(Five printed pages. If you’re new to these tales, here are the preface and introduction. Enjoy!) NIGHT, AND THE CLEAN SMELL of salt. Slap of waves and wind-flapped canvas. Creak of leaping timbers. An urgent overhead call, and a soft…
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.
5 Thoughts: Pattern Matching
1. THERE ARE TWO TORAH STORIES which have troubled me for some time. 2. The first is about the giving of the Ten Statements (AKA the “Ten Commandments,” but “statements” is closer to the actual Hebrew). What should have been…
Prosatio Silban and the Sovereign Cure
(Five-and-a-half printed pages, inspired by our current situation. If you’re new to these tales, here are the preface and introduction. Enjoy!) THEY SAY, SOMETIMES, THAT THE cure is worse than the disease. But to Prosatio Silban’s way of thinking, that…
365 Names: God*
GOD* came about after I saw someone refer in like manner to the current president (at this writing, in early December 2019) and some sports figures. Although it’s meant to indicate someone whose office or standing is shot through with…
Road Bound (A Prosatio Silban Tale)
(Three-and-a-half printed pages. If you’re new to these tales, here are the preface and introduction.) MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN ABOUT the quaint and lumbering buopoths native to the Exilic Lands and other curious places – but to this day, little…
Minute Mitzvah: Play Nice
Today: Don’t shame anyone. Explanation: When you make someone feel painfully self-conscious, you destroy a little piece of the world — and not only for them. Your own soul / psyche / personality suffers as well. In today’s hyperpartisan social…
Prosatio Silban and the Anxious Drummer
(Two printed pages. If you’re new to these tales, here are the preface and introduction. Enjoy.) NOT FOR NOTHING HAD PROSATIO Silban parked his galleywagon outside cosmopolitan Soharis’ main military barracks. Soldiers are a notoriously hungry lot, and use any…
“…And Just Exactly What Is A ‘Buopoth?'”
“MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN ABOUT the quaint and lumbering buopoths native to the Exilic Lands and other curious places – but to this day, little remains understood about the shy beasts beyond the proverb that ‘they will haul all day…
Cook’s Honor (A Prosatio Silban Tale)
(Three-and-a-quarter printed pages. If you’re new to these tales, here are the preface and introduction.) THE FIRST CLUE PROSATIO SILBAN had to the midnight intruder was the sound of someone rifling through his galleywagon pantry. The second was the paring-knife…
Plague Haiku
THE PAIN IN MY CHEST Is growing by the hour. I hope it’s heartburn.
My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.”
— John Dominic Crossan
Prosatio Silban and the Last Meal
(Three printed pages. If you’re new to these tales, here are the preface and introduction.) ASIDE FROM BUOPOTHS, NO ONE knows exactly what a fatberry-cake tastes like. But measuring by how many the quaint lumbering beasts eat, the greasy maroon…