lifting again his hind leg

Within a few hours of being in Dublin, I knew I had made the right decision.  I wanted to show Ulysses to the James Joyce Centre, and since we're staying only a few blocks away and needed to kill some time before checking into the hostel, we ambled on up there, blurry eyed and a little jittery from the coffee.

The visit took two attempts.  On the first attempt, we was blocked by a gentleman sitting on the steps drinking a couple of bottles of Budweiser.  Okay, this is surely the right place, even though it's in the middle of a residential street.  We walked on and came back about fifteen minutes later.  The same gentleman was peeing in the bushes next to the James Joyce Centre.  He noticed that I had noticed that he was peeing in the bushes of the James Joyce Centre and said to me,

--- Just watering the flowers, mate.

I walked past him and up the stairs and into the James Joyce Centre and spent the next hour and a half learning about James Joyce.

Did you know he was born on Groundhog Day?

My favorite little part of the museum (it looked like a small museum) was a replication of the tiny bedrooms that Joyce had to write in for most of his life.  I have long been interested in how writers write, the process, the position, their surroundings, their medium.  It looked as though Joyce used any type of notebook he could get his hands on.  The pages were not lined.  He wrote in longhand and without too many words on a page.  He took what looked like crayons and crossed out and circled and reworded large blocks of his handwritten text.  Once that was acceptable, a manuscript was typed, and the ones I saw had text that ran virtually to the edges of the page, hardly an indentation for a new paragraph, hardly space in between lines.  Text so tiny and compact I was having trouble reading it without getting quite close.  It's not that my eyes are terrible (though I could probably use glasses from time to time, Mr. Squints-a-lot), but Joyce was plagued his whole life with poor eyesight, suffering through a number of surgeries, forced to wear eyepatches, and thicker-than-coke-bottle glasses.  By the time he died, he was very nearly blind.  It boggled my mind how he could have made any corrections once these crammed manuscript pages were typed up for him.

After showing Ulysses a good time at the James Joyce Centre, I took him past the statue of James Joyce.

Needless to say, me and Ulysses were quite surprised by another sign that being here in Dublin was a little something like fate.  Like this all should very much be happening.