Lee was never sad or angry. She seemed happy to just be alive. She wasn’t pretentious or interested in what I did. She never once asked me if I thought she looked good. She was confident and funny and spontaneous.

My small group of friends were all similarly anti-social, autodidactic, talented, and at war with the permanence of their bodies. It was a good time.

The minute you get into your dope is the minute you stop progressing in the progressive world. No need for new clothes, new music, new hair styles. Drugs are beautiful in the way they create a singularly focused mind.

The reason I want to write about drugs is that I don’t believe anyone has done a proper job of it. That it has been tried over and over and that there is already so much writing devoted to the topic doesn’t deter me. I also think I’m willing to be more honest than most other writers have been, and not ornament the language with psychedelic verbs or

But it’s terroristic outside today. I saw green jeeps and docile Canadian machine guns. A Persian man near skid row said, “Give me a hug,” and it looked like he might have been wearing a suicide vest. It was the most tempting hug I’ve been offered all year.

I walked home with my deliquescing cock in my work pants, pretty much having forgotten I may have impregnated a very young girl, wondering what the fuck it was going to take to make me feel whole again, now that I knew it wasn’t sex. Enter drugs.

In the end, I only believe in Siddhartha Gautama and Bertrand Russell. And although I’ve published many things indicating otherwise, I believe the only truly original artists of the last one hundred odd years are Vladimir Nabokov and Patricia Highsmith.

The door opened and a woman in her late forties came out. She had permed hair, a linen jacket, printed skirt; her eyes were puffy and swollen from crying. So, it’s one of these offices, I thought. An office without a secondary exit. I liked secondary exits. The suffering needn’t meet the suffering in the anteroom of suffering.

What I love about drug addicts, one of many things, is that they don’t care about the news. News is an abstraction.