O Brave New World

Bloomsday drafts his speech on a treadmill at the Lakewood Y. His musical menu includes: Brand New Day by Sting with Stevie on harmonica (warm up); the album, Eraser, by Thom York (hard momentum running, intermittent hard walk); selected songs from Todd Rundgeren (cool down). For shits 'n giggles, he rocks out to Prince's When U Were Mine and I Feel 4 U on the way home and blasts Darking Nikki in the driveway.

Inside the stone colonial, Molly and Luna snuggle like hamsters, awaiting papa.  He gathers his effects from the car and sees he has missed a phone call.  The number is not familar, with an unknown area code.  Suddenly, his hand vibrates as a new text message arrives.  It's a tweet.  "@BloomsdayDevice: How was U'r workout?"

Bloomsday's first thought is, Prince is tweeting me. But reason prevails. Another text arrives: "I'm in the cab down the street."  Bloomsday turns and looks and sees a cab parked, lurking, suspicious.  No one takes cabs in Cleveland.


He takes to the cab, walking tall. Two passengers emerge.  The stinky puppeteer and his silent companion. "Dobry den," he says.

"Dobry den," Bloomsday replies. "Have you been waiting long?"

"No hurry. As you instructed, we had waffles at Gene's Place. Delicious, I'd say."

"I believe the technical term is delicioso."

"Pardon?"

"Nevermind.  Look, I'd invite you in, but I got a new baby and a tired momma in the house. How about you take me in the cab to the destination of my choice."

"Excellent idea. We need just a half our of your time."

"Fuck that.  Your taking me to bloodymaryville.  You fly, you buy."

The stinky puppeteer surmises.  "I think I understand."

I Feel Like a Leonard Cohen Record: No One Ever Listens to Me

Sunday Epiphanies

Things Got Ugly at This Year's Office Party...

Moyers. Wendy. Epiphany.

Bloomsday shuts the car door and checks his pockets.  He fumbles with the ear bud wires of his music content delivery system, then walks briskly up the parking lot incline toward Cleveland Browns Stadium.  The cheapest walking distance with a view.

The giant LED on its west side shows the time:  9:08.  Technically late. Practically, not.


Bloomsday bisects the Jesse Owens/Police Memorial Plaza, at the northeast corner of Sheriff McPoodley-Roo's Way.  As he approaches a cannon, aimed squarely at him in the center of the square, he see's something he hasn't before.  Two men in European suits and sunglasses waiting for him.

"Dobry den," one says to him.  "Are you not Bloomsday?"

Bloomsday recognizes that accent.  "Dobry den.  You'll have to follow me.  I'm late."  The two men suddenly spring into action, placing themselves on either side, tripping to keep up.

"We understand you are a man of the people."

"Sure," I say.  "Aren't you?"

"Well, yes, but not the American People.  I was born in Czechoslovakia.  I now live in the Czech Republic. I never moved."

"That's funny." I say. The other man is suspiciously silent.  I stop outside the doors of the justice center. "Gotta go, guys.  What can I do for you?"

"We are here on behalf of the Government of the Czech Republic.  We wish to make you an Honorary Ambassador to our country, and extend membership in our Order of the Finicky Eaters."

"Excuse me?"

"That's not it's real name.  Only members know the real name."

"Why me?"

"Because you're on television, dummy."

"Oh, you know your Paddy Chayefsky."

"Actually, I know my Ned Beatty."

"So, I'm in. Great. What do I have to do?"

"You'll be invited to Prague for a ceremony. There is an award. You give a speech. We pay you."

"I feel that there's something you're not telling me.  What's the catch?"

"Our government has taken great interest in the story of The Thinker. We think you are an excellent resource on the topic."

"Yeah, me and Sister Wendy."

"Who?"

"Nevermind.  This is getting a little Kafkaesque."

"That's funny you should say that. Prague and all.  Cleveland's a lot like Prague."

"Yes, but we have no Kafka."

"I wouldn't be so sure, Mr. Bloomsday."  He lean's heavily into me, as if casting a spell.  I recognize him.  Years ago.  The Stinky Puppeteer.  It was a puppet production of Eurydice.  Orpheus. Our second night in Prague. The tiny, cramped theater stunk of the unwashed.  It was him above the tangle of strings.

"Meet me at the museum at noon.  At The Thinker."  Bring cash, Bloomsday thinks to add, but doesn't. He pushes his way through the revolving door of the justice center, leaving his new friends in the cold.

Beauty, Eh?

The Greatest American Novel is About the Rise and Fall of a Governor

A Trinitarian Notion

Shortly after his completion of studies of harmony and counterpoint with Maestro V. Fellegara, Bloomsday settles in for a night of a.m. feedings.

On the desk before him, his unfinished manuscript, Danza: The Movie

Breathe Deeply, My Love

This Episode of The Bloomsday Device is Brought To You With Limited Commercial Interruption by:

FIRST AMEND MINTS

FRESH BREATH. FREE EXPRESSION.

Clevelandia: Annunciation
A Pome by Bloomsday


The world is recreated

a billion times a day

by Google maps

and Jesus traps

and souls above the fray.

These words are scored in stone

upon the rocky shore:

"He is faithful."

"He is faithful,"

is what the words implore.

The water washes sins away

as hands and face we clean,

Annunciates

Greek palindrome

in church tiles' waxen glean.

The weighted Dame leans overburdn'd

by Clair and Lakeside door.

her scales are tipped,

unjustily gripped,

which makes her feel a whore.

Partly-Inspired by Semi-Actual Events

Prague Remembers Everything

The Clock Parade

We are
Trapped in Prague without passports
No hope of escape from this cage with no bars
We fend for ourselves, but mostly each other.

Huff to the top of Petrin Tower – Hitler dreamt of imploding it.
The Josevof, pristine, crumbling cemetery
Where the sons and daughters of Moses, piled upon one another, aspire for eternity.
Hitler spared that, too.

White asparagus and white cheese rolled up in cottage ham,
Broken clocks reflected on our plates.
Jazz mystics, puppets tangled by alchemists, crystalline Mozart on folding chairs,
Gun battle church basements, walking ghosts, arm in arm.
Beloved infanta, the clock parade.

Garish, weathered puppets of death and resurrection 
Christ and apostles glide by on the gears.
The everlasting covenant will dong each half-past hour.

We are
Trapped in Prague without passports
No hope of escape from this bed without bars
We’re fond of ourselves, but mostly each other.

Joan Sutherland (1926-2010)

From the Libretto of Verdi's La Traviata


ALFREDO
We’ll leave Paris, my dearest,
Together we’ll go through life.
In reward for your past sorrows,
You’ll bloom into health again.
Breath of life, sunshine you’ll be to me,
All the years to come will smile on us.

VIOLETTA
We’ll leave Paris, my dearest,
Together we’ll go through life.

ALFREDO
Yes.

VIOLETTA
In reward for past sorrows,
I shall bloom into health again.
Breath of live, sunshine you’ll be to me,
All the years to come will smile on us.
Ah, no more!
Let’s go to church, Alfredo,
And give thanks for your return.
(She falters)

Stinchcomb Soundtrack

"And You Wanted to Dance, So I Asked You to Dance."

First Day of Class, or The Electric Fuzzy

The bell rings and you find yourself here.


Preface, wherein Bloomsday reveals the general subject of inquiry


According to the International Transactional Analysis Association, TA "is a theory of personality and a systematic psychotherapy for personal growth and personal change".

1. As a theory of personality, TA describes how people are structured psychologically. It uses what is perhaps its best known model, the ego-state (Parent-Adult-Child) model to do this. This same model helps explain how people function and express their personality in their behavior
2. It is a theory of communication that can be extended to the analysis of systems and organisations.
3. It offers a theory for child development, by explaining how our adult patterns of life originated in childhood. This explanation is based on the idea of a "Life (or Childhood) Script": the assumption that we continue to re-play childhood strategies, even when this results in pain or defeat. Thus it claims to offer a theory of psychopathology
4. In practical application, it can be used in the diagnosis and treatment of many types of psychological disorders, and provides a method of therapy for individuals, couples, families and groups.
5. Outside the therapeutic field, it has been used in education, to help teachers remain in clear communication at an appropriate level, in counselling and consultancy, in management and communications training, and by other bodies.  (Wikipedia)

Episode 1: The Berne Convention, wherein Bloomsday poses a thesis.

The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, usually known as the Berne Convention, is an international agreement governing
 copyright, which was first accepted in Berne,Switzerland in 1886.  The Berne Convention requires its signatories to recognize the copyright of works of authors from other signatory countries (known as members of the Berne Union) in the same way as it recognises the copyright of its own nationals. For example, French copyright law applies to anything published or performed in France, regardless of where it was originally created. (Wikipedia)

Article 15 (2) of the Berne Convention states:

(2) The person or body corporate whose name appears on a cinematographic work in the usual manner shall, in the absence of proof to the contrary, be presumed to be the maker of the said work.

Reference to Article 15 (2) appears almost subliminally in PT Anderson's 1999 film, Magnolia.  One of the film's many stories involves a brainy kid who pisses his pants on a gameshow.  At the gameshow's conclusion, the credits roll swiftly, unreadably, until their end where the following stays upon the screen for a second or two:

COPYRIGHT (C)MCMXCIX

BIG EARL PARTRIDGE PRODUCTIONS, INC.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

BIG EARL PARTRIDGE PRODUCTIONS, INC. IS THE AUTHOR OF THIS MOTION PICTURE FOR THE PURPOSES OF ARTICLE 15 (2) OF THE BERNE CONVENTION AND ALL NATIONAL LAWS GIVING EFFECT THERETO.

So now then.

The name of the "father" of Transactional Analysis, who broke with Freud's psycho-analysis, and supplanted it with the analysis of interpersonal transactions, is Eric Berne.  And what is Magnolia, if not a grand analysis of such transactions and Berne's theories?


Episode 2: The Electric Fuzzy, wherein Bloomsday elaborates on his experiences with T.A.


[work in progress]

Episode X: The facts about magnolia


I was chatting with an adversary/friend over lunch the other day, and he told me of an email he got from an old crush. He's married now, and unofficially expecting, and the note put him in a philisophical mood.

"At first I was freaked out, because I remember her being so important to me, like, I had to have her in my life, then it didn't happen and I suffered and now I'm someone else, anyway, and I realized that she's dead to me."
"Dead to you? Really?"
"We'll, yeah, you know, that was a totally different me. That life that I lived, those feelings...they're totally irreconcilable with who I am today."
"...and, therefore, she's DEAD to you?" I probed his thoughts on this, and came up with this assessment: he looks at his life like a series of isolated, compartmentalized lives; these many identities, over a life, become the constitutents of the whole. For him, childhood didn't overlap with adolescence; high school vs. college vs. law school provided sharp divisions of his concept of self; he has been born and died and born again with every love interest in his life.
I respond: "Just because life is made of different chapters, possibly written in different tongues, different styles, doesn't mean it ain't all part of the same book, asswipe. Whether you're inclined to see it this way or not, your life is linear and cumulative and all those "who I used to be's' are undeniably, honestly a part of 'who I am now.' Just because your psychological makeup allows you to make a clean start of things, push the past away to make room for the present and future, doesn't mean you don't have to reconcile and incorporate the 'used to be's' with/into the 'now.' I mean, do I really have to quote Magnolia in this Thai restaurant? We may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us. You're a fucking enlightened traveller from the east, asshole. Why is it up to me to remind you of these things?" 
He concedes the correctness of my proposition. He always does. I conclude: "And don't start talking about people in your past as dead unless they actually are dead, for no other reason than they might actually die and then you'd feel bad, like you were somehow responsible for their deaths. Like I felt responsible for Ethyl Merman and Roy Orbison. I still feel bad about that."

One of the central mysteries of magnolia involves the three “unbelievable coincidence” tales that bracket the rest of the action. The film reveals to the audience these three bizarre stories in its prologue, suggesting that they will, somehow, inform us of a subtext for the plot to come: emotional breakdowns during a freak frog rain in the San Fernando Valley. But this has always been an unsatisfactory, if not dubious, explanation for the placement of the three coincidental tales. First, while a frog rain may be bizarre, it is not, strictly speaking, a coincidence. There is no meaningful or ironic intersection of events, unless you make some stretches, such as Dixon’s “good Lord bring the rain in” rap or the myriad Exodus 8:2 references coinciding with the frog rain later that day. But those are really products of Anderson’s narrative structure, and not integral to the tale of a frog rain, itself. We can say the same of similar coinciding events, such as Earl’s death, Linda’s foiled suicide, Donnie’s secret mission and Stanley’s epiphany. To call these events “coincidence” misapplies the term; they just all happen to happen at the same time. 
If these vignettes serve as more than a merely disorienting teaser for the strange story to come, do they offer clues to another cinematic agenda? What do the three urban legends actually mean, anyway? In a film dense with rich, novel symbols, these three tall tales, dissected like lab frogs, offer not only a Rosetta Stone for the ultimate meaning of magnolia, but also provide the most ambitious prologue in film history.
A clear understanding of this theory requires a segregation of the prologue into three distinct short films. Once interpreted individually, the three tales may then be conceptually reintegrated in a manner that explains their own presence, as well as the three-hour opus to come.

I. The Greenberry Hill Murder:

“The three vagrants whose motive was simple robbery” attack a well-respected chemist. Ignorant of, or unconcerned with, his status and appreciable wisdom, Green, Berry and Hill murder Sir Godfrey beneath the storefront which proclaims his now-lost art of optical-chemical analysis. The black and white and rotoscopic effects, cropped within a small, square view, drive home the antiquity of the event. While Ricky Jay’s narration relies upon an article that dates the event in 1911, a more ancient date is referenced by the Greenberry Hill, London sign: AD. 1356.
The most striking feature of the first minute of magnolia is not the corny name coincidence, but it’s parallels to the central initiation myth of American Freemasonry. New initiates to the Masonic order are subjected to a re-enactment of the death of another wise man felled by the hands of “three vagrants whose motive was simple robbery.” For masons, the legendary Hiram Abiff, architect of the temple of King Solomon, represents the hidden wisdom of the ages, lost to the simpleminded greed of his aggressors: Jubelo, Jubela, and Jubelum. The death, burial and rebirth of Hiram Abiff are the metaphorical touchstones for the Masonic initiate, leading to subsequent grander insights about the human condition as he proceeds through the path of enlightenment from Entered Apprentice to Master Mason. (An aside on the notion of “rebirth”: curiously, Sir Edmund Godfrey is reincarnated later in the film, when the same actor plays the concerned young pharmacist during Linda’s breakdown.)
The Masonic connection in magnolia is hardly speculation. From Ricky Jay’s Masonic ring and “meet upon the level, part upon the square” comment, to the placement of Albert Mackey’s “The History of Freemasonry” tome on Stanley’s cluttered library table, to Donnie Smith’s infiltration of Solomon Solomon’s “temple,” the film is cluttered with masonica. The first minute of magnolia serves as both an imprimatur on the film as a Masonic document and, perhaps, as a shorthand “initiation ceremony” for each of its viewers.

Equal scrutiny of the remaining coincidental prologue tales yields no less surprising results. Though both devoid of Masonic reference, the second and third tales, examined individually, reveal an agenda of an even higher order.

II. The Frogman:

Delmer Darion’s tragicomic fate at the unwitting hands of his troubled nemesis is certainly the most fanciful and amusing of the three tales. But the most potent aspect of this short film – its grandiose visuals – is distinct from the story, itself. From the first transitional shot of flames “licking over” the edges of the Greenberry Hill tale, Anderson frames this vignette amidst the essential natural elements of fire, earth, air and water. The Frogman sequence contains underwater shots, shots of fire, shots of planes soaring through the air, and shots of scorched and pristine earth. One complex shot, in particular, verifies this elemental agenda: an “earth’s eye” view, looking straight up, as a plane passes through a blue sky, dumping water upon fire clinging to tall trees. Frozen in view, this symbolic logos reveals a second magnolia imprimatur: the eastern way.
This natural/elemental theory, like the Masonic one of the first tale, is borne out significantly throughout the rest of magnolia. The film we will soon see documents a world beyond Judeo-Christian spirituality, beyond western morality, a world characterized by the interconnectivity of all things, a karmic/Zen alchemical recipe of eastern mysticism and western absurdity. Yet, it is also a very natural world, characterized by clouds and 82% chances of rain. 

DIXON: When the sun don’t shine, the good Lord bring the rain in.

The only other character in the balance of magnolia to come to recognize this natural order of things is Stanley, diligent in his studies of natural (and Masonic) phenomena, and curious of the mechanics behind weather forecasting at the WDKK? studios:

STANLEY: I was wondering about the weather department. I was wondering whether or not the weather people have outside meteorological services or if they had in-house instruments.

CYNTHIA: Um, I can check on that for you. Maybe later we can take a tour…You asked about that because it’s raining outside?

STANLEY: I guess.

CYNTHIA: So what do you do? Whatever’s happening, that’s what you look into? Something like that?

STANLEY: I don’t know.

CYNTHIA: You don’t know? Well, it’s not a bad way to be…interested in everything that’s going around.

Stanley is the culmination of eastern and western intellectual traditions. In a crucial moment, Stanley succumbs to “the call of nature” during the gameshow. Later, his frog rain epiphany, that “this is something that happens,” evinces his passage to a new level of elemental and natural awareness. 
The Frogman sequence serves as a sort of “cinematic feng shui,” reminding the viewer that all the elements are represented here, and that conditions are right for the evolution of consciousness. Combined, the first two-thirds of the prologue provide substantial ballast to raise the curtain on the human drama to come: the dysfunctional Barringer Family.

III. The Suicide/Murder of Sydney Barringer:

The third tale of the prologue, more subtly filmed and realistic in its tenor, is also less symbolic than the other two, though it is equally rich in subtext for the remainder of the film. The essential notion of human suffering permeates the short. From Sydney’s lamentable suicide note, to the stunned and maddening grief of his parents, to the creepily anguished, sometimes backward, purgatorial background music, the Barringer sequence is soaked with sorrow and suffering.
It begins, however, on a rather clinical note: the forensic conference where the Barringer tale is told. Punctuated with fast and slow motion, the shot’s most important information is provided on the soundtrack, where the only audible word of the coroner’s speech is found: “curiosity,” that euphemistic synonym for original sin.
Sydney’s suicide note, visually pieced together with various close-ups and pans across the words of the page reveals the depths of despair: “I’m sorry/ but I cannot forgive you now/ I have suffered/ so I will go/ and be with God.” Sydney is the poster child for the poor of heart. And what else is magnolia, if not a meditation on despair?
The perplexing Barringer family dynamic is, arguably, beside the point. The real issues addressed in the short are the root causes of human suffering and individual responsibility for it. The sequence awakens us to this central question of human understanding, particularly within the context of parents and children. Who’s culpable for the death of Sydney Barringer? Sidney? His Mother? His Father? Of course, each one is culpable to varying degrees under various standards. Similar questions will be asked of the film’s many characters as magnolia unfolds, and as the transgressions of parents upon children build to life-defining crescendos. The final tale of the prologue trilogy defines the ultimate inquiry of magnolia: human suffering.

So now then

The prologue of magnolia serves as a primer for the rest of the film. It defines the moral, intellectual and spiritual agenda for the next three hours, and provides the informed and open-minded viewer a glimpse of the grand cinematic architecture to come. This is no coincidence. No, this cannot be that. 

Now, that shit will help you solve the case.

To Conspire: Verb, [Latin], To Breathe Together

The thick stench of rotting stomach fills the courtroom, as it does most days.  Smells like a coupla people are dying on the inside, Bloomsday thinks.  He will narrow it down to the exact culprit before the docket is over.  This is because he, and he alone, finds himself whisper distance from each defendant. He, and he alone, talks rights, charges, and choices into greasy, clotted ears. In return, he'll feel their hot, moist breath on his own ear. Sometimes its the stink of booze or pot or cigarettes or cats or dogs. Mostly it's just the nauseating wave of the unwashed. Some days, it's a cocktail. Today, it's definitely, the smell of the dying.  He will smell it on their breath. Death breath. The breath of death.

Bloomsday scans the crowded courtroom to narrow down the suspects.

"All rise!" the bailiff intones and the judge enters.

Bloomsday decides to hold his breath for the next four hours.

Carver Sent to the Back of Dubus?

I hit upon Raymond Carver in college at the insistence of a dear friend. Maybe it was zeitgeist and trendy, but I was moved by it. He had just died and his short story collection was passed around like communion. The Robert Altman film, Short Cuts, was a sort of collage/homage to Carver's writings which ,COINCIDENTALLY, many (short-sighted) viewers saw as what P.T. Anderson was ripping off when he made Magnolia.

This NYTimes article suggests Carver's work was really the product of a clear-headed editor. That may not change my opinions of the stories, but, I suppose it modifies where he stands in my own personal literary mythology.

Robert Penn Warren and the Great Twitch. Kerouac. Robbins. Coupland. Katherine Dunn kept them all in check. Which is why I hope Molly and I read Geek Love aloud.  Soon.

Guest Poet: William Butler Yeats

The Stolen Child

Where dips the rocky highland

Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,

There lies a leafy island

Where flapping herons wake

The drowsy water rats;

There we've hid our faery vats,

Full of berrys

And of reddest stolen cherries.

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand.

For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses

The dim gray sands with light,

Far off by furthest Rosses

We foot it all the night,

Weaving olden dances

Mingling hands and mingling glances

Till the moon has taken flight;

To and fro we leap

And chase the frothy bubbles,

While the world is full of troubles

And anxious in its sleep.

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes

From the hills above Glen-Car,

In pools among the rushes

That scarce could bathe a star,

We seek for slumbering trout

And whispering in their ears

Give them unquiet dreams;

Leaning softly out

From ferns that drop their tears

Over the young streams.

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Away with us he's going,

The solemn-eyed -

He'll hear no more the lowing

Of the calves on the warm hillside

Or the kettle on the hob

Sing peace into his breast,

Or see the brown mice bob

Round and round the oatmeal chest

For he comes the human child

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand

From a world more full of weeping than he can understand

Guest Poet: John Donne

Holy Sonnets: Batter my heart, three-person'd God

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend

Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

I, like an usurp'd town to another due,

Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;

Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,

But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.

Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain,

But am betroth'd unto your enemy;

Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,

Take me to you, imprison me, for I,

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Corinne Bailey Rae Almost, Sort of, Kinda Explains The Bloomsday Device

Clevelandia: The Limericks

There once was a rock band named Maiden
whose lyrics were satanically laden.
They played the Coliseum
and everyone went to see 'em
but the cops came and made everybody leave.

Dark Wedding

veil upon veil is raised,
one after one.
wisdom, the groomsman,
stands next to the sun.

Salome's bare flesh is now ripe for the raping
and Saint John's maw is so ghoulishly gaping

Assassins with plumbs in hand slouch toward Clevelandia
mocking degrees back in whored-Alexandria

stone upon stone is razed,
rune after rune.
wisdom, the bridesmaid,
stands next to the moon.

Crosses to Bear, Ducks in a Row, Marshall Your Inner-McLuhan

Metaphors strike me.  I try not to overuse them, but they do come in handy at times to succinctly convey a more elaborate point.

Take, for example, the Bloomsday Device.  I mean the entire thing: every post of each of the four blogs I manage (The Device, The Epiphany, The Manifesto, and O'Ghoulihy with his breakaway republic of Clevelandia), as well as the YouTube channel that bears the same name.  That is the near sum total of what I have in mind when I say, "Welcome to the Bloomsday Device."

But the Bloomsday Device is also, in fact, a metaphor.  It is shorthand for my externalized consciousness, realized.  It contains trifling details, sublime works of art, legal analysis, cultural artifacts, political commentary, personal philosophy, mystical insights, social criticism, satire, stupidity, and much more.  Just like the contents of my head since I was a child, except electrified and digitized.  I actually consider it a part of me now.

Perhaps its a sort of self-actuated psychotherapy, or group counseling for one. I don't exactly know how to describe it's impact on my mental state, other than to say I know it's there and that reassures me. You may judge me mad, but, at least, I don't sit around the dinner table talking with mannequins, for Christsake.

Another simple answer involves posterity: maybe I just want this stuff out there so someone, somewhere, knew I was here. A sort of existential road map for future travelers.

In any case, you are welcome to it.  Perhaps, someday, I'll be welcome to yours.

Happy Birthday: Me 'n Declan McManus

For those playing along at home...

The Bloomsday Device welcomes you. When future archeologists dig deep within the electronic synapses to divine its origins, they might find that The Device was set in motion by this sacred text:

Then again, they might not.

How about a nice cup of ?WTF? this morning?

Elenor Hany bedazzled the crowd
with her poems read aloud
and a Parker-esque wit and/or quip

but they all turned away
though she begged them to stay
when she offered her middle name: Pip.

Elenor Hany decided to chance
a most memorable dance
on her floor, though she thought she might slip.

As she tumbled and twirled
to the news of the world,
E. Pip Hany maintained a firm grip.

Though no audience saw
what should register awe,
she did know she had startled the gods.

Her accomplishment stay'ity
out of view from the laity.
Of repeat, she thought, "What were the odds?"

An Epiphaneer's Lament

Epiphany is one of those words rarely used in common parlance. As it should be. It is a word reserved for special occasions. What it signifies is a deeply personal positive realization. You can't have a bad epiphany. When Oedipus realizes that he has murdered his father and married his mother, it is not an epiphany. That is not to say epiphanies cannot arise out of darkness. Indeed, I'd guess that most classically defined epiphanies hit people hard when they least expect-and most require-them. It's like the mind creates them to fill the existential void of human experience. Or, if you prefer, God puts them there.

So my ears perked up when I heard the judge use the word in court. He did so in correct context: hoping that my client would emerge from his prison stay, imposed, in part, for punching the life out of his unborn child, a newer, better, moral man: a prisoner's epiphany of the highest order.

But hope for an epiphany is not the same as having one. And sticking someone in a cage is surely no guarantee of enlightenment upon their release.  I told my client to come see me in a year when he gets out.  I hope he does.

Before he was taken from the courtroom, he asked me for my card. "I don't have one. I'm Bloomsday. Ask around. I'm easy to find."