Writ

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 at his throat – his own paring-knife.

“Wake up, stranger,” came a frightening – or was it frightened? – whisper in his right ear. “I need your silver.”

“I don’t have any,” the cook whispered back. “It’s been a bad week. But if you let me live, I’ll cook you a meal more than worth your time.”

“A meal!” scoffed the would-be thief. “What do I want with a meal? I can make my own meals. What I need is your money. Fetch it now.”

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Writ

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

Writ

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 lumps (smelling faintly of lavender) must be a delightful treat.

Prosatio Silban pondered this mystery as he fed his own buopoth, Onward, a sixth cake of the day and wiped his hands on his faded green apron. It’s a good thing fatberries are ubiquitous, he thought, or I’d be out a useful dray-beast – and a beloved traveling companion.

He scratched Onward behind one ear, told him what a good buopoth he was, and stashed the fatberry-cake bag under his galleywagon’s driver’s bench.

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Life

Hunkerin’

THE PHRASE OF THE DAY — let’s face it, of the hour (or even minute) — is “an abundance of caution.”

As I write this, I am anticipating a shelter-in-place order for my county (Sonoma) to begin today. No telling when it will end, or even if. It may not happen at all.

The mood at the Attinson Digs continues to be stop-and-go watchful. I imagine that’s true for most people in the world right now. As for me, I am delving more intensely into my daily routine (Torah and astronomy study, handwashing, cooking [actually, baking, as the fresh fruit and vegetables have all been picked over by my fellow locusts], loving the cat, handwashing). It seems to help, somehow, either as an escape or a connector. Or both.

The early morning Sonoma streets were largely empty today, but the grocery store parking lots were crowded.

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Crit

First Graf: The Dharma Bums

IN MANY WAYS, THIS 1958 book is better than the earlier On the Road. Kerouac’s signature stream-of-consciousness narrative style is more flowy, and the novel’s lionized centerperson (poet Gary Snyder, or “Japhy Ryder” as tDB calls him) a more noble character than OtR’s Neal Cassady — pardon me, “Dean Moriarty.” The Buddhism as portrayed is sympathetically casual without being didactic, which I suppose is also true of Buddhism itself. The book opens up in Los Angeles, where Kerouac (ahem, “Ray Smith”) is trying to “get the hell out of Dodge…”

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Writ

War Prints (A Prosatio Silban Tale)

(Six printed pages. If you’re new to these tales, here are the preface and introduction. Enjoy.)

THE BROKEN TIRE SOFTENED AND then hardened again under Prosatio Silban’s kneading fingers, but he soon realized that his repairs were little stronger than the god which powered them.

O Tersten, Dispenser of Temporary Redemptions, many thanks for Your assistance, the beefy cook prayed, trying not to wish for a different supplicatee. May a Cold Wall rubber-wright be happy to improve my repair for a pot of something delicious.

He was midway up the Long Path: ten miles of straight pitted road slashed like an old dueling scar up the face of a mile-high sandstone cliff. Mountains pierced the clouds to the northeast and south. On the western horizon, the green hills of the Uulian Commonwell undulated toward him; below him the Hidden River flowed its marshy way to the Rimless Sea. Between the two, the green faded into a tumbled black – wounds of a war which had finished when Prosatio Silban was too young to understand it.

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