Archy, Nemesis

Adventus Beginneth

St. Elmo's Fire, Two: Black Friday

On the Elmo/Petreus Affair:

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, I'd like to remind us all fair minded people that we are all more than the sum of the worst things we've ever done.

But if sit in judgment we must, then, perhaps there is a secondary question:  Which misconduct is worse?

The Unbalanced Ventriloquist or the Turkey General.. Both involve puppeteers. And what is Bloomsday, if not a scrutinizer of puppeteers?

Find:  G'Nip G'Nop, Rock'Em Sock'Em Robots, A Wrongfully Accused Future Sex Offender Registrant, Tetris, Tres Aves Du Angry Extremists, Don't Spill The Beans, An Elephant, A Bat Cave, A Large Turkey. 

Yeats, Joyce, Zeroes and Ones

Of all the literary precedents in my life, it is not James Joyce who features most prominently. It’s William Butler Yeats.  You may ask, what’s the difference? I suppose, having completed my Sunday morning kitchen sink game of Jenga, there is no time like the present to explain.

Yeats’ works are spread more evenly across realms of poetry, essay, fiction, drama, and seem to follow a psychological aesthetic steeped in his personal, sometimes cockeyed, beliefs.  Yeats had ghosts and visions, real and imagined. Yeats’ “widening gyre” and ominous beasts “slouching toward Bethlehem” tried to make sense of our limited senses, stretching out the mind of the reader, changing them, beckoning them, warning them. Yeats possessed a politic.

Joyce may have been more fun to be around, a better friend, a better drinking partner, and a better lover to his Nora. Yeats was emotionally stunted, more solitary, rejected fully by his Maude.  Joyce spilled out what was in him effortlessly, perhaps with reckless vigor, then moved on.  Yeats, more restrained and unsure, was constantly correcting and modifying his works until his death.  Ultimately, I like Joyce better; but I feel as more an inheritor to Yeats’ burdens.

A crucial question in my mind is how the two would react to the full term of the 20th Century.  Both seemed intent on describing its origins.  How would they have described the century’s end?  What medium would they have chosen?  Would our technologies, our global horrors, our post-modern sensibilities render them speechless?  Perhaps, Samuel Beckett is the answer. Perhaps, it’s Ulysses Bloomsday.

The Bloomsday Device is a complex construct of media and psychology, fiction and non-fiction, film, politics, poetry, and humor.  I’ll call it Third Millennium literature, at least until someone gives it a better name.  It is reverent to Joyce and Yeats, but steeped in my own history, not theirs.  The fact that I am a lawyer, a poverty lawyer in a poor American city, and that I endeavor to weave my personal experiences into the fabric of The Bloomsday Device puts me on unequal footing with my literary ancestors.

Let me offer up an example:  The OnePocalypse.

This November 11th will mark the first anniversary of the date upon which the day, the month, the year, the hour, the minute, and second, simultaneously read “11.” This digital succession of ones happened twice that day, of course.  I dubbed the hours between the two -- 11:11 a.m. to 11:11 p.m. -- the OnePocalypse.  I wrote a poem about it. I put up a video on YouTube.  I blogged about it.  It entertained me.  But it also tapped into my inner-Yeats.

It seems impossible to imagine that the digital read of a clock-full of ones could not have existed in the worlds of both Yeats and Joyce, but imagine we must.   It is, perhaps, the most mundane, most prevalent distinction between the contemporary mind and those of the past.  We may now casually distinguish between the analog and digital, but Joyce and Yeats could not, like fish unaware of waters ahead.  But aren’t those who, today, fail to see the metaphorical distinction between wound clock-time and atomic clock-time swimming against an invisible tide, as well?  Doesn’t the binary code of zeroes and ones that created the words before your eyes have meaning for the modern mind?  If so, then I see no better moment to memorialize it than the OnePocalypse.

What if I suggested the OnePocalypse was the ultimate break with the past, and beginning of our collective future? What if I suggested it was also a doom and gloom end only for those who fail to see it? It is not inconsequential, certainly for Joyce fans, that, in binary code, a zero is a “no” and a one is a “yes.”  In this regard, the OnePocalypse is the ultimate affirmation, a “yes I said yes I will Yes” times three.

I am confident that my literary ghosts approve of this analysis, a sliver of self-regard writ large upon our common screens.  And while the Bloomsday Device churns on, often unnoticed, I’ll celebrate your hopeful participation in this newly-christened, one-year-old millennium, even if you don’t.

Next: Archery

The History of Spasm Dancing, Annotated; Vol CXIV

Do They Sell Sir Elton John Be Gone?

Secret Level in Zelda

Sugar Hiccup: The Movie

Requiem DJ

That's Not Meat! Those Aren't Pants!

Nothing is what it seems. Nothing.

The Blind Spot

"That's bullshit! Total bullshit" Bloomsday is seething.  "You can't close the Society for the Blind's coffee shop. Coffee made by the blind just tastes better! I'll chain myself to the creamer if I have to. This decision, probably made by Kasich, cannot stand. He's even a corrupt asshole to the disabled! I've been buying coffee at this place since I was a kid...MY FATHER FOUND PERIODS OF SOBRIETY HERE!"


Bloomsday's audience of colleagues sips their rich, aromatic coffee, and nods in agreement, some are startled and concerned. They've never seen him this angry.

"People are such assholes.  This is the BEST PLACE ON EARTH FOR GOOD COFFEE, ESPECIALLY NOW THAT YOUR STUPID FUCKING CASINO IS OPEN."

"I don't understand," Cherry Osgood tips her horn-rimmed glasses quizzically. "What does this Society for the Blind Coffee Stand have to do with our new casi--"

Bloomsday interrupts, "It's 'your stupid fucking casino'."

Annoyed at this accomodation, she continues. "What does this coffee shop on the fourth floor of the Justice Cent--"

Bloomsday interrupts, "It's 'Elsinore Courthouse.'"

"What does this coffee shop on the fourth floor of...Elsinore Courthouse have to do with...your stupid fucking casino?  The casino is a couple blocks away.  No one passes this coffee shop on their way to the casino."

"You are correct, love. But plenty of folks might pass it when they leave."  Bloomsday points and the heads and eyes of his colleagues follow. "Through that door right there."

There is a door, a large metal door on the west wall of the coffee shop, next to the television showing The Three Stooges.

"That door is connected to the police station. Every drunk, con, crack head, thief, and their friends who bond them out could walk through that door on their way to freedom after arrest at the casino. Lotsa poor fuckers who need a cup of coffee."

"Bloomsday! We could run it!" Cherry tosses off her glasses and her pert, blonde wig.

"Yes. We could.  The Blind Spot, where casino cons and beggars get their first cup of coffee and some legal advice.  Arrestee's get their first cup free.  Cops and prosecutors pay full price."

Cherry tosses her arms around Bloomsday and smothers him with kisses.  Their colleagues, at first, amused, settle into uncomfortable.

The Kubrick Kitchen is Open

Irish on the Run

Mattress Sale Weekend: Sale-a-bration!

I pledge allegiance to women who rock. May they sleep on a new or hardly used mattress tonight.

A Descent Into The Maelstrom

My favorite story by Edgar Allen Poe is a surprisingly harrowing tale about the force of Nature. No supernatural plot point, no plunging the depths of human depravity. It's a story about brothers caught in a whirlpool off the Norwegian coast. There's a narration trick, for starters. The initial protagonist becomes a mere listener for the remainder of the story, after he visits the site of a notorious recurring maelstrom with one of it's only survivors.

The description of the watery destruction scrapes my psyche for some reason. Perhaps it's the absence of villain, the futility of escape, the visage of ships and brothers disappearing into the vast, unstoppable watery swirl. It's unlike any other scary story I've ever read.

But there's more. There's a solution to a puzzle, a mystery solved, that saves the life of the storyteller. Suffice to say that modern concepts of pattern recognition and situational awareness are keys to survival. That, and choosing the right piece of wood in the churning sea to hold onto.

I often think of the story as I stand in the center of the crowded, seething, stinking courtrooms of the Poverty Capital of America, where I beg for justice and mercy for the poor, as my father did before me before he died of a liquor-soaked, broken heart. I clutch the podium provided, and hang on for survival.

I watch for patterns in the behaviors of judges and prosecutors and cops and clients. I pay attention to the cameras and microphones and watch my every word. I note the presence of people in the gallery behind me, I expect they are gauging my persuasion, my character, with each poor meat patty in the prison/industrial complex fast food restaurant I represent, until it's their turn to stand with me at the podium.

I think of my own solution to the puzzle, my own mystery solved, that grants me an almost beatific buoyancy amid the swirling eddy of despair and prejudice and ignorance and addiction and incompetence and corruption that nearly engulfs me each day.

The solution is this: Courtroom Classroom Theater Church. And I have wisely chosen the right piece of wood.

The Alchemical Routine

Bloomsday drives east, towards Clevelandia, on the shoreway that hugs the southern banks of Lake Erie. it is the first business day of 2012. His mind reels backward in time, to Prague and the alchemists, their transformations of base metals to gold, guided by elemental recipes.

He exits at East 9th and takes a quick left, northward. Ahead, the street seems to drop off into the icy water. White foaming waves crash over the breakwall, screaming into the left ear of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's pyramid. Another left, and he sees the giant, trinitarian turbine looming in front of the Great Lakes Science Center and its massive sphere. Then, a strange tribute to fallen firefighters, two rescue-suited statues overcome by the three-storied flames, footsteps from the turbine's base. Then comes Browns stadium. Brown, the earthen hue of dirt cast upon the annual grave of hopes we bury each year in this garish orange vault.

As Bloomsday vrooms to his Port of Clevelandia parking spot, he notes the succession: water of the lake, wind of the turbine, fire of the memorial, earth of Browns Stadium. Water. Wind. Fire. Earth.

He passes under West 3rd to the gated entrance to his city's port, and notices the port is...busy. Unusually busy. Cargo ships, containers, trucks, flatbeds with mysterious, large objects tethered under opaque plastics.

All the elements for transformation are here, he muses. Ripe for the commingling.