Rogers Park was where I bought my first legal six-pack. Six aluminum cans of Natural "Natty" Light, bound by plastic rings. Natty Light was what I drank all summer, a ritual that culminated in slamming a can on a sofa we'd dragged out to the yard on moving out day.

I lived in Rogers Park with two roommates on the second floor of a three-floor house with black-and-white checkered linoleum in the kitchen at back and bright yellow walls in the sunporch at front. Paula spent lots of time in her room listening to David Bowie and making art projects out of pins and vinyl cushions. Both of her parents were deaf; whenever I answered the phone and heard what sounded like a fax machine, I had to put the phone onto a special machine where I could type responses to her parents if Paula wasn't home. (I'd like to find Paula again.)

Amy's 21st birthday was the same day as mine. Her friends threw her a party in our apartment with a huge cake and plenty of alcohol; my name was added to the birthday song as an afterthought. I didn't invite anyone to the party, and ended up leaving early on the back of a motorcycle with one of Amy's friends, racing up Sheridan to the Baha'i temple in Wilmette. He kept telling me not to lean the opposite way, to fight my natural instincts to overcompensate for the tilt of the bike as it rounded corners. On our way back we tried to buy a bottle of wine in Evanston after midnight, only to be reminded by some guy in a deli that Evanston was a dry town. He drove me back to the house where the party had dried up too, so I went to bed and he rode home. I can't remember his name.

I was in Chicago for the summer, studying Estonian and Baltic History and serving coffee in the basement of the second tallest building in Chicago. We learned about the deportations of Baltic citizens to Soviet work camps in an airless campus building on the south side of the city and then I'd go home and sit on the side porch with Amy's boyfriend - who happened to be involved with the Chicago Socialist Workers Party - arguing over whether or not what Stalin did was okay to the point where he'd say "sometimes people have to give things up for a greater cause" and I'd have to stand up and slam the door. Or open a beer and make angry noises through gritted teeth. Or walk down to the shore and smoke a cigarette.

I spent a lot of time on my own back then. Went to the movie theater on our block with the frayed couches and stale, saltless popcorn. Tried to make conversation with boys at record stores and concerts. Went to the zoo with a guy I knew from IRC (where are you now, godboy?) whose Lincoln Park apartment overlooked the site of the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre.

Amy knew someone who worked for a late night Showtime series and was looking for couples to be filmed during their most intimate moments, and discuss their opinions on sex for a small fee. I called my ex-boyfriend and told him this; he was poor and I was poor but we still laughed at the thought. "How could you do that without giggling? How could you do that at all? Could you ask them to turn the lights off?"

This is what has been pouring out of me as I've been reading Stephen Elliott's The Adderall Diaries. That's kind of like saying "I once walked up a really steep hill" while reading the biography of Sir Edmund Hillary, but I can't help it. Someone mentions the name of a familiar street, a million associations pour out of that recognition, and the writer's instinct is to get them all down before they fly off into the ether. Which is exactly how this book seems to have come to be.

Page 56: "We're all just writing about ourselves."

Maybe we all read like we're reading about ourselves, too. Inserting ourselves into the story, blanketing ourselves in the author's voice as if it were our own. My 9th grade English teacher once told me that I tended to write book reports in the style of the author I was writing about. Which makes perfect sense. Everything I'm writing somehow comes from the book I happen to be reading.

This is what my experience of The Adderall Diaries has been: reading a story the author has written himself into, finding myself in that story, bringing my own story out of it and onto this page, into which you may certainly read your own story.

A strange, endless loop of literary narcissism. (In the kindest sense.)

So every mention of Rogers Park becomes a time when I was suckered out of my last $10 in a cup and ball game on the red line ("It's in your hand," I insisted when they asked me to pick a cup, over and over, until finally they pressured me into making the wrong choice) and had to get my mom to send me money via Western Union so that I could get a train ticket the next morning to pick up my paycheck. A time when I was crazy enough to jump on the back of a motorcycle, say "where are we going?" and trust him when he said "you'll see."