Jim Carroll

After reading only the short excerpt of The Basketball Diaries, I became intrigued about the rest of the story. The language Carroll uses is beautiful, despite the sad, seemingly hopeless atmosphere he describes. The introduction to this section caught my eye because I read Naked Lunch in high school. I like how the sections are organized chronologically by season and year. The narrator seems like he originally liked taking drugs, but as his addiction looks him in the face, he realizes the freedom that drugs once offered him may not be as meaningful as the freedom of being clean. He also talks a lot about his friends, with whom he shares this lifestyle. They are young, high school students experimenting and getting in over their heads. He describes the effects of LSD, and how the drug attaches levels of energy to objects, like trees. The detachment he feels from his body while on LSD seems frightening to me. I understand that these types of experiences were often the main goal for drug users, but they don't sound appealing to me.