nice piece by me on Inverse about preworkouts:
https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/pre-workout-supplements-explained
the guy who invented the first pre-workout self-published the Underground Steroid Handbook (amazing book btw)… no one ever talks about the USH or Dan Duchaine or illegal steroid literature when compiling histories of samizdat literature or zines but the USH is really a fitting crossover piece and the aesthetic link between communist Russia (RIP) and the 1980s American hard-core scene… I remember an MRR Book Your Own F!!King Life from 1995 that I read cover to cover, repeatedly… bored kid at home… BYOFL was a city-by-city guide of punk bands, promoters, vegetarian restaurants, and so on, with people using the info about venues and spaces (all mailing addresses and landlines, not much email) so and crash and so on get set up that way… covering the whole world. Iran had a section with two bands, each with an address and maybe a phone number, one described as metal, one described as death metal, one of them called More Guts. Twenty-five years later and I still think about More Guts now and then, I have never found out any info on them… they are not on Discogs….
Robert Sietsema who does restaurant reviews for Eater NY did a zine in the 80s about food and offal (a former colleague of his sang for Youth Defense League around the same time; I don’t know whether he did any fanzines)… Pete Beste who did the black metal photo and Houston rap books told me that the Roswell New Mexico alien enthusiasts did zines as well… maybe he was talking about these:
Which is a photograph of his. Though with no disrespect to any of the abovementioned, none hold a candle, research-wise, to the Underground Steroid Handbook. Its publishing was a before and after moment in that field, for many academics and for law enforcement. No writer can ask for more. Some of his writing:
(1)with more below.
Actually, one zine does, there is one zine more successful in scope and reach than the Underground Steroid Handbook. It’s John Coster-Mullen’s atom bomb fanzine. Titled Atom Bombs: The Top Secret Inside Story of Little Boy and Fat Man, it’s a self-published spiral bound book that Coster-Mullen, a truck driver in Wisconsin, copied at Kinko’s between shifts; it details the exact measurements and operations of the two (still-classified) atom bombs dropped on Japan in 1945. It’s widely considered the single best resource on the inner workings of those two bombs, and its technical drawings are considered best in field, much better than the ones in Richard Rhodes’ Making of the Atom Bomb, according to Rhodes at least. It received a glowing review in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
From the New Yorker story on the author from a decade ago:
Which is a great story and the way I found out about him. You can’t buy Coster-Mullen’s book anymore, it’s not on Amazon and he doesn’t have a web page or store and I emailed him yesterday and got a mailbox full. What is weird is only Duchaine got trailed by the FBI. Coster-Mullen has seemingly been left well alone.
I think the point of the Steroid Handbook and Coster-Mullen’s book is that even the most foreign poles of knowledge are accessible with effort. It sounds like a Horatio Alger story but they’re not getting rich, they are just doing what they had to do. I think. Anyways, pre-workouts are interesting and I wrote about them for Inverse. I have had a few other stories on Inverse too that have been published over the past few weeks and you can get to them via my Inverse story above or my link below. I don’t want this letter to be a clearinghouse for my published work so I included this shaggy dog story about steroids and atom bombs as a way of getting readers to check out my other writing.
Thanks for reading. And to all the felons who are reading this and who can’t vote today, DM me I’ll send you a tee. (XL only… limit five felons, two tees per felon max, shirts may be withheld depending on on my … opinion of your crime)
Snake
Other work:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-JLRt0Ec6gZBm50hATYCYmLctnF9GhVijoEbam50JSw/edit
(1) taken from the intro to USB II which is the only one I have. Some more samples:
What a writer!