Blogging Phenomenon

projection of
The Blogging Phenomenon:
An Overview and Theoretical Consideration by James M. Branum

What Are You Trying to Say?

Some of the best inventions of 2002 had to do with translating. The Braille Glove turns sign language into text for deaf people, the Dog Translator lets people know what dogs mean in English when they bark, and the Infoscope helps in translating signs and posters in other languages into their equivalents in English. These may only be prototypes at the moment, but technology is improving all the time despite fears that we may meet with the wrath of God for overstepping our bounds.

The One After the 8:12

Overweight, balding, a bearded father is standing at the bus stop with two young daughters, perhaps seven- and eight-year-olds, both extremely thin and waiflike, blond. The seven-year old stares unmovingly at a woman who is shabbily dressed, looking homeless, who is wiping a window on the lobby door of an apartment building. The child stares and stares at the woman while the other sister is oblivious to her surroundings, skipping in place while holding daddy’s hand. As the bus pulls in to the stop, the seven-year old lightly punches her father in his big soft stomach and then hugs his waist. He disentangles himself from them as he leads them to the bus doors. The girl looks back for the woman, but does not see her.
On the bus, there are five other parents taking their five children to school. The windows having been left opened, allow bits of conversation to be heard on the street. The parents have kid names such as Jody and Buffy. The kids have adult names like Laura and Fergus. Also their conversations reflect their names. The parents’ interests seem innocuous, while the children appear to be speaking of serious subjects. And these children seem younger than both the girls who just boarded.
As the bus finally pulls away, the woman, belying her appearance, stands with a container of steaming coffee from Starbuck's. Holding the container with both hands, she watches the bus take off on its uptown route. The school is off of Third Avenue in the thirties. She used to take her own child on the next bus after this one when she was working in midtown a number of years ago. Some situations never change or do but only imperceptively.
Her bus should be coming shortly. More parents and children are gathering, though less than regularly wait for the 8:12.
The coffee has cooled enough to drink but it leaves a terrible aftertaste and so the woman never finishes it. It’s that way with many things. She finds she rarely finishes anything.

Her Turn

Now Eileen gives English lessons to a young couple from Mexico. They both come for the lessons, but only he seems to be improving his English and that only marginally. He’s taking the class to please the wife and keep her occupied. For every fourth or fifth question, she says, “Your turn,” to him, but she pronounces it, joor toorn, with what sounds like a French inflection. Otherwise, she blurts out answers as if oblivious to his presence. They are an attractive couple and would be more so if she would let him get a word in edgewise.
Eileen wonders if the husband, who introduced himself as Paco, but whom his wife insists on calling Francisco Javier, was so quiet before they moved to New York. She is fairly sure she knows whose idea the move was.
The oversized tennis racket-shaped brooch studded with what appears to be diamond chips that the wife frequently wears was instrumental in Eileen's decision to move to Mexico. She has told them she is about to go, any day now.
The wife tells her she "is being, how do you say, improbable?"

The Perfect Game

Eileen's boss was a tennis buff who used to demo every new racket he learned of. He never bought any. He was seeking the perfect 4 ¼ handle. He said he was looking for the perfect game. When he would send her to the tennis store to pick up the new models, he would ask, “Can the person demo-ing designate the tension of the strings?” She always felt a little foolish bringing back the rackets a couple of days later and having to tell the salesman that her boss wasn’t buying them. In the four years she worked for him, she must have repeated these little treks a hundred times and the day she left the company he was not in. He was away on a retreat, probably playing tennis with his old unreliable racket.

Paco and Anilla

His mother says, “Mi amor,” and “Precioso,” on the telephone. At home, she solicited his affection with food and nouns. His father was more likely to ask Paco to fix him a drink and used adjectives such as chingada and de mierda. His brother and sister were differently affected by their parents’ vocalizations. Now with Anilla, he just lets her do all the talking. Much of it is in French or her halting English so none of it stays with him so much as the nouns and adjectives he heard at home.

San Cristobal

Odyssey?

2001 was supposed to be the year we went on a space odyssey, but the biggest event of the year was 9/11.

Missing Notes

"Even though I haven't moved up the corporate ladder, I now and again merit these awards for excellence in various categories. One or two have had a high degree of prestige.
"I was nominated for one four months ago, and it came down to this: My last supervisor, a woman I had had a disastrous affair with, had to sign her approval to the nomination, as it was proposed by my current manager (a woman with whom I've always gotten along very well), and it upset my old supervisor to have to sign the form as she had written some bitter notes which she made part of my personnel folder. She checked the folder to see if the notes were still there and discovered they weren't.
"She let it be known the notes were missing and though they had only her word that they had ever been there, the bank started an investigation.
"They discovered that one day for about twenty minutes I had had access to my folder and they were ready to accuse me of tampering with bank records. I was put under pressure until one day last month when my old supervisor, my ex-girlfriend, had a nervous breakdown in the office and it became clear she had been ready to crack for some time.
"They found denigrating notes, scores of them in her desk, in which she had written false accusations of a plot concocted by me and my new manager, of whom she was insanely jealous.
"So they gave me this cruise for two to make up for it. I'm here with my new girlfriend, who's a writer. We intend to write my story and see if we can make some money from it.
"I know it is only a matter of time until they squeeze me out of the job. They don't like these kind of things occurring during working hours. I think they were surprised I didn't ask my manager to come with me."

Guatemala

Orange You Relieved?

There are no words in English to rhyme with month,
Unleth of courth you only uthe it wunth.
Another word for which there are no rhymes is orange, true
As it may be, I think I'm not, but aren't you
Relieved there is no exact match for silver,
Making it all much harder for a thief to pilfer?
And no dog's bark will suggest a rhyme for purple,
Nor a cat's meow, but a little birdie's chirp will.

Nothing Gets Done

As kids we seemed to have been able to do this, that or anything almost as quickly as the thoughts came into our heads. Now as we've grown older the same things seem to take longer to bring to completion. It is as if time has slowed down while our reckoning of it has sped up. Days fly by and nothing gets done.
Last night as I sat at my desk, I stared at my typewriter and smoked a cigarette, waiting for inspiration to strike. The clock on top of the bookcase struck first. Ten o'clock. The last note of the Westminster chimes resounded for a full minute. I had been sitting there daydreaming for nearly three hours. The sheet of yellow legal-sized paper peeked around the roller with seventeen words typed on it, twelve of which I had already decided to scrap.
I sipped cold coffee and wished for someone to ring the doorbell so I would have a valid reason for leaving my desk. All my friends must be out of town this month. Nobody has been apologetically interrupting me in the midst of a brainstorm in weeks. And there I sat without a usable idea in my head.

Stuck on 17

The sound of the creaky doors sliding open woke Miranda, but the view through them was enough to convince her she was still asleep and dreaming. She could see a barren hallway with a decor, if one could call it that, which appeared older than the lobby.
Apparently, the car was still stuck on 17, but at least they could get out. She tapped Richard's shoulder, and he woke with a start.
"Time for work already?" he asked.
She pointed to the open hallway.
"Damn," he said, rubbing his eyes. "I thought I had dreamt this."

Who Really Killed Lincoln?

Thumbing through a book about Lincoln, Leon is strangely attracted to a daguerreotype of John Wilkes Booth. There is a magnetism in the eyes. Leon is floating through some strange time warp. He spirals within a cyclone and spins through the years and lands in Brooklyn in the Roaring Twenties. He's Callie, super-blond, super-flapper. Callie lands in 1864 and goes mad because she doesn't understand what has happened. She gets involved in a conspiracy to kill President Lincoln. Slowly Callie (Boots)/Booth realizes what's happening but isn't up enough on her history. The end is inevitable. John Wilkes Booth lands in 1968, and accustoms himself to part of today's world. He is prepared for this because when his fate had been decided he had the picture of himself made and prayed to be absorbed by the spirit of whoever saw the picture after a hundred years, with such a desperation that when Leon, the first to see it in the prescribed time (he was cleaning out his grandmother's attic), magic occurred.

Booth is an 1860's southerner in 1968 Brooklyn. One day while crossing the street, he is killed by a speeding motorist.

Leon cannot be a super flapper. He isn't that friendly with people. The spiralling, that awful dizzying spin, had told him something supernatural had happened. He plans to make a fortune and sell stocks just before the Market crashes and buy property, etc. just after. A jumble. He dies from a heart attack.

Or, all this happens when Booth is in a barn and is looking at a photo of himself. The switch occurs after he sets fire to the barn and Herold shoots him, but the marshals know there is something strange about the dead man's face.

Callie dies, causing a timewarp discrepancy. The two live spirits, Booth and Leon, are in telepsychic battle with each other and only one can win. Leon, who is vain, kept a diary of how either the person who left his body, or Booth, will die through traps...No good, huh?

All right. Forget it. I'm going to bed.