Union Pacific Is Attractive With Five Positive Trends

By Michael Hooper

Union Pacific (UNP) has recently exhibited five positive trends that make its stock look attractive at current prices.

The five trends are steady-to-growing volumes in the first 18 weeks of the year; higher pricing; a fuel surcharge; a dividend over 2% and a stock buy-back program that is like a revolving bank.

With those trends in place and the stock down 9% year to date, Union Pacific looks attractive.

The S&P 500 is down 18% so far this year, through May 12, 2022. The NASDAQ is down 27% year to date. My portfolio is down 4% year to date. I am overweight Berkshire Hathaway (BRK/B) (48% of my total portfolio), the rest of my portfolio includes consumer defensive stocks like PepsiCo and Coca-Cola and Hershey, railroads, utilities and dividend aristocrat ETF (NOBL).

I’ve watched Union Pacific stock for over 20 years. I once had a client who paid $8,500 for shares of Union Pacific Railroad stock in 1948. By 2012 those UNP shares were worth over $2 million and paid $36,000 annually in dividends.

Another reason Union Pacific is such a good investment is limited competition, its chief competitor is BNSF Railway, owned by Berkshire Hathaway. Union Pacific owns the Central Corridor from Denver to Winnemucca, Nevada. The route includes the famous Moffat Tunnel in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, the tunnel with 6.2 miles represents the highest point in the UP line. There were 28 people who died during the construction. Many of them died when they discovered a lake inside the mountain. Water from the lake goes to Denver.

Total volumes of traffic at Union Pacific railroad were up 2% year to date and total carloads excluding intermodal where was up 9% year to date through Week 18 ending May 7. So far in the second quarter, carloads were up 3% but intermodal was down 10%, so total volume was down 3%

Revenue was up 17% in the first quarter due to higher volumes, fuel charges and favorable pricing and mix.  

Union Pacific Railroad will struggle to grow volumes because of a shortage of staff and constraints in the supply chains. The war in Ukraine, the Covid-19 Pandemic in China, where so much of our imports come from, and inflation may hurt traffic. Intermodal traffic will decline as imports fall off.

The railroad's dividend is yielding 2.09% yield at today’s prices. Generally speaking a good rule of thumb for this stock is Union Pacific is a buy when the dividend is over 2% and it’s a hold or a sell when it’s under 2%.

Historic Dividend Yield for one year from YCharts

The one-year chart shows the dividend yield spent much of its time below 2%.

According to gurufocus, UNP's dividend yield has ranged from 1.47% to 3.22%, with the median of 1.92% over the past 10 years.

I own UNP and CSX (CSX), Canadian Pacific (CP), Canadian National Railway (CNI) and Norfolk Southern (NSC). My favorite is Union Pacific.

Union Pacific was recently trading at $230.80 per share. I think it's a buy from here to $241.00. However, because of extreme volatility, the stock may revisit current prices or go lower in the near term. But I expect this stock to perform well over the next two to five years and beyond.

Editors note: Michael Hooper owns shares in UNP, CSX, CP, CNI, NSC and BRK/B.

Michael Hooper's Journey from Clarinda Native to Author

By Michael Hooper

Thank you for having me in this book talk tonight Monday May 9, 2022, in Clarinda, Iowa. In the past 12 months I published two books: a Painter in Paris and the Wonderment Years.

The story behind my books is a long and wandering Odyssey of trials and tribulations and lessons learned, sometimes the hard way but it’s also a story of dreaming, Studying and saving and investing and working daily toward a goal.

First let me say I am grateful to my family for supporting me especially my wife Heather and out children Hannah Dale and Reid and Hannah Marie Hooper, my brother Tom and my brother Richard. I also want to thank my cousins and aunts and uncles in the states, Ohio and in Puerto Rico!

As a freelance writer I get jokes all the time about my way of life. What do you do all day? Dream up thoughts. Well yes. Ideas can change the world. What do you call a writer with health insurance? Married. Why does a writer enjoy writing about fantasy fiction so much? Because it’s better than real life where the scribe's pay is miserable.

Strangely enough. Around 1978 when I was in 9th grade I was a librarian in Clarinda Junior High School, in this very site where we are now, I was hired to work as a Librarian during study halls. 

At that time I could relate to the books of SE Hinton,  the Outsiders, That was Then This is now, About the break up of a friendship. Something I experienced when I was young.

I was born in Maryville, Missouri, in 1963 and my family moved to Clarinda around 1966. I remember my family and I gathered around the TV in 1969 to watch Neil Armstrong step onto the moon as the first human to touch the surface of the moon. We were so in awe of this. My brothers and I built this huge 5 foot model of the rocket used to go to the moon. This rocket is a metaphor for our adventures. Our parents Jovita and Charles Hooper encouraged us to build these models airplanes. When we were little kids we saw the home of Kathy and Ken Hunter and saw Kenny Hunter built these model airplanes that flew in the sky and we thought that was cool and we wanted to do that too.

My grandfather Thomas Reid Hooper gave me a pocket knife and said don’t sell it or give it away or lose it and I still have it to this day. I think there was something in my grandfather wanting us to save everything, his house was full of collectibles of all kinds books art tools cartoons. When I was 10, he gave me a book about Klondike Mike who was Canadian who sought to make his fortune in the gold Klondike gold rush in Dawson Canada in the late 1890s. Mike was an entrepreneur and perhaps that story influenced who I am. Klondike Mike made a lost and made another fortune. As Phil Anschutz, the billionaire said, You will make mistakes but you can make up for them.

My grandfather Thomas Reid Hooper gave me my first diary book for Christmas 1981. I’ve been keeping a diary ever since so that is 40 years of diary keeping. I used the diaries to help write these two books.

I worked 20 years for newspapers in Nebraska and Kansas. I wanted to be the best reporter I could be, one who could be trusted with integrity and a desire to be fair, accurate and thorough. Credibility is everything in journalism. I cultivated sources who could keep me informed and often had exclusive front page news about the biggest story of the day. 

Some of my favorite stories were interviewing a true granddaughter of a Civil War veteran, covering Ronald Reagan in Hastings Nebraska for USA today, Touring with a rock band in Italy and writing about it for The Topeka Capital-Journal. I remain friends today with Civil War veteran Samuel Dinsmoor's granddaughter, Janet Stevens Holmquist Smith. Dinsmoor was a folk artist sculptor from Lucas, Kansas, whose sculptor garden is there today as a museum.

Before there was a Painter in Paris and the Wonderment Years I wrote three other unpublished books called Shattered on the Plains, with Arlen Lazaroff, Shattered on the Plains was about eccentric men in Nebraska and Kansas, including a Hermit named Bogie Savage who lived in a sod house in a ghost town.  I also wrote a biography of poet Arlen Lazaroff story and a third book called Bar Stories which were written as short vignettes.

In 2019, I watched a friend of mine Skyler Troughton write and self publish several books on Amazon. She advised me that I could do it but needed to download Microsoft Word. 

I had learned how to dictate into my phone in order to write on deadline. My shoulders and wrists suffered carpal tunnel syndrome from pounding the keyboards over my 20 years as a journalist on deadline. I was always looking for a new way to write and dictation was the answer. I was so thrilled to be able to quickly dictate an entire story into an email to myself, using my phone. This saved my arms from all this clickety-clack clickety-clack. So inspired by my friend Skyler, I started dictating my choicest diary entries into a word file. These choice diary entries began as a look back on memory lane, what are the real things that happened back there, is my memory of them accurate? My diary has information that would otherwise be irretrievable if not written down.

As a freelance writer, I have the entire day to set up like I choose, so I can be productive at my favorite times of the day, early morning, and midday. I prepare dinner for Heather and me. We love fresh fruits and vegetables, like avocados, tomatoes, onion and rice and beans. All this cauliflower and broccoli are great vegetarian meals, but sometimes I just want a fat double cheeseburger with a layer of bacon, mayonnaise and tomato.

The Wonderment Years opens at a very difficult time in my life when I was picked up as a runaway. When I left Clarinda, Iowa, at age 16, I never thought I would be coming back here to do this. If you read my Wonderment Years, you will see I was transported by a policeman to Council Bluffs, Iowa., where I stayed in a group home for a month before moving to the Omaha Home for Boys.

I had been getting in trouble with smoking marijuana and lying and stealing and even some vandalism. My parents moved me to the Omaha Home for Boys where I lived on a ranch with 12 boys, some of them very challenging and difficult people. I was lucky that I immersed myself in my studies at school and found out I was pretty good at literature and art and drafting. I connected with Charles Gould who gave me his own poems to read and introduced me to Henry David Thoreau. Mr. Wilke my drafting instructor showed me home that he built with his construction class. And then Mr. Johnson my art teacher encouraged me to draw and paint every day in watercolor. He said, "your work today is practice for something greater tomorrow."

After graduation from high school in 1981 at Benson High School I went to Hastings Nebraska where I enrolled in Central community college in their drafting program. While there I met a man named Keith Marsh who told me about Yellowstone park and encourage me to get a job there and live there and work there. You’re gonna love it. So I finished my studies for the spring semester and left for Yellowstone and had the most amazing time of my life ever it was so explosively awesome, seeing the Rocky Mountains for the very first time I think and in a bus all the way to Livingston Montana where I met all these philosophers playing frisbee waiting for our transfer into the park where we were given places to live in dorms and and I had all of this good backpacking equipment so I had my job taking care of dormitories cleaning them and then I moved up to resident assistant. 

I just thought this was the best time of my life, I work during the day and then go hang out with my friends at night we go hot putting in the Hot Springs or we go hiking somewhere or we listen to some music or maybe go to a Bible study or sing songs at the employee pub. And I loved it and I wrote about it every day in my diary and I thought this is awesome I wanna be a writer and told my Dad that I wanted to switch majors and he said well you can’t even spell and I said well I can learn how to spell a word  there’s dictionary Dad said finish your associate's degree and then go on to get your bachelor's so I finished my drafting degree and then went to the University Nebraska Lincoln finishing four years later in 1987. My first job out of college was at the Fremont Tribune in 1988. I worked there a year and a half and then went to the Grand Island independent  for nine years then I ran a staffing firm in Kearney for a year, I sold my share of the business and bought Coca-Cola stock with the profits. We moved to Topeka where I became business editor a the Topeka Capital-Journal for 10 years. I worked four years at a trust company and sold my shares in the business and went out on my own as a full-time freelancer writer investor.

Oh yeah there’s some trippy things That happened along the way like losing my virginity in a hayfield. While in high school. But in my early 20s I did not go to college to get a wife I went there for an education first and foremost. Period. I wanted to work a couple of years outside of college and save up some money and go on a trip to Europe.

I had received a postcard from Jeanne Bourne in Greece of an empty park bench on an empty beach and she said what is missing from this picture and I thought to myself me I should be there right now on the beach. She said don’t worry about saving up too much money just get here you’ll find a job.

In a years time I had saved $5000 and paid off $2000 in credit card debt and now was taking off for the adventure of a lifetime.

I traveled around Amsterdam Germany Austria and Switzerland with a friend from Nebraska Lauren Lazaroff and then went to Greece. In Athens at the train station, I met woman named Archie from Australia and Bassim this man from Cairo. They took me to their hotel. I really liked it. I liked the Bohemian travel crowd. I asked Archie how they got their jobs as working for this hotel. And Archie said well I can introduce you to the boss. I pulled out my résumé and showed the boss and he talked to me and asked me where I was from and he hired me and he said as soon as you’re done with your trip on the islands come look me up and I’ll find some work for you . So I went out to the islands for a month and hung out with these German girls on this island of Anti Paros and we also visited Irakli yeah it was just awesome I was like I can’t believe a human being can do this. I was jealous of this Englishman who had a beautiful campsite against a stone wall on the beach, he said, yeah I’m living here all summer.

My lifestyle in Greece on the island of Antiparos was pretty simple I would get up eat a little cereal and fruit and water and juice and maybe go out for a cup of coffee and sit in a café and write in my diary. I also wrote numerous letters in the morning and then in the afternoon I would go to the beach and swim and in the evening Read and perhaps hang out with some friends.

We used to hang out at a place called the Doors in Antiparos. This is where we would listen to songs like riders on the storm by the doors or satisfaction by the Rolling Stones and Don McLean‘s by by miss American pie. I thought this was the perfect life like why would I wanna leave this? I met one person who had enough money saved for two years and was taking the his time on his way to the trans Siberian railway across Russia. And he was interesting we were inside of bar that was blue and melancholy and there was another man and spent 20 years traveling around the world and he seem kind of lonely. These two people were fascinating but I’m not sure I wanted to be like them? Yeah there was for sure a wonder lust for me. 

I traveled through Italy France Spain on a backpack and ended up in Barcelona. I was walking a loss along Las Ramblas in Barcelona and this guy says hey hello and I said hello and he said are you British and I said now I am an American he said do you like to party and I said yeah and he said follow us. And so I did we ended up in the Square sitting around there were musicians in the Square and please and children playing and people drinking in the bars and we sat in the courtyard there on this beautiful day and drink beer and and enjoy the camaraderie among the patriots X patriots from England South Africa the United States Germany and we talked about human distraction of indigenous people all over the world including in the United States and Australia and the genocide of peoples was kind of sad but it linked us to our concern about humanity and at five minutes before midnight I said hey I’m gonna be 27 years old in five minutes and all these guys I said hey they they ordered more beers and rolled up some joints and and we drank and got hire and they sang happy birthday to me and  it was probably the most amazing birthday I’ve ever experienced and it was with strangers and it was so full of love.

I learned some really key things from Europe and one was maintain my youthful spirit and Wonderlust an adult and sense of adventure and most of all my sense of wonderment. This is why I call my book the Wonderment years because they’re full of all of this Out Loud, Wide awake hyper awareness of how intensely amazing this life is and I try to carry that sense back to the states with me. And I also learn to work efficiently you know as a writer I would write intensely all morning long and accomplish a lot mostly letters and journals and and short stories while I was in Europe but nonetheless I was constantly working working working and yet had all this time to see life  and go to the Prado in Madrid. 

I returned to the Grand Island independent to work As a regional reporter covering 14 counties in Nebraska. Total blast of a job. I covered the story of Cathy Beard of Ord Nebraska missing person who is a body was eventually found two years later in a lovers Lane. Jim Helm and I interviewed the killer in jail, Using psychological techniques like such as flattery saying that we’ve heard he said very well read and intelligent human being and that he have many thoughts and his friend going and would love to hear them and he talked to us for 2 1/2 hours on tape. He knew he was the killer because he said he wanted to have sex with her but she refused him and said now now now please John now I always thought those were her last words. A film called buried in my backyard was made of this killer John Oldson and Cathy Beard and it’s now on the oxygen network .

While in Grand Island , This new intern showed up with her mother. I saw her and I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. And my friend Christine Romano sitting next to me said she has the purest most blonde hair. I was supposed thunderstruck by this woman that I didn’t say anything to her all week and then on Friday she says hello and asked me what do you do around here on a Friday night and I said whatever you wanna do and we went to a park and she rollerbladed as I walked in we got on the swings and started swinging up and down in the flight in the sky and I told her about Europe and she said she wanted to go to Europe and I said we should go together  and we did two years later. After we got married. On our honeymoon we went to Paris, we climbed the Eiffel Tower, we swam in the south of France including Nice where we bicycled in this gorgeous city on the French Riviera. We stayed a night in orals the town where Vincent van Gogh painted and lived with for a time with him Paul Gauguin. You definitely can feel the hot sun that place at the time there was a woman who lived to be the oldest living woman in the world living in orals and her name was Jeanne Calmet who lived to be 122 years old dying in 1997 she knew van Gogh and called him a dirty smelly man. So she was alive while we were there. Heather and I went on to Prague where we sat on cafés near the Charles bridge and took a tour of a palace with an American ex-patriot named Mike Rainey who took us to restaurants where we ate well we bought a bunch of Crystal and  garnets in Prague and then went on to Sweden where we saw Heather‘s cousin Bengt Okie and dined with their families and then we lived in a little cabin in the woods and rode bicycles around the neighborhood it was awesome. Awesome is a really popular word in Topeka especially at church people say awesome man and awesome. 

When I started painting in oil three years ago I began dreaming of going back to Paris. My first thought I have to be ready to go there I need to know how to paint at least with the basic fundamentals so I hired teachers to teach me how to paint and after three years I felt somewhat ready to go. My wife couldn’t go but she encouraged me to go and I received encouragement from a friend of mine who lives in Paris. I figured I would keep a journal of everything I do in Paris as I paint every day with the goal of turning it into a book. So that was my mission is to make it an authentic book of my own creation of my own paintings but I met these wonderful artists along the way and I fell in love with their artwork and asked to produce their work with mine and now have multiple artists including Robert Lobet an artist from the south of France to I met in Paris Robert Lobet makes his own books by hand and I bought one of them and featured that artwork in my book.

To write your own book

Write an outline for your book with a beginning, middle and end. And write a little every day just one page and you will have 250 pages in 250 days. Even just write one paragraph a day.

I always prepared my material first and had it all in front of me and then I dictated the book into my phone as an email to myself and then I would copy and paste it into a word document and add photos as appropriate.

Once I was done writing and editing, I ship it over to Amazon, write out the copy for the necessary things such as name of the book subtitle of the book description of the book. Write a good description. There is a way to look at how your book would look. You can proof it in front of you on the computer before sending it and if you send it and you find a mistake later well collect that all your mistakes and then fix it and resubmit it and it’ll be submitted in the new way the corrections will be in place  so the nice thing about publishing with Amazon is that you can improve your book if you see a problem you can change it. And it’s still your own book.

Looking back, I am inclined to rewrite diary entries into a narrative. Told in a single voice with a theme that develops over the duration of the book.

Rather than lists of people or places, I would write about the philosophical implications of my observations, and more humor! The twisted messy side of relationships, how politics is driving a wedge between friends and family.

My wife wanted me to tell the story of my childhood when the some friends and I went underneath the city of Clarinda in the sewer when it was about 0° outside it’s kind of cold and the water was frozen and we took a sled and hiked it all the way through underground kind of crawled on the ice crazy we ended up downtown and crawled out of the sewer and probably smelled like it too.

Perhaps more than anything, I cherish the experience of literature, the gathering of poets on a blanket on a hill, or by the riverside around a fire. Heather and I took a bottle of wine, a blanket and some snacks, and sat on a hill at Illif Commons, sharing poems about the sky by Eileen Myles.

A Punk Rock Memoir: Face It by Debbie Harry

By Michael Hooper

Debbie Harry's autobiography Face It is a fascinating read through the 1960s and 1970s New York City. This woman was at the right time in the right place to perform music with people at CBGB's the famous punk rock alternative rock hangout in New York. Blondie achieved fame in the late 1970s and early 1980s, selling millions of albums, with hits like Heart of Glass, Call Me, Rapture and The Tide Is High.

Blondie performed alongside the Ramones, Television, the Talking Heads, Iggy Pop and David Bowie.

She worked as a waitress at Max's Kansas City and served as a Playboy Bunny at the Playboy Club. It was hard work, harder than at Max's, and the clients were mainly businessmen, suits, she wrote.

"You got treated well but really it was just another job and not as much fun as the last one," she wrote.

Her book is an odyssey of her life and memories. She says she wishes she would have kept a diary or a journal and then she would have remembered more.

Debbie Harry and Chris Stein, co-founders of Blondie, were lovers and partners for 14 years. He took a lot of photographs of Debbie. He made her feel confident and sexy. Sometimes these photo sessions would lead to passionate loving making. He later moved on and married and had two children, but he and Debbie continued working together. They put out a new album and toured the world.

Debbie Harry and Chris Stein were friends with Andy Warhol. Andy painted a picture of her. Andy took some photos and showed some to her. She picked the one she liked. And he made it. She still has the original.

Nevertheless her memories are very vivid from her fascination with the television set as a child, watching cartoons and wrestling. She met Andre the Giant. 

Her sense of fashion is legendary. Designers created many outfits for Blondie. She wore a striking double edge razor blade dress that hugged her body yet all these razor blades have been softened to prevent injury.

Debbie Harry says, "I was playing at the idea of being a very feminine woman while fronting a male rock band in a highly macho game. I was saying things in the songs that female singers really didn't say back then. I wasn't submissive or begging him to come back, I was kicking his ass, kicking him out, kicking my own ass too. My Blondie character was an inflatable doll but with a dark provocative and aggressive style I was playing it up yet I was very serious."

There are some really dark and hard things like when she and Chris got attacked and she was raped, or when they quit the band in the '80s while Chris was sick. But hey the two are still alive today and they've seen a lot and done a lot.

I find that amazing because they were drug users for a long time. She discusses their drug use in the book. Heroin was a popular choice. Chris Stein would grow cannabis on their deck at the apartment in New York City.

She just loves NYC. She dreamed of living and working in NYC when she was a teenager. She was adopted, she discusses this in the book. Her childhood seemed middle class, her parents did well but were not among the wealthy.

Her childhood included Girl Scouts, ballet. She changed schools, met new friends and began dyeing her hair blond. She wanted to be platinum blond like Marilyn Monroe.

The fan art in this book is great. I love the photo of these women artists:

Debbie Harry has engaged with some brilliant artists over the years. I'm fond of Joan Jett, Chrissie Hynde and Siouxie Sioux. Very powerful artistic women!

In conclusion, Debbie Harry's book is a wild ride through the 1960s, 70s, 80s and beyond. She has lived an extraordinary life. She worked with some great musicians over the years. She also performed in multiple movies.

Blondie is a class act.

Heroin's Wrath: Sing Backwards and Weep by Mark Lanegan

By Michael Hooper

Mark Lanegan's memoir Sing Backwards and Weep is a gripping story of a heroin addict/musician struggling to find his way out of darkness.

Lanegan was the lead singer of Seattle grunge band Screaming Trees and a prolific solo artist and collaborator with other musicians including Isobel Campbell and Moby. He was involved with Queens of the Stone Age and Gutter Twins. His solo work could be described as a haunting Leonard Cohen. He is America's equivalent to the French poet Charles Baudelaire. He is influenced by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, The Velvet Underground, Gun Club, David Bowie, the Saints, Joy Division and Lou Reed.

Lanegan died Feb. 22, 2022, at age 57, of undisclosed causes. He had struggled with Covid-19 and wrote a book about his experience called Devil in a Coma while living in Ireland with his wife.

In Sing Backwards and Weep, published in April 2020, Lanegan is stripped bare, he seems to hold nothing back. The book was so compelling, I read it in three days. At various times in his life, Mark Lanegan was a porn addict, a whore willing to have sex with just about any woman, he suffered multiple sexually transmitted diseases, he was a liar, a cheat, a thief, a drug dealer and a man driven by revenge who fought with his own bandmates and with strangers who pissed him off and sometimes with other musicians. He seemed heartless yet there was a deep profound sorrow and agony at moments in his life when he realized how many people he had hurt.

His voice is so throaty and damaged, he sounds like he is going to cry when he speaks.

He shares the needle with Kurt Cobain, of Nirvana. One time Kurt and Mark Lanegan went to an ATM together and Kurt withdrew several thousands of dollars from various accounts, kept a couple hundred dollars for himself and gave the rest of the money to Mark. Another time Mark needed a fix in Denver where he was stuck in a snowstorm. Kurt sent him some heroin inside a coffee bag but the snow storm prevented quick delivery.

Mark Lanegan grew up in Ellensburg, a small town in Washington State where he started drinking and became an alcoholic by age 12. He had a terrible relationship with his mother. His father let him do whatever he wanted but warned him that his rebellion was going to lead to a life of struggle and hardship.

Mark did all kinds of drugs but used heroin to get off of alcohol. In 1984, he joined guitarist Gary Lee Conner, bassist Van Conner, and drummer Mark Pickerel to form Screaming Trees. He saw the band as his way out of the small town.

He often fought with members of the band about the direction of the music and eventually won out as their lead singer and main songwriter. They moved to Seattle and became relatively successful but never as big as Nirvana, Soundgarden or Alice in Chains. Nevertheless Screaming Trees performed at concerts and festivals over the years, often with other grunge bands in the United States and Europe.

Perhaps the most challenging thing in his life was finding heroin in order to avoid dope sickness. Without a fix a heroin addict gets really sick and starts throwing up and suffers diarrhea as the body works to eliminate all its toxins. The only way to stop the dope sickness is to get another fix. Lanegan was given a limit of $200 a day while on tour and he spent most of it on heroin. I'd say more than a third of the book is devoted to his struggles to score drugs.

There are so many missed opportunities in his life. He turns down a chance to provide the music for a movie in Massachusetts because he is afraid he can't find heroin there.

Perhaps the most harrowing tale of scoring drugs is when he's in Europe and he's suffering from dope sickness and needs a fix in Amsterdam. He goes out at 2 a.m. to a square where drugs are sold. He buys some dope but when he returns to his hotel he finds out it's fake. So now he needs more money. He pounds on the door of the merchandise sellers and asks for money and they threaten to call the cops but finally give him two 50-pound notes for his share of the merchandise. He then goes back to the same square to buy drugs but two people rob him at knifepoint and take all of his money. You would think at this point he would give up, but no, he takes a cab back to the hotel and fights with the cabbie over his lack of cash to pay him. Inside the hotel he finds out at the front desk that he's been authorized to charge up to 500 guilders on a credit card so he takes the money, pays the disgruntled cabbie, grabs another cab and goes back to the same square to try to find heroin. No one is there and he begins wandering the streets of Amsterdam. A strange person riding a bicycle comes toward him. He asks if the cyclist has any heroin and sure enough the guy does. Lanegan needs to do a shot right now. The Dutchman locks his bike up and sees an unlocked bike and steals it and takes it up five flights of stairs. When they enter his apartment he throws the bicycle on a pile of bikes. Lanegan is by now full of dope sickness and vomiting with diarrhea. The Dutchman prepares the heroin for him to shoot up. While sitting in the stranger's toilet he shakily finds a vein and shoots the heroin into his bloodstream, and for the first time in over a week he starts to feel well.

The book includes a story about a Swedish fan who is pompous and entitled. He partied with her and her friend but didn't like her at all for her better-than-thou attitude. On a second occasion, he was doing heroin with a couple of friends. They had washed needles in a tall glass of water. When she burst into the room, she said she was thirsty and saw this tall glass of reddish water and guzzled it down in one full sweep. It took all his might to keep from bursting out in laughter.

The book includes his encounters with musicians like Bernard Summer of Joy Division and New Order, Johnny Marr of The Smiths and encounters with Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings.

Courtney Love pays for much of his rehab in California.

The book ends with the news that his long time friend and co-drug user Layne Staley of Alice In Chains has died from a speedball drug overdose.

In the book's dedication Mark writes, "For Tony (Anthony Bourdain) and all my other absent friends."

I never did heroin, but Mark Lanegan's life reminds me of the drug addicts I knew as a teen-ager. They seemed like loyal friends when we would score a bag of weed together, get high and listen to music. But sometimes they would steal from me. Or one time, Mike Hughes beat me up because I didn't get him high. As a drug dealer, Mark would sometimes burn his source, steal the dope and keep it for himself. One time his source threatened to kill him. I learned the hard way, I had to get rid of these lying druggie friends to find people I could trust.

I am also greatly disturbed by all the self-torture in the book. He's throwing up, he's cold, he's got the chills. One time his arm swells up from an infection, at one point doctors considered cutting off his arm. All of this self-torture says one thing, stay away from heroin.

Sure Mark was the exception in terms of production. He wrote and performed high, and seemed to do all right. But his life was a living hell. And most people are not productive on drugs.

Here's some of the lyrics from Mark Lanegan's song, I Wouldn't Want To Say

I wouldn't want to say, my friend
So I’m not saying anything
You say you'll fall, I'll fall lower
A love letter was what I meant
A bullet to the heart was sent
The way my body lay here bent
In the freezing exposure and frozen to colder
I wouldn’t want to say
No, I wouldn't want to say

Get out while you can, get out while you can
I will bring bad luck and misery to you, man
I'll paint this shadow across your land
While putting something graveyard dark
Straight into your hand
I wouldn't want to say
I wouldn't want to say

Finally, there are some sad haunting sounds generated by Mark Lanegan. Search him out on YouTube and you will find his music. I learned a lot from this book, mainly what it's like for a heroin addict. It is a frightening experience.