We Are Coming To The End: The Book Of Drugs/Mike Doughty

Soooo... I love it when I can get a bunch of thoughts swimming and swirling in my head all at once.  I am up in beautiful Michigan (and if you have never done Michigan in summer I feel sad for you).  It is "vacation" which means I am away from work which means I think about work at a low hum in my head all day long which after the first day becomes a drum beat.  My client problems, how I can clean up my paperwork, how I can do what I do better, my client problems, research I need to do, how to do more pro bono, my client problems... on and on.  I also have the specter of vacation.  We go to this town called Arcadia and we have a house and there is a Lutheran Family Camp there and between the house and camp we have a constant parade of friends and family which is...nice and that vacation is thumping along like a bass line with the buzz of the work thing and then... we go to "Program" at the camp.  They bring in these speakers each week and they talk for an hour and a half each morning about God, life, the Bible, ministry, beauty, truth, how to live your life and that is this nice melodic keyboard... against the work... against the vacation and then if I am reading something good, if I happened to bring a good book to read and not just a throw away Jonathan Grisham book.  This week I am reading Mike Doughty's "The Book of Drugs" and it is great for someone like me (an asshole) who really likes indie music and stories about damaged people and redemption and that is like a fine guitar line going through all the rest... and it 70 and sunny with a breeze and I am laying on a couch typing and thinking about the death of this blog and the start of my new project and work, and family and vacation and god and art and nature and how absurdly kind God has been to me and my family and...well, I just love it when I get a bunch of thoughts swimming and swirling in my head.


Soooo... this Mike Doughty book.  He was the singer, songwriter, guitarist front man of a band called "Soul Coughing".  They were an indie rock band of some acclaim back in the day.  All of my music snob friends recommended them to me and I bought all three albums.  Hated them.  It was not music I could pigeon hole and had sampling and "beats" and for God's sake he was WHITE!. 

He describes his drug life as he grows up and becomes a musician and has some success and tours and eventually, as they all do, discovers heroin. Sadly it did not kill him or he might have been huge.  Seriously, it is a really good book.  He is clearly and fairly unrepentantly a huge ass.  He speaks of his band mates in ways my friends don't speak of their first ex wife.  They seriously sound like awful people who were getting noticed on his back and taking credit for making something of him.  The sound like pricks.  But nearly everyone in the book sounds like a prick. He clearly was going through life as the worst kind of smug, talented, insecure tool and the most striking thing about the parade displayed in the book is that it is a parade.  No one stays.  He is too much.

Before I read this book I had already become a fan of his solo work.  Brilliant, edgy singer songwriter with good guitar chops a great sense of melody.  I strongly recommend it.  Anyway, it is a very good read and a story really of the grace of God, bravery, luck and redemption and ultimately, and very unlikely, a source of hope.  And it is well written.  Buy it.

So that having been said, The Diner Review is in it's death throes. I would like someone to edit it, throw out the shit (of which there is a great deal) keep the diner reviews and keep the better (more readable) pieces and edit the shit out of them and then I would like to let it stand.  If edited it is not the worst body of work.  I am willing to pay for this service and if interested please email me at mab@mabeckerlaw.com.  I will not pay a lot but for someone who has a reasonable facility with grammar and the language (sadly I do not) it should not be that big a project and it is worth a couple hundred to me at least.  If you have an unemployed college graduate at home it might be perfect.

I will be rolling out my new project in the next few weeks if not sooner.  I am going to try and keep it smaller in scope and it is much more of a focused effort.  I might need to do two new blogs.  One for all the background noise in my head and one for this new jag.  It will be no surprise to most of my compatriots and I have touched on here as of late.  It is my hope that my next post in these pages will be my last.  On to more swimming and swirling.