"You are NOT funny!"
she claimed, falsely.
Nuns with Shotguns
, Vol II of THE WORLD IS MY ASHTRAY, picks up where
Pepperoni, Jalapeños & LSD
left off. Paul and Lonnie disappear into a Rocky Mountain ghost town to decompress from a manic year in Boulder, Colorado. The town of Eldora is spectacular, serene, virtually uninhabited. Perhaps a hundred hermits are scattered throughout the mountain valley, cleaning their guns and guarding their bongs. Now twenty years old and even more determined to write his way to financial freedom, Paul hunkers down at his typewriter in his new, idyllic setting and begins banging out his first novel, helped/hindered by his numerous vices.
"The liquid acid I'd taken to celebrate having liquid acid rolled clean and strong..."
Full of Budweiser, hallucinogens, and a young man's lust, Paul cannot resist the temptation of the larger, manic world. Before long, he's relentlessly chasing new women, blasting through the mountains on his motorcycle, and tripping acid on the mountain peaks surrounding the Eldora valley. Wedding weirdness, stunning sunsets, puppy poop, brutal loss, hard drugs, continuous betrayal, and strange mountain saloons punctuate this continuation of P. H. Mountain's whirlwind comedic memoir. Set against the backdrop of the final decade before the tech revolution,
is a full embrace of reckless living, an unapologetic testament to the stunning beauty of attacking life with the throttle open and arms spread wide.
"I knew I had to die, dammit, but since I had to die, I decided there could be no better moment to do so, and the intense awareness of perfect death made me suddenly fall madly in love with life. The moon, the night, the cold sting of mountain air, a madman at the wheel, his wailing scream penetrating nature's wildly illuminated darkness. Damn. It was worth it, enduring all this long life, all the hidden terrors just over the horizon, the heartache and heartbreak, the hard work and easily achieved misery, if only for ten minutes as such."