I have allowed an entire week to evaporate again, and I really hate myself for not staying true to my proise. I feel as if I can’t persevere. The slightest discomfort is enough to discourage me. I am not as masochistic as I calim to be, I suppose. How do I expect to survive a war, or the Revolution?

Maybe I won’t.

I console myself slightly by realizing I have been reading like a maniac lately, and my brain feels a little loose… I don’t know if [that’s] from the reading or from the swimming (God knows how many parasites I might have swallowed. I wonder if I ought to take [anti-parasitics]….)

But I have at last read 1984, whizzed through Fight Club, and have re-read Catch 22. I was struck at the horrible similarity between the world portrayed in 1984 and the which is portrayed in Catch 22. Communism may be dead (at least in the West) but the principles of Ingsoc have adapted quite well to rampant capitalism.

But Catch 22 captures an essence that 1984 does not, in that the leaders are rarely as intelligent as O’Brien and Colonel Korn. They are more like Catchcart, Peckem, and Dreedle, and the fact that incompetents rule makes the horror more horrible still. The way that companies re-write history (Phillip Morris and how it tries to proclaim the good they do—Anheuser-Busch and the Food Bank commercial—hell, the fact that we refuse to acknowledge that alcohol kills more people than all illicit drugs combined—the way Milo Minderbinder gets away with “what’s good for me is good for the Syndicate, and everyone has a share….”)

I don’t know if I’ve written this already, but I think Fight Club has ruined my life. Or saved it, maybe. I can’t decide.

Tyler Durden is Yossarian is Winston.