BLOOMSDAY

Okay, so I finally went and done it. I did a Bloomsday and got my tee shirt. Now I can never again claim, with an air of disdain, that I've never done a Bloomsday. Notice, I didn't say "ran" Bloomsday. I was a walker with my wife, and I really hated to have people pass me, but my wife slowed me down. She's a bit younger than my 66 years so what can you expect?

I'm serious about being bothered when people passed me. Still have that stupid male need to compete instead of enjoying the walk through beautiful scenery with crowds of nice people all around. It was my wife's first Bloomsday also, and at mile 6, she said, "I think once is good enough for me." But, passed or not, we can claim we never stopped along the way and kept plodding mile after mile start to finish and finished in just under 163 minutes.

One nice thing about spending a good part of the day walking, eating out and riding buses to and from downtown (another first for me in Spokane was the bus ride) is that I didn't have to hear or read about Bush's Iraq folly. One thing I was thinking yesterday is that if this were 1950s America, Bush would have a 20 percent approval rating for his wild hair up the butt invasion of another nation. Americans were much more peaceful and wise in those days. They weren't paranoid and confused. You had to attack them first before they invaded and occupied you.


WILL THE REAL BLOOM'S DAY STAND UP?

How many have ever read James Joyce's "Ulysses" whose main character is Leopold Bloom as in Bloom's day? In Joyce's largely autobiographical novel, "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", his main character, Stephen Dedalus proclaims, "I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some form of life or art as freely as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning."

Ah, goodness, if I were young again, I'd go into exile like Joyce.... Bush is everything wrong with current America—violence, pride, cruelty, ignorance and illiteracy. He is so un-American and Nazi-like, you could almost imagine he comes from Texas, that strange, murderous patch of tumbleweed located in northern Mexico.


"Men read maps better than women because only men can understand the concept of an inch equaling a hundred miles." —Roseanne Barr