Lou Reed is really dead

Lou Reed is dead. Really dead this time and not an internet hoax. I wasn't a big fan of his. I associated his music with heroin use and my experiences with people who used heroin were all negative...eventually.

I did plenty of drugs myself but mostly just pot and hallucinogens. I learned early that speed and downers were not for me. Speed made me lose weight and I was far too skinny as it was, downers just put me to sleep and one time I almost didn't wake up and I don't even know what it was I took. Scared my roommate because she couldn't rouse me for classes.

It was a very stupid act on my part. I was 19 maybe and I was getting kicked out of college six weeks before the end of the second semester for smoking pot

which I was doing but they only caught me because they set me up using someone who I thought was a friend and she turned me in

and I had made the mistake of letting the Dean Of Women call my parents to inform them of the fact

apparently she lied to them about what kind of drugs I was taking

and I had recently gotten off the phone with my parents who were coming to get me over the weekend and I knew I was in for a world of hurt and I finally had a date with a guy in my Geology class that I was interested in and we went out that night and he gave me this 'downer', a pill he had got somewhere and I took it.

Fortunately I did get back to my dorm room before I passed out and fortunately (or unfortunately) my roommate just let me be I was still breathing and eventually I woke up and had an awful hangover and had to face my parents in a few days.

So the day comes, and they barely speak to me and frogmarch me to the car and don't let me get in the backseat but make me get in the front seat between them and my father grabs my left arm and jerks up the sleeve of my shirt and checks my arm for tracks and then does the same thing on my right arm and...

I cannot believe he just did that

I am insulted to the core and after that everything he says to me falls on deaf ears. I am, of course, their virtual prisoner so I try and make all the sounds they want to hear.

That little act cleaved me from my parents for the rest of my life. That and the year or two that followed, before I escaped their house altogether and I married the Rat Bastard to do it.

Who I divorced 3 1/2 years later.

The next time my father tried to control who I was and, basically, my life, I stood up to him and told him I would do what I damn well pleased.

Actually, I think what I said was I would sleep with who I wanted and when I wanted and if he didn't like it I would move out.

I was living with them at the time.

I know, I know.

So where was I? Oh yeah, Lou Reed and heroin. My 1^st husband/ex-husband used heroin but not while we were married. I didn't put up with that shit. Last I heard he had got disability from his parent's company where he went to work after I divorced him because he didn't have anyone to support him anymore from an accident on the job site because he was probably STONED and hooked up with another junkie who got an inheritance and they were living in a trailer house somewhere in Florida doing drugs all day.

But that was a long time ago.

I had a friend once who did heroin, this was back in the Rat Bastard days, until he broke in my house when I was gone on vacation and stole from me.

Anyway, you get the picture.

I know I'm being unfair to Lou Reed. I know he was a very talented guy and very influential and I did/do like some of his stuff and we are poorer for his passing.

But I was never a big fan.