Junky Book

Well holy shit, high-five to you, early teens me! Though I may have mixed feelings about some things I loved back in my formative, pointlessly cynical years, this rereading experience was actually, well, kinda rad. Can I say that at almost 30? Rad? Or am I getting to where it's like when your folks n' grandfolks try to quote "the hip lingo of the kids these days" and it enters your brain like aural chipboard? This novel held up, is my point.

Maybe I'm just an asshole (probable), but Burroughs makes me laugh in this bitter, "fuck it all" sort of way that's fairly therapuetic when not indulged in to excess. If I let it go too far and didn't try to temper it down with at least a little bit of sunshine, I'd perhaps end up all drunken rendition of Bela Lugosi in some shitty apartment just hating stuff. It's important to keep your dose low, ya know? Still, Burroughs knows how to utilize the English language, particularly descriptive metaphor, in a manner both extremely hilarious and sharply visual. Also, he knows exactly what a junky looks like: the how, the why, and the rationalization processes behind their behavior when they are engaged in that special, weasely, droney junky non-charm to an extent which leads me to believe he kept his mirror pretty clean most of the time. I mean the mirror he looked at himelf in, not the...never mind.

For those of you who've never met a dope addict, there are also some amusing and astutely descriptive scenes involving a period when our protagonist tries to get off the junk by assuming a regiment of absurdly excessive alcohol abuse. You've known a drunk before, right? Once he goes off his rocker and starts finding himself a recurrent troublemaking fool, his once supportive friends start telling him he should maybe think about quitting the booze and going back to the needle for his own sake, and for their own collective sanity. Somehow Ole Willy's self-deprecatingly accurate descriptions of his drunken blackout behavior and experiences with cyclical, hangover-induced mental torture when compared with the very real dangers of morphine addiction leads to a comically black "lesser of two evils" type of fork in the road. Wait, did he just make me laugh talking about that? Did he just talk himself back into drug addiction because it's less outlandish than being a raging alcoholic? Yes, people totally think like that when they're all strung out! Ha! Oh, Papa Bill.

I would suggest reading this again if it's been a while. I was surprised anew by Burroughs's dirty poetry. I think I'll reread some more very soon.