Junkies are liars. They have to be professionally.

I've always wanted to be a guy with a rec room.

Jake La Botz is a creator of dark poetry and haunting song, the kind of music that gets in your bones and rides you for days, a sound and vision only those who've been to the bottom and clawed their way back up can generate. His midnight gifts evoke Hank Williams and Skip James as much as Tom Waits and Dylan. Not everybody will get this music - because not everybody is ready for the truth.

It's not like I was an alkie or anything. Alcohol is for cleaning needles

I always tell myself, when I remember the non-stop self-generated hell party that used to be my life, I wouldn't be here if I didn't go there.

Nothing ever turns me on so much in a woman as unhappiness.

The Adderall Diaries is phenomenal. With jittery finesse and a reformed tweaker's eye for detail, Stephen Elliott captures the terrifying, hilarious, heart-strangling reality of a life whose scorched-earth physical and psycho-emotional dimensions no one could have invented - they absolutely had to be lived. By all rights, the author should either be dead or chewing his fingers in a bus station. Instead, he may well have written the memoir of an entire generation.