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.” "

The Potato Lottery

Part of getting high sometimes is about simplifying your life and feeling grateful as exemplified in J P Dooley's Two for the Road now on Amazon:

"It was a parcel east of Azalea with a funky plywood cabin, on a south-facing hill above a recently paved logging road.

A hundred seedlings:  I put some in a hot-house cobbled together from a pile of old lumber at the top of the driveway, a few more in deer cages down the hill, ten or twenty in the damp spot below a barely weeping spring, others hidden in clumps of thorny blackberries and wild rose, a dozen in a straight row along a collapsing fence.

Except for the ones near the spring, the rest had to be watered, buckets carried up the hill and across the slope, five gallons at a time.

The ancient hermit’s life:  chop wood and carry water.  It makes you strong.

Hard times at first, after the fast life of the city, not much stimulation, no beating heart but fat quiet and inland heat, followed by cold.  A contemplative environment in which I scribbled down notes and ideas for paintings, quick sketches and color schemes on a couple of reams of white vellum from the Oakland Library System that Aggie Ina Kolb had handed in the window of the truck as we were leaving.

“You’ll need these,” she said.

We worked with a brush-piling crew, didn’t get paid for three months, and spent the summer living on a fifty-pound bag of rice and what we could forage.  No abundance of wild edibles in the southern Cascades, or harvestable forest products like moss:  we had pot, pinched tops from the plants, but no food.  We ate rice with onions, fried rice, rice gruel, rice cakes and peanut butter.  Unconcerned, we grew thinner.

On my birthday, on my way to a public spigot down the road for water—our shallow well was poorly sealed, and things lived and died in it—coasting on my bicycle, I came upon a potato in the road that had bounced out of a truck, and screeched to a halt, overjoyed, as if we had won the lottery."