51

Another slow week. It happens. I'm not worried.

Tweak: Nic Sheff -- Well, not exactly a feel good book about overcoming obstacles. Tweak is an autobiographical account of one man's addiction to meth (and just about anything else he can shove down his throat or shoot in his arm).

Nic Sheff could have been a golden boy. He grew up in a good family, well-connected to the entertainment industry and decidedly upper middle-class in the way it was meant to be lived. People who can take month-long vacations to Hawaii are doing just fine, I think. Of course, Nic is a fuck-up, who uses drugs, uses people and makes one bad choice after another. It's not funny. It's not really even all that interesting to watch him do it.

The book, surprisingly, lacks grittiness. Certainly, it gives a lot of attention to the sudden, barely remembered ways he manages to torpedo relationships. He fucks family and friends over time and time again while either on drugs or while trying to get money to buy drugs. However, Sheff distances himself from the things he finds distasteful in retrospect --like selling his ass to gay men-- and instead focuses on petty larceny and theft. Not to say, stealing from your stepfather isn't bad, but if the message of the book is "don't do drugs because..." prostitution for drugs with freakish-looking men sounds a lot more convincing an argument not to do meth.

He also barely seems to give a shit in retrospect for the damage he did. I don't get a sense of much feeling of responsibility. It was always just the damned drugs, which may or may not have their roots in how he was raised by a too permissive buddy father and a cold, distant mother. Blah, blah, blah... It's always something.

My preferences for the author to debase himself a little more in print for my amusement aside, the book feels incomplete. There isn't much of a resolution. He goes to rehab --again. Maybe it sticks this time. Maybe it doesn't. There's not really a sense of closure.

This all sounds like I hated the book. I didn't. Overall, I liked what Sheff did. He just could have done a lot more.