

Dont shut this out, Tyler says.

Soap and human sacrifice go hand in hand.

You leave the pub in a stream of men, walking through the beaded wet car silence of streets where its just rained. Its night. Until you
get the Blarney-stone castle.
The floors in the castle are rotted away, and you climb the rock stairs with blackness getting deeper and deeper on every side with
every step up. Everybody is quiet with the climb and the tradition of this little act of rebellion.

Listen to me, Tyler says. Open your eyes.

In ancient history, Tyler says, human sacrifices were made on a hill above a river. Thousands of people. Listen to me. The sacrifices
were made and the bodies were burned on a pyre.

You can cry, Tyler says. You can go to the sink and run water over your hand, but first you
have to know that youre stupid and you will die. Look at me.
Someday, Tyler says, you will die, and until you know that, youre useless to me.
Youre in Ireland.

You can cry, Tyler says, but every tear that lands in the lye flakes on your skin will burn a
cigarette scar.
Guided meditation. Youre in Ireland the summer after you left college, and maybe this is where you first wanted anarchy. Years before
you met Tyler Durden, before you peed in your first crme anglaise, you learned about little acts of rebellion.
In Ireland.
Youre standing on a platform at the top of the stairs in a castle.

We can use vinegar, Tyler says, to neutralize the burning, but first you have to give up.
After hundreds of people were sacrificed and burned, Tyler says, a thick white discharge crept from the alter, downhill to the river.

First you have to hit bottom

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AT: Perm

To deal with the whole permutation thing

1.)Its another link- the permutation is just a calculated method of transforming

and adapting a product to reach a goal.
2.)Any reason they give as to why the perm would be a good idea are the same
kind of cultural representations of events based in a perfectionist ideology that
cause the impacts of the 1AC.
3.)Hitting rock bottom is not a weekend retreat. You cannot settle for one last
couch, one last attempt to solve. Remember, it is only when you lose
EVERYTHING, including the affirmative, that you are free to do anything.

<Pg 70>

Tyler says Im nowhere near hitting bottom, yet. And if I dont fall all the way, I cant be saved.
Jesus did it with his crucifixion thing. I shouldnt just abandon money and property and
knowledge. This isnt just a weekend retreat. I should run from self-improvement, and I should be
running towards disaster. I cant play it safe anymore.
This isnt a seminar.
If you lose your nerve before you hit bottom, Tyler says, youll never really succeed.
Only after disaster can we be resurrected.
Its only after youve lost everything, Tyler says, that youre free to do anything.
What Im feeling is premature enlightenment.

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Ballot OV
The affirmative views the ballot as a means to an end. All of their authors write from
a prescriptive mindset that there are blemishes in the world that need fixing. They
frame the ballot in he same waywere destroying debate, etc use the ballot to fix
the problem. Vote negative to reject this constant drive to perfection. At the point in
which all their FOB arguments are based on using the ballot as a means to an end,
there is no reason to vote aff.

1. If you agree with us, you may as well vote now. Forget about judge intervention,
forget about all that crap you hear about what it means to be a judge. Throw
away your ballot by affirming that the affirmative is just consumerist culture
trying to sell you a sofa.
2. If youre not down with us, evaluate this round in a traditional fashion. You
dont have to care, but this is our project, this is our redemption. View this
round through our framework if we win it. After all, you are not your ballot, and
we are not our record. Whether or not we win the flow, this is not a weekend
retreat. This is our burning lye kiss, our salvation.

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2NR OV
The affirmative is engaged in and endless drive for perfection that will ultimately
end in the exact opposite of what they desire. Call it a case turn, and external
disad, call it whatever you want. The fact is, the only problem with the
affirmatives endless drive for perfection is that perfection is impossible, and as
long as we attatch our lives to cultures message of how to create a perfect world,
then we are trapped in a depressing alienating void, a world in which none of their
impacts matter, because we arent really people, but just actors on a screen.
Remember, dont evaluate this round based on where the ink is on your paper, but
on whether or not the affirmative is winning their assumptions. If we win our
framework then there is literally no reason to vote affirmative because their
solvency is just another futile attempt to attain what were told is perfection. They
can extend all the arguments they want and rant about how sweet their case is
but, unless theyve on-face engaged our framework, theyre really just ranting.

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Line by Line OV
Line by line analysis is arbitrary. Thirteen minutes of explanation and analysis do not
deserve to lose to a so-called dropped Krishna card that, based on those thirteen
minutes of explanation of analysis, doesnt even make sense in the context of the
round anymore. The flow is artificially constructed and judging based on it is equally
as artificial. When evaluating this round, dont look at the flow as separate
arguments; look for the picture that each team paints. Dont look at the arguments
that the 1AR says we dropped as conceded, look at whether the assumptions
behind these arguments and the way they are framed in round are or are not
addressed by the block in the form of explanation. Any argument they have
concerning line by lines being good is a link to the criticism, The line by line is a tool
of culture. To confine argumentation to the line by line ensures that all arguments
come in a certain, pre-packaged form, ready to be arranged around your apartment.
Our criticism is a celebration of difference, a rejection of culture, something the line
by line is literally structured to make impossible. Dont arrange arguments in some
fucked up fung shway style apartment layout, think about them. The very idea that all
arguments should be perfectly lined up, each aff answer with a neg one next to it, is
the consumerist logic that seeks to attain an alienating perfection.

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AT Counter-Ks
Their counter-criticism is just another link. It still comes all pretty and pre-packed,
something to buy and put in your condo. They want a form of political analysis that
solves their counter-K, something that allows us to attain political perfection. Their
arguments may be pretty, they may sound convincing, but thats exactly the point.
Theres a reason we talk about arguments in terms of whether or not you buy them.
Unless they can offer some sort of criticism that doesnt function within the same
consumerist framework the 1AC established you can consider their arguments
functionally irrelevant.

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AT you say X (their harms) are ok

1. Make arguments about it being another link and that it doesnt actually engage
your framework. Unless they can on-face answer your framework, a bunch of
huffing and puffing about racism doesnt get them anywhere
2. Try to solve their impacts. If they say racism, remember that racism is just a
product of consumerism that demands some sort of perfection. Im pretty sure
Hitler was thinking about dusting his condo when he gassed the Jews.
3. They cant actually DO the plan. Period. Make arguments about how, when
arguments become commodified, they lose all of their value. You cant solve
biopower if its just another pre-packaged argument, ready to be bought and
sold in exchange for the ballot. Their impacts are culturally embedded. Any
attempt to solve them through the same cultural logic the 1AC endorses will
inevitably end in more alienation
4. Our impact OW. Whoopty fucking doo, no one is racial profiling us. Too bad our
lives still suck and were still stuck sucking the big, syphilis infected cock of
culture. If we lose the alienation, blow up our condo and drop the Parker-Morris
building on some museum, we couldnt give two flaming shits in hell what
anyone else thinks about us. Remember, racism etc are damaging because we
feel inadequate as human beings. Were told a human being is X and we just
arent that. We can never measure up because the po are always telling us we
arent white, heterosexual and rich enough.

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Framework OV
Their call for a common understanding of how debates should operate is exactly what
we criticize. The idea that debate should come in a pre-packaged box thats perfectly
fair, provides X kind of education and is culturally acceptable is the same logic of
perfection that alienates us from our own role in history. The 1NC was essentially a
framework argument, an argument about how we can view the role of arguments like
framework, harms and solvency in debate rounds. Hitting rock bottom does NOT
involve landing on the perfect cushion of a perfect framework for debating, its about
abandoning the project of perfecting debate. Debate becomes worthless when we
cant engage it on terms that WE establish, when each round is dictated to us by what
culture tells us a debate round should look like. Even if they win that we destroy
debate or whatever, thats just so-called solvency for our alternative. Just like the
narrator smashed in Angels face, we have to smash in the face of debate. It isnt
about lasting perfection, but that one moment of perfection when the ballot is signed
for a self-destructive advocacy. Its about the knowledge that we WILL all die, about
the knowledge that none of this ultimately matters.

Our act of transgression is a necessary part of hitting bottom. We have to consider

that perhaps God will never love us. That our only choice is between hell and
indifference. We choose hell.
<141>
How Tyler saw it was that getting Gods attention for being bad was better than getting no
attention at all. Maybe because Gods hate is better than His indifference.
If you could be either Gods worst enemy or nothing , which would you choose?
We are Gods middle children, according to Tyler Durden, with no special place in history and no
special attention.
Unless we get Gods attention, we have no hope of damnation or redemption.
Which is worse, hell or nothing?
Only if were caught and punished can we be saved.
<109-111>
a police detective started calling about my condominium explosion, and
Tyler stood with his chest against my shoulder, whispering into my ear while I held the phone to
the other ear, and the detective asked if I knew anyone who could make homemade dynamite.
In the house on Paper Street,

Disaster is a natural part of my evolution, Tyler whispered, toward tragedy and dissolution.
I told the detective that it was the refrigerator that blew up my condo.
Im breaking my attachment to physical power and possessions, Tyler whispered, because
only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit.

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The dynamite, the detective said, there were impurities, a residue of ammonium oxalate and
potassium perchloride that might mean the bomb was homemade, and the dead bolt on the front
door was shattered.
I said I was in Washington, D.C., that night.
The detective on the phone explained how someone had sprayed a canister of Freon into the
dead-bolt lock and tapped the lock with a cold chisel to shatter the cylinder. This is the way
criminals are stealing bicycles.
The liberator who destroys my property, Tyler said, is fighting to save my spirit. The teacher
who clears all possessions from my path will set me free.
The detective said whoever set the homemade dynamite couldve turned on the gas and blown out the pilot lights on the stove days
before the explosion took place. The gas was just the trigger. It would take days for the gas to fill the condo before it reached the
compressor at the base of the refrigerator and the compressors electric motor set off the explosion.

Tell him, Tyler whispered. Yes, you did it. You blew it up. Thats what he wants to hear.
I tell the detective, no, I did not leave the gas on and then leave town. I loved my life. I loved that
condo. I loved every stick of furniture. That was my whole life. Everything, the lamps, the chairs,
the rugs were me. The dishes in the cabinets were me. The plants were me. The television was
me. It was me that blew up, Couldnt he see that?
The detective said not to leave town.

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Fairness
1. Our argument isnt that fairness is badits that the way the negative engages
the idea of fairness isnt cool
a. Their idea of fairness is based in the same perfectionist logic of the 1AC
they cant defend any inherent value in their project, but rather, they
assign value based on some external standard of beauty and truth.
b. Fairness for whom? Discussions of assumptions and value are the only way
we can carry out our project.
c. Cross apply the altonly in a world in which a round is viewed as a
solitary act can fairness ever be truly discussedits only when you lose
everything that youre free to do anything.

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Education
1.)What kind of education? The education the aff advocates engages
a static world in which there are problems and ways to fix them.
Education does not have intrinsic value but is only valued if it is
about the governmentif it comes in the form of pre packaged
scenarios of X conflict.
2.)Were educational tooour education is that of a new way of
looking at life. The affs ardent appeal for education is just
another perfectionist demand for culture that distances us from
learning about ourselves.

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We link to our own K

Not really, their arguments are written in the context of isolating problems and fixing
them. Any reason you have to vote affirmative are rooted in perfectionist logic
explained above. Our act is a solitary act, an end unto itself. We assign value to our
act in this specific round because were actually doing something. Dont vote for us
because it has X effect on X thing beyond this round. Vote negative to reject
perfection.

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Language Ks
1. This argument is just another linkblah blah blah
2. Their impacts are predicated on us giving a damn about what other people think
of us. In a world of rock bottom hitting etc we couldnt care less. We have to
accept that language can be damaging sometimes and just accept the pain in
order to hit rock bottom.
3. The use of the word Fuck in fight club, in the bed scenes with marla and Tyler,
i.e., I havent been fucked like that since grade school are all examples of how
the use of the word fuck is a quick ride to rock bottom, and the sweet abandon
that is the alternative.

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J23
William S. BurroughsExterminator! (1977. p52-4.)

hillside over the sea. man sitting there on a cane seat . . . he is dressed in old-fashioned puttees
green sport coat of English cut he has a sandy mustache stained with tobacco pale blue eyes . . .
near him we now see several convulsed forms, the closest a few feet away outstreched hand
clutching a handful of grass . . . the camera pans out convulsed corpses to the sky back to the
man sitting there on his cane seat . . . the man takes a chicken sandwich out of a wicker lunch
basket . . . "safe at last" he says and starts eating his sandwich . . . the man you see here is
Doctor Lee . . . Doctor John Lee . . . he was a sensitive man and it lacerated him to walk streets
and enter restaurants where he encountered living organisms manifesting wills different from
and in some cases flatly antagonistic to his own . . . "the situation is little short of intolerable" . . .
Rock Ape waiter there with the wrong wine . . . he was a timid man in a way you see and not able
to fix the waiter with Mandrill eyes and ugly American snarl . . . "bring me red wine you hairy
assed Rock Ape or I drink it from your throat!" . . . now the doctor was a man of independent
means and could usually avoid such disturbing incidents but the possibility was always there . . .
this disturbed him and he was a man who did not like to be disturbed . . . he decided to end the
whole distasteful thing once and for all by turning everyone into himself . . . this he proposed to
do by a virus an image concentrate of himself that would spread waves of tranquillity in all
directions until the world was a fit place for him to live . . . he called it the "beautiful disease" . . .
his first attempts to activate the image meal failed . . . he realized of course that to administer a
dead or weakened strain of the beautiful Lee virus would invite the disaster of mass
inoculation . . . he had to be quite sure you understand . . . some of his "canine preparations" as
he called test cases died in quite unpleasant ways that disturbed him for he was a humane man
and did not like to be disturbed so these unworthy vessels only increased his resolve to make a
better world . . . one day it occurred to him if perhaps the image meal were radioactive . . . he
painted a culture of image meal with radium paint and put it in an iron box covered on the
outside with layers of human skin and now he chuckled "let it steep" and made himself a cup of
tea . . . he finished his tea and opened the box . . . "ladies and gentlemen of planet earth
introducing 'Johnny 23'" . . . his cat hissed made an abortive attempt to walk on its hind legs and
fell in convulsions . . . in its dying eyes he read an almost human hatred . . . he attributed the
death of his cat to a short circuit of overburdened synapsis occasioned by a too rapid conversion
to the human condition . . . "now we must find a worthy vessel" . . . remember the good doctor
was a humane man who did not like to harm anyone because it disturbed him to do so and he
was a man who did not like to be disturbed . . . he had convinced himself that "Johnny 23" would
simply remove from the planet hostile alien forces manifesting themselves through other people
that this would come about through peaceful penetration in the course of which no lives would
be lost . . . "Johnny 23" would simply make friends of everyone . . . the doctor was not a man who
argued with himself . . . the first public appearance of "Johnny 23" demonstrated a miscalculation
. . . worthy vessels clutched at an often imaginary mustache and fell in convulsions looking at
some invisible presence black hate from dying eyes . . . "Johnny 23" was one hundred percent
fatal . . . the good doctor had a spot of bother a narrow escape in fact when the worthy vessels
found out who "Johnny 23" is . . . fortunately the epidemic was well advanced by that time and
"Johnny 23" finished the job . . . he finishes his sandwich and licks the grease off his fingers . . .
he puts a cigarette in a stained bone holder . . . he sits there smoking . . . it is very peaceful
there on the hillside nothing to disturb him as far as the eyes can see he gets up folds his cane
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seat and walks down a path toward the sea . . . his boat is moored by the pier . . . it is a small
boat and he can handle it alone . . . last awning flaps on the pier . . . last man here now.

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