Chuck Palahniuk's Lifehacks

This article is part of the The Great Authors Series series.

Fill your house with dolphin pitchers. With replica knives from the Mummy movies. With inflatable camping chairs with beer holders in the arm rests. Escape from the meaninglessness of consumerism by consuming. There is a code waiting to be unlocked in the banality of digital picture frames. Cover every wall in them and meditate as the same three stock photos checkerboard transition over and over. Nothing is permanent. It requires batteries. It will all dissolve to the next meaningless incarnation in a perfect checkerboard transition.

Bereft, hand-sanitized, triple-purified. We've transformed bustling city centers into empty cathedrals. Where the bowel worm? Where the liver fluke? The screw-fly? The amoeba once clinging to our nurturing membranes has gone. Your body is pristine and waiting to be inhabited. Give me your tired, your poor, your writhing Ascaris, yearning to lay eggs in the lungs. Become the final destination of a whole new world of life.

Blow up a dam. Burn a warehouse filled with pool noodles. Assassinate a celebrity impersonator. Send a box of wasps to a pastor. Steal a historic tall ship and run it into a pier. The point is not the act itself, it's the subversion of expectations. If it happens enough times, if the subversion is brazen enough, we throw the switch and the trolley car the whole of society has been pushing along the track suddenly becomes a rollercoaster.

Brian Graniard Morse owned a tree trimming business in Loveland, Colorado. He started his day like any other. His friend and business partner was up in the bucket trimming branches when Brian entered the wood chipper. He emerged in a condition the police described as "total morselization." They had to confirm his identity by the fingerprints on the controls of the machine. Did he fall or did he enter it willingly? I choose the latter. Suicide can be a heroic endeavor.

– Zack "Geist Editor" Parsons (@sexyfacts4u)