HAPPY BIRTHDAY THOUGHTS FROM THE DEEP END WITH MISS JULIE’S POOL BOY: Today, the boss of MJPB has a birthday. The first birthday they spent together was at a concert with the band Chicago. That day, the couple known to some as Papa & Jules, couldn’t have seen the highlights & shadows that lay ahead, that they’d go from standing in line for concert tickets to lines on their faces. In the art world, when complementary colors like blue & orange are brought alongside one another, they are modified or amplified & made stronger, an event called simultaneous contrast. Whether the blues & oranges on their color wheel have traveled in troughs or climbed one of life’s peaks, Miss Julie has contrasted the highs & the lows with dignity & compounded toughness & grace into an elegant grit, often when all her Pool Boy offered was an elegant dishevelment, sorta like Bacall’s Slim was to Bogey’s Steve in “To Have & Have Not”. She’s stood in the rain, faced untamed winds, danced in the sunshine & dried tears in the night & let MJPB tell you about the night. Sometimes, it’s frigid, a lonely, biting chill when warm weather friends are revealed by their absence but she’s been there for the Pool Boy & sons. It’s often been just them & a blanket, but she’s there. Other times, the night’s had a volcanic, suffocating pressure. An eruption delivering heat so convincing MJPB was sure he’d just purchased 12 acres of Hell & she was there. It may have been just those two & a solitary water pistol to extinguish the magma, but she was there like a gunslinger, dueling flames at 20 paces & when the light of grit & determination was almost out in the Pool Boy’s lantern, Miss Julie was fanning the fire. When flames left ashes, her footprints were in the debris. She helped rescue a pool & swim team when a pandemic claimed two summers, she’s rescued birthdays & Christmas, rescued months when the money was gone by the 20th, & she’s rescued this human when he lost his way on trails lit by bridges he torched, enabled his writing addiction with pens, paper & belief, & meant it when she vowed for better or worse & MJPB, in under 400 words in 1st person & 3rd, says happy birthday & I love you Miss Julie