Book by cover

These are a few of my private journal collaged covers from the 1970s.

The cover above is mentioned in the excerpt below from my soon to be self-published memoir.

(Note – DMT is the weirdest hallucinogen I’ve done . . . it makes “reality” an interactive collaboration.)

I got to be so much in the flow in Brahman, Michigan, one morning I walked half mile up to the highway, stuck out my thumb and a guy picked me up and drove me all the way to Chagrin Falls, Ohio to my friends’ front door.

On the second leg of the journey, I hitched from Chagrin to West Virginia to visit Stone Ranger. It was during that time–DMT time–I had collaged my notebook with word balloons cutout from comic books. Twice on that trip word balloons answered my questions. For example, I asked, “What should I do now?” And a word balloon said, “Well, now we eat.”

It started raining badly, so I sat up under a highway underpass, smoking DMT-soaked parsley and reading one of my religious books, a small, black Brotherhood book that said we could manifest our own reality. I looked up and saw it was still raining. I looked down and saw there were thirty pages left. I said, “Well, I’ll finish the book, and when I’m done, the rain will stop and the sun will come out.”

Whammo, when I finished the book, the rain immediately stopped and the sun came out. I laughed in delight and said some sort of joke to God–to reality–at God’s expense and stood up laughing, lost my balance and landed in a puddle of rainwater. I made joke on God; God made joke on me.

Hitchhiking back, an attractive girl picked me up and said, “Oh shit, if you’re going to kill me, kill me now.” She explained she was on speed and was nervous but had to have somebody to talk to.

“I can help with that,” I said. She flinched as I reached down into my pack to pull out my pipe and some marijuana. I got her stoned. She drove me back to Chagrin and gave me her phone number, but at that point I was being faithful to another man’s wife and never called.

— from chapter 23 of Stations of the Lost – a true tale of armed robbery, stolen cars, outsider art, mutant poetry, underground publishing, robbing the cradle, and leaving the country by Smith & Lady.