The Published Unpublished
(The Upsprung Trap of Pornography)
I’ve always found writing to be an enjoyable past-time escape.
I can’t exactly pin down a specific prompting event that would have gotten me started. I’ll go out on a limb and say sometime in my late teens; some summer course at a local college in order to gain extra credits. Some Language Arts thing. An essay on motorcycles which, other than knowing they existed because I’d seen them, I knew absolutely nothing about.
I do remember I received an ‘A’ on that essay – with a marginal note from the instructor saying: ‘Great observational discernment and fabrication!’ – which I took to mean that, just maybe, I had learned something – that something being a gift for recording my observations. A reliable witness, if you will. Indeed! – that is if you include the obvious downside of it’s holstered, loaded, hair-trigger weapon – fully loaded with brass-bright recall as it’s ammo.
That was some time ago. Over the intervening years I’ve put together roughly sixty-five works of which twenty-five are published on the site you are visiting right here and now. My published body of work will show that I, like many people with the balance of their life behind them, and living these particular times in which we are all involved, leans toward Socio-economics, Geo-Politics, History, Truth, Faith and hopefully, Wisdom.
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Some many years ago it became obvious to me that something darkly untoward had escaped its shameful cage. Some camellian-skinned predator with a taste for societal family values and the chastity of youth. Cursed with some evil genetic instinct toward sensual gluttony; pre-designed to change colors with public tolerance as the entre’ – all the while thirstily anticipating the youngest of us as dessert. So far beyond those curiosity-prompted tree-fort photo’s torn from some dusty magazine discovered under someone’s dad’s basement work bench.
Through study, I could liken the allure of porn to the heated pool of a resort somewhere warm where a breeze animates tall trees and the local language is anything but yours, and it doesn’t really matter because the style of dress is scantily suggestive and the local lingo is visually and silently spoken using the side-long glance and alluring body-language. Where the catch phrase of the day is, ‘Come-On-In-The-Water’s- Fine’. But you’d best have a double-firm grip on the pool-ladder as you repeatedly dip your toe for useful and workable insight, because in this jungle you are the frog and the water is heating to a boil.
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Admittedly, such a study is done less than openly as it meshes poorly with a family situation and with my faith. The why of the study, I’ll admit, might have been some vague, brewing desire to place myself somewhere as a pin on the map of “known and charted writers” by being edgy and brave. But so much for that. Have you looked around lately!?
Today I incinerated my ‘little black book’ of facts and figures in our fire pit along with raked willow twigs and a broken old chair. Nobody really needs to see anymore ‘links and descriptions’ tempting or leading the curious into any trap.
As to marriage? Time, I find, creates embers much more pleasant than the initial flame.
Maurice St. Jean
Long ago to April 16 2024.