"Positively it woolies one to think over it."

(178.8-180.33)  The narrator's unflattering description of Shem picks up with Shem holed up in his "compound" amidst the fallout of Bloody Sunday, now "that bloody, Swithun's day."  The doorways of Chapelizod were smeared with the blood of Irish patriots, "the blood of heroes" ran down the streets in rivers that mixed with tears of joy, and yet Shem, "our low waster," never came out of hiding to join the mob of "slashers and sliced alike."  Even while people filled the air with song, children went to school, and women crossed rainbow bridges, Shem only ventured to look out of his "westernmost keyhole" with a telescope to gauge the situation outside.  While he was in the act of doing this, however, he "got the charm of his optical life" when an unknown person pointed "an irregular revolver of the bulldog with a purpose pattern" at Shem from point blank range.

"What," the narrator hears us asking, was Shem "really at . . . for he seems in a badbad case?"  The answer is that he became an alcoholic and drug addict, and a megalomaniac to boot.  He began putting a seven-letter honorific title after his name and sat in his room "making believe to read his usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles" (Joyce's Ulysses, which was originally published with a blue cover and prominently features Dublin's Eccles Street).  He set to writing, with "every splurge on the vellum he blundered over" becoming to him "an aisling vision more goreous than the one before."  In his reveries he eventually envisions himself singing on stage as women throw their undergarments at him.  But, in actuality, Shem's in a very poor state.  The narrator lists Shem's numerous ailments, from "the fumbling fingers" to "the bats in his belfry," and notes that he was so down low that "it took him a month to steal a march" and "he was hardset to mumorise more than a word a week."  

So, even though Shem was getting his ideas from other sources, it still took him forever to even write a single phrase.  This is Joyce once again parodying himself and nearly two decades that it took him to follow up his "usylessly unreadable" Ulysses with Finnegans Wake.