#guts chuck palahniuk

[iluvjesus666]

fuck it. chuck palahniuk's "guts" in pretty rainbow gradient

Inhale.

Take in as much air as you can.

This story should last about as long as you can hold your breath, and then just a little bit longer. So read as fast as you can.

A friend of mine, when he was thirteen years old he heard about "pegging." This is when a guy gets banged up the butt with a dildo. Stimulate the prostate gland hard enough, and the rumor is you can have explosive hands-free orgasms. At that age, this friend's a little sex maniac. He's always jonesing for a better way to get his rocks off. He goes out to buy a carrot and some petroleum jelly. To conduct a little private research. Then he pictures how it's going to look at the supermarket checkstand, the lonely carrot and petroleum jelly rolling down the conveyer belt toward the grocery store cashier. All the shoppers waiting in line, watching. Everyone seeing the big evening he has planned.

So, my friend, he buys milk and eggs and sugar and a carrot, all the ingredients for a carrot cake. And Vaseline.

Like he's going home to stick a carrot cake up his butt.

At home, he whittles the carrot into a blunt tool. He slathers it with grease and grinds his ass down on it. Then, nothing. No orgasm. Nothing happens except it hurts.

Then, this kid, his mom yells it's “suppertime”. She says to come down, right now.

He works the carrot out and stashes the slippery, filthy thing in the dirty clothes under his bed.

After dinner, he goes to find the carrot and it's gone. All his dirty clothes, while he ate dinner, his mom grabbed them all to do laundry. No way could she not find the carrot, carefully shaped with a paring knife from her kitchen, still shiny with lube and stinky.

This friend of mine, he waits months under a black cloud, waiting for his folks to confront him. And they never do. Ever. Even now he's grown up, that invisible carrot hangs over every Christmas dinner, every birthday party. Every Easter egg hunt with his kids, his parents' grandkids, that ghost carrot is hovering over all of them.

That something too awful to name.

People in France have a phrase: "Spirit of the Stairway." In French: Esprit de l'escalier. It means that moment when you find the answer, but it's too late. Say you're at a party and someone insults you. You have to say something. So under pressure, with everybody watching, you say something lame. But the moment you leave the party…

As you start down the stairway, then — magic. You come up with the perfect thing you should've said. The perfect crippling put-down.

That's the Spirit of the Stairway.

The trouble is even the French don't have a phrase for the stupid things you actually do say under pressure. Those stupid, desperate things you actually think or do.

Some deeds are too low to even get a name. Too low to even get talked about.

Looking back, kid-psych experts, school counselors now say that most of the last peak in teen suicide was kids trying to choke while they beat off. Their folks would find them, a towel twisted around the kid's neck, the towel tied to the rod in their bedroom closet, the kid dead. Dead sperm everywhere. Of course the folks cleaned up. They put some pants on their kid. They made it look… better. Intentional at least. The regular kind of sad, teen suicide.

Another friend of mine, a kid from school, his older brother in the Navy said how guys in the Middle East jack off different than we do here. This brother was stationed in some camel country where the public market sells what could be fancy letter openers. Each fancy tool is just a thin rod of polished brass or silver, maybe as long as your hand, with a big tip at one end, either a big metal ball or the kind of fancy carved handle you'd see on a sword. This Navy brother says how Arab guys get their dick hard and then insert this metal rod inside the whole length of their boner. They jack off with the rod inside, and it makes getting off so much better. More intense.

It's this big brother who travels around the world, sending back French phrases. Russian phrases. Helpful jack-off tips.

After this, the little brother, one day he doesn't show up at school. That night, he calls to ask if I'll pick up his homework for the next couple weeks. Because he's in the hospital.

He's got to share a room with old people getting their guts worked on. He says how they all have to share the same television. All he's got for privacy is a curtain. His folks don't come and visit. On the phone, he says how right now his folks could just kill his big brother in the Navy.

On the phone, the kid says how, the day before, he was just a little stoned. At home in his bedroom, he was flopped on the bed. He was lighting a candle and flipping through some old porno magazines, getting ready to beat off. This is after he's heard from his Navy brother. That helpful hint about how Arabs beat off. The kid looks around for something that might do the job. A ball-point pen's too big. A pencil's too big and rough. But dripped down the side of the candle, there's a thin, smooth ridge of wax that just might work. With just the tip of one finger, this kid snaps the long ridge of wax off the candle. He rolls it smooth between the palms of his hands. Long and smooth and thin.

Stoned and horny, he slips it down inside, deeper and deeper into the piss slit of his boner. With a good hank of the wax still poking out the top, he gets to work.

Even now, he says those Arab guys are pretty damn smart. They've totally re-invented jacking off. Flat on his back in bed, things are getting so good, this kid can't keep track of the wax. He's one good squeeze from shooting his wad when the wax isn't sticking out anymore.

The thin wax rod, it's slipped inside. All the way inside. So deep inside he can't even feel the lump of it inside his piss tube.

From downstairs, his mom shouts it's suppertime. She says to come down, right now. This wax kid and the carrot kid are different people, but we all live pretty much the same life.

It's after dinner when the kid's guts start to hurt. It's wax so he figured it would just melt inside him and he'd pee it out. Now his back hurts. His kidneys. He can't stand straight.

This kid talking on the phone from his hospital bed, in the background you can hear bells ding, people screaming. Game shows.

The X-rays show the truth, something long and thin, bent double inside his bladder. This long, thin V inside him, it's collecting all the minerals in his piss. It's getting bigger and more rough, coated with crystals of calcium, it's bumping around, ripping up the soft lining of his bladder, blocking his piss from getting out. His kidneys are backed up. What little that leaks out his dick is red with blood.

This kid and his folks, his whole family, them looking at the black X-ray with the doctor and the nurses standing there, the big V of wax glowing white for everybody to see, he has to tell the truth. The way Arabs get off. What his big brother wrote him from the Navy.

On the phone, right now, he starts to cry.

They paid for the bladder operation with his college fund. One stupid mistake, and now he'll never be a lawyer.

Sticking stuff inside yourself. Sticking yourself inside stuff. A candle in your dick or your head in a noose, we knew it was going to be big trouble.

What got me in trouble, I called it “Pearl Diving”. This meant whacking off underwater, sitting on the bottom at the deep end of my parents' swimming pool. With one deep breath, I'd kick my way to the bottom and slip off my swim trucks. I'd sit down there for two, three, four minutes.

Just from jacking off, I had huge lung capacity. If I had the house to myself, I'd do this all afternoon. After I'd finally pump out my stuff, my sperm, it would hang there in big, fat, milky gobs.

After that was more diving, to catch it all. To collect it and wipe each handful in a towel. That's why it was called Pearl Diving. Even with chlorine, there was my sister to worry about. Or, Christ almighty, my Mom.

That used to be my worst fear in the world: my teenage virgin sister, thinking she's just getting fat, then giving birth to a two-headed retard baby. Both heads looking just like me. Me, the father and the uncle.

In the end, it's never what you worry about that gets you.

The best part of Pearl Diving was the inlet port for the swimming pool filter and the circulation pump. The best part was getting naked and sitting on it.

As the French would say: “Who doesn't like getting their butt sucked?”

Still, one minute you're just a kid getting off, and the next minute you'll never be a lawyer.

One minute, I'm settling on the pool bottom, and the sky is wavy, light blue through eight feet of water above my head. The world is silent except for the heartbeat in my ears. My yellow-striped swim trunks are looped around my neck for safe keeping, just in case a friend, a neighbor, anybody shows up to ask why I skipped football practice. The steady suck of the pool inlet hole is lapping at me and I'm grinding my skinny white ass around on that feeling.

One minute, I've got enough air, and my dick's in my hand. My folks are gone at their work and my sister's got ballet. Nobody's supposed to be home for hours.

My hand brings me right to getting off, and I stop. I swim up to catch another big breath. I dive down and settle on the bottom.

I do this again and again.

This must be why girls want to sit on your face. The suction is like taking a dump that never ends. My dick hard and getting my butt eaten out, I do not need air. My heartbeat in my ears, I stay under until bright stars of light start worming around in my eyes. My legs straight out, the back of each knee rubbed raw against the concrete bottom. My toes are turning blue, my toes and fingers wrinkled from being so long in the water.

And then I let it happen. The big white gobs start spouting. The pearls.

It's then I need some air. But when I go to kick off against the bottom, I can't. I can't get my feet under me. My ass is stuck.

Emergency paramedics will tell you that every year about 150 people get stuck this way, sucked by a circulation pump. Get your long hair caught, or your ass, and you're going to drown. Every

year, tons of people do. Most of them in Florida.

People just don't talk about it. Not even French people talk about everything.

Getting one knee up, getting one foot tucked under me, I get to half standing when I feel the tug against my butt. Getting my other foot under me, I kick off against the bottom. I'm kicking free, not touching the concrete, but not getting to the air, either.

Still kicking water, thrashing with both arms, I'm maybe halfway to the surface but not going higher. The heartbeat inside my head getting loud and fast.

The bright sparks of light crossing and criss-crossing my eyes, I turn and look back… but it doesn't make sense. This thick rope, some kind of snake, blue-white and braided with veins has come up out of the pool drain and it's holding onto my butt. Some of the veins are leaking blood, red blood that looks black underwater and drifts away from little rips in the pale skin of the snake. The blood trails away, disappearing in the water, and inside the snake's thin, blue-white skin you can see lumps of some half-digested meal.

That's the only way this makes sense. Some horrible sea monster, a sea serpent, something that's never seen the light of day, it's been hiding in the dark bottom of the pool drain, waiting to eat me.

So… I kick at it, at the slippery, rubbery knotted skin and veins of it, and more of it seems to pull out of the pool drain. It's maybe as long as my leg now, but still holding tight around my butthole. With another kick, I'm an inch closer to getting another breath. Still feeling the snake tug at my ass, I'm an inch closer to my escape.

Knotted inside the snake, you can see corn and peanuts. You can see a long bright-orange ball. It's the kind of horse-pill vitamin my Dad makes me take, to help put on weight. To get a football scholarship. With extra iron and omega-three fatty acids.

It's seeing that vitamin pill that saves my life.

It's not a snake. It's my large intestine, my colon pulled out of me. What doctors call, prolapsed. It's my guts sucked into the drain.

Paramedics will tell you a swimming pool pump pulls 80 gallons of water every minute. That's about 400 pounds of pressure. The big problem is we're all connected together inside. Your ass is just the far end of your mouth. If I let go, the pump keeps working - unraveling my insides, until it's got my tongue. Imagine taking a 400-pound shit, and you can see how this might turn you inside out.

What I can tell you is your guts don't feel much pain. Not the way your skin feels pain. The stuff you're digesting, doctor's call it fecal matter. Higher up is chyme, pockets of a thin runny mess studded with corn and peanuts and round green peas.

That's all this soup of blood and corn, shit and sperm and peanuts floating around me. Even with my guts unraveling out my ass, me holding onto what's left, even then my first want is to somehow get my swimsuit back on.

God forbid my folks see my dick.

My one hand holding a fist around my ass, my other hand snags my yellow-striped swim trunks and pulls them from around my neck. Still, getting into them is impossible.

You want to feel your intestines, go buy a pack of those lamb-skin condoms. Take one out and unroll it. Pack it with peanut butter. Smear it with petroleum jelly and hold it under water. Then, try to tear it. Try to pull it in half. It's too tough and rubbery. It's so slimy you can't hold on.

A lamb-skin condom, that's just plain old intestine.

You can see what I'm up against.

You let go for a second, and you're gutted.

You swim for the surface, for a breath, and you're gutted.

You don't swim, and you drown.

It's a choice between being dead right now or a minute from right now.

What my folks will find after work is a big naked fetus, curled in on itself. Floating in the cloudy water of their backyard pool. Tethered to the bottom by a thick rope of veins and twisted guts. The opposite of a kid hanging himself to death while he jacks off. This is the baby they brought home from the hospital thirteen years ago. Here's the kid they hoped would snag a football scholarship and get an MBA. Who'd care for them in their old age. Here's all their hopes and dreams. Floating here, naked and dead. All around him, big milky pearls of wasted sperm.

Either that or my folks will find me wrapped in a bloody towel, collapsed halfway from the pool to the kitchen telephone, the ragged, torn scrap of my guts still hanging out the leg of my yellow-striped swim trunks.

What even the French won't talk about.

That big brother in the Navy, he taught us one other good phrase. A Russian phrase. The way we say: "I need that like I need a hole in my head…" Russian people say: "I need that like I need teeth in my asshole…"

Mne eto nado kak zuby v zadnitse

Those stories about how animals caught in a trap will chew off their leg, well, any coyote would tell you a couple bites beats the hell out of being dead.

Hell… even if you're Russian, some day you just might want those teeth.

Otherwise, what you have to do is, you have to twist around. You hook one elbow behind your knee and pull that leg up into your face. You bite and snap at your own ass. You run out of air, and you will chew through anything to get that next breath.

It's not something you want to tell a girl on the first date. Not if you expect a kiss good night.

If I told you how it tasted, you would never, ever again eat calamari.

It's hard to say what my parents were more disgusted by: how I'd got in trouble or how I'd saved myself. After the hospital, my Mom said, "You didn't know what you were doing, honey. You were in shock." And she learned how to cook poached eggs.

All those people grossed out or feeling sorry for me…

I need that like I need teeth in my asshole.

Nowadays, people always tell me I look too skinny. People at dinner parties get all quiet and pissed off when I don't eat the pot roast they cooked. Pot roast kills me. Baked ham. Anything that hangs around inside my guts for longer than a couple hours, it comes out still food. Home-cooked lima beans or chunk light tuna fish, I'll stand up and find it still sitting there in the toilet.

After you have a radical bowel resectioning, you don't digest meat so great. Most people, you have five feet of large intestine. I'm lucky to have my six inches. So I never got a football scholarship. Never got an MBA. Both my friends, the wax kid and the carrot kid, they grew up, got big, but I've never weighed a pound more than I did that day when I was thirteen.

Another big problem was my folks paid a lot of good money for that swimming pool. In the end my Dad just told the pool guy it was a dog. The family dog fell in and drowned. The dead body got pulled into the pump. Even when the pool guy cracked open the filter casing and fished out a rubbery tube, a watery hank of intestine with a big orange vitamin pill still inside, even then, my Dad just said, "That dog was fucking nuts."

Even from my upstairs bedroom window, you could hear my Dad say, "We couldn't trust that dog alone for a second…"

Then my sister missed her period.

Even after they changed the pool water, after they sold the house and we moved to another state, after my sister's abortion, even then my folks never mentioned it again.

Ever.

That is our invisible carrot.

You. Now you can take a good, deep breath.

I still have not.

[thermodynamic-comedian]

the magnus archives does not take into account the fact that you can catch a fear mark on youtube dot com

[piggiebonez]

a reminder that gaz canonically reads chuck palahniuk

Z4DRS DNI. GET YOUR INTESTINES SUCKED OUT OF YOUR BODY👍

[have-you-read-this-short-fiction]

"Guts" is available to read here

[alittlefishaw]

[lakesbian]

Gameboy anon, cont: I also did that one Sidepiece fic and actually published it, but I don’t think that counts as good. Unless you really like Guts by Chuck Palahniuk and / or are into that kind of thing.

i have zero idea what "that one sidepiece fic" is but i just wanted to take this opportunity to inform the public that i support when things are grotesque, senselessly or sensefully violent, purposefully gross-out for any reason including just for fun, and/or otherwise liable to cause people who complain about gory horror movies being "torture porn" to start gagging

[mylifeinfiction]

Guts by Chuck Palahniuk

Inhale. This story should last about as long as you can hold your breath, and then just a little bit longer. So listen as fast as you can.

Despite not actually reading anything of his for another couple years or so, the first time Chuck Palahniuk entered my radar as anything more than “the guy who wrote Fight Club” was because of his early-2000s book readings. If you were paying attention to anything to do with books online back then, it was hard to miss the hyped up headlines about people fainting during his readings. In all of these cases (of which there were dozens), Guts is the story he was reading.

In 2008, after I’d already read several of his books (Choke, Survivor & Rant, at least) and become a full-blown fan, I finally dove into Haunted, fully prepared to be disappointed. There was just no way this 10-page short story could ever live up to the hype. Boy was I wrong.

In the end, it’s never what you worry about that gets you.

I read it again once or twice in the following years, but when I sat down to it earlier today, it had been a solid decade since my last reading. I’ve been dying to revisit it ever since I met Chuck Palahniuk once again last month in Boston. My brother made a comment about the Guts readings and Chuck’s face lit up like someone remembering a long lost love or an especially life-changing Christmas present. I knew instantly that I needed to re-experience the story that could elicit that kind of reaction with a mere mention.

Chuck Palahniuk’s Guts is every single bit as sick and twisted, disgustingly perverse, hilariously over-the-top and cleverly written as I’d remembered. It’s also every single bit as disturbing, nauseating and haunting as I’d remembered, too. This is a singular reading experience you’ll either love or hate; a story that will gross you out in such an extreme manner that you’ll either put the book down with a wicked grin on your face or in a rush to lose your lunch. I’ve read very few short stories (Graham Masterton's Eric the Pie comes to mind) that can elicit the type of reaction that this one does. It’s depraved. It’s vile. It’s truly one-of-a-kind.

Now you can take a good, deep breath. Because I still have not.

10/10

Guts was originally published in the March 2004 issue of Playboy, is featured in Chuck Palahniuk’s 2005 novel, Haunted, and can be found all over the internet, apparently; including HERE on Genius.com (yes, the place I go to for lyrics), of all places.

-Timothy Patrick Boyer.

[alikestory]

as far as i can tell, only this one person has ranked chuck palahniuk books by how disturbing they are.

(i've read fight club, invisible monsters, diary and guts. from my limited experience i would say it is accurate. :v )

[sirspeep]

i am reading haunted (chuck palahniuk) at the beach and i'm gonna need someone whos better at drawing than me to do some character designs of aaall these assholes

[justplainsimon]

Too many kids these days know more about final destination than guts by chuck palahniuk 😔😔😔

[tammyholmeslecter]

Canibalismo, Chuck Palahniuk e Raphael Montes

Hoje vim surtar falar sobre um assunto que desenvolvi um grande fascínio nos últimos dias: Canibalismo.

Por mais que possa parecer perturbador e até nojento o assunto em si, é possível tirar tantas reflexões sobre o assunto, tantas metáforas que realmente me impressiona.

Bem, como comecei a me interessar pelo assunto? Esse filho da mãe aqui:

(Essa série real alugou um triplex na minha cabeça)

Hannibal é uma série da NBC que possui 3 temporadas (infelizmente) com 13 episódios cada. Obviamente é baseado nos livros de Thomas Harris, mas tem suas diferenças que fazem a série ser única. A começar pela profundidade maior que tem da relação entre Hannibal e Will, que, ouso dizer, se torna o foco principal da série. E o Hannibal vê o canibalismo não como algo violento, mas sim uma arte. Isso é claramente percebido ao analisar as cenas de crime, que são perfeitamente montadas, com todas elas tendo um significado por trás.

Nesta cena, além do cadáver ter os aspectos e formato de uma árvore, o corpo tem todos seus órgãos internos removidos e uma planta venenosa é posta em seu lugar.

Essa cena nem preciso explicar. Uma clara referência ao quadro Primavera, de Sandro Botticelli.

Enfim, não vou me extender muito em apenas Hannibal, mas já é possível entender a profundidade da série, (recomendo fortemente pra quem nunca assistiu!) e há muito mais a se analisar sobre a série, porém vou dar continuidade a minha saga em descobrir diferentes mídias sobre canibalismo.

Ontem mesmo terminei o livro O Jantar Secreto, de Raphael Montes. Geralmente, não leio livros contemporâneos brasileiros (amo os clássicos), pois maioria são fantasias ou romances (ou autoajuda, que é pior) e quase nenhum realmente tem uma sinopse que me chame a atenção. Mas quando vi que esse livro tinha canibalismo como tema principal, e que tinham cenas que para algumas pessoas era de revirar o estômago (adoro livros grotescos, hehe), resolvi dar uma chance. E definitivamente não me arrependi.

Quando terminei este livro, fiquei meia hora olhando pro teto tentando processar o plot twist que ocorre justamente no epílogo. Foi um final que realmente era difícil de prever. Mas não foi só isso que me deixou encantada com o livro, também foi as inúmeras críticas sociais e as cenas chocantes escrita de forma crua, algo que imediatamente me fez lembrar de um outro autor que amo: Chuck Palahniuk.

Não li outros livros de Raphael Montes (ainda), mas já posso dizer que há uma semelhança com Palhaniuk.

Ambos escrevem histórias grotescas, equilibradas com humor ácido e criticas sociais (coloquei aqui a capa do conto Tripas, melhor exemplo da essência de Chuck Palahniuk, na minha opinião). Isso sem dúvidas fez eu me interessar em ler outras obras de Raphael Montes futuramente.

Mas ainda tenho muito a descobrir ainda sobre esse mundinho do canibalismo e suas metáforas. Ainda há vários livros e filmes sobre o assunto que ainda não vi, mas pretendo em ler e assistir mais sobre em breve.

[nicholasandriani]

Exploring Literary Themes from Around the World: From Staircase Wit to Prometheus and Epimetheus to Chuck Palahniuk's 'Guts: How to Effectively Captivate Audiences with Irony

The concept of “staircase wit” is a popular literary motif that has been used in various works of literature across different cultures and time periods. It is a term used to describe the phenomenon of thinking of a clever comeback or retort after the opportunity to use it has passed, often occurring on the staircase while leaving a conversation or event. This concept is closely related to the use…

[sexhaver]

it's really a shame that chuck palahniuk's best-known work is Fight Club. not that it's bad by any means, but Guts is... the anthology i originally read it in (Haunted) stuck it at the very end with a preamble mentioning that people would vomit and/or faint during public readings of it at bookstores, which i both entirely believe and love visualizing. even without vomiting or fainting, the idea of reading it out loud in a public space is insane i mean neurodivergent

[alittlefishaw]

[sweatermuppet]

what are your fav ever books? all genres! :3

love songs - crass

fight club - chuck palahniuk

the big book of exit strategies - jamaal may

savage pastimes: a cultural history of violent entertainment - harold schector

gut: poems - j bailey hutchinson

nightsky with exit wounds - ocean vuong

2001: a space odyssey - arthur c clarke

what's eating gilbert grape - peter hedges

brute: poems - emily skaja

the outsiders - SE hinton

madness - sam sax

fear & loathing in las vegas - hunter s thompson

brokeback mountain - annie proulx

no country for old men - cormac mccarthy

said the manic to the muse - jeanann verlee

look: poems - solmaz sharif

tap out: poems - edgar kunz

johnny got his gun - dalton trumbo

soft science - franny choi

jurassic park - michael crichton

the jokes over - ralph steadman

blud - rachel mckibbins

eyes bottle dark with a mouthful of flowers - jake keets

horsepower - joy priest

the wettest county in the world - matt boundurant

mothman apologia - robert wood lynn

the shining - stephen king

acid in georgia - jasmine ledesma

winter stranger - jackson holbert

the great gatsby - f scott fitzgerald

lunch poems - frank o'hara

piercing - ryu murakami

collected poems of maya angelou

do androids dream of electric sheep - philip k dick

[ronthedunedain]

Chuck Palahniuk Guts vibes.

All fun and games in the pool until Sveta gets caught in a drain and ruins the party