Last Post

I'm finally done with this book.  Bill is finally done with cocaine.  He started a new job at a different publishing agency and still works there today.  He and his father have rekindled their relationship and talk frequently.  Bill is still with Noah even though he cheated on him many times.  The book doesn't go in depth in how he started using cocaine, just that he started in college.  I really enjoyed reading this book.  In a way it is a scare tactic to keep people away from hard drugs like cocaine.  I can't imagine how horrible it must be to use cocaine and to lose the trust of everyone you know.  This book is unlike any that I have ever read, because it's a memoir and everything in it is the brutally honest truth.  He tells us the worst of what happend to him during this time in his life.  He holds nothing back from the reader and just gives it to us straight.  I would definitly recommend this book to a friend just as a outside read because it's crazy what drugs like cocaine can do to you. 

Post 4

It turns out that Bill did go through with rehab.  He spends four weeks in rehab in Portlan, Oregon.  We find out that his family has a had many generations of drug and alcoholism on both his mom and dads' side of the family.  A few months after being clean he finds a used crack stem and smokes the leftover residue from the stem.  A few days later he calls up his drug dealer and spends $600 on cocaine.  Bill then asks himself why he ever left smoking.  This shows that a drug users abuse is usually reoccuring.  He blows off all of his appointments and lies to people.  He goes to a film festivle he promised to go to but only stays one day instead of two.  He is throwing away his life so that he can smoke.  He becomes increasingly paranoid that he is being watched by police and even questions suicide.  He overdoses and is sent to the hospital.  He then goes to a psychiactric hospital with a rehab center.  So far this book has had many twists.  Right when you think that Bill is finally going to turn his life around and do some good, he goes and smokes and everything just becomes hell for him and his family.

Post #3

Right now in the book, Bill is still a heavy drinker and uses cocaine.  But he is starting to go back to his publishing company that he owns.  His company is miraculosly making decent profit from a book that they recently published.  One night to celebrate a book publishing he drinks to much goes home wakes up and his boyfriend Noah tells him that his sister and two other close friends are there for an intervention sort of thing.  "I don't struggle, not yet.  I am quiet and cooperative as each of them, in turn-- Kim, Kate, Noah, David- tells me they will support my getting sober but won't support me, won't have anyrhing to do with me, if i continue to use." (Clegg 181)  I find this part very emotional and interesting mainly becuase I'm curious as to what Bill is going to do.  In the past they have told him to sober up but he has never gone through with it.  But now that they are all threatening to leave him, he realizes that he must make a choice to either keep using drugs, or to have his family with him.  The next couple of chapters will definitly be interesting.

Book Post 2

I am currently about 3/4ths done with Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man by Bill Clegg.  Bill is currently in a hotel room where he is with a man that he met at an airport.  They first begin drink alcohol and after a couple hours they start doing crack/cocaine.  While doing the drugs, Bills boyfriend calls him on his cell phone asking where he is.  His boyfriend, Noah, correctly assumes that he is doing cocaine, and demands that he go back home immediatly, thus showing that Bill does have people who care about him and want him to stop using the drugs.  Bill then hangs up on his boyfriend and starts a one night relationship with the man from the airport.  This shows that these kinds of drugs can destroy relationships with friends and family.  The next morning Bill discovers that alltogether he has less than $30,000 dollars in the bank.  He has spent all of his money on buying cocaine for himself and people that he does the drugs with.  He also somehow manages to help his mother with her finances that came with divorcing his father a few years before.  The drug abuse by Bill was a major factor in the downfall of his parents marriage. 

Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man

I am reading the book Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man, which is a memoir written by Bill Clegg.  Bill Clegg is a cocaine addict, an alcoholic, and a homosexual.  I am halfway done with the book so far, and a lot has happend.  Bill does crack-cocaine regularly and cannot control his urges to smoke it.  He smokes in public restrooms, such as in airports and restaurants.  He also does crack with random people that he meets, such asa taxi drivers.  The life of a crack-cocaine addict doesn't seem to be a very good life.  Bill used to own his own publishing company that he has driven into the ground because of drug abuse.  He spends all of his money on cocaine, almost every day he pulls 2,000 dollars out of his bank account to be spent on cocaine.  The book shows how drug abuse can destroy relationships, families, jobs and confidence.  He knows that he needs help but whenever somone tries to help him he just shuts them down. People in our society need to know that people do care about their drug abuse, but they also need to carry out the rehabilitation process.  So far this book seems really interesting.

Invisible Children

One thing that really stuck out to me during the video we watched is how it took seventeen years for this war going on in Africa to really get noticed by the media.  You would think that a war where kids and civilians are being killed and abducted would make the front page news everyday, but before Invisible Children was created hardly anybody knew of the war going on in central Africa.  I think that this program is doing a lot of good in giving the people of Africa a voice, but I think that the real goal should be to deploy more troops to central Africa.  Last month Obama sent 100 troops to Uganda to help out, but I think that he should send more.  I don't really think that the crisis tracker and protection plan help out that much, I think that the best thing to do would be to take action against the LRA.  I like the fact that we are helping out the Invisible children foundation.