Veins by Drew



I am a huge fan of Toothpaste for Dinner. I have been reading it since about 2006 and I’ll give a go to pretty much anything that Drew creates. I wasn’t too sure what to expect from Veins but I was hoping for some laughs and that warped yet honest way of viewing the world that TPFD has.

Veins certainly delivered. The story went to some darker places than I was expecting, definitely, but it was still funny and made plenty of astute observations. I don’t know if I can say that I enjoyed the book. There was a lot in there that was uncomfortable or squirmy or just downright sad. It wasn’t a happy story, but it was compelling and I couldn’t put it down.

The story is really a series of anecdotes from the main character, M.R. He is a weird guy and does some weird, weird things. He can explain most of the weird things he does though. He tells you the steps that lead to this situation and how each step leads to another to eventually end up with this completely bizarre outcome. M.R. just has very different way of understanding the world resulting in him thinking and doing some very strange things.

It made me think about people I’ve met who, at the time, I probably thought were a bit mentally challenged. It made me rethink that. Perhaps they just view the world through a very different lens than I do and they see things and make connections that I don’t. I don’t know what has happened to them in their lives, so maybe I should be a little less judgmental. M.R. certainly went through enough to make anyone a little crazy, although he was definitely somewhat off kilter from the get go.

If you want to get an idea of what Veins is like check out @drewtoothpaste.com where Drew does some trolling on social media sites. The posts are written in a very similar voice to Veins and often make the same weird jumps of logic and conclusions as in the book.

I found Veins genuinely entertaining, if a little disturbing at times. It’s not a long book so even if you don’t like it you won’t have wasted too much time. Also, buying this book gave me a bit of a warm fuzzy feeling because it was the first time I was able to financially give back to Drew. I’ve been reading TPFD for a long, long time and it feels nice to show that support monetarily, even if it was only $5 for the Kindle version. There are many TPFD t-shirts that I would live to wear, but because I live in Australia the postage costs almost as much as the t-shirt.

4 out of 5 rap cassettes.

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