All My Gurus Are Dead

was my first thought of note this morning, still half-asleep as hot water scalded my back and shoulders. I composed an entire thousand-word blog post in those sixty seconds that followed, but life intervened, and all I can remember is that odd little title.

All my life I searched for a guru. Still do, I guess, though not with the passion of a twenty-year-old or the desperation of a forty-year-old. Now I’m just pessimistically complacent, and if the search is ever to be successful, well, it will actualize itself in its own terms and in its own time.

All my gurus are dead:

Douglas Adams Thomas Aquinas Isaac Asimov Augustine Ludwig van Beethoven Jorge Luis Borges Ray Bradbury Robert Browning Buddha Lord Byron Philip K Dick Antonin Dvorak Albert Einstein Richard Feynman Cary Grant Ray Harryhausen Joseph Haydn Jimi Hendrix Homer John Keats Soren Kierkegaard Stanislaw Lem Ignatius Loyola John Milton Isaac Newton Plato Frederik Pohl Ronald Reagan Francis de Sales William Shakespeare Percy Bysshe Shelley Jean Sibelius Socrates Alfred Lord Tennyson John Ronald Reuel Tolkien Lao Tzu Virgil Richard Wagner John Wayne Colin Wilson Roger Zelazny ...

to toss out some proper nouns upon the mountain peak.

All my gurus are dead.


[Bongo drums fade out; End histrionic teenage angst rant]

[Trust me, it sounded better in the shower.]