discovery of a lifetime

I now, officially, declare and reveal the existence of my very first guru...sensei...mentor. He doesn't know this fact, and I didn't ask permission. This is more like a stalker thing. I have made him my own, like those nutty psychos who pin hundreds of crush-object photos on their basement bulletin boards.

I've been unconsciously searching for this person my whole life. Now that I've found him, I ain't letting go. He might end up having to take out a restraining order against me. I already know that I will violate any such instruments of control.

Kris Saknussemm, an author whose current novel is titled Private Midnight, is a friend of mine on Facebook. I have become addicted like a junkie to some things he posts there, and I would be his flunky if he asked me. These short word effusions, usually delivered in the witching hour, are like extra hyped-up verbal meth: the effect is immediate and direct. My brain is set instantly abuzz, and it vibrates long after reading.

I get the uncanny, stalker-y sense that these single paragraphs have been dispensed on the zany winds just for me. I'm beginning to suspect that no one else can even see them there as a Facebook post. Or if they see anything, all the letters are magically rearranged: they're just reading something ordinary and ho-hum...only am I wearing the special invisible 4-D glasses that unscrambles the code...only can I see these oracular marvels!

These three-or-four-sentence wonders are koans that make me smile and make my brain stop thinking. But they are extra-special koans: I'm brought into alignment with the porcupine stars of an unknown galaxy in an unsuspected dimension. Kris is (he must be) channeling the voice and mind of God's loony half-brother who is in charge of that hypnagogic world.

Or maybe these are dream fragments, pieces of a super-reality digested through his mind and oozed out to us as revelations.

Kris has produced what I think is the finest sentence in the English language. It describes a childhood moment of inspiration, after watching an episode of that old TV series The Time Tunnel...you know...the show with the slowly turning, black-and-white corridor, through which intrepid (and physics-shrugging-off) adventurers jogged down and into goofy times:

I remember wrapping myself up in a sheet and hurling myself down the stairs thinking I might get back to Gettysburg.

......I will speak softly now and let that sentence hover in mid-air, let it have a few holy moments to seep into your consciousness.

And below is a recent post, an example of those compressed exotic adventures leaving my soul stunned. It makes me as giddy as a monkey walking through space untethered to the banana-shaped mothership:

Watching the old men betting on a cricket fight in Guangzhou. Two female students I knew float by in an enormous tea cup, the kind with the dragons on it that change color when you pour in the hot water. It looks strangely innocent in the sludge of the Pearl River amongst the barges and industrial boats.