K. Marvin Bruce

I can’t help it.  Inside every man there’s locked a puerile little boy.  The other day I was on the website of the Catholic University of America.  As everyone knows, Catholics have some of the greatest hangups about sexuality in all of Christendom.  Like most universities, however, CUA has to appeal to both genders to make ends meet. In any case, I was looking over the undergraduate programs for a friend and the head picture struck me as impossibly funny.  All the more so because it was totally unintentional.  Over the past few years institutions of higher education have been using plenty of photos of coeds to attract the guys.  That’s just the way it is. In this photo, however, the two women have inscrutable smiles on their faces as one makes the universal “inches” sign with her fingers.  It doesn’t help that there’s a guy sitting right there, not looking their way.  On the blackboard behind, although blurry, is the word “tube....

Confession, they say, is good for the soul.  So I’m over fifty and haven’t broken through to the paid writers’ club.  I write under a pseudonym.  I love taboo topics. To be a writer, I’m told, you have to get out and promote your stuff.  I wonder how you do that with a false identity.  Mine is a matter of necessity.  Although I’m half-a-century on, I have family members way ahead of me.  They don’t know what I do with my free time. My family tend to be conservative Christians.  There are some words I’ve never heard uttered in my humble homestead.  Words that, if you want to be a realistic writer, you’ve got to use.  Not to mention the ideas that the Bible strictly forbids. I live in my head.  My daily existence is unremarkable.  That’s one reason that I write.  The other day I was reading about some people, in real life, stranded in an isolated location.  They had to do what they could to survive.  A...