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."

The Humor of the Oracle

In this free sample from Two For the Road, by J P Dooley, Jaymo and Lee demonstrate one can get high from how fate likes to play jokes on us:

"Nearing Tok Junction in high good spirits, we went through our gear, tightening down our packs, and Lee pulled out the book.  A last oracle before being on our own again; we each threw separately.  

Girard went first.

41.  Sun/Decrease.  “Six in the third place means:  When three people journey together, their number decreases by one.  When one man journeys alone, he finds a companion.”

He handed the coins to me, and I threw:

64.  Before Completion.  “Success.  But if the little fox, after nearly completing the crossing, gets his tail in the water, there is nothing that would further.”

From Tok it was still five hundred miles to Ninilchik, three hundred just to Anchorage.  A weary feeling of having it in the bag, and I had to remind myself that every hitch is a roll of dice, and that we are all but out of money.

Lee held the book to her head, put it down and shook the coins thoughtfully before dropping them.  All broken lines until the last, the hexagram of Splitting Apart.

“Six in the fifth place means:  A shoal of fishes.  Favor comes through the court ladies.  Everything acts to further.”

Commentary:  “Splitting apart means ruin.”

Three were about to become two; separation and ruin followed by a bride delivered by her court, still some way in which I can fail to make the crossing, and I’m wondering if it’s going to be Girard and Lee hitching off into the future and me going my way alone. Impossible to vibe it out:  Lee was capable of anything, always ready to leave the past behind and step boldly in some new direction.

Still before noon when they dropped us off at the junction across from a gas station, and we watched the One World Land Transect Expedition chugging off up the grade towards Fairbanks in bright sunlight.  “That was definitely weird,” Lee said as we slung our packs and crossed the road.

Great to be free of them but I felt uneasy, contemplating the oracles and how the images might be fulfilled.

Before we even had a thumb out, a car pulled up slow and stopped.  Three women inside.“We’ve got room for one,” the shotgun passenger said, and they were all looking at Lee.

 It was not the way I thought the moment would arise, so soon, and reviewing the hexagrams, saw the permutation I had not considered, that she would climb in and leave us both behind.

“Well, I did think about it,” she told me later.

“Thanks,” Girard said, and slipped into the back seat, his pack on his lap and the door shut before they could change their minds.  “See you down the road,” he said, waving through the window with a cheerful smile.

Suddenly it was just Lee and me and the highway, and I’m feeling entirely unburdened, rapturous, fancying that everything has been fulfilled:  a splitting apart, three have become two, and I am with Lee, my only destination, the other side of the river.  We kiss and eat peanut butter sandwiches.

After noon, in spite of the bright sun in a clear sky, the temperature dropped sharply, and we could hear the wind, low on the mountain, rushing like surf in the stands of slender young trees, stirring a meadow of dead fireweed, an acre of dry flowers drifting away into the air. People passed and waved, a cheerful mood all around but no one stopped."

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.'