New J P Dooley Book Available on Amazon!!!

Two for the Road by J P Dooley is now available on Amazon!!!  Here is a free exerpt that illustrates the way adventure can bring one into the ever present now:

 "The water, even at sunrise, was deep blue.  A sure sign:  you could tell there was going to be wind.

Twenty-five miles west of Santa Barbara by eight-thirty, between El Capitán and Refugio, an early start but I knew we were in for it; I’d been on this coast too long to mistake the dark scuff that extended out to the islands.  The surf, breaking big on the points, would be blown out by noon.

Approximately the hour when we rounded Conception and ran, head on, into the unbroken North Pacific swell, long lines to the horizon, shearing into whitecaps, and a dry gale driving straight into our face.  The blunt bow of the Hake slammed into the big waves like a crashing semi, shuddering, groaning, steel whining, spray flying to the stern; the only dry spot on the deck was a four foot square behind the pilot house.

Danny and I braced ourselves against the walls, Rinaldi’s face a snarling mask as he fought the wheel, his enterprise on the line, a gamble of everything.  Blinding glare through the film of water over the windows, heatless, wind howling, little jets of moisture blowing through cracks onto the binnacle.

A tough haul, even for a seaworthy craft, and high drama:  each swell stopped her cold, engines racing as the screws broke free on the crests, digging in again to drive her down the back side into the next one.  We were making about two knots an hour, human walking speed, and as the afternoon passed, and the waves got steeper and more hollow, looming mountains of water, I wondered how much she could take before breaking up.

The pounding became monotonous, hypnotic, collapsing everything into the moment, no future, no past, just this now and the next jarring collision, fear ceding to a crystalline euphoria.  It was like a drug--terror and pleasure and the soul stripped naked:  sea junkies, taking it to the limit, one more time, and one more time."

The Psychedelic Rule Part II

Sometimes drugs are used to further one's process of getting high.  Jaymo shows us the proper mental state one needs to be in to have a fullfilling experience in J P Dooley's Getting High:

"Acid’s not a drug in the usual sense; not a narcotic or an upper or downer, or a sedative, but something more like a key that releases blocked energy, unlocking hard patterns of thought and perception, who we think we are, opening the channels, letting it flow.  No particular physical event—constriction of arteries, slowing of alimentary process, suppression of pain—but an expansion of mind, feeling out beyond eyes and fingers, inward to an awareness of autonomic function, everything repressed by notions of sanity and propriety—for most people rapture and a sense of the beauty and intricacy of things, love, and the way in which this kaleidoscoping sphere of time-space is almost infinitely funny—everything unconscious, unthinkable, stupid, prurient and innocent coming to the fore, equal and equally meaningless in glittering reality.

But first the ego must go.  A feeling of confusion, everything out of control; you cannot will yourself to breathe but it happens anyway.  Bizarre thoughts, terror that you are going mad, losing it; I grope at the sand, clenching handfuls, aware of the millions of silicate particles between my fingers and the sickening vastness of matter and mind, coincident with memories of animals defecating, and the voice of John Lennon:

“Don’t hold on, relax and float downstream

This is not dying, this is not dying”

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."