Rick Marriner

Seven hundred yen at the garden gate sets pocket a’jingling, giving casual passersby a moment of #doubt about the worth of ambling among mossy stone relics and cedar stands. I prefer the fee: it limits the flow to those willing to choose this path. #vss365

Gene Wolfe makes a stray detail essential 200 pages later. Neal Stephenson builds vast intellectual machines, with digressions as working parts. Adrian Tchaikovsky lets biology, society and technology reshape one another, then follows the consequences. I like ideas that unfold over time and pages.

When God finally answered, by incessant text message no less, Felix had to finally ask him to stop. Yeesh! Forty years of prayer, and only now did it occur to him that God had been listening between prayers too. He caught himself wishing God #dead, then felt regret before he could help it. #vss365

The warship A Small Administrative Error offered liberation or lunch. ‘What’s the #delta?’ asked the governor. ‘Lunch takes longer. Your liberation was approved while you read the menu.’ #vss365 Tribute for Iain M. Banks, who gave the machines wit and us something space operatic to think about.

“Welcome to Orbital Ring 2, folks! I’m June, your Fun Director while you’re here with us. I #reckon y’all are hungry.” “Reckon?” Bobby whispered. “Six grand, she’s guessing.” “Behave, Robert,” Ruth said. “I want certainty.” “You married me after three dates.” “You had rent control.” #vss365 #scifi

“‘Safe if used as directed.’ Bobby, it says it right on the packaging.” “‘May cause confusion.’ Ruth; baby, we’re eighty-four.” “So?” “I can’t see the Bronx anymore. We paid six grand for a shuttle to an orbital ring, and neither of us remembers why.” “The buffet is nice, Bobby.” “Fine. Gimme two.”

I was temporarily out of portable fiction. A walk in this sweater weather town with only my phone stuck in my trouser pocket could not suffice. A ramble of purchased paperbacks later and I’m happily parked on a bench in my floppy hooded sweater opening to page one. #peace

Went into a Port Washington,NY bookshop to idle away an hour while Keira had her nails done. Came out with five Philip K. Dick novels, apparently a course of PKD. This is the only reasonable response to temporary solitude; paranoia, alternate realities and a mild theological crisis. #bookstore

I’ve now read a baker’s half-dozen (that’s seven, right?) of Tchaikovsky (see books, not ballets). His apparent recurring positions: Slavery: against. Bullies: likewise. Tidy endings: keen. Being human: negotiable. You can find him yourself lurking conveniently at @aptshadow.bsky.social.

The wave rises, cresting at twenty minutes; known and predictable. Forty-five hours into the ninety-six-hour fast; leaving only water and modest electrolytes as inputs, the body’s systems have shifted a day ago to clean-up and repair. This last #hunger response is now passing, as they do. #vss365

My heart checkup was hmm… “not great.” Dying used to be far off. My academy roommate has cancer. But I’ve become accustomed to the thought of the end. Maybe soon; maybe in years. I am not addicted to completion (anymore). I’ve never arrived to the end of my to-do list, not in 52 years.

The problem is in estimating the probabilities of causation. For instance : He stayed twenty minutes longer. She hurt, say, seven percent less. The problem (apart from being the sort of people who’d quantify this) is how much less she’d have hurt had he stayed ten.

Abigail laughs easily and has cried with me, her hand on my shoulder. She feels deeply and writes from a mysterious spirit inside her, tapping wisdom far beyond her age. She’s the baby of this large, complicated family, another in a long lineage of complicated, curious and interesting souls.

@aptshadow.bsky.social read by @emmanewman.bsky.social omg Yes please! In queue for right after I finish reading about Rex, Honey and Bees! 🐝 (Vestigial tail nub wags)

Teton Mountains 2026 The lakes went dark under the weather. The woods smelled of pine and wet earth. Everything felt washed clean. After weeks of wildfire haze across the West, it was good to see mountains with sharp edges again. Better still to walk among them.

A non-compete is a strange country: borders without geography, time enforced as distance. Add smoke and heat, and the world contracts to books, weights, miles indoors. Fall is already moving toward us. I refuse to meet it as the same man who began waiting. #prosepoetry #writingcommunity

Wildfire smoke erased the mountains, so I stopped asking the day to become another day. Inside, a book opened, a treadmill turned, and one green thought began to #sprout in the hours I had mistaken for delay. #vss365 #writingcommunity

Wildfires. I wake into their breath. Even Glacier National Park, timeless and immense, wears a veil of smoke and haze, waiting patiently for the wind to remember its way home.

Shelly’s chair faces the garden, not the world. Paint fades. Wood weathers. Seasons do their quiet work. Some places aren’t meant to impress anyone. They’re simply where a good life sits for a while, coffee cooling beside the morning.

The library returned books their readers had not finished. Some arrived with sentences underlined in a handwriting no one recognized. By Monday, every borrower had received the same final chapter. No one opened it. They had already started behaving differently. #microfiction #MicroMonday #BookSky

books crowd every shelf unread spines schedule futures death keeps no waitlist #senryu #micropoetry #writingcommunity #BookSky

To #tend a thing is to accept that care leaves no receipt. The root may deepen or rot. The fever may break for reasons that exclude you. Still, the hand returns with water, embarrassed by its hope and unable to put it down. #vss365 #writingcommunity

Roslyn was built to feed coal into the Northern Pacific, then spent decades surviving the industry's exit. Yesterday we rode its hills on batteries. Energy transitions sound cleaner in policy papers than in towns that keep the old shafts underfoot. #RoslynWA #Energy

A Killdeer (Charadrius vociferus) pauses at Lake Yellowstone’s edge, twin black bands bright against its white breast. The Canon R5 with 70–200mm caught the watchful eye, wind-ruffled feathers, and blue water fading softly behind it. #birdoftheday

E-bikes turn hills into coverage. Hiking turns them into evidence. In Roslyn, both routes #descend through the same mining history. Speed changes how much ground you see; slowness changes what counts as ground. #vss365 #writingcommunity

Fun to see @aptshadow.bsky.social on the shelf at Books & Bites in Roslyn, Washington. Small book stores with speakeasy’s in the cellar are my new favorite places to be on holiday! #bookstores

Glossolalia is not the brain’s machine code. It borrows the speaker’s phonology and lacks stable shared syntax. Stephenson’s better insight is lower-level: ideas can bypass analysis by arriving through rhythm, trust, fear, hope, repetition, and belonging. #BookSky #Cognition

Rational and irrational are poor coordinates for religion. Better axes are text versus embodiment, hierarchy versus charisma, routine instruction versus intense revelation. Pentecostalism occupies both ends at once. That is why the binary fails and the movement scales. #ReligiousStudies

Stephenson wants Pentecostalism to be the irrational layer breaking through. History ruins the diagram: Bible study, doctrinal formulas, newspapers, rail lines, missionaries, credentialing systems. Ecstasy, yes, but with distribution logistics. #BookSky #ReligiousStudies

Snow Crash offers a rude theory of civilization: mutual incomprehension may be the bug that keeps one bad idea from achieving root access to the species. Not praise for walls. A warning that perfect communication creates perfect attack surfaces. #BookSky #ScienceFiction

smart ape builds a wall meme knocks using his own voice ape invites it in #senryu #micropoetry #writingcommunity #SnowCrash

Intelligence can #ascend without taking the rest of the animal with it. Snow Crash understands the problem: every brilliant cortex still rents basement space to a host eager for the next contagious certainty. #vss365 #writingcommunity

trending gods return algorithm rows the ship homer checks metrics #senryu #micropoetry #writingcommunity #TheOdyssey

Odysseus blamed gods, monsters, and a very patient narrator. We have weather apps, wildfire maps, and three state DOTs. Same journey, different bureaucracy. The #shift is that now the sirens send push notifications. #vss365 #writingcommunity

Privilege once meant believing weather was scenery. This summer it means an Airstream, enough fuel to keep moving, and the discovery that mobility does not equal escape. Houston heat followed us north; wildfire smoke entered the race forecast. #ClimateChange

Physical Commodity Traders who did NOT come up to the front office via Operations sometimes drift into the easy misconception that “logistics” is code for merely a slower form of immediate obedience. Go ahead, piss off your Ops Team and let me know how long things go well for you. #respectOps

smoke map on my phone months of training become smoke a question of lungs #senryu #micropoetry #writingcommunity #running

We took the northern #road to escape Houston heat. Washington was hotter. Now I check smoke maps before a mountain marathon. Climate change was easier to discuss when it still sounded like someone else's weather. #vss365 #writingcommunity

four days to the race tapering teaches the legs distrust of stillness #senryu #micropoetry #writingcommunity #running

Bings darken as they ripen. Rainiers blush and bruise. Same species, different evidence. Under the same #tailwind, damage disappears into one skin and shows brown against the other. #vss365 #writingcommunity

Five days from the marathon, I take each trail #turn with the confidence of a man who has mistaken preparation for control. My legs know better. They have stopped correcting me. #vss365 #writingcommunity

Snow Crash gave citizenship to franchises. We laughed because the uniforms had logos. Thirty-four years later, my phone knows which republic I serve before I do. The border is a password. The flag renews monthly. #BookSky #ScienceFiction

Trader by trade, writer by repair. I spent years learning what a barrel was worth and longer pretending that answered what work was for. I write each day because the man who avoided it has finally run out of exits. #writingcommunity

three quiet agents one prompt remembers them all only one wakes up #senryu #micropoetry #writingcommunity #AI

Every trail run begins with the same small lie: I can #depart from the man who woke up tired, doubtful, and ten days from a marathon. The first hill corrects the record. I am still him. He is simply moving. #vss365 #writingcommunity

eight days without stores shopping carts sound like thunder mountains keep their names #senryu #micropoetry #writingcommunity #camping

At the far wall, the body I meant to #conquer was already waiting. It had my lungs, my clock, my certainty about how many laps remained. We touched together. Only one of us turned. #vss365 #writingcommunity

bison in the lane traffic remembers patience without a meeting #senryu #micropoetry #writingcommunity #Yellowstone