The World Is My Ashtray

At eighteen, Paul Mountain pissed on his academic scholarship to the University of Minnesota and fled to Boulder, Colorado without money, family or prospects. In a cramped one-bedroom apartment with two other dudes, Paul's life was youth unbridled, impulsive, and without remorse. Within a year, Paul finds himself in a tiny cabin with his new girlfriend in a Rocky Mountain ghost town, convinced he can write his way out of poverty before buying his first legal drink. He was wrong. He was wrong about a great many things. In his whirlwind comedic memoir, Paul escorts the listener on his rabid quest for anything to avoid the looming bondage of adult responsibility.

Set against the backdrop of the final decade before the tech revolution, Pepperoni, Jalapenos and LSD is a story filled with women, drugs, old motorcycles, speed junkies, crime, sex, mountaintops, poverty, more sex, long blasts down empty ski slopes and laugh-out-loud happiness. More than anything, it's a story of embracing recklessness and celebrating mania.

"The day will soon come when the cigarettes finally take hold, the doctor shouts, "Cancer!", and God's gavel falls, sentencing me to death and who the fuck knows what else. Probably hell, but I'm hoping for a clerical error, the great celestial typo."