Reader Comments and Preface to Getting High

Comment by Tara Chung on March 23, 2016:

LOVE IT!!!! Thanks for an incredible read. I bought both books! Your lyrical writing leaves me breathless. Its poetry and art and all my senses got wrapped up. I sound like a freak. I'm sorry. You just have a new very respectful fan!

P.S. I prefer the old school book cover in that 60's rotten orange color with the sketched motorcycle. I do not feel the new cover for the paperback version. It's too new. Even kids like old school look now so whoever told you to have this glossy shit was wrong! I would have paid the $9 for the paperback version just to have the look of the kindle cover. Thanks.

Reply by J. P. Dooley on March 28, 2016:

Tara Chung,

Glad you like my writing and I really appreciate the glowing review.

I'm so not used to effusive praise that I thought you might be my publisher setting me up to not feel so bad about that new cover you like (and about which I am not enthusiastic). She was slightly offended when I forwarded your blog missive and demanded to know if she were using a pseudonym to pull my strings.

JeanMarie has certainly earned anything she's made off my books.

I infer you might be a writer; definitely someone resonating with the same muse. So maybe you know: writing on for years, through aeons of anonymity, one retains a faith that there are other beings out there who will feel the thrill, the surge and drive of the prose. And when someone does, it's the sweetest reward.

Thanks for feeling it and thanks for saying so. Best wishes, JPD

On the Preface to Getting High: 

In an era of instant communication, publishing still happens at a geologic pace:  months and years go by with no movement, then suddenly there's a tremor and the mountain advances a few feet up the fault line.  Thus Getting High and Two for the Road are about to be pulled temporarily from the market and set up for an official release (Two for the Road) and re-release (Getting High, slightly reformatted, with a new cover) in hopes of a review in a national periodical.

Jean Marie Stine asked me to write a preface for the new Getting High, and I am posting what I sent her.

I started with a much longer piece along lines we had discussed, but after reading it at the writers' group, realized I disliked it even more than they did.  So for prefaces generally, which run the gamut of too much information to a pompous kiss ass all around.  The only one I ever loved is John Steinbeck's intro to Cannery Row—short, evocative, leading you up to the first page.  It was my model.

Preface

This book, reformatted and re-issued, and its sequel, Two for the Road, tell some stories of a brief era that now belongs to another century, a little taste of the dilemma and the fun:  hippies, mystical women, recent soldiers, forgotten sages, freewheeling adventurers, people who were not American royalty.  And all the dimensions of psychedelic which include the strange, the sublime, and the impossible.

For these American tales are also adventures in Reality and what lies under the surface of things, that sometimes caused me to laugh for hours, until my guts hurt and my face was sore from smiling.

As Baba Anonymous puts it:  “Reality is not what you think.”

That time of living by Hippie Law (“Whatever you have to do to get high”) is a moment long gone, a lifetime ago, but not really gone at all.  Not just as a function of memory and nostalgia, more than a ripple in the fabric of culture and style, but the same moment, still, the only moment:  the eternal Now in which all things are experienced; the secret door, portal to the beyond within.  Where everything that ever was and all potential, still is.

Something you can see when you're stoned.

And right now, always, in the midst of business as usual, an old friend, someone you've never met, the finest lover, keeper of the mysteries,  the next thing, experience, substance, book, person to alter your life and expand your mind, give you pleasure, take you deeper, is just pulling up at the curb outside, strolling down the street, dancing out of the darkness.

 

 

The Quest for the Golden Willy

In J P Dooley's newest book: The Adventure of the Golden Willy: The Adventures of Lance the Pornstar, is it truly the golden willy, or is it just another quest to obey Hippie Law?

”What makes you so sure this is the Willy you’re looking for?”

“Even if the object in her hand isn’t the real thing, it’s the exact replica of an object that very few people outside the household and family treasury have ever seen. A reproduction, if it’s a copy, in such minute detail, including the balls and the peculiar shape of the glans, as to be virtually identical; it matches the only photograph we have of it, even down to that mark near the scrotum, that some think is Leicester’s crest.  This one had at least to have been cast from the original.”

“Notice how it shines,” he continued.  “Those who have beheld the Willy in person, including myself and the Duchess, feel it could be genuine.  I say, is there any more of that weed?”

Cockjaw

As said in the last post, J P Dooley's The Adventure of the Golden Willy: Adventures of Lance the Porn Star is now available on the Amazon Kindle!  Here is a racy yet hilarious excerpt from the first chapter:

 

"It was when Peggy Perdu, my comrade and co-star, couldn’t open her mouth wide enough to taste an hors d’oeuvre without her jaw cramping.  “Cockjaw,” she said massaging her cute face.  “This is all your fault, Lance.”

 

I smiled and then we both laughed, I robustly and she through barely parted lips.  If you’ve seen any of her movies or videos, such as XYZ and Beyond Impossible, you know how she takes giant penises in ways and postures that defy the imagination, riding, sliding, sucking, jacking and licking, and indeed it had been the monster member of our associate, Rex Goliath, that had bruised her mandible.

 

Rather a reference to something that had happened a week or so before."

 

Fifty Shades of Fun: The Adventure of the Golden Willy: The AdventuresOf Lance the Porn Star is now available on the Amazon Kindle!!!!!!

It's finally here!!  J P Dooley's newest book The Adventure of the Golden Willy: The Adventures of Lance the Porn Star is now available on the Amazon Kindle!!!!!!

Download it by clicking on the link below:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0122DD7J8/ref=tsm_1_fb_lk

Here is a quote from Lance himself:

"“Agatha Christie,” I said, “could not have orchestrated it better.”"

Living in the Moment with Jaymo

Sometimes getting high really is just living in the moment and enjoying the scenery as observed by Jaymo in Two for the Road by J P Dooley:

"The rest of the winter was wet, a long rainy season, and in the spring the University bluffs, still undeveloped, were lush with tall grasses, new fennel, and big swaths of yellow, purple and white flowers, mustard and wild radish.

On a warm day in late March I was walking alone on the trail along the cliffs, above the sea, my shoes slung over my shoulder, feeling the still moist earth between my toes, sensual and pleasant, enjoying immortal sights, the islands like shadows in the bright early afternoon haze, kelp lying thick and luxurious on the surface, whales making their way north, the rushing surf and afternoon breeze combining hypnotically:  rising and falling, pushing and receding, a yearning and a surrender.

A sensation first, and from the corner of my eye I see it:  a ship with square sails, coming out of the west, flags flying, long red pennants, a weathered black hull, modest castles fore and aft but not a galleon, narrower, nimble.  I know I am imagining it, a colorful ghost, but breathless hold the vision of it, coasting well off shore, continuing east beyond Campus Point as if skirting a phantom headland or reef, before making a slow graceful turn into Goleta Bay."

Lee: The Definition of Hippie Law

Lee sums up Hippie Law perfectly in an excerpt from Two for the Road by J P Dooley:

'“Do you think Mescalitán could be New Albion?” Lee asked as I finished the last column in the waning twilight.

“I suppose it would have to be, whether he landed around here or not—part of his grandiose claim, but the ship I saw didn’t look exactly like the Golden Hind.” It had been similar but lower fore and aft, different lines, packing more sail.

“Maybe it happened more than once,” Lee suggested.

Ultimately the cannons were identified as late Eighteenth Century, cast in New England, and likely belonging to a ship that had entered the Pacific as the Eagle and been renamed the Dorotea (the Dorothy), the galeta after which the adjacent town had been named.

“I was so close that day, Lee.  And I wasn’t even stoned.”

“Getting high,” she said, “has never been entirely about the drugs and sex, but how much fun you’re willing to have, and how far you’re willing to go.”

She’s an all-the-way sort of person.

“I like the drugs,” I said, reloading the bowl.

“Well, you’re an orthodox old hippie.  But you know what I mean:  it’s about following the rapture to where it leads, getting higher.”'

Perfecting Yourself Does Not Get You High

Even if you do everything perfectly, you cannot fake getting high.  As exemplified in J P Dooley's Two for the Road, sometimes you just need to let loose and have fun:

"The spawn of my father’s brother, in youth the wildest high school tripper and rounder, a dick with ears who had screwed the novia of Carlos Reyes, the lovely Maria Jesus, on the floor right in front of him, and given us all a case of the crabs; who had borrowed my pound and a half down sleeping bag for a weekend in the mountains, leaving me his ratty Dacron over-nighter with a broken zipper and torn up lining—his dog had birthed puppies on it; my bedding for six sea-faring months when he forgot to return it, and I had nearly frozen to death in it on the Alaska Highway.

The Claremont Colleges had made him more thoughtful, and soon after a major Acid trip where the rest of us saw giant beings with wings on their heads, he had become a cultist, follower of a guru who recruited on college campuses and promised enlightenment in only three lifetimes.

Not a bad deal except that it cost you every pleasure of this one: no meat, eggs, or cultured milk, no garlic or onions, a diet so bland it was like eating cardboard; austerities and fast days and no sex except when the moon was right.  He had got into it to avoid the draft, after pulling a high number in the lottery.  “Just a cover,” he had told me then, a useful affectation developed further in an attempt to make it flawless.  A stunning reversal of the wild abandon of his youth, the same way, I mused, that thieves sometimes become cops.

A week later, I watched him as he walked up the hill in late afternoon sunlight, carrying his pack and dusty banjo case, less kid-like with his hair cropped short and a thick moustache. His lady was gaunt and didn’t look very happy.

He introduced her as Ananda Deva.  “We go by our Sanskrit names now,” he said.

“Bliss Goddess”, a bad fit in her case; she called him Ram Murti.

Their eyes were wide and empty, mercilessly calm.  It’s good to cultivate the perspective of cosmic witness, especially when you’ve been too avid a player and sinner; good to watch it all just happening, but they were kind of creepy.

Lee put on water for tea.  “Are you hungry?  I have a pot of beans going, vegetarian.”

“We’ve been fasting,” Herman said.  “Need to break it with buckwheat and rice.”

Lee nodded, into everything.  “There’s a pan in the cupboard.”

“We’ve got our own."

His girlfriend took it from her pack and started to pull out a fat bag of grains.

“Don’t forget,” Herman said grimly, being the enforcer, “we have to bathe and meditate first.”

I directed them to the creek across the road.  They returned an hour later in the gathering dusk, more wide awake—the stream was cold—but just as self-absorbed and down. Whatever they were doing or pretending to do, they were both depressed, lackluster, low pulse.  And Herman seemed uptight and reserved around Lee, strangely circumspect, rarely looking at her, directing most of his conversation at me.

“I don’t masturbate anymore,” he said. 

Yeh, whatever, to each their own, I thought, but after years of DeSoto Jr. I’d had it with Brahmin pretenses of purity and oppressive dietary requirements. Filling my pipe carved from a deer antler--new buds from the first harvest, dried in a paper bag over the stove--I lit it and handed it to my cousin.

“Wow,” he said.  “Pot.”

“We haven’t had any for a long time,” his girlfriend said.

The way they each took a big hit and held it seemed to indicate a mood to break out; they were on vacation after all.  Soon they were stretching and sighing, and for the first time the Bliss Goddess was smiling.

“I’d really like to try some of those beans,” she said.  Herman held out for rice and buckwheat until it became obvious that no one was going to fix it for him.

A sinfully deep experience for them both, ecstasy in feeding the starving body; Lee and I had been there, only a few months before.

After supper, over more weed, everyone now more animated, we brainstormed possible adventures.  “What’s it cool to see around here?” Herman asked.

I considered local options:  Canyonville, Milo, Tiller, all forgettable places.

“Let’s go out to the coast tomorrow and look for magic mushrooms,” Lee suggested.

Herman appeared depressed again.  “We don’t eat fungus.”

“Oh, Hermie,” his girlfriend said, abandoning his Hindu pseudonym.  “It might be fun.” "