Wake up Leopold Bloom, because I’m 22 and have a pathetic definition of partying.

People celebrate lots of fictional events: May the 4th parties; storming the Capitol because of stolen votes; all the holidays of all the religions that aren’t yours. But none are as great as Bloomsday.

You can’t spend May 4th using the force to defeat Sith lords, or Hanukkah making candles last eight days, but if you can drink a lot and muster the courage to meekly ask your spouse to make you breakfast the next day, you too can be the hero of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

In 1994, I joined the Dublin celebration that traces the fictional meanderings of Leopold Bloom on June 16, 1904. People drank Burgundy and ate gorgonzola sandwiches at the same pub he did, bought lemon soap from the same Victorian shop he did, and saw oddly sober men reenact Paddy Dignam’s funeral at the same cemetery he was buried in. Some wore Edwardian outfits. Others made fun of their Edwardian outfits. Still others wore Edwardian outfits and made fun of people not wearing Edwardian outfits.

Since then, I’ve gone to a restaurant in New York to choke down kidneys for breakfast, because that’s what Bloom ate. I’ve gone to readings in New York City featuring actors such as Stephen Colbert and similar ones in Los Angeles. Bands played Bloomsday related music while I drank Guinness in a shirt that said, “and yes I said yes I will Yes.” The shocking part is that I’ve gotten three different women to go with me to these events, none of whom I was related to.

That big nerd energy, enough to light at least four Comic-Con conference room, must have fueled a ton of sweet Ulyssesfanfiction.

Or so I assumed.

The biggest fan fiction site, Archive of Our Own, with nearly 10 million stories, has practically no Ulysses-inspired ones. There was a short piece from Bloom’s cat’s perspective, in which he complains about the disgusting kidneys, called “A Portrait of the Pussens as a Kosher Cat.” And there is one truly great piece that delivers the gay sex between Bloom and Stephen Daedalus that I expected would clog the site. In it, Daedalus and Bloom don’t part after drunkenly urinating late at night. Instead, the fanfiction author has them check out each other’s members and then, in the Q&A catechism style of episode 17, writes:

His instruction to Stephen?

To retrieve the thick, firm, bulky second volume of Hozier’s History of the Russo-Turkish War.

What new use, entirely unanticipated by Hozier, was found for his work?

The repeated paddling of Bloom’s upturned rump, which proved fleshy enough to sustain the most force Dedalus could muster, that quantity being greater than either suspected in light of the latter’s physique.

Why was there not more of this? Ulysses was made for fan fiction. This is a book centered on one of those weird sudden friendships between an old guy and a young man that teachers get away with calling a “search for a father figure.” Each chapter has its own weird style asking to be parodied. The book itself is fanfiction of Homer’s Odyssey. I asked Claudia Rebaza, who runs communications for Archive of Our Own, what was holding people back.

Part of the issue, she explained, is that no one reads Ulysses. Or any other books. The most popular source materials on their site are, in order: Marvel superheroes, the Korean boy band BTS, Harry Potter, the ghost-hunting TV show Supernatural, DC superheroes, YouTube celebrities, and Star Wars.

But what’s working against Ulysses even more than the fact that no one has read it is that it’s good.

“Fanfiction tends to focus on canons which are not particularly high quality,” Rebaza told me. Part of that is because genre fiction offers a clear pattern to build new stories on, which is why there’s a lot of pro wrestling fan fiction.

But more importantly, bad art is oddly inspiring.

“A flawed work is much more likely to give confidence to a writer, as in the expression (very often seen in response to modern art) ‘I could do better than that.’ Confidence and self-consciousness affect a lot of writing,” she argued.

People are inspired to copy bad work. What people do with great works, Rebaza said, is celebrate them in other mediums. While there’s very little Mad Men fanfiction, people create music videos about the show. There’s a new edition of Ulyssesfilled with illustrations by the late Eduardo Arroyo.

Which is probably why out of the 10 million stories on Archive of Our Own, there is only one in which I am a character. It is from 2017 and the summary of the story is: “Gay?”

I feel like I’ve finally made it.

Joel Stein is the senior distinguished visiting fellow at the Joel Stein Institute. A former columnist for Time, the L.A. Times, and Entertainment Weekly, he is, amazingly, also the author of In Defense of Elitism: Why I’m Better Than You and You’re Better Than Someone Who Didn’t Buy This Book and Man Made: A Stupid Quest for Masculinity. Follow him on Twitter,Facebook, Instagram, Friendster, or Google+.