The title of the book, Staying Stoned: High in the Mountains, is very misleading.
Staying Stoned was originally recorded on magnetic tape; no digital recording devices were available, no Google, no internet. As a result, the editing process was a nightmare. An excerpt near the end of the story expresses the editing problems better than I can in this prologue.
“Twelve hours of tape do not a book make. There is still all that typing someone must do and the editing. Oh God, the editing this mess of words will need, in order to make any sense, when someone tries to read it. All those run-on sentences will have to be chased down and stopped. The dangling participles can’t be left dangling. Misplaced gerunds will have to be found and returned to their proper place. And the breaks in my speech, that might become excessive commas, could be a problem You see, this sort of tell-it-as-you-go story book is a real nightmare for an editor.
Of course, I could just transcribe it exactly as I said it. Sort of a James Joyce style stream of unconsciousness – my own portrait of myself as a young man,” Theo wrote.
In 1978-79, when Staying Stoned was first recorded on magnetic tape, in addition to the editing problems, marijuana was illegal in all fifty states. The ‘War on Drugs’, as named by Richard Nixon, had already begun ten years earlier, and Nixon declared illegal drugs “Public Enemy Number One!” By 1982, Nancy Reagan was telling us to “Just say no.”
All indications are that we have been spending billions of dollars a year on an unwinnable war. And just saying no hasn’t worked out so well for many of us either.
Travel back in time as a 26-year-old carpenter attempts to reduce his personal harm, by taking a self-imposed sabbatical away from all of his addictive; substances, influencers, and environments.
For three months, starting on Christmas Day in 1978, Theo, and his Great Dane named Misty, hunkered down to attempt a drug free winter. At a summer camp, called Lime Kiln Camps, in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the young man and his dog concentrated on staying warm, and on staying alive.
