The Village Voice

“Listening To Heroin:

What Dope Says About Pleasure, Poison, and Keeping Score”

 by Ann M.

“…If you don’t really understand how other people feel, and don’t much feel for other people, or not in the ways society says you’re supposed to, heroin is ideal because it levels the playing field, rendering fellow users more predictable and less inhibited. Dope reduces the anxiety of social life, especially in an underground art and rock scene simultaneously characterized by chronic insecurity and outsize egos, relentless status competition and the stark alternatives of sudden success and permanent obscurity.”

For some odd reason, this paragraph and in particular that phrase “permanent obscurity” entered my consciousness and stayed there for years, becoming the thread from which I would pull this crazy novel.