"So I’ve always had this illusion, right? A fantasy that I've found myself caught up in. I had this very naïve preoccupation with the idea of the struggling, fucked up artist. In a way, I guess I felt like in order to be creative you had to live on the edge of madness and self-destruction. My heroes may have been great artists, but they were almost all tormented people. Charles Bukowski died an alcoholic. William Burroughs shot heroin for more than fifty years. Donald Goines was shot to death in a drug deal gone wrong. Yukio Mishima had himself ritually beheaded in the center of Tokyo."
- Nic Sheff, author of Tweak: growing up on methamphetamines, on his blog, nicsheff.blogspot.com
I read Sheff's book about a year ago, and I have to say it's nice to see that he's realised that that idea is, truth to be told, really fucking lame. It's such a boy thing, isn't it? Living like Bukowski, moving to some big city, taking drugs and just being so interesting and self-destructive and well...just so awesome, really. All the time. And of course, forgetting the writing part of it all or writing things that have been written a million times before by the guys they're trying to emulate. It's just so pretentious. Anyway, having said that, I appreciate that that was (obviously) not the only reason as to why Sheff started taking drugs and eventually got addicted to crystal meth. I'm just saying, for someone like me, what with all the depressions, the OCD and the in and out of therapy all the time, it just seems pretty fucking self-indulgent/stupid/lame to actively try to add some more drama to your life.
Read Among other things, I've taken up smoking, then Salinger's Franny and Zooey (loved it, cannot believe I didn't read it earlier) and now I'm reading The graduate by Charles Webb. It's really good.
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