i have recently reunited myself with my personal guru...like, really...i have absolutely no ambition to say that this guru is the guru for all...but certainly for me...and i really don’t fancy idolizing anything, human or not...but the words of the particular author i refer to dampen the places in my cerebrum that have grown so dry that they were frighteningly close to cracking...likewise, the core of my being seems to ooze with delight with every passing sentence...

i discovered this writer when i was about thirteen or fourteen, and i floated away from my small town freakishness on his lullabies of babies with lightening eyes, flea circuses, obscenely long hitchhiker thumbs and description after description of objects that were less objectified than the way humans tend to describe other humans...the philosophical interludes (really long tangents, actually) filled every void that i felt was forming in the absence of like-minded peers...in other words, this was the way that i came of age...

...now, i have returned, after a hiatus of many years...

...and, wow, get ready for my second coming...

here is a taste:

“Soul is not even that Crackerjack prize that God and Satan scuffle over after the worms have all licked our bones. That’s why, when we ponder – as sooner or later each of us must – exactly what we ought to be doing about our soul, religion is the wrong, if conventional, place to turn. Religion is little more that a transaction in which troubled people trade their souls for temporary and wholly illusionary psychological comfort – the old give-it-up-in-order-to-save-it routine. Religions lead us to believe that the soul is the ultimate family jewel and that in return for our mindless obedience, they can secure it for us in their vaults, or at least insure it against fire and theft. They are mistaken.”

[Tom Robbins, “Villa Incognito” (2003)]