AUSTIN, Texas, June 16, 2005 — It is Bloomsday. The day that a fictional guy (Leopold Bloom) wandered Dublin in James Joyce's Ulysses. I suggest to FFP that we should do something in honor of it, sort of in jest.

I do get up a bit earlier than usual. I make my welfare call to Dad and get to the club at nine for my tennis game. It's hot out there, folks. I play the requisite three sets with the, um, older ladies. (Older than me!) The sets are short. My results are 6-0, 1-6, 6-1, I think. I think that one lady, with macular degeneration is the decider on how the results go. And yet she has

good hands and instincts and, if she can't really see the ball or sees two, she gets a lot of stuff back. I just hope I can keep playing for the next fifteen or twenty years like these ladies. We have conversations between the tennis. The woman I'm substituting for likes clay and one lady wishes she's known she wasn't coming so she could have worn the shoes she used for hard court. Another woman likes that no one in the group sits on changeovers (the missing woman does that). One woman opens a Diet Dr. Pepper in a koozy at ten o'clock. She says she has one at ten and two but can't drink one at four. It comes up in conversation that the same woman grew up in Oak Cliff in Dallas. She names the street. It is very close, I think, to where my two aunts lived for fifty-five years. She is about the same age as my younger aunt who lived with them.

After the tennis I go to the gym. I was my face and try to cool off and then do some weights and machines. Then I ride the exercise bike for twenty-five minutes. It's never enough.

I go home. I eat breakfast. Well, breakfast food: cereal and yogurt. The day is open from now on. I do some writing and then watch some of the films for AFF. I eat lunch. Well, lunch food. Broccoli salad and some leftover fish stew with some crackers. FFP comes in between and among three interviews he's doing. He is stockpiling columns so he can relax when we go away and when we come back from the trip.

FFP has some pictures for columns for me to download. He has come home from one of his interviews full of the possibility of starting a Bloomsday Event as a benefit with one of his interviewees charities as the beneficiary. He is excited by this possibility and wants to have dinner with someone to discuss it. He calls up an actress friend he's talked to about such a deal before, but she's got a performance. He calls up the interviewee and she agrees to having dinner to discuss it further. That's how I end up getting cleaned up and going to dinner, unexpectedly. FFP conducts business at 34th Street Cafe with our dinner guest and all the other people he knows.

We get home and watch the Spurs tank for a while. I read the papers. Then we watch a video FFP ordered a while back called Joyce's Women about Joyce's wife, his invented characters like Molly Bloom, etc. All through dinner I've joked about maybe, one day, I'll have to actually read the book. I have done much prep work (some would say avoidance): reading biographies of Joyce, reading the infinitely more accessible The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, reading exposition and criticism and even reading a translation of The Odyssey. I still have a course on DVD and I've yet to finish Gilbert's book. (It is a bathroom book and I've managed to read over a hundred pages in utter bafflement. Untranslated French and Greek, English words I don't know, quotes from the unfathomable source, footnotes about literature and legend that are dense as heck.) I think the attraction is this utter density that Joyce knowingly foisted on the literary world.

We stay up too late somehow again. Finally to bed.