This is a dark, dangerous and revealing romp through the heart and head of Marc Spitz, a music journalist, playwright, author and blogger who wrote about (and lived) the cultural decadence of the 1990s. Here he details his rise from a blogger for Spin to a gossip columnist to eventually becoming a feature writer, where he shared verbal punches with Chuck Klosterman.

Along the way, Spitz writes about college, addictions, failed poetry and the lure of celebrity. He has a fine ear for verse, as here when he riffs on Los Angeles:

"I went out for drinks one night with Julie Bowen a few days before leaving LA for good. Kurt was dead. I was halfway there. She was starting to get real jobs. She was going to have a career. I was going to have a funeral. From a table in the revolving bar that sat atop the Holiday Inn, we looked out at the city - a purple sky, a few stars, a million twinkling lights - with easy-listening jazz on the stereo. This was only the dawn of the age of irony. They hadn't started playing Bad Religion and Dinosaur Jr. or Esquivel in places like this yet. But we liked it as a change of pace from some of the hipper bars in town..."

Spitz was there in the '90s, and we're lucky he was. He brings that decade alive for the readers and what it was like to hang out, shoot up, and look inside.