The Endlong Ride, 13th Day of Fall, 525 M.E. (Deneb): And still, these languid days and nights continue to pass as in a dream.

Deneb is a walking day, and today I walked a mere Monroe (5.8 miles) before I was turned back by an incoming thunderstorm. I got in the house just in time to avoid getting soaked. 

I'm thinking I may cut back a little on the length of these alternating-day walks, as they're taking too much time. At 3.1 mph, the Monroe itself only took about two hours, but before I head out I have to change into walking clothes, eat and properly hydrate, and make sure my bladder and bowels are evacuated. When I return, I need to rest and sometimes even cat-nap, and then shower and change back into street clothes. All told, if I decide at say, noon, to walk, it might by 4:00 pm before I'm out of the shower and dressed again. And that's a Monroe in my own neighborhood. If I opt for a nine-mile Harrison along the Chattahoochee, not only are there two more walking hours, but also the time driving to the trailhead and back.        

The long and short of it is I find myself resisting the walks, reluctant to commit half the day or more to the effort, or unsure that the weather's going to give me a four- to six-hour window without rain. If I just went out the door and walked a two-mile Adams, I'd be done within an hour and wouldn't need nearly as much prep or cool-down time. 

Today, when I wasn't out walking, I finally finished reading Ulysses. I liked it, at first, but as it went on and on (and on and on and on), I gradually grew irritated, then frustrated, and ultimately resentful. Having completed the book - every page (all 768) and every chapter (they're not numbered, but 28) - I can honestly say it's the most pretentious, self-indulgent, tedious bullshit I've ever wasted my time on. I mean, sure, I get it - Joyce is a genius, a highly intelligent, well-educated man - but he rubs your nose in that on every page, stuffing the pages with the most recherche references and vocabulary, stylistic posturing, and pointless flights of fantasy. Not to say that there isn't literary merit to the book  despite all the self indulgence, wankery, and endless digressions. I'm glad that I read it (really), if for no other reason than I can confidently say I'll never do that again and wouldn't recommend it to anyone else. 

If you haven't read it, let me spoil it for you my revealing the plot. A man, one Leopold Bloom, who's catfishing some woman responding to a non-existent job offer so that he can exchange dirty letters with her, gets up in the morning, burns the kidneys he was frying for breakfast, goes to a funeral, masturbates in a public park while staring at a teenage girl, and then stalks a young man in the red-light district, bringing him home in order to seduce his own wife, whom he knows slept with another man that day. He fails, the young man leaves, and Bloom crawls into bed with his wife, his head buried down at the foot of the bed. The end. 

It takes Joyce nearly 800 pages to tell that story (Hemingway could probably reduce it to one sentence), those 800 pages overstuffed with run-to-the-thesaurus phrases like "agenbite of inwit," angular sentences like "Before born bliss babe had. Within womb won he worship," and nonsense onomatopoeia like, "Imperthnthn thnthnthn." Not to mention his frequent and casual use of the notorious n-word.

To be sure, it was fun trying to decipher the first hundred or so pages, but after a while it just became fucking preposterous.   

What else is going on? Oh yes - a third storm system has developed in the Atlantic, behind Hurricane Erin and the system discussed yesterday that's tracking along the same path as Erin. That third system is currently just off the coast of Senegal, but has a 30% chance of developing into a tropical storm and is heading towards us to the west.