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."