When I was growing up in middle school and high school, I had a next door neighbor trailer park friend named Jordan, who is quite a character and has showed up in detail in some of my long-form Nostr posts from a while ago. He ran a series of sand-pit fights in his backyard that I participated in.

Sadly, he had the most broken and crazy home, like him and his younger sister were often alone and figuring out life for themselves, with their mom coming back like every other day barely, but Jordan was so charismatic and funny and smart that I hung out with him and his sister a lot at home and at the bus stop. Their trailer was an absolute mess, but it had a chaotic warmth to it from the people there. Jordan basically ran the place. When his absentee single mother came home from time to time after work and whatever else she was up to, she'd be like, "Oh Lyn, hi! I've been out today due to motorcycle lessons. (???) Do you want a bagel? I've got bagels. Jordan, you should be more like Lyn, she's polite. She always says thank you. Stay as long as you want Lyn, sorry for the mess." And I'd be like, "uhmm, thanks!"

Jordan, who was two years older than me, taught me to play Magic the Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons, and got me into anime via Trigun and Cowboy Beebop; all sorts of nerd stuff at a time when I was kind of otherwise aimless. I was living alone with my 60+ year old single father at the time.

We then became a funny duo as teenagers; him as the charismatic outlandish guy who usually got into trouble, taught me all sorts of nerd stuff, got his girlfriend pregnant at age18 and started a family with her, barely got out of high school, and me as the total opposite introverted bookish polite one next door that would play Magic the Gathering or Dungeons and Dragons with his friends group, and that he'd trick his friends into fighting in his sand pit as a joke since they didn't know what they were getting into, but that was like clean as a whistle in terms of schoolwork and relationships.

Anyway, the point of this rambling post is that I first watched Fight Club in the best possible setting. I went over to Jordan's house one evening, and we started watching it. But then his mother called him and said to come to help with some shit she was dealing with, so he was like, "hey I got to go Lyn, but you can keep watching it, no problem." So I was there at night, in his messy trailer alone (???), watching Fight Club. The place was a mess, I felt weird that I was the only one in their home despite not living there, and Jordan was basically a more benign equivalent of Tyler Durden. So actually the movie hit a bit harder because I was both enjoying it but also constantly on edge because I was in a weird environment that didn't quite feel right, and yet felt oddly on-brand for the movie.

Can't really replicate that. And it's burned into my memory better than most movies.


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