Facing Entropy

Sometimes Hippie Law requires that when faced with horrible circumstances one must delve deeply into one's own soul and psyche in order to get high as illustrated in a scene from J. P. Dooley's not-yet-published tales of Vietnam, Sergeant on the Wall:

"Dust from our approach was settling on his eyes and flies crawled over his lips and into his wounds.  The wrack of his legs was particularly unsettling.  "I'm glad it's you and not me, bro…" I said softly.

I was stuck there for a long time; Markus decided to change tactics and bring the tracks around before going on.  It had been a hot night, and Mr. Charles had been dead for almost eight hours.  As the heat of the day really came on,he began to change and melt, right before my eyes.  His stomach began to swell and the rest of him to leak and further deflate, breaking down into essential fluids with their separate recognizable smells:  blood, bile, piss, shit, mucous, saliva, lymph, fats, waxes and oils.

I found myself staring at him fixedly, at first with growing horror and distaste, my head spinning; my body saw its fate and cringed.  But then I began to feel something else:  a liberation from the flesh, a clear space, a deep peace.  Then I was barely breathing, looking at the whole scene at once, the light filtering through the trees, so beautiful, and the corpse melting into the sand."

The Psychedelic Rule

The analysis and incorporation of the cosmic truths of psychedelic experiences is de rigueur in Hippie Law. Adherents of Hippie Law accept this as a matter of course as illustrated in this excerpt from the soon-to-be-released novel, Two for the Road, by J. P. Dooley:

'DeSoto Jr., deeply into the cosmic oneness of things, a concept he had come on in a flash of insight when we took Morning Glory seeds in the fall of 1964, was doing research for his dissertation on the inter-relation of human thought and natural process.  “Everything defines, limits, causes and conforms to everything else!” he used to say, and it was still a liberation for him, a relieved collapse into the arms of the universe and wild nature.  Searching for a population to demonstrate what he had in mind, he had run into a fellow grad student doing a monograph on commercial fisherman, and muscled in on his data base by helping him conduct interviews.'

The Deeper Meaning of Getting High

In Two For the Road, by J P Dooley, Lee and Jaymo discuss the true, deeper meaning of what it means to get high:

"Many years down the road, Lee Callahan and I were staying with Franklin DeSoto Jr. and Marlise on the Santa Barbara Riviera, in the apartment downstairs.  The sun had just gone down, lights coming on in the town and around the harbor, but the sky was still bright enough for reading.

“Look at this,” Lee said, tossing me last week’s newspaper.

 

A bold headline:  FREAK TIDES EXPOSE OLD CANNON.  Apparently seen by many from the beach at the mouth of the Goleta Slough, then officially discovered and removed to the University where they were surmised to be from a wreck or perhaps jettisoned to get a ship over the bar and into the estuary behind it.

 

“I saw those cannons, Lee!” I said, and told her about it, the ship rounding the point, the cannons falling into the sea, and how I had found them.

 

“It must be something I remember, something that native man saw.  He must be real too.  And he made a song about it.”

 

She nodded, pausing to light the pipe.  “Who do you think he was?”

 

I had never considered it; he had always just seemed to be me.  “Someone who wandered around and looked at things,” I said, groping. “Someone both young and old and always alone.”

“Maybe he was a ghost.”

 

And a persistent memory, if not mine then a feature of the collective unconscious of humanity, where everything is also the seed of the next thing; stories repeat themselves, the past spontaneously recalled, re-created or merely re-lived without awareness. 

 

And I thought about the vision of the ship, how I had just imagined it, a kind of fantasy, psycho self-indulgence that conformed to something real, the accurate vision of an actual historical event.

 

And then, watching Lee blow smoke rings, I remember that this is how I have peered into the future as well, the same unreasonable imaginary place, and how I saw her, my beautiful unconventional companion, this citizen of the future—not just as some ideal image but sharp, true and complete down to the details of her lips and easy smile— before I ever met her, as clearly as I saw the ship and the cannons."

Mysteries and Mysterious People

Sometimes unlikely people are found to be interesting and highly intelligent.  In J P Dooley's book in process, Lance the Pornstar: The Golden Willy, two pornstars get to the bottom (so to speak) of a mysterious disappearance.  Enjoy a brief intro into the story:

"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.

 

Except for her shapely bosom, she is small and petite.  I have to hold her up to peek in the window of our neighbors’ house when they’re having the exhibitionists over.  She has a beguilingly innocent face with wide blue eyes, blemish-less skin, and a pouting cat mouth, the placid mask in front of a craven psyche, a body with a double uterus and the libido of an entire roller-derby team.  She speaks with a gentle southern accent, Sugar, Darlin’, words flow like honey, an illusion of soft and vulnerable.

 

I come off as the hard one, so to speak:  an Englishman with a curt voice and manner and that peculiar frowning expression we British fellows get for holding our mouths to the phonemes of the Queen’s English.  She’s diminutive and I’m tall, muscular and rather hairy.  An illusion of brute dominance in contrast to the truth:  my credential as a porn star is exquisite sensitivity and subtle deference."

When the Shit Hits the Fan...

Hippie Law stipulates that even in the most stressful situations you have to do whatever you need to get high.  An example of this in a difficult situation is shown in an excerpt from J P Dooley's book about Vietnam, The Sergeant on the Wall:

"Easy, Mahoney, I thought.  Nobody's shooting and it's early yet.  Have to figure we're cool.

Slowly I looked all around, feeling better about things, then down at their shrouded forms.  And suddenly, as if through another lens, I saw it, knew with a rush of acute certainty that they were going to die.  I had The Feeling, deep and unmistakable.

Charlie was probably watching us right now; I felt sick.  My mind raced, kaleidoscopic, thoughts displacing thoughts, progressive deviation, until shaking, I was on the verge of rational meltdown.

Don't become the Weasel, I said to myself, taking a deep breath, refusing to give in to the pre-potential for madness that lies just under the surface when you've been in constant danger for too long.

But I had learned to trust this thing we called The Feeling, perception beyond normal awareness, beyond reason, and by the time they were done, I was completely unnerved.

Coughing softly, Jones rolled over and put the charger for the Claymore next to the radio.  "See, haole:  no big thing!" Pineapple said, adjusting his gear.

You rotten bastard, I thought, hating him, both of them, acutely.

Thus I was awake most of the first watch, dog-tired but the evening was still and quiet, and I didn't trust Pineapple to not give us away.

Images of Tooker's hooch, warm candlelight and incense and pot smoke, came and went as I struggled to stay centered and alert.  Finally, around twenty-three hundred, it began to mist rain, then come on harder.  Knowing we were covered now, wrapped up in the noise of the storm and fairly safe, I rearranged my poncho to keep my legs as dry as possible, and bunching the soft liner around my head, fell asleep immediately."

Southern Charm and a Free Mind

In J P Dooley's writings, Jaymo has outrageous and sensual adventures in the Southern states.  They depict a time when the Southern youth abided by Hippie Law.  This is an exerpt from J P Dooley's book Two for the Road:

“Greetings from Lousy-ana!” in letters so large they took up most of the space with the rest crammed into a single increasingly smaller line.  “Jaymo, what’s the haps?  Where are you at, bro…”

Opiates were suspect.

My eyes drifted to the address, a lady’s hand, and then to what appeared to be a decorative border in the same ink; on closer inspection, an unpunctuated message, carefully scribed along the edges and around Beau’s missive, a private post-script added before mailing.

“JAYMO YOU’RE A REALLY FINE MAN PLEASE BE MY FRIEND I’D TAKE REALLY GOOD CARE OF YOU—“ the same line I had used on her, Tooker’s favorite come-on, followed by:  “I DO GRITS THE WAY YOU LIKE ‘EM COME BACK LOUISA”

A lady who could turn cartwheels and bend over backwards to touch the earth, her long honey-colored hair cascading to the ground, then contorting the other way, put her feet behind her head; the implications of her invitation were stellar.  I could feel my hands around her slender waist, remembered the scent of her hair and how it surrounded our faces like a curtain when she rolled on top, covering my lips with hers.  I stared at her image for a long time; Tooker had drawn her tits with medical accuracy.  Her body was an erotic temple, her mind free and ready for fun in the warm southern sunshine."

The Hawk of London

There are many places that can raise your consciousness, here is a poem written by J P Dooley called "The Hawk of London":

I have seen the Hawk of London and I have heard its cry

I have watched the London Fox walking boldly in the night

I have seen the long gray Rat and Mudlarks by the river

And felt the gaze of the Carrion Crow perched upon the Tower 

In the cellar of Gordon’s over bottles of wine

We talked about London and the passage of time

Leicester, Trafalgar, Embankment and the Strand

Remnants of Empire and eras that were grand

 

I feel safe here she said in the world’s greatest city

A civilized place of manners and money

Steeples and spires and the dome of St. Paul’s

The Gherkin and the Shard and the ancient Roman walls

 

Britain is England, the center of things

And England is London, the abode of kings

Elizabeth, Charles, William and George

Parliament, Whitehall, Prime Ministers and Lords

 

Trains and the Tube, busses, bikes and cabs

Theater and the arts, Sunday Roast and pubs

A feast for the senses, wit like a knife

When you tire of London, you are tired of life*

 

London is brilliant, Doctor Johnson was right

The very best of culture, sparkling and bright

But for me never easy, never perfect, never safe

But a matrix of danger, hardship and death

 

For I have seen the Hawk of London and I have heard its cry

I have watched the London Fox walking boldly in the night

I have seen the long gray Rat and Mudlarks by the river

And felt the gaze of the Carrion Crow perched upon the Tower

The East End, Brixton, Vauxhall, Battersea

Places and streets where she might not want to be

Spring-Heeled Jack leaping from the past

Thieves circling Clapham Common, looking for a chance

 

Eyes through half-closed curtains, sirens in the night

Dark figures passing swiftly under the tall streetlight

Ghosts in top hats, petticoats and lace

The Ripper and the hangman and The Reaper’s faceless face

 

For I have walked the streets of London through this and many lives

From Tyburn Cross and Bedlam to the docks of the old South Side

Where ladies live on garbage scavenged from the Thames

And sell their souls and bodies for opium and gin

 

Bloody deaths of traitors, religious fratricides

Hanged, drawn and quartered, and witches burned alive

Black Death and Smallpox, starvation and disease

Bridges crowned with severed limbs and the smiling heads of kings

 

Rolling drums at Greenwich, the whistle and the pipe

Sailors dancing in the wind, swinging til they’re ripe

Oppression and enslavement, black coal smoke and steam

The glory of London is someone else’s dream

 

In the darkness of the Tube I have sheltered from the Blitz

And hidden from the Vikings in Fleetside gravel pits

In the crypt of St. Pancras I have fled the wrath of God

In the temple of Mythras I have worshipped flowing blood

 

And I have seen the Hawk of London and I have heard its cry

I have watched the London Fox walking boldly in the night

I have seen the long gray Rat and Mudlarks by the river

And felt the gaze of the Carrion Crow perched upon the Tower 

 

I feel safe here she said in the world’s greatest city

A civilized place of manners and money

A feast for the senses, wit like a knife

When you tire of London you are tired of life

Whatever You Have to Do to Get High

One of the definitions for Hippie Law is: whatever you have to do to get high.  Here is an excerpt from J. P. Dooley's book, Getting High, currently available on Amazon:

"In dire circumstances, up against the wall, there are covenants you make with yourself, before the witness, with the gods, the condition of staying awake another night, of dragging my body up in the pre-dawn to face yet another remorseless day:  that if I live through this strange test of war, I will never again be the pawn of evil empire, of convention, a prisoner of habit and other people’s expectations, but I will dedicate my life and its fate to the most real, immediate, and personally pleasurable ends.

 

Getting high, rapture and ecstasy unfettered by duty and war but driven by them; a desire to explode into the molecules of the world, getting down, getting laid, and to go beyond the world, to follow mystic threads, other conceptions of reality, people who glow, the divine; to express myself and be myself, and to throw my razor into the sea."

The Adventure of Love

From J P Dooley's book, Two for the Road, coming soon to Amazon:

Earth space, static vault of the heavens, sectioned like an orange:  longitudinal wedges inside which the earth turns and travels, the seasons divided by three into twelve personalities, styles, potentials, a ring around the ecliptic, a giant clock.  The cycling planets move through it, charting analogue meetings and destinies—squares, trines, and conjunctions, the slow precession of equinoxes toward that date certain, basis of the Mayan calendar, when the winter solstice coincides with the hole of demons in the Milky Way, before moving on.  Yearly the dark lord arises to drag the maiden of summer down to the shadow world and enslavement, drawing her warmth across the projected equator, then at the moment of possessing her totally, must let her go.

I propped myself up, looking over Lee, asleep next to me, at Ed Petrovich’s antique clock on the bookshelf.  Already light and the high atmosphere above Isla Vista was a bright blue in the open window of the bedroom at Marvin Manor, a place I had lived in and often returned to.  Six a.m., and it felt like we had just crashed out.

A phone a few feet away; groping for it, I dialed a number from memory.

“Hello?”

“Lenny, Jaymo.  I need a quart of milk if you’re out cruisin’.”

“Extra rich?”

“Please.”

“Be right there, man,” click.

Five minutes later I heard the tick-tick-tick of a bicycle on the landing, a soft knock and the front door opened, and then Lenny’s smiling face was peering into the bedroom.  Seeing Lee asleep, he tip-toed in, exchanged a foil-wrapped quarter ounce of hashish for a twenty dollar bill in an abalone shell at the foot of the bed, crumbled a gram from his pocket into my pipe, and handed it to me.

“Blonde-Leb,” he said.

Lee woke up, her lips a pouty frown.  I handed her the pipe.  She smiled.  Lenny struck a match and held it for her.  “Enjoy,” he said, laughing, as we passed it, and split.

Lee and I shared a glass of water; suddenly we were both laughing.  “He delivered it to us in bed—“ she croaked, “he even lit it!”

A diurnal dope dealer who got up early and delivered promptly, a new and unheard of ethic in black marketeering.

Ah, the Kingdom:  the pleasure of heaven on earth, the good old days happening now, unmistakable, and this plane of worldly endeavor, a thin lens in the glory, almost irrelevant except for the life of the body, hardly of interest.

So it is with your lover, the symptom:  more fun, more return, more interesting than careers and economies.  You feel the heat, the amber light and smoke that drew you from the Bardo.

“I came here to get you,” she said.

I have noted how we took up with each other as suddenly and totally as our war-driven parents:  so in retrospect, but in the moment our mating was still volatile, unbounded, and temporary in the eyes of old friends.  You wouldn’t have bet on its success or longevity, or if you were into laying odds, it would have been on Girard Duval, her handsome lover and housemate of several years, with me as a high stakes long-shot.

In safari shorts that complimented her tan strong legs, waffle-stomper boots with red laces, a straw-yellow shirt with a border of fringe, she had just hitched-hiked down from the Redwoods last week, six hundred miles alone, a fearless traveler, only slightly unnerved when a ride had taken her to the prison in Soledad.  Looking up at the sun low on the dark ridge of the Santa Lucia Mountains, feeling the freedom dreams and lust of five thousand prisoners and carloads of leering vatos, she had experienced the exquisite loneliness of the maiden about to be sacrificed to the beast.

That dark thing that young women flirt with, unholy, dangerous, forbidden:  “I could feel it looking at me,” she said.

A nice Mexican family from Oxnard, visiting their incarcerated son, had pulled over, frightened for her, and taken her all the way to I.V.

“I have to be back in Oregon in two weeks,” she said, passing the pipe.  “Ends to tie up.  Are you coming with me?”

“Of course,” I said.

Big Bob gave us a ride out to Ellwood, past the forlorn tower of the Barnsdale Oil Company, edge of the local world, to the break in the freeway at Tecolote.  Like everyone else, he was charmed by Lee. “I’m disappointed.  I thought you’d stay for a while.”

She laughed, “Well, we’ll be back,” and I smiled, amused to have my own welcome renewed.

Ten minutes later, we caught a single ride all the way to Palo Alto.

**********

From the Beginning...

Welcome to the blog that celebrates the code of guidelines for pleasure seeking bohemians through the writings of J P Dooley.  This is an exerpt from the first chapter of his second book, Two For The Road, coming soon to Amazon:

"From the beginning there were things I recognized:  the smells of kelp and tar, the licorice scent of fennel rising up from the slough, the aromas of sage and mountain lilac brought down from the hills by the night wind.

A newcomer then, drawn by a branch of the University of California with a point break, but my head was somehow already there, the Santa Barbara Channel, a south-facing shore, bright with sunlight, moody with fog; I seemed to know it in my bones.

Not as actual knowledge or even intuition, rather an identity, someone I connected with when my bare feet touched the faint if only spirit imprint of his on old paths and in areas gone wild.  An aboriginal component of my own psyche, originally accessed through surfing, a person of the always-world, pre-industrial, pre-electric, who has never heard of Jehovah, Jesus, the Buddha or Mohammed, has not read Plato, practiced geometric logic with Aristotle, and does not know or care that he lives in America.

 

A part of me and also a fantasy, something I wanted and because I was young, let myself have.

He bathes in the sea, plays in the waves, finds crabs and stranded clams in tidepools, and an abalone washed up in the surf that I stick in my new day-pack and take home for supper.  He collects colorful Olivella shells and grinds off the ends, stringing them on old fishing line as beads.

He follows secret trails through autumn brown grasses, from which I view the heart of his world, in which he is a lone hermit: a few square miles of tidelands and swamp at the back of Goleta Bay, surrounded by rising hills and the steep wall of the Santa Ynez Mountains, at high tide a continuous shallow lagoon with spits and ridges of land that were once villages and camps, and a mound of white shale topped by the airport beacon, last remnant of an island near the mouth of the slough where a confluence of creeks flows to the sea, the site of a town with a thousand huts when the later Spaniards and missionaries arrived; they called it Mescalitán.

A generic Spanish name for places processing agave and places that didn’t, the possible mispronunciation of something else from another language; abandoned, overgrown and forgotten, it had been leveled in 1942 to build the runways of the Marine Air Station.

I learned that from local lore, along with the story of a very old anchor found high on the backside of Moore Mesa, above the estuary of Maria Ygnacio Creek that separated Mescalitán from the mainland.  No one knew where it had come from, though there was a rumor it had been used in the Mexican era to winch over and careen a ship in the calm channel behind the white shale cliffs.