Here at the facility, each meal begins when “guests” walk in single file to the “dining room.” To put myself in a mood of pleasant anticipation, I like to think of this procession as a parade, an opportunity to smile, wave, imagine the rousing chorus of a brass band. Attempting to implement this approach led to a brief spate of solitary confinement (for my own safety), but I’m sure it will yield a far more pleasant result for those on the “outside.” Consider adopting this new tradition when family and friends join you for a July 4th gala at your home. Pass out small flags (available at your local dime store or crafts shop) and, especially if children are present, kazoos are certainly in order (again a well-stocked variety store is a good source for these, but they should be collected before the meal is served). In here we find that a “flag” made from a single sheet of “TP” taped to a pencil and a piece of cellophane held against a comb (wash it first!) are the perfect accessories for our “meal march.”

Next, as our meal begins, we are each given a shiny stainless steel tray with partitions for the different types of food. For your event, I suggest similar trays but in bright red, white and blue plastic. These can be purchased by mail order ahead of time (page 167). To impart a patriotic flavor to our reusable trays, I enlisted several surly veterans of the facility to supply sharpened paper clips (a no-no, but I think even our “hosts” would agree that the end justifies the means) to engrave flags, banners and stars as permanent garnishes. You can achieve the same motif with the “July 4 Decal Packet” (available at a nominal charge from www.marthastewart.com). Presumably, your party guests will be more amenable to a patriotic motif.

The menu is often rather limited chez Lompoc, but it exudes a certain charm and embrace of basic American foodstuffs that harks back to simpler, more innocent times. And you know how I feel about more innocent times. I strongly encourage you to adopt this culinary theme for your holiday gathering — a paean to the purity of yore: bologna sandwiches served on gleaming white bread (for ease of preparation leave the crusts on) or peanut butter and jelly (“PB&J” we called them when I was a child; in here they’re known as “rat bait specials” — recipes on page 194). To complement the sandwiches, canned corn or peas and a simple boiled potato (page 129) — known as a “flying coldcocker” in here — create a Yankee veggie melody that your guests won’t soon forget. To drink, a half pint of milk in the carton can summon up memories of happy school days (or hard time at Attica), and refreshing ice tea served in a tin cup always puts me in mind of Adirondack camping trips.

Unlike those of you at home, I enjoy the bonus of a vending machine here at the facility that dispenses a surprisingly good trail mix — assorted nuts, raisins and bits of chocolate that no one else wants to eat (though I will confess to competing from time to time for a fresh bag of Cheetos). I’m sure a similar mixture is available at your grocer. I’ve found that the plastic caps from spray-paint cans (used here in the sign-painting shop) make enchanting nut cups. By snipping off the ends of our toothbrushes and fashioning them into two-prong forks (another no-no here, I suppose, but sometimes a little rule breaking is in order), we make the our nut treats last several minutes — just one more little trick for bringing old-fashioned leisure back into dining.

As you will recall, I’ve always believed that a table is not really set until the flowers and napkin rings are in place. And as you might imagine, napkin rings are a rare item around here, but necessity is the mother of invention. Who would have thought that when cut into fourths and decorated with toothpaste, the tubes from toilet-paper rolls make perfect homes for the serviette (page 136)? If you like, trim them in a scallop pattern and add glitter (not available here). Have the kids add names or humorous nicknames! (We like to label ours with the number of days left on our sentences — a getting-to-know-you trick that creates a sense of optimism and hope, especially among the short-timers.)

One happy discovery I’ve made recently is that celery tops quickly arranged in a Dixie cup whisper “party” in a very unostentatious and distinctly American manner. Use four to six such displays to enliven the center of your table (page 87). (Unlike me, you are not likely to have to trade cigarettes for celery stalks, a step that is mortifying but, as you will see, well worth the periodic debasement). Decorating the cups as we do in here — with papier-maché curlicues made from masticated gum wrappers — will give your affair an atmosphere of playfulness. Origami centerpieces fashioned from back issues of Easy Rider magazine add an exotic and amusingly outré touch.

Most important, be it bologna or foie gras, enjoy your holiday, enjoy your meal and especially your freedom — it’s a good thing! Take it from an “insider”: You can have a good time even when you’re serving hard time.

When the name Lord Buckley is mentioned, it gets one of two standard responses. The less common is a gleam in the eye, a signal from another member of the secret order of Buckley devotees, often followed by a fevered account of first hearing his Lordship and perhaps an imitation of his loopy lingo, maybe a passage from “The Nazz,” his most famous monologue — a retelling of the story of Jesus of Nazareth in hipster patois (“He was a carpenter kitty …”). The more frequent response is, “Lord Buckley — who’s he?” It’s that reaction that makes the existence of Trager’s book and the attention it’s getting — it will be featured on NPR’s “Morning Edition” on Friday, June 28 — slightly miraculous. Because while the members of the secret Buckley cult have always thought that their guru deserved to become less of a secret, that such a thing might actually come to pass, especially 42 years after Buckley’s death at age 54 in November of 1960, seemed unlikely at best, which is why the first chapter of “Dig Infinity!” is called “Lord Who?”

Trager answers the question with a call and response litany that fills most of a page, some of which goes like this: “Lord Buckley: the white, six-and-a-half-foot-tall, ex-lumberjack cat who invoked both the manners of the English aristocracy and the street language of black America … Lord Buckley: the picaresque pill-popping darling of Al Capone … Lord Buckley: the jazz philosopher who jammed with Charlie Parker … Lord Buckley: the original viper, the Hall of Fame Hipster, the baddest Beatnik, the first flower child, the premier rapper … best known for his ‘hipsemantic’ retellings of Bible stories, Shakespeare soliloquies, and modern poetry in the 1950s.”

“Lord Buckley is a secret thing that people pass under the table,” novelist Ken Kesey said. “You ask writers who they think is the best writer and they all mention someone above them. Gradually you get up at the top, and you get to Samuel Beckett and not many people have read him. But a lot of people have been influenced by Beckett. I think the same was true of Lord Buckley. There were a lot of people influenced by Lord Buckley who have never heard his material.”

Indeed, far too many to count. What Trager has done for “Dig Infinity!” however, is track down people who have heard Buckley and acknowledge his influence, and scores of others who knew him and spent time with him. From Robin Williams, Jonathan Winters, Steve Allen, Studs Terkel, Wolfman Jack, James Taylor, Red Rodney, Ken Nordine, George Harrison, Dick Gregory, Ed Sullivan and Wavy Gravy to Dizzy Gillespie, Jerry Garcia, Judy Collins, James Coburn, Honey Bruce (widow of Lenny), Eric Bogosian and scads more. Virtually all of them testify to his singular gift for magical language, and many point out that he was equally gifted as a hustler and a con man, which only makes the story richer. (To make it richer still, a CD featuring 12 of Buckley’s live performances, including “The Nazz,” is stitched into the back of “Dig Infinity!”)

When I first came across Trager in 1992 I was writing a magazine article about Buckley and he allowed me to quote from several of what became an estimated 500 interviews he conducted for “Dig Infinity!” (Portions of more than 100 appear in the biography.) Since then, we’ve corresponded sporadically, and he ended up using brief excerpts from two or three interviews I did for the magazine article in his book. I first wrote about his project for Salon in 1995, when this magazine was less than a month old and Trager was already shopping his book around to publishers, but with little luck. “Why did it take so long to get the thing published?” I asked when I called him at his New York home.

“It was hard to get through to publishers,” says Trager, who also wrote “The American Book of the Dead: The Definitive Grateful Dead Encyclopedia” and is now editor in chief of the monthly journal Editorials on File. “Having been in publishing all these years myself, I know what the guy at a publisher who wants to sell a project in-house is up against. He has to go to a meeting with all those suits and he’s talking about some white guy who died 40 years ago who talked black street talk? I could just see their eyes glaze over, even at the more progressive, open-minded places. You don’t normally associate a stand-up comedian with a larger, humanistic agenda, which is what Buckley was about — along with being a wild guy. Publishers would ask me, ‘Who’s the market for this? Is it a Beat Generation book, is it a book about comedy, is it about American show business in the middle of the 20th century?’ The answer is it’s about all that stuff and a lot more.” Fortunately, the small New York publisher Welcome Rain stepped up to the plate, though it’s unlikely anyone will get rich on the project. “The advance would never even begin to pay me for blank tapes,” Trager says, “but it was pretty generous considering the obscurity of my subject matter.”

Buckley was a quintessentially American character. If he hadn’t invented himself, Mark Twain would have had to return from the grave to do so. “He grew up dirt poor in gold mining country,” Trager says. “That a guy like that could end up on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’ with stops along the way in the dance marathons and burlesque and vaudeville and swing and bebop and Vegas is really quite remarkable. He lived sort of a hero’s journey, to put it in Joseph Campbell-esque terms.”

Richard Myrle Buckley, born in the tiny Sierra town of Tuolumne, Calif., in 1906, knocked around the country a bit before becoming a moderately successful performer on the strength of clever, but conventional, comic routines. Then, sometime in the early ’50s, he radically transformed himself into the “Hip Messiah,” Lord Buckley. He affected a regal manner, often wore a pith helmet, tie and tails, waxed his mustache into long, upturned stiletto points, assembled a royal court and took to bestowing titles — his wife was Lady Elizabeth Buckley, then there was Prince Owlhead, Lady Renaissance, Prince Lewis (Buckley’s aide de camp), Count Jocko Crown Prince of Morocco and numerous others. And he didn’t merely invoke the Lord Buckley persona for his performances, he lived it 24-7.

When Jonathan Winters first met Buckley in Las Vegas in the 1950s, “He started calling me Prince Jon,” Winters recalls in the book, “and I asked him, ‘Why can’t it be Lord Jon?’”

“Because, my dear man, I am Lord … I am Lord Buckley.”

And Winters said, “Yeah, I remember you in the forest. You were against the Black Knight and he all but dismembered you with some kind of medieval hand ax.”

“Ahh, yes,” Buckley said. “Yes, my friend, thank you for remembering.”

In the mid-’50s, as Beat culture and Buckley’s metamorphosis took hold simultaneously, he became as well known to a certain sector of the population for his abundant eccentricities as for his rhapsodic and transcendent storytelling. Jazz vocalist Jon Hendricks said of Buckley, “He was probably the hippest guy I ever met.” But Dizzy Gillespie put his finger on the infectious musicality of Buckley’s delivery. “What I liked about him was the way he could recite. He’d say, ‘They get on magnabuttasitemin youmakcattabare wa! …’ He was doing rap and scat before anybody.” And musician Buddy Jones nailed it this way: “Comedian is not the word to describe him. He didn’t come out and use words and have these routines like other comedians at the time. He would play to the house and be able to wing it. He improvised as jazz musicians did.”

As Kesey pointed out to Trager, Buckley’s masterly transposing of classic stories into hipster argot turned out to have a surprisingly broad influence and underground staying power. Bob Dylan called him “The fuel to my success,” and Frank Sinatra crowned him “the most sensational comic of our time.” For those who catch the Buckley virus, their enthusiasm often mutates into a desire to proselytize. “When you get bit by the bug,” Trager explains, “you want to share it with whoever will listen. Aside from the breadth of his work, the absolute uniqueness of it, there’s a message there that is really thousands of years old, basic Golden Rule stuff — that we should laugh with one another, that we should help one another. A lot of his work also explored the darker elements of the human condition — [monologues such as] the ‘Bad Rapping of the Marquis de Sade,’ or ‘Murder’ — but they did it with a kind of goodwill that didn’t make evil seem benign, but embraced it in a way that didn’t deny it existed either. He was dealing with the yin-yang aspects of human character.”

Many Buckley fans point to one of his most frequently quoted remarks to make a case for his being a precursor to the evangelizing for tolerance, equality and the power of love that became such a force in the youth movement of the 1960s. At the close of his performances he’d often say: “Before I leave you, I’d like to say to you, people are what it is all about … they are Mother Nature’s brightest flower, her sweetest, purest, most elevating thing that ever was. You are groovy flowers in a garden where I am privileged to stand and share a few moments with you.” Says Trager, “If he’d lived, in relative good health, into the age of the Fillmores, it’s hard not to believe that he would have been a hippie star of a cooler variety than Timothy Leary or Ram Dass or someone like that.

“And on a purely political basis,” Trager continues, “here was a guy who was doing pro-civil rights pieces [such as Joseph Newman's 'Black Cross,' later covered by Bob Dylan] to not necessarily sympathetic audiences in the 1940s, if not earlier. I don’t know if that’s visionary, but it’s certainly brave. He stuck his neck out for what he believed in and contrary to what a lot of people might think, he was not using elements of African-American expression casually. His work addressed not only racial, but all kinds of social inequities head-on. Yet he was able to get it underneath the radar in a way that, maybe, Lenny Bruce wasn’t able to. Bruce really stuck it in his audience’s face: ‘This is the problem.’ Buckley had a gentleness about him.

“I feel Buckley was a genius,” Trager goes on. “The work itself stands on high, yet it’s totally neglected. It isn’t even a footnote to a footnote to a footnote. To me he is a great American visionary who should not slip through the cracks anymore.”

When Trager talked with Robin Williams, the comedian told him, “Buckley and Lenny [Bruce] were both jazz … their work was jazz — verbal jazz … Buckley, you might even say, was more lyrical or poetic. The first time I really heard Lord Buckley, I thought to myself, ‘This is amazing.’ It’s got layers on it. You can take it on the comic layer and you can just keep getting deeper and deeper with it. The musical layer, the literary layer — it’s full of literary references … Hearing his work is like hearing the great jazz riffs — they are full entities unto themselves.” And while it would be unfair and pointless to ask, even a musician, to fully appreciate, say, “Kind of Blue” by merely reading the music (Buckley really must be heard), this, the opening to his classic “The Nazz,” gives a sense of how his Lordship cooked with words:

“Now lookit here all you cats and kitties out there whippin’ and wailin’ and jumpin’ up and down and suckin’ up all that juice and pattin’ each other on the back and hippin’ each other who the greatest cat in the world is. Mr. Malenkoff, Mr. Dalenkoff, Mr. Eisenhower, Mr. Woozinweezin, Mr. Wyzinwoozin. Mr. Woodhill, Mr. Beechhill and Mr. Churchill and all them hills gonna get you straight! And if they can’t get you straight, they know a cat that knows a cat that’ll straighten you. But I’m gonna put a cat on you was the coolest, grooviest, sweetest, wailingest, strongest, swinginest cat that ever stomped on this jumpin’ green sphere. And they call this hyar cat … the Nazz.”

“It’s a fuuny thing with Buckley,” Trager says near the end of our conversation. “No matter what word you use to describe him, it fits, but it doesn’t fit. I think of it like performance quantum mechanics in a way. If you look for the wave you’re going to see the wave. If you look for the particle, you’re going to see the particle. If you look for the stand-up comedian, you’re going to hear the one-liner. If you look for the visionary, you’re going to hear the grand message. If you look for the mystic, the healer, you’re going to hear the evangelist. And that’s a testimony to his power and genius — they all apply.”

The glorious Cockettes, the florid and fluorescent LSD-fueled drag review that briefly lit up San Francisco, and excited the media as far away as Paris, 30 some years ago were onstage performing one of their live shows. It might have been “Journey to the Center of Uranus” or “Tinsel Tarts in a Hot Coma” or any number of other wacky, apolitical extravaganzas — Rodgers & Hammerstein gone terribly, terribly wrong. Whatever it was, it looked like Kabuki collaboratively produced by Busby Berkeley, Dr. Seuss and Federico Fellini, generously seasoned with Carmen Miranda. As John Waters has described the scene, “It was complete sexual anarchy, which is always a wonderful thing.”

I had a beat-up Nikon F hanging around my neck when poet Allen Ginsberg, obviously stoned out of his gourd, walked up, pointed at the camera and said, “Delicious! Take many, many, many pictures.” I did, too, but I’ll be damned if I know what happened to them. I’ve always regretted losing those photos, but my regret has been mollified by the recent release of “The Cockettes,” a new feature documentary. It airs Friday, June 21, on the Sundance channel and has opened, or soon will, in theaters across the country. It’s also showing at film festivals around the world.

“The Cockettes” is a curious celluloid time capsule that succeeds in a way that few films have at accurately capturing the spirit and riotous acting-out — sexual and otherwise — that typified the most frequently disparaged and caricatured decade of the 20th century: the ’60s. But then the Cockettes would be nearly impossible to caricature — they aspired to cartoonishness and, to their own surprise, reached that sparkling mountaintop, and even stayed there awhile.

The film’s directors, David Weissman and Bill Weber, who spent four years putting the documentary together, describe the Cockettes as “the last hurrah of the Haight-Ashbury at its best.” It’s an interesting distinction because, contrary to so much of what’s been written or filmed about those times, there was indeed a “best,” though most of the lightheartedness, exhilaration and artistic experimentation had been replaced by hard drugs, hard times and bad vibes before the Cockettes first shimmered into existence in 1969.

That may be one of the reasons they shone so brightly: The Haight and the impossibly naive dream of hippiedom were crumbling, but the Cockettes still exuded the optimism, playfulness, sexiness and theatricality of a subculture that slipped away almost as soon as it was born. It was a time, too, when the dark specter of AIDS was still more than a decade in the future and sexual abandon seemed to be consequence-free.

The Cockettes were certainly into sex, drugs, excess and self-indulgence, as creative communities often are, but Weissman and Weber’s film goes behind the glitter and eye shadow and finds that there was something more substantial to the group as well. In addition to being intoxicatingly funny, they succeeded at forming a community of sexual renegades that was focused on new ideas at least as much as it was on sex, maybe more so.

As Weissman put it when we first spoke nearly two years ago while the film was still in production, “This was not about female impersonation. This was what came to be known as ‘gender-fuck.’ There had never been bearded hippie drag queens before.” Underneath the hedonism and circus sideshow frivolity the Cockettes shared an interest in pushing the parameters of sexuality, social acceptance and theater about as far as they could be pushed — they were aggressively messing with cultural presumptions and having a hell of a good time doing it.

Fayette Hauser, one of the original Cockettes, who appears frequently in the film, said of those times, “We were living in a parallel universe of myth, fantasy, self-exploration and high drag. What mattered was enlightenment. A new idea was the valued currency. We treated each other like gods and so we became gods. This acid-induced, profoundly honed persona was what we saw in each other … In our minds, we lived more fully, loved more deeply and dressed more beautifully than anyone else in the world. We were divas of the highest order and everyone wanted to be a Cockette.”

It would have been easy to make “The Cockettes” little more than an exercise in nostalgia, but instead it’s a highly entertaining act of counterculture archaeology; what Weissman and Weber went through to dig up performance footage, still photos and former Cockettes is worthy of another documentary. Some Cockettes just couldn’t be found. “There was one in particular that we were dying to find,” Weissman says, “who I looked for literally for three and a half years, who we never were able to find, then she miraculously reappeared just a few weeks ago — that was Harlow. Harlow was a ’60s fixture in San Francisco not just as a Cockette, but also as a member of the Plaster Casters. There were so many people who were dying to find out what happened to Harlow, Peter Coyote had contacted us to say, ‘Do you know where Harlow is?’ And Chet Helms from the Family Dog asked, ‘Where’s Harlow?’ Turns out she’s been living out in the country, in Southern California, for a long time.”

“How far have the Cockettes drifted?” I ask Weissman. “Who among them has the least Cockettish life today?”

“Most of them live fairly quiet lives,” he says. “Most are fairly marginal financially, nobody’s really become a yuppie in any way. In their hearts, they’re all still Cockettes.” And several, including the troupe’s founder, Hibiscus, died of AIDs.

In conjunction with the San Francisco screening, Weissman and Weber have curated an exhibition of original show posters and documentary photographs at the city’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. I happened to be walking through the exhibit when Weissman, Harlow, another Cockette named Rumi and San Francisco photographer Robert Altman showed up to see the photos, many of which Altman took.

Altman was chief photographer at Rolling Stone from 1969 to 1971 and continues to work as a photographer and Web designer in San Francisco. When the Cockettes were at their peak, he was assigned by Rags, an alternative fashion magazine of the time, to do photos to accompany an article about the troupe by Mary Peacock. “I spent about four days living with the Cockettes,” Altman told me, “over at their commune. I wouldn’t call it bedlam, but it was certainly nonstop activity … Hibiscus had come along and drew all these people to him … he had a sense of fun about being gay: ‘Not only is it OK to be gay and be out of the closet, but we can sing and dance about it and put on a show about it.’”

Weissman and Weber were determined that their film not be simply a glorified home movie, a cinematic scrapbook of hippie memories. “Bill and I struggled all through making the film,” Weissman says. “We wanted to make a movie that was not a nostalgia piece about something that happened once, but was about possibilities that are timeless — a movie that could serve as a reminder of how important it is when you’re young to be a rebel, to ask questions and to have fun. To seek community and not be totally driven by career and money.”

Nor were Weissman and Weber hoping to bring about some kind of resurrection. “I think that individual eras can’t and shouldn’t be re-created,” Weissman says. “Each era has potential for its own appropriate style of art and rebellion. Things have to come out of their own moments and yet they can also be informed by history. Certainly the Cockettes were very informed by the 1920s and the ’30s aesthetically — but they were also completely a reflection of their time much the way Burning Man is a reflection of the era it came out of.”

In recent years, the success of films like “Priscilla Queen of the Desert,” “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” and “Paris Is Burning” have brought gender-bending cinema to a mainstream audience. Whether “The Cockettes” can also reach that audience, as Weissman hopes, remains to be seen. He’s pushing for it to be viewed as a movie that will have appeal beyond gay filmgoers. “I think a lot of people have assumed that this movie is just another drag queen movie,” he says, “but it’s had huge appeal for people who are interested in both the counterculture of the era and countercultures generally. I never saw it particularly in terms of gay things. None of these people came out of the gay movement per se, they came out of acid, they came out of Haight-Ashbury. There are a bunch of straight guys in dresses in a lot of our pictures, a bunch of them.” As Hauser puts it in the film, “People were allowed to live at the end of their imaginations.”

The Cockettes’ trajectory was a relatively short one. They came together in 1969 and it was all over by 1972, their collapse helped along by money disputes and a disastrous New York debut; their act just didn’t work out of context. The East and West countercultures may have had a desire for sexual theatrics in common, but they didn’t speak each other’s language. The New York catastrophe is seen in “The Cockettes” along with its polar opposite: footage of some of their rollickingly good San Francisco performances, as well as clips from their film, an orgiastic send-up of Richard Nixon’s daughter’s marriage called “Tricia’s Wedding,” and the San Francisco arrival of the divine Divine for several guest appearances with the group.

Not surprisingly, Weissman and Weber’s film has engendered plenty of strong reaction. “We’ve had a lot of powerful, personal testimony,” Weissman says. “A woman came up to us at Sundance who said that she had always hung out with the Diggers in the Haight. And she said to me, ‘It’s just become so hard to talk about that time period, because people just think, Oh, hippies, big fuckin’ deal. This is the first thing I’ve ever seen that really captures the complexity and exuberance of what that period felt like.’”

Seeing “The Cockettes” today is an odd bit of time travel to an era when sex, how we saw it, how we talked about it and what it meant to us seems eons away from the present. Despite the hippie revolution that was centered in San Francisco, there was still a great deal of societal naiveté about sex, and gay liberation was still very much in its infancy, which is perhaps why there continues to be something very refreshing about the Cockettes, their spirit and sense of humor.

After the show that night, as I walked out of the Pagoda Palace, the pocket of my Army field jacket stuffed with film canisters headed for oblivion, I spotted Ginsberg talking with a small group of people near the curb. Two things about him were different from when I’d seen him earlier: His pen had leaked all over the pocket of his white shirt and he was wearing lipstick.

The book is a pleasantly droll travelogue and reading it may have an unexpected effect, even for those who haven’t inhaled wacky tabacky in decades. After disappearing into a cloud of pot tales for 286 pages, one feels an unmistakable craving — much the same way you work up a powerful thirst after watching a movie in which the characters are constantly sipping martinis, or get hungry after paging through a favorite cookbook.

Like Craig Claiborne describing coq au vin, Preston makes cannabis sound so inviting and transporting: “At the first toke, that strange bodily sense of eagerness and impatience takes hold, a longing for the remembered indolent happiness of being high. The mere taste of it in mouth and lungs brings on the longing. Then comes the payoff — that great whoooooooooosh of feeling uplifted, like some unseen force is tucking its hands under your armpits and whispering, Come fly with me.”

In Preston we have a man who loves his subject so very much he’s willing to circumnavigate the earth in hopes of more visitations from the Great Whoooooooooosh. And he is not disappointed. Yet he doesn’t let the longing and luscious indolence distract him from his mission. He does not, for example, spend 60 pages describing the most amazing leaf he found one day next to a river near a town under a mountain in, uh, umm, never mind, I can’t remember.

On the contrary, “Pot Planet” is fun to read, gallops along and, should you like to embark on such an odyssey yourself, might even serve as a guide. “For much of the research and most of the writing of this book,” Preston tells us (with just the teensiest bit of defensiveness), “I was high on marijuana. Now then — it can’t be that amotivating.” OK, OK, chill, man. Point made: You can type while baked. But here’s the good news: Notwithstanding the occasional preachy passages, you can’t even tell that Preston was stoned when he wrote “Pot Planet,” which is more than you can say for a lot of books.

He begins his sojourn in British Columbia where he goes to be a “marijuana judge at Cannabis Culture magazine’s first ever Cannabis Culture Cup,” a grass-judging get-together — kind of like a wine tasting, but smokier and with much better names. Burgundy, cabernet and chenin blanc are fine as far they go, but they can hardly compete with “Shishkaberry,” “Bubbleberry,” “Sweet Skunk,” “Purple Hempstar,” “Chocolate Thai,” “Highland Oaxaca Gold,” “Northern Lights” and “Texada Time Warp.” The names alone adroitly underscore the qualitative difference between pot and alcohol. Regardless of which way your tastes run, grass is the clear victor in the moniker competition.

“Pot Planet” is an insider’s report, but the noncognoscenti needn’t feel left out. Preston is gently didactic, sometimes peppering his instruction with a fetching aquatic analogy to help us grasp the basics. There are two marijuana species, he explains, indica and sativa. A third species, ruderalis, isn’t worth bothering with unless you’re a strong believer in the placebo effect. Indica and sativa affect you quite differently, he writes: “Smoke a sativa and go for a swim and you’re likely to feel yourself to be a water sprite, splashing on the diamond surface. Smoke an indica, and you’ll feel yourself a shark, with an urge to hold long breaths and descend to the murky depths.”

Speaking of descending to the murky depths, what would drugs be without sex? Exactly. Fortunately, Preston only makes us wait until Page 13 before getting down to it: “Marijuana is one of the few plants (kiwifruit is another) that is either entirely male or entirely female. On most of the world’s plants the female and male sex organs, the pistils and stamens, occur on the same flower.” Unfortunately, that’s one of the hottest sex scenes in the book or we’d have a bestseller on our hands.

Nevertheless, what “Pot Planet” lacks in the slap and tickle department it makes up for by taking the reader on an intoxicated mystery tour that stops in Nepal, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Australia, England, Holland, Switzerland, Spain, Morocco, Canada and the United States. During his stint as a marijuana judge in British Columbia, Preston notices that the conversation resembles “pretentious wine snob chatter,” and learns that pot grower DJ Short has created a chart of basic olfactory categories to help tokers talk like connoisseurs. Short’s categorized aromas include “woody,” “spicy,” “earthen,” “pungent,” “chemical” and “vegetative.” But Short’s chart isn’t as helpful to Preston as a tip one pothead gives him before he’s to depart for Nepal: “If you want to score anywhere in Asia, just find a place where they’re playing Bob Marley music.”

The book is mostly about pot, of course — its availability, its relative strength, the people who merchandise it and the people who try to stop them from doing so all around the globe — but Preston also throws in the occasional odd anecdote that has nothing to do with dope, and those passages are some of the most entertaining. In Katmandu he doesn’t hear Marley, but he does come across Bhawani, “an English teacher at the local college,” a chatty gent with whom he discusses Shakespeare, the meaning of life (Preston says he doesn’t know what it means), “The Great Gatsby” (Preston says the novel’s lesson “might be that money can’t buy happiness”) and Bhawani’s table manners:

“He’s been eating his dhal baat, the rice and bean staple of the Nepal diet, with his right hand. Now that he’s finished he’s pouring water from his glass onto his hand, to clean it, and the water is dribbling into the leftover food on his stainless-steel plate. I’m staring. He’s got bits of uneaten rice and dhal right up to the crotch of his fingers. He sees me staring and stops.

“‘Oh, pardon me. This is rude. We have a superstition that if we wash our hand on the plate like this, it results in trouble. It makes the plate appear like the pot where we vomit when becoming sick.’ He changes the subject. ‘What do you know about Keats? What of his love of Fanny?’”

In Thailand, Preston hears about a less literary fellow who likes to “smoke speed and creep around all night in the rice fields, trying to catch poisonous snakes.” Once he catches them, he puts them in a burlap bag containing marijuana. “‘It mellows the snakes out completely,’” an expat tells him. “‘You can pick them up with your bare hands.’” Uh-huh. You first.

Though Bangkok’s got a rep as Sin City, Preston says it is not “pot-friendly … There are a couple of reggae bars in the alleys off Khao San Road, places with big sloppy amateurish Bob Marley portraits painted on the walls, where you’ll be offered ganja, but in the guesthouses nearby you can buy speed, ecstasy or ketamine easier than pot.” What he does smoke in Bangkok doesn’t pass the whoooooooooosh test: “[I] never experienced the giddy rush, the sudden whoooooooooosh up the mental mountainside that marijuana brings me.”

In Vientiane, Laos, where, at 2 in the afternoon, only “mad dogs and cannabis smokers” go out in the scalding heat, Preston scores two ounces of “powerful but not all that pleasurable” grass for 20,000 Laotian kip — about three American dollars, and later ends up in a restaurant next to the Mekong River where he’s waited on by a transvestite. Another guest asks Preston, “‘Is that a man or a woman?’”

“‘A man who wants to be a woman,’” Preston responds.

“‘How do they make love?’” the Laotian wonders.

“‘Love is a feeling that comes from the heart,’” says the writer. And like marijuana, it knows no boundaries, can’t be successfully legislated. (Bhawani, if you’re reading this, that seems to be the lesson of “Pot Planet.”)

Preston’s book works best when he’s not worrying about converting us to Whooooooshism and we’re just allowed to stumble along with his amusing tale, as he goes from puff to puff, country to country and character to character, a latter-day Margaret Mead smoking out chemical relief. Still, while the pro-pot lobby can be as tedious as the no-pot lobby, as this story unfolds Preston’s promotion of legalization seems by far the more cogent point of view (and he’s certainly not sneaky about it: The book’s last chapter is called “Pot Polemic”). Not surprisingly, given where his sympathies lie, virtually everywhere he goes he comes across rational arguments against cracking down on grass, but Cambodia supplies him with one of the most lucid illustrations of the futility and abject silliness of the war on drugs.

“Until very recently pot was legal in Cambodia,” Preston writes. “It was a drug for old people to smoke in the evenings or use in soups as an appetite enhancer. It was a weed. You could buy it in the market for a dollar a kilo. Thanks to American diplomatic pressure it was made illegal three years ago. And now that it’s illegal it’s worth something. The price is around seventy dollars a kilo in Phnom Penh, which means in three years cannabis has gone from worthless weed to the most profitable crop a farmer can grow. So everyone’s growing it.”

For a laid-back doper, Preston is awfully hard to please. Even when he gets to wide open Amsterdam, where grass and hashish can be legally purchased in coffee shops, and where everyone is so gloriously free that their clogs must be nailed to the floors so they don’t float up in the air, he’s still not satisfied.

In the Dutch city, he writes, “Some coffee shops take the craft of marijuana growing seriously, and do their utmost to supply the best. But, I have to say, even in the better coffee shops, like De Dampkring, or De Rokerij, I felt a sense of disappointment, a letdown. Finally, a place where you can freely buy marijuana, and they’re pushing it at you just like booze or tobacco. Is this what legalization would be like? Would pot become just another consumer product, marketed like any other line of goods in Babylon?”

I’d answer that, but I don’t want to bring the dude down.

TO: Quick Test 5 Marketing Team

RE: Launch of Nico Water & creation of new products

First: You rock. Why? Because getting Nico Water mentioned in the first paragraph of a New York Times piece rocks. Do we care that the article got a little whiney and bogged down in details? No, we do not. Most people are only going to read the first two paragraphs anyway. Important fact: Nico Water name appears seven times in the article. You are branding monsters. (Jan, be sure to send the Times gal a case of Nico. Make it two, in case she likes to share.)

OK. Bad cop time: I don’t want to lose this momentum. I want everybody at the Tuesday meeting to show up with at least five new nicotine product and promotion ideas. Bring me concepts that rock or stay home. And never forget: We’re here to help nicotine addicts with a dietary supplement. Think liquid vitamin with sexy spin — that rocks!

My ideas so far: For people who balk at drinking nicotine, a skin penetrating spray, possibly with anti-aging properties. We hook up with Estee Lauder and invade the cosmetic counter — eye shadow, lip gloss, perfume (Nic at Night, Nicaresse, Nic No. 5; we’ll get Nicole Kidman to endorse). For the guys: Shaving cream. For everybody: Sunscreen. Deodorant. Foot powder. Toothpaste.

Next: Products for a beautiful inside. Health is our primary motive. I see nicotine yogurt, tofu, granola, carrot juice, power bars and, for the gourmands, low-fat aioli. We can spike bee pollen, flax seed and motor into the vitamin mother lode: Nicomins for a healthy buzz and longer life! We can spray vegetables and fruits, stake some territory in the organic section. Don’t forget kiwi.

And let us not forget the orgasmic section. Foreplay: Nico-spiked feminine products, sprays, powders and whatever else goes on down there. And how about a nicotine patch where the sun don’t shine? Yes, pantyliners. For the main event: Condoms are a natural (Nicodoms); performance enhancement a real possibility, with spray for the fellas (Nicolast), maybe lubricants for the gals (NicoGlide, NicoLube). Afterglow: The post-coital cigarette is iconic; a swig of Nico Water could definitely take its place.

Serious product placement should help here: Tom Cruise, Diane Lane, Freddie Prinze Jr., that hot señorita from “Y Tu Mamá También” for the artsy crowd. I want to see these people reaching for a bottle of Nico Water after they’ve finished rolling around like rutting sea lions, all lathered up with their NicoGlide. For ads (saucy banners on Internet dating sites, hot layouts in VF and Vogue?) we could go with a tag line like “After your partner lights your fire, let Nico Water cool your jets.”

Staying naughty for the moment: We’re going to need Nico-drenched indulgences for the high-spending self-destructive crowd. The prize? A Starbucks tie-in. Nicoccino, Nicspresso, Nicofrappe, Nicosoylatte. There isn’t a smoker alive who can drink coffee without a cancer stick. Same goes for the hard stuff. We can inject everything from vodka to single-malt scotches with a Nico chaser. Or how about a Nico mixer (for the Nicopolitan, the apple Nicotini). Sake is a gold mine too: Nikko Sake. (Phil: Your suggestion of a white nicotine powder that the consumer snorts is very hip, but it could give us some image issues down the road. We’ll put that one on the back burner for now.)

Short term: We are slaves to Nico Water promotion. Summer’s coming, let’s get plenty of Nico Water handed out at marathons, cancer walks, biking for Jesus, whatever. Visuals: Clear mountain brooks, birds, wildflower-carpeted meadows. (Somebody call that Butterfly girl who lived in the tree. See if she’ll do an endorsement.) And let’s sponsor a Nico Water swim meet — we’ll fill a pool with the stuff. And for god’s sake, don’t forget wrestling.

It’s your turn on Tuesday. Rock my world.