1. Do not talk about, let alone read, Fight Club 2.

 

2. Do not talk about Chuck's radical political position—because he doesn't have one. Unless total annihilation of the human race is a position? [Of course in a nuclear apocalypse, birds will still be singing in happy-pappy undecimated Portland.]

 

3. Do talk about Chuck being very bourgeois. With enough time to drink a lot of wine, pop a lot of pills, and swap zombie plotlines with his all-female writing group [who survive aforementioned nuclear apocalypse while helping him break the 4th wall].

 

4. Let's forget about talking—Chuck sucks at writing comic book scripts. In fact you wonder why he agreed to this gig. In fact when can you ever remember a novelist titling a sequel with the number '2'. Not even the second Avengers movie is called Avengers '2'.

 

5. Chuck does not have any pithy tattooable phrases left for you. Did he ever? Perhaps the most pithy quote from FC2, will redeem this dilemma:

 

Young people, they're so hungry to anchor themselves in the vast world. It's too bad that someone couldn't plant a bomb and explode all the worthless furniture stored inside Sebastian's head [Edward Norton's character]...his cheap, mass-produced IKEA ideologies [Is an IKEA ideology one you can take apart and easily reassemble? A mass-replicated ideology? Say like: men getting together to beat the shit out of each other in the backrooms of sweaty bars while attempting to plunge the world into extinction level chaos?]. His secondhand junk-store epiphanies and thrift-store political positions [Has Chuck been shopping one too many times at The Red Light on Hawthorne? At least they're less snooty than the Buffalo Exchange]. Those bargain-basement dreams [Okay, Chuck, we get it, you can afford new clothes, or you're really tired of the adjective: vintage, believe me, we all are, but unlike you, we can't afford vintage real-estate]—it's too bad a cleansing fire couldn't sweep them all away...making room for enlightenment. [In which we see the remains of Sebastian's blown-up charred skull.]

 

Now is there anyone lining up to have that tattooed across their asscheeks? Oh wait, there's a few kids from L.A. lining up at Hawthorne Ink right now....

 

6. Chuck says Fight Club 2 fits in with the Entrepreneurialism of Contemporary Art (Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, etc.), that this is in fact a kitsch re-presentation of global neoliberalism leading economic and environmental ruin. And he's all for it.

 

7. In the absence of Chuck's ability to recreate pithy tattooable phrases, we, the editors of 5th Wall Press will help a fellow Portlander out. [It seems we have no other way to end this article.]

 

8. Stare into the abyss, and the abyss blows your shit up. [Best placed on left or right forearm.]

 

9. Communism is Capitalism's bitch. [Inner thigh, lower back, or around the belly button.]

 

10. Be the Napoleon of napalm. [for nihilists] or: Be the Napoleon of napalm you want to see in the world. [for idealists]. [Nihilists: best placed on scalp or forehead. Idealists: best on your palms, and on as many others’ palms as you can convince.]