A Situation...

Two white brothers, roughly 23 and 21 are in a fairly busy mall in what would be considered an upper middle class area of town. This mall is not located anywhere particular: no deep south and no urban northern city, just “any-town” USA. These two brothers would regularly waste time walking around the mall. And on this occasion, having been cooped up in their parents’ house over the Christmas holidays, walking the halls of the mall is great therapy. These brothers are close, good friends, but rarely do they ever see each other during the regular course of the week.

Our story begins in the mall where the brothers happen to be walking around with no obvious place to be or go. Now, immediately down the hallway, there is an Asian couple, probably in their thirties, with a small toddler who is walking, but not extremely well. The couple is sitting on a bench with their backs to the brothers, and at a first glance, almost anyone would suspect that both the man and women are relatively foreign to this environment, let alone this country. The two are even speaking in some sort of Asian language that is indecipherable to the two boys.

Now, as the brothers approach this tableau, they notice that the toddler has wandered away from the parents who are in the midst of an important conversation. The parents do not notice their child wandering away to their backs, and as moderate foot traffic is surrounding the child, the eldest brother feels it necessary to warn the parents about their child’s behavior. Not knowing where this sudden parental nature comes from, he senses that the child is in imminent danger. His first thought is to pick up the child and bring him out of harms way, but then realizes what this might look like in court, when the foreigners bring attempted kidnapping charges against him.
-Two unsuspecting Asian immigrants, having only recently moved to the U.S. to find the success unavailable to them in their suppressing communist homeland, had their only child abducted from underneath their noses as what seems to be a 23 year old white pedophile tried to take advantage of their naivety of American culture and kidnapped the child, hoping to raise her as a young Asian prostitute.

The older brother knows that even though his intentions are pure, perception in America is reality.

By the time this idea had retired itself from his thinking process, the scene has already worsened. Now, the toddler is in the middle of the highest foot traffic, and the parents are still unaware of their child’s departure. It is now evident that a direct rescue is not possible, however the child, as the older brother surmises, will be crushed any moment by the oncoming host of mall clientele. It is getting extremely dangerous, and the brother knows he must warn the parents as quickly as possible, however the vast vocabulary of the Japanese language he has never learned is now failing him. And so the brother, with only what seems seconds before the child is to be annihilated by pedestrian hordes, shouts in a wild panic to the Asian parents “Hey! Everybody Wang Chung Tonight!” while pointing at the child.


Have you ever been in a near fatal car accident and what you know is merely seconds seems like an eternity as your car hurls itself into the guard rail, and all you can think is “did I leave the gas stove on?”


Time stops for both brothers at that moment. Everyone is frozen in one place. Parents, brothers, child and marauding horde of shoppers all appear to understand that this might be the perfect time for the apocalypse. It even seems as though some mall manager has even decided to turn off the elevator music most common to malls, so that in this frozen picture of time, the whole world has became silent. If only a pin would drop at this moment, the fat man in line at the Cinnabon® might possibly drop dead of a heart attack.

What brakes this most life-like of all photographs is three-fold. Immediately the mother realizes her child is missing, and scanning her now desolate surroundings, leaps to her feet and with wild abandon grabs hold of her child. The frozen herd of patrons resumes their route with mild gasps and whispers. And as the film starts to get back to speed, “for this could only be a movie” the younger brother thinks, the father of the child stands and faces the two boys and in the purest parlance of English asks so clearly, “What did you just say to me?”

The older brother hopes that time would decide one pause wasn’t enough, and another one of those “time standing still” moments would be great to interject here, preferably long enough for the older brother to sneak he and his younger brother out of the scene and maybe go get an ICEE® and definitely forget this entire experience. But here they stand, and time decides it is an appropriate time to remain constant.



A Situation...
New pieces of art by bo odom

The Luncheon

Fish was alone. Eighteen of his closest friends were in the room with him, or out on the sun porch, but Fish was alone. He was staring at the party platter filled with meats, cheeses, olives, and sweet pickles. And in his solitude, Fish was mesmerized by the stack of Swiss cheese that occupied the center.

-Has anyone eaten a piece of Swiss cheese? Fish asked, but there was no response.

Everyone was talking, and no one was listening.

It seemed as though the Pike's Peak of Swiss had not been disturbed, as though not one person had even contemplated adding the crater filled cheese to their cardboard Dixie plates. This was absurd to Fish, not that he would ever dream of adding Swiss cheese to his sandwich, yet the synapse in his brain were firing too slow to make any logical conclusions. He just stood, feeling almost ashamed for the Swiss. Had the cheese in some fashion lost it's edge, it's coolness? Were the fashion police of Paris and Amsterdam snuffing the commodity at all of their shows?

-Has anyone eaten a piece of Swiss Cheese? Fish asked this time with a louder, more projected tone, feeling he had emphasized some degree of urgency while not crying wolf.

Everyone was talking, and no one was listening.

Something was ravishing the very essence of life that Fish held dear. A drop of sweat started to creep down his brow while his mind started racing through incalculable math equations. "How many slices would a pound of Swiss cheese provide if each slice was cut in 1/16 inch units?" "Would the company that made the party tray err on the side of less cheese, hoping to curb their profits, or would they risk their marginal gain in hopes of return business?" Fish was alone in these thoughts, and he started to curse everyone in the room silently, knowing that they could care less about the existence of this cheese on the kitchen counter. He fervently walked to the staircase and stood on the second step. And as Fish shouted the words across the room, desperately hoping for a straight, real answer, time seemed to stand still.

-Has anyone eaten a piece of the Swiss?

The only response came from his friend Ashley who, after remaining still for what seemed an eternity, walked over to Fish and grabbed his hand.

She did not speak. Neither did anyone else for a few moments. Fish just stared at his friends, holding them in contempt, with his mouth slightly open. Anyone of his friends would have read "stupidity" in his face rather than "contempt"; and as they found themselves continuing with their earlier discussion, snippets of laughter in the air, Fish found himself releasing Ashley's hand and walking back to the party tray.

He stared down at the Swiss.

Fish was alone.

And everyone was talking, and no one was listening.



The Luncheon
New pieces of art by bo odom

Packing Cigarettes Against My Wrist

So, I decided that I would wait a full month from the inception of this blog to write the first entry. However, as December 20th rolled around, I found that I was more and more preoccupied with things like sleeping, dreaming, and churning home-made ice cream. Needless to say, It is now almost a new year, and I have yet to find the time to even introduce myself.

My name is bo. I've decided in the past few months that on all of my creative work, I will use my nick name and not my given name as a signature. bo odom. No capitalization, for I find it a little more artsy, and also a little less normal. Not to say that the name "Bo" is normal. Neither is "Clarence", my real name. Clarence Guy Odom IV (the forth). I feel no need at this juncture to explain how my parents got "Bo" Out of the name Clarence, yet hopefully one of my characters will explain this in the future.

C.G.O. ?
C.G. Odom ?
Clarence G. Odom ?
C. Guy Odom ?
O. ?
Bodom?

These are only some of the ways I thought I'd sign all of my original work (Some other ideas consisted of "The Falcon" or "General Tso's brother Kevin"). But I saw a movie the other day - no need to mention the name of the movie, although it was located in Marshall, WV and all of us, and by all of us I mean "we" , were the movie - in which the director's name was listed as McG.

McG ?

Are you kidding me?

*I apologize for the rhyme. And I officially make this my apology for all rhymes in the future. I do not apologize however for not apologizing in the future for rhymes that I may or may not commit, for I have already apologized for those future rhymes here in the present. Capice?

Apparently this McG character either didn't want to inform us of either his first name or his last name (I can only assume that his last name starts with the letters M, C, and G) or the keyboard somehow stuck during the editing process, or he's too cool for school. I don't even want to guess. However, I would hope that when I IMDB that sucker, it better be his full, legal name.


Ok, so I just IMDB'd that guy, and McG is the first three letters of - you guessed it - his middle name. Idiot.

That's when all of my potential artisan names were dropped, and the lower case "bo odom" was created.


I'm guessing that usually, the first entry of any blog tries to explain what the blog will entail for the future. I absolutely feel no need to do this. The title does that for me to begin with. Even as I type right now, here in the present, I am finding it difficult not to type the following

-this blog will be the ever prevailing ramblings of a guy that, while he is sitting on the front porch of a seldom used railway house packing his cigarettes against his wrist, creates meaningless (or Aristophicleanly meaningful) stories to impress his friends, all of whom are not present at the time of the creation of the story, and therefore receive a truncated, lopsided, meandering recollection of the excellent story that was created on the porch of the railway house, which is seldom used.

I feel like everyday my mind explodes with new art and stories that I have now way of relinquishing, and therefore I wait to long, and the dreams of Penelope diving off the 100ft high dive with a back handspring and 3 and a half twists at the Olympics ends up becoming Phil jumping off the 3ft springboard and doing a misguided dive that turns up into a belly buster at my 40 year old friend Melissa's raised backyard pool.

I want a way to keep the High Dive!

But I consistently find that my inventions turn into underused, un-patented, garble that I pass on to no one.


I hope you enjoy reading.
I might not care if you don't enjoy. Maybe I will.
Feel free to respond.
I might not read your responses, but feel free to respond with criticism, encouragement, new art, new ideas.



Packing Cigarettes Against My Wrist.
New pieces of art by bo odom