SOMETIMES, AND WITHOUT MEANING TO, religious faith can eat itself by blurring the lines between divine desires and human humbuggery. By which is meant, O Patient Reader, that while the Flickering Gods always have a clear idea as to what…
Author: Neal Ross Attinson
Neal Ross Attinson is one of those text-compulsives who feels naked without a keyboard, or at least a a pad and pen. He is unafraid of adverbs, loves astronomy and gastronomy with equally unabashed passion, and lives with/in an eclectic library in Sonoma, California.
Read This (E)Book
THIS IS WHAT COMES FROM puttering about in a small morning with nothing else to do (thanks, PKD, for the reference): “Little-t truths for our and every time; a considerable consideration of considerings.” Pithyisms is, thanks to Smashwords, my second…
Prosatio Silban and the Sacreantal Reflex
IT BEGAN WITH A SIMPLE question: “What is the most challenging place you’ve ever visited?” “The place where I learned not to drink,” Prosatio Silban replied, raising a glass of blue duliac. “But you are drinking now!” pointed out his…
5 Thoughts: How I Spent My College Intuition
1. THEY SAY THAT IF YOU can remember certain events or associated places, it means you were never there; space-time knots whose experience is colored by the hazy circumstances of the experiencer. Case in point: the Neo-Pagan Society of Diablo…
Prosatio Silban and the Forgotten God
IT WAS A DARK AND stormy night, and Prosatio Silban, thoroughly soaked, could feel a watchful gaze upon him as he parked his galleywagon under a crumbling iron roof. He shivered, searching for the source of his unease. But nothing…
Prosatio Silban and the Advertent Appetizer
AND THEN THERE WAS THE time Prosatio Silban sold a meal for a song – literally. The beefy cook had set up his galleywagon in the small, quiet, and mostly indifferent marketplace at the village of Taverner’s Luck, but had…
Prosatio Silban and the Royal Fete
EAST OF THE UULIAN COMMONWELL lies the shaggy, semi-marshy expanse called by Commonwell-folk the Emerald Incessance. Few of those outsiders traverse it without purpose, or dread, or both; its green depths do not long hold even well-known paths, and what…
Words To Bring Back: “Virtual”
– Definition: adj. almost or nearly as described, but not completely or according to strict definition. – Used in a sentence: Though no Popeye, I am a virtual strongman when it comes to eating spinach. – Why: Let’s retake the…
Workman’s Wages (A Prosatio Silban Tale)
ALL GOOD THINGS MUST EVENTUALLY be replaced, though not without some effort or expense – so Prosatio Silban discovered on a cloudy summer’s day in stony-hearted Tirinbar, whose inhabitants were the most reputedly avaricious in the Uulian Commonwell’s Three Cities…
… Each of us sits alone within the cell of our subjective awareness. Now and then we receive cryptic messages from the outside world. Only dimly comprehending what we are doing, we compose responses, which we slip under the door. In this way, we manage to survive, even though we never really know what the hell is happening.”
— John Horgan
Day’s Life (A Prosatio Silban Tale)
IT IS SAID THAT WERE it not for the leather-lunged hawkers of epicurean Pormaris, the sun would not know when to awaken. But whether or not that’s as true as it sounds, the great island-city’s markets are indeed its economic…
Prosatio Silban and the Difficult Patron
FROM THE INEXORABLE RULES OF mercantile interplay comes the inescapable principle: “There’s Always One.” “With what may I please you?” Prosatio Silban asked the stoop-shouldered man sitting down at one of two tables-and-chairs in the lee of the beefy cook’s…