Old School Arizona

[waveguide]

"Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the “normal people” as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say club passwords like “Have a nice day” and “Weather’s awful today, eh?”, you yearn inside to say forbidden things like “Tell me something that makes you cry” or “What do you think deja vu is for?”. Face it, you even want to talk to that girl in the elevator. But what if that girl in the elevator (and the balding man who walks past your cubicle at work) are thinking the same thing? Who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on conversation with a stranger? Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others."

Timothy Leary (via purplebuddhaproject)

taken from an earlier recording, tho i understand leary (aka "dj doktor megatrip") went on to do videos with these guys. he knew some folks around here so i have my own opinion, but this is hilee wreckomendead

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLv9Vn0chpI

(i follow that up with saint francis e but cats aint feelin)

 

[rbt]

Timothy Leary the Dean of psychology @ Harvard. It is nice to ponder the social engagement and reluctance done by today corporate environment. If I am not mistake Leary and Ken Kesey quickly found out with fame the world they had a handle reality and understanding. I don't think they understood outside their culture. It is like the BEAT Hotel in Paris that had many from the bohemian view with Gore Vidal, Sole, and Warhol. The view of the world after the war in Europe and existentialism. This is where we today are comfortable at the tip of the finger pointing and take distain of the other fingers 3 directions. Oh how we tyre of our fellow man insecurities while disregarding his strengths. Some how this will solidify our own value. We are yes in a culmination all I can say is yes we all are.

 

[waveguide]

when leary was in tucson in 88 he stayed at the mellon-hitchcock household.

 

[Madjag]

Live By The Sword, Die By The Sword

Live By The Sword, Die By The Sword

Lest we forget, it’s our mission to evolve. Change is inevitable so why not become your own Change Agent? Become the primary creative force in your life and seek out ways to go beyond the beyond….

“He not busy being born is busy dying.”
- Bob Dylan​

Authentic Presence is a Tibetan Buddhist term that I learned about through the writings of Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche. A crazy wisdom yogi, Trungpa entered the western world and became the first to define Tibetan Buddhism in ways that Westerners could truly understand. By being in our world fully, he was able to see through our sunglasses and experience our world view. This first-hand knowledge gave him the ability to easily move between two worlds and become the Oracle necessary for reaching Western minds. His simple clarity and humorous way of explaining Tibetan Buddhism is brilliant.

Some of my friends never did seem to get outside of themselves, though. They allowed their life to be one of a victim instead of taking credit for being a creator. I’m sure you’ve had your share of suicide friends, too. The first friend that kills themself is always a shock. We knew them so well, we think, yet how did this event slip by us? Why didn’t we see it coming and work to prevent it?

My dear friend Michelle took herself way too seriously. She allowed her inner Judge to deliver a guilty verdict. She accepted what her Mind told her without question. Her shame and remorse for certain events was so great that she believed she needed to be punished, that she needed to die. And so she did by her own hand.

“Suicide victim” sounds like there is no one to blame and that it somehow happened to that person without them having anything to do with it. What, the world did it to them? Ah ha! That’s the crux. It’s as if we want to pardon them for what has “happened” to them, but nothing has happened to them. They did it 100% all by themselves.

We all have guilty thoughts at times and it’s not unusual for shame to pop in and out of a healthy person’s life. For some more, for some less. This is no surprise. What is surprising, though, is that some folks believe most everything that they hear or see in their mind as if it’s “true”. They base their entire guilty verdict and case upon info that they themselves came up with. But wait, that’s cheating. They need to find an impartial judge and let them decide, but unfortunately that’s not the way it works.

Accidental suicide like Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman is a different sort of animal, one that hides a different sadness and motivation. My closest, oldest friend George was on that train and just couldn’t get off. He was busted carrying 10,000 hits of acid and a few ounces of coke while driving back to Phoenix from LA. To pass the time he took a nice big Black Beauty, some clean pharmaceutical speed, and was pulled over by California State Highway Patrol doing 88 mph in a 70 mph zone. His wealthy father hired a top attorney and the judge ultimately said that George could go into the Armed Forces, into jail, or into college. He chose college and graduated Cum Laude from medical school as an Ear, Nose, Throat specialist and surgeon.

George never really had the “calling” to be a healer. A few months after he had started his private practice and he told me that on one day he’d be telling a patient that he couldn’t operate on their throat cancer because it was too advanced and had spread too widely throughout their body while on another day he would be listening to a family pouring praise upon him because he had saved their child’s life by repairing their fractured face, a face that had hit a tree head-on at 20 mph, propelled from a tumbling ATV.

The emotional roller coaster ride was too much Geo’s heart and soul so he went back to his comfortable drug world for pain relief, this time as his own doctor. Need a prescription? No problem.

One day his wife of only 2 weeks found him collapsed and dead in the kitchen. Apparently his breathing had stopped entirely from first drinking a few beers and then following that with a Demerol chaser injected directly into his butt muscle. This is flirting with death, and any doctor knows, because the dose that kills is so close to the dose that doesn’t when you start mixing alcohol and intravenous pain killers. All morning on that day it seemed that everything was going wrong for me at work. I was truly upset and I didn’t know why I was making so many mistakes. When the phone rang around lunchtime and a lady friend’s voice said, “Doctor George is dead”, it all became clear. I burst into tears as if my body had been waiting for hours for my consciousness to catch up with the pain it had already perceived hours earlier. Oh George, oh man….

I don’t go to funerals so I wrote his mother and father instead. It was a short note that let them know how much I owed their dear son and how much I cared for him. I told them that because of my early college friendship with him I had come to visit and ultimately moved to Arizona where I have lived for 41 years since that day; I told them that the yard sale Geo told me to visit was where I met my future wife and the mother of my two daughters; I mentioned that I even hear an echo of George’s laugh every time I laugh. I absorbed a bit of it over the many years of his hilarious antics that were accompanied by his madman laugh. He was the Joker for sure, the Coyote, the Trickster in the flesh and I was just an amateur in his shadow.

Even more crazy was the fact that his other close friends, ones he knew long before we met, were even greater Tricksters and that George himself had been an amateur. When I met the biggest Jokester of them all, Steve-O, I soon learned why.

Steve had a secret lab in northern Cali, tucked deep into the woods not far from Redway, where the Country Tavern, on the road to Shelter Cove, was his headquarters in the Emerald Triangle’s booming cannabis sector. Though homegrown was king Steve was followed a different call entirely. He had a chemist and together they made extremely pure, pharmaceutical-quality LSD. Steve distributed the acid across the West through a network of close friends like George. It was a tight operation that never crashed and burned over the many years it operated from that redwood laboratory. Steve-O was basically insane, but being a bad-ass, he was able to keep ahead of the curve that inevitably had to eat him, too.

I was one of George’s testers and when he returned from Cali with a new batch of acid, I would be one of the first to give it a whirl. This fine acid started as a liquid and was poured over and ounce of rice flour or some other similarly benign substance. The ounce of powder could be combined with 15 more ounces of filler to make a pound of street-ready acid. 1,000’s of capsules and many hours later, that pound would be transformed into a small bucket of acid caps, single hits, ready for local dealers to offer up to their loyal customers.

Some dealers preferred buying the powder and doing the capping themselves, partly because some of these questionable characters would cut the powder even more and have 25%, maybe 50% more caps to sell. Capitalism was certainly practiced in the drug world, too, and the type of dealer who’d hang out on the street in Boulder on “The Hill” were just the kind you’d expect to have a pocketful ready to sell anyone who came up to them and asked, “Got any acid man?”.
No problem.

If you’ve ever had pharmaceutical-grade LSD you’ve experienced something that cannot be explained with words. It isn’t something to take lightly or to play with in large doses. Mix and match, you say? Why not? Be like another friend I met back in the early 70’s who used to shoot speed and acid together and then drive a cab all night in Denver. He confided to me that he figures he did it maybe 200 times before he overdosed himself and woke up face down with a needle still in his bruised and bleeding arm. When I met G-man he couldn’t finish a sentence. I’d ask him where he was living in Jerome and he would answer, ”Well, I’m, uh, I have, uh, moved to, uhhhh, I’ve moved to, uhhhh, a small, ummm, uhhh, and, ummm…….”

Two years later, after giving up all alcohol, drugs, weed, and becoming a vegetarian G-man could actually finish a sentence. But I digress…. in the name of lessons to the wise.

Let’s go to the party instead!

George said that Steve loved to play tricks on people. His main magic was to spike them with a large dose of acid slipped into their food or drink. For acid-heads or even experienced weed smokers, the initial rush would reveal that you were in for a ride and it wasn’t entirely unfamiliar or spooky. But for the first time acid subject, the effects could be anything from groovy to terrifying, usually both! In all my years I have never been spiked and am grateful for it. I’ve seen even experienced trippers go off the deep end and spiral down into dark territory so I always felt that spiking was a bad karmic move. And soon I’d realize just how bad it could get when George began his tale from his most recent Cali buying trip.

Steve had met George in the San Francisco bay area on this particular visit. He wanted to share with Geo some of the highlights of the North Bay around Oakland and Berkeley where he had spent a lot of his time earlier before moving north to the Triangle. Many of Steve’s biggest acid contractors lived there, I mean, why not with 10,000’s of students, loads of hippies, and young people flooding in from all over the USA in order to be a part of the groovy scene in the Haight-Ashbury district, Berkeley, and Golden Gate Park. The year was 1972 and the time was right for change.

Steve took George along with two other Arizona friends who were visiting, Larry and David, on a bar tour that included a stop at a dive-bar topless joint. This club was in a rough neighborhood, but no worries, it catered to anyone and everyone who could afford a drink and perhaps a tip for the ladies on stage. After settling in at a table near the back of the bar, Steve left the others and began walking around the place, with a big pitcher of beer, visiting table after table and talking loudly to all sorts of drunken men who were out for a good time. Steve would hang for a while a table, pour the fellows there a few refills from his big glass beer pitcher, and then move on to another table, repeating the same motions. Finally, when he was finished with his unusual bar room dance, Steve left his pitcher on one of the tables and walked back to George’s table.

To George and his Arizona companions it seemed like Steve was everybody’s new best friend. He seemed totally at ease just crashing in on each table and shooting the shit for a few minutes before sliding on over to the next group. What Geo and crew didn’t know was that most of these guys were off-duty military men from two nearby bases. The topless bar was one of their prime hangouts and it catered to these soldiers and sailors in more ways than one. Steve knew this and had planned all along to provide Geo and his buddies with the show of their lives.

10-15 minutes after Steve began his initial bar room visits there seemed to be a bit of disturbance festering at one of the tables. Nothing that wouldn’t pass for drunk testosterone boys facing off though over some nasty comment or sarcastic joke. It just rose up out of the audience a bit louder and harsher than one would expect. Like an echo, a few other tables mirrored this energy and a few guys started getting real loud. Suddenly one of these guys climbs up onto the dance stage and corners one of the ladies in motion, trying to engage in some sort of sexual dance that wasn’t real smooth or cool by any means. Large hands soon lifted this kid off the stage and into a corner where the bouncers, probably motorcycle gang members making a little money working part-time at the topless joint, pinned him mercilessly against the wall while telling him what’s what. As they were occupied with this first troublemaker, other soldiers began fighting, climbing on the stage, throwing glasses, grabbing the dancers, you name it and the bouncers had no way of handling the decaying scene in the least. It was pure chaos…

By this time Larry and David had stood up and backed up to the wall at the very back of the bar. They were looking for a way out. George joined them and they moved slowly toward the doors to the street, avoiding any fights or crazy kids who might drag them into the melee. They had just about made it when the double doors flew open and a crowd of SWAT team officers jammed into the bar with shields raised and clubs swinging. My friends stood still against the wall as the commotion deeper within the joint attracted the police. Though they were scared as shit, Geo and crew slowly moved with their backs along the wall until they slipped out the front doors. Lots of bodies were going in and out at that point so they got lucky and hit the road, never looking back I imagine.

When they regrouped later that day at Steve’s Oakland house, there he was, sitting on the porch of the old cottage and grinning like a happy Santa. George and the boys knew what had happened by that point, but just to clarify, Steve launched into the details of how he had used an ounce of acid powder that he had in his pocket and had poured gobs of it into the many pitchers of beer that he had been sharing and leaving around the bar room. By his reckoning, most of those boys had taken at least 25 hits of acid each…..they’d be tripping for days.

The local bay area newspaper soon related that the bar incident had led to its permanent closing. Geo and crew went back to AZ with a doctor’s bag full of powder and a bright, psychedelic future for Scottsdale, Phoenix, Boulder, and Denver. As the Universe would have it, Steve-O soon met Captain Karma himself when a friend that he had spiked got him back and sent Steve on an unexpected and intensely trippy vacation. Ever the good sport, Steve got the poor guy on the floor and punched him out pretty badly, setting himself up for an even freakier acid trip due to his retaliation and anger. What a sport.

A Jamaican proverb worth remembering: “Dirty game play twice”.

Seen……

 

[waveguide]

that's why i keep coming back

i and a friend went with the mellon-hitchcock girls out to their dad's place in the chiricahuas.. "he just likes to live out here" was the explanation i received at the time.

psychic/foretelling experiences. it would be about twenty years before i found out why he was staying out there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Bowart


so no, i rarely believe in suicide. "22 vets commit suicide every day" many of them women. how many of them have technology in their bodies they have no idea about, the future is likely to inform us all, in one way or another.

 

[Littleleaf]

 

[Sforza]

Nice Madjag.
Reminds me of some of the many trips I took back in the late 60's early 70's. Never had a bad trip. I did take a couple of trips with guys who told me how they loved tripping but when the shit got real heavy, they started freaking out and needed hand holding. I was never worried no matter how bizarre thing got. I always knew that it was drug induced and it would end eventually. Can't say that I enjoyed the crash though. Good ganja helped that crash. While I still love the ganja, I can't say that I have any desire to ever take LSD again. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

 

[wolfhoundaddy]

The first time

The first time

was on a trail to a cave in Grand Canyon. We headed down Grandview trail to Horseshoe Mesa, skirted the west side and barely dropped off the edge to the portal. Window pane.
None of us had been in the cave before. And we had only two flashlights for 4 of us. What could go wrong?
There is a main room you enter, then the cave splits left/right. Going right it goes a ways. We started to turn around when the one guy I didn't know started to freak. "We're lost and we're all gonna die! He takes off back into the cave. My buddy says he will go look for him, and takes the other flashlight. So me and Scott sit in the totaldarkness and wait. I don't remember being freaked. He came back without him. So we went looking for him. He managed to let us walk by him in the dark. Then turned his light on. In his other hand he held a hunting knife. "We're lost and we're all gonna die!"His eyes were as big as saucers. Long story short, we talked him into returning with us, we found our way out. The second he saw the light he calmed down. I remember feeling as though I was being birthed as I emerged the cave.
I'm glad I have experienced. It was a good tool for the way. It also has allowed me to relate to my two adult sons as they still occasionally partake.
Grand Canyon Motor Lodge cabins 1973.
Wish I could find some of those old friends. Good times

 

[Sforza]

I don't much like going into caves straight, so I wouldn't want to trip in a cave. I also cannot recommend riding a motorcycle at night while tripping hard. I kept getting caught up in how pretty the colors were in the light from the headlight, which distracted me a bit from keeping the bike on the road. But all is well that ends well.

 

[1TWISTEDTRUCKER]

I haven't tripped in nearly 25yrs. 83-85 I tripped LOTS!!!
The Wife and I are planning to re locate to Portland, Or. with in the next 3mos. I am planning a camping trip with My Best Bro, and a few other good Friends. I am getting a sheet, and We are gonna trip for a weekend together before I move 1800mi. from home, and all Our Friends. I am looking forward to it very much.

 

[Madjag]

Last trip for me was in the Fall of 1972.

Kept up with the Medicine, though. Peyote doesn't cheat.

 

[wolfhoundaddy]

Last trip for me was in the Fall of 1972.

Kept up with the Medicine, though. Peyote doesn't cheat.

Most of my early experiences with psychedelics were at Grand Canyon. I lived there '72 and '73. We hiked into Havasupai for a week long adventure. We brought some lsd, but the guys next to us had a big pot of buttons on simmer on for the whole week. I have drank alot of tea in my day, but have never come on so fast or pure as I did with their brew. I still feel it 40 years later.

 

[1TWISTEDTRUCKER]

I never had the pleasure of the peyote experience. I prefer mushrooms over LSD generally.

 

[rbt]

I remember Haight & Ashbury but 68 and least we remember the words from SGT Joe Friday " Marijuana is the match, Heroin is the fuse, and LSD is the BOMB! " so kids " Keep Off the Grass " and only " Dopes Use Dope "

advertisement>please buy the new water filtered Waterford brand for a richer smoother taste brought to you by Phillip Morris. As Sgt. Friday stokes away a pack a show and stops by a local " Cocktail Lounge" a martini to calm him down before the drive home.

So some how Timothy Leary is now the voice of reason along with his long time friend and confidant G. Gorgon Liddy Nixon's main operative commander whom gave Elvis his special Honoree federal police officer badge to circumvent legal problems. Folk Music, Motown, Vietnam bombing, Civil rights, Voting Rights, EPA, Medicare, all passed by republicans.

Fuck I cant stand anymore reasoning, I have reasoned it is of no reason anymore eat drink be merry for we know not! where we are going because we don't have a reason.

 

[1TWISTEDTRUCKER]

I remember Haight & Ashbury but 68 and least we remember the words from SGT Joe Friday " Marijuana is the match, Heroin is the fuse, and LSD is the BOMB! " so kids " Keep Off the Grass " and only " Dopes Use Dope "

advertisement>please buy the new water filtered Waterford brand for a richer smoother taste brought to you by Phillip Morris. As Sgt. Friday stokes away a pack a show and stops by a local " Cocktail Lounge" a martini to calm him down before the drive home.

So some how Timothy Leary is now the voice of reason along with his long time friend and confidant G. Gorgon Liddy Nixon's main operative commander whom gave Elvis his special Honoree federal police officer badge to circumvent legal problems. Folk Music, Motown, Vietnam bombing, Civil rights, Voting Rights, EPA, Medicare, all passed by republicans.

Fuck I cant stand anymore reasoning, I have reasoned it is of no reason anymore eat drink be merry for we know not! where we are going because we don't have a reason.

Talk about discordant,,,, Dam Man!!! are You tripping now, rbt???

I trip to realize truth's that have ZERO to do with the REAL World view that is pumped into Our brains through retarded talking points. All meant to keep the populous chasing Boogie Men.

I believe My insanity revolves around an intolerance to this stupid shit. Unfortunately The Sheeple rule.

Twisted

 

[1TWISTEDTRUCKER]

After re reading, I got the last line, I think We on the same page. Ya gotta have at least a D9 to get through the bullshit to find a sliver of truth.
I suspect a lotta the truths I was taught are bullshit too. All ready proved so many of them wrong. I pretty much assume anything, that I was taught in the Government halls of indoctrination that I attended, until dropping out in My Jr. Yr. of HS.
That was 30yrs ago. I had better shit to do. The World wasn't ready for what I had to do. It is now, and I am, at 49yrs old finally realizing My path. More to come.lol

Twisted

 

[Sforza]

I plan on hiking into Havasupai before I leave this vale of tears.

 

[wolfhoundaddy]

The last time I hiked out was when I turned 56. My son and I caught a ride to Phantom Ranch and hiked the Bright Angel out. It was a thrill for me as I was able to show him the cabin I helped build at Indian Gardens. He could have been out a couple hours ahead of me. I usually take about 7 hrs. to hike out.

I never pay to enter the Canyon. I put in my local time and feel it is my second home. I pull up to the nice,smiley,starched uniform,smokey bear hat,tie tack,Albright Academy graduite, smile and do my jedi...".I am here for a job interview". I blow some invisible smoke into their gov't space just for good measure.
"Pass on thru sir, have a Hopi day."

 

[Apache Kush]

badass b - a has one of the best trout streams in the state worth the hike indeed

 

[Madjag]