TYLER: Did you know if you mixed equal parts of gasoline and frozen orange juice concentrate, you could make napalm?
JACK: No, I didn't know that, is that true?
TYLER: That's right. One can make all kinds of explosives using simple household items.Fight Club
Actually, that's not right. Chuck Palahniuk said, "Well, Ed Norton changed one ingredient in every [recipe] to make them useless. So, that really pissed me off because I really research those really well. Actually it's styrofoam and gasoline - it makes the most incredible explosive."
Which isn't true either. This I know because I put that mixture together myself, as a hormone-infused adolescent male. I don't even know exactly how I figured it out--I think I have dim memories1 of putting gasoline in a styrofoam coffee cup, which promptly shriveled and dumped its contents onto the garage floor. So I discovered that you can dissolve styrofoam peanuts into gasoline and it'll make a stinky greasy plastic mess that will burn quite handily, giving off gouts of black smoke. But it doesn't explode and it doesn't burn underwater. Real napalm was supposed to burn underwater, according to the knowledge of explosives somehow common to all teen boys. But I didn't have any white phosphorous, which is what the inventive folks at Dow added to the jellied gasoline so that it would stick to Enemy Combatants and keep burning after they'd jumped into rivers to make it stop.
This is the second post in a row that mentions this particular movie. I don't have a thing for it, no real affinity, it just happens to be on the television. And once more I'm sitting in the recliner at my mother's house, mostly because she's got cable and I don't. TV serves as background noise, a distraction that I can check into and out of as needed. There's nothing else on that makes the right kind of familiar background noise. So, Pitt and Norton it is. It forms a jumping-off point for my brand of dashed-off tripe. Completely irrelevant to the larger point here, if there is one.
A new friend of mine recently remarked that I have a "hard shell." It was during a chat, typed rather than spoken, which is how we've had most of our conversations to date. Very modern. She's young and lovely and makes interesting music, and is a quite recent acquaintance, a matter of months, really, so it was interesting to hear that I give off this armored impression. I didn't feel especially well-plated, until I thought about it some more, trying out the imagery, seeing how it fit. And it fit well: I can almost see it, an intricately articulated, chitinous exoskeleton, dark, with deep and iridescent blues within the plating. It's not lightweight--although it doesn't weigh much for the amount of protection it gives--and I've gotten used to carrying it around. I can almost feel what it would be like to strip it off, and that removal feels intimately biological, as though the components of the armor are partially bonded to my flesh. Not to the point where removing it would be painful or bloody, but I have the definite impression that peeling it free would expose skin that would be ever-so slightly damp and new, pale from being hidden from the sun for so long.
I've never thought of myself as having a hard shell. But that's not necessarily the sort of thing you can readily see about yourself. Sometimes it takes fresh eyes with an outsider's gaze. It feels a bit like new knowledge, but it fits within my self-conception too readily to be entirely new. It makes sense. So I'll accept it and see what happens if I behave as though it's true.
1That sounds vague because I have a loose grasp of the difference between actual memories and the memories of dreams from certain periods of my life. It's not really a problem. I'm just more comfortable with the total lack of certainty that truly lies at the heart of the stories we tell ourselves about our past than most people I know.
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