Three things: – My beats: fire, cops, breaking news, and meetings as needed.– I work with some freakishly smart, amazingly creative people; two of whom I have now dueled with a lightsaber.– The Game hasn’t changed much — get it…
Author: Neal Ross Attinson
Neal Ross Attinson is one of those writing-compulsives who feels naked without a keyboard, or at least a a pad and pencil. He is unafraid of adverbs, and lives with an animal companion and eclectic library in Sonoma, California.
And so, to work.
It was four-and-a-half months since I was laid off from the sasonal office-manager position at a local nursery, and longer still since I worked in my official profession, when I picked up the phone to call Sonoma Valley’s newest newspaper.…
Thump, Flutter, Gak
I looked up from the computer, wondering about the “thump.” Then I saw the robin on the patio — fluttering wings outspread, struggling to get up. Outside, through the gate, into the side-yard. “Are you okay?” I asked reflexively. She…
Natural Machines
A number of years ago, I got into a cocktail-party argument (or its boho-pomo equivalent, since we were in San Francisco in the 1980s) with someone who decried the “unnaturalness” of spaceflight. Her thesis, IIRC, was that humans were somehow…
Exploring Mind
WHAT DIFFERENTIATES THE EXPLORER FROM other humans is his answer to the following question: “If you could experience something that no one else ever had, but the cost was your own life, would it be worth it?”
Hiding the Hidden
Last week, we read in Parsha Beshallach about the departure from Egypt (Heb. “Mitzrayim”, or “narrows,” which the mystical tradition identifies with the forces of constraint and bad-habitry). Among the other nifty details is this one, from Exodus 13:21: “And…
Torah Nerds, Unite!
Some people say that the Torah can only be meaningful if the events depicted therein are true. In other words, if 600,000 people didn’t march through the Sinai Peninsula; if the plagues were just a mythologization of natural disasters; if…
Mystic Fables for Religious Misfits ™
Here’s something I’m working on which has not yet been published. The working title is Around the Rimless Sea: Mystic Fables for Religious Misfits; each features a mercenary cook and former holyman named Prosatio Silban. This excerpt is from one…
Working Definition
God 1 adv. the Omnipresent Center SEE Copenhagen interpretation, quantum consciousness 2 v. The Connector of Space and Sustainer of Time; One, Alive, and Intent 3 n domesticated primates’ ultimate attribution of excuse, tragedy, success or inspiration
Stephen3PO
The writers’ strike wears on, but our nerves don’t thanks to those daring and resourceful folks at Operation Facestrong. Long may it wave.
“I Seen It Too!”
WAITING FOR THE GRATEFUL DEAD with Sputnik at the Shoreline, c. 1989ish, one of us began the following conversation: “For example, that guy over there with the ‘I Climbed Lassen’ T-shirt.” “Yeah.” “Well, he obviously wants everyone to think that…
Pithyism #0
The future is an open hand; the past is a closed hand. What’s in between?