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.
