The kind you’re born with, the kind you choose, the kind that teach Catholic school
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Norm Moser is a writer who lives in Berkeley, California. His most recent collection of fiction is El Grito del Norte and Other Stories (Illuminations Press, 2110 9th Street, Apt. B, Berkeley, California 94710).
It’s not the mere existence of pornography that troubles me. We’ve always had it. It’s the amount of it that’s the problem. Never before, to my knowledge, has the world had so very much printed and cinematic pornography. It will not go away by itself, so it cannot be ignored.
I live now like a deposed king, which is to say, with a slight air of once-proud nobility I cling to as I cling to the rags and tatters of my existence because it’s all I’ve got left.
It is a large, very old, grey-green house with brown shutters, a long porch in front with a portion of it screened in. There is no lawn to speak of. But there is a yard with tall grasses waving sensuously to passersby and there are some trees, fruit trees perhaps, and in the back, one suspects there are animals and a rather large garden which comes right up to fences on both sides of the house.
The happy people with big hips and watery lips pulled up by the river and sat down, spent. There trout bubbled at them, trees shaded and grass waved. It was time for a smoke. They sat in a circle, passed the smoke around.
The usual assumption about power is that there is only one kind — physical. Spiritual power exists too, though the two are not entirely unrelated, in my experience anyway. I don’t mean only the kind of spiritual power you find in church, synagogue or temple. Spiritual power sometimes manifests itself mysteriously in the arts, in the streets, in the schools, and occasionally in politics or the martial arts as well.