I already left a comment above, but I'm posting this longer one (that I'd left in the FB group) here, too: Reading all these comments make me realize how well loved he was, but how his warmth and quirkiness touched so many. How they too experienced the magic of Sascha's presence and conversation. I can recall the first time I met him. I was at my friends apartment, and he was telling me about his new roommate who worked 15-hour days at some evil tech giant and hadn't surfaced from his room in days. A few minutes later, the roommate's door suddenly opens and this fellow with hair so unruly that it made Albert Einstein look like Vidal Sassoon walks into the kitchen and greets me with an affable "hello." Maybe it was something about the playful sparkle in his eyes or simply the way he zipped about the small apartment, but I was instantly drawn to him. Within minutes, we were talking about the nature of consciousness and how it relates to time--and possibly creates it. This was San Jose, pre-social media, so to find someone who thought at this level and did so in a totally non-pretentious way (he actually cared about the idea itself) was totally refreshing. I'm not sure what happened the rest of the night, but we left the space tie continuum behind at some point and I believe we ended the night banging out Hey Jude on his rental piano, my friend standing in the background wondering what the heck had just been birthed. All the times after when we hung out were like that, the conversation taking on a life itself, ending up somewhere totally unexpected--but always exhilarating (a trenchant take on the political scene washed down with a Big Lebowski reference.) Even after not seeing Sascha for years, it was so easy to slip back into that conversational zone, the endless zany riffing on whatever happened to bubble to the surface. I'll miss that--those playful, silly, heady, profound, whimsical...oh, to heck with the adjectives--those oh-so-Sascha conversations.
