Anyone who has read James Joyce’s Ulysses knows pain.

It is not that the book is bad. Thumb down a compendium of the best books ever written and you are bound to stumble on Ulysses at some point. It is dense and weighty and can do things to you emotionally that are perhaps outside the purview of what you expect from a novel. It is pulp and binding and yet it can seep into you like few things.

And yet Ulysses might also be over-dense nonsense that is maybe begging you to throw it into an incinerator manned by the wild beasts of reality television. I can’t say which.

Joyce’s third chapter in Ulysses is called Proteus, and it might be the widest literary exploration into the depths of mental misdirection ever attempted. It feels, to me anyway, like being locked in a padded cell and being poked by a very pretentious dowsing rod for an hour. Your first read-through, you will be lost. Your second, you will question your sanity. I do not know what happens on the third because I became a Bird of Paradise and flew into a temporal Olive Garden on an unnamed planet in Steven Seagal’s ear cavity.

This is from the SparkNotes entry on that chapter. This is all part of a lucid dream sequence, by the way. I think. I’m not entirely sure.

Opening his eyes, Stephen notices two midwives, Mrs. Florence MacCabe and another woman. Stephen imagines that one has a miscarried fetus in her bag. He imagines an umbilical cord as a telephone line running back through history through which he could place a call to “Edenville.”

And then.

According to the Nicene Creed, a part of the Catholic mass, Christ was “begotten, not made,” meaning that he is part of the same essence as God the Father and was not made by God the Father out of nothing. Stephen, in contrast, was “made not begotten,” in that though he has biological parents, his soul was created out of nothing and bears no relation to his father’s. Stephen would like to argue the specifics of divine conception (are the Father and the Son the same being or not?) with heretic-scholars of the past.

No. I would not like that. Any more and I can’t guarantee we’ll make it to the end of this whole and alive and together as people.

Now I want to say this: MLS’s allocation rules are that chapter. They are Proteus. They are Protean in nature. And I know because I descended into their depths and I barely made it back with wit enough to spell my name.

On Dec. 9, I engaged in a bit of Twitter chatter with well-known soccer writers Leander Schaerlaeckens and Jeffrey Carlisle. Both men are as knowledgeable about the machinations of MLS as any single independent human has any right to be. There are not many independent American sports journalists who spend all of their professional might pouring thought into how this league’s allocation system works, but these are they.

If you will, I am dropping you into that arena now.

Over the next hour, Schaerlaeckens, Carlisle and I puzzled and postulated over the new Targeted Allocation Money ruling that had just been dropped into place. In addition to the $500K already in the kitty, MLS opened spending up a further $800K to buy down players who would otherwise be above the Designated Player threshold. As is usual with MLS rule tweaks, explanations were done at the 35,000-foot level. On the ground, where we are, everything else looked hopelessly pixelated.

If anyone would understand while we hemmed and hawed over what this meant, it would be MLS allocation wizard and Sounders GM Garth Lagerwey. Generally considered the Dean of MLS GMs, Lagerwey attempted to explain things to MLS fans through Seattle Times writer Matt Pentz last week, and, well, this is hard.

“Yes, it can be confusing,” Lagerwey said. “Yes, it can give the impression of not being transparent. But, although the money isn’t (interchangeable) and has to stay in one particular bucket, if you think of the salary cap as just one mechanism … ” He catches himself. “It’s unfortunately complex and a little bit difficult to clarify.”

Lagerwey is our SparkNotes and he is telling us we are reading Proteus, so just buckle the hell up because this test is going to suck your brain out through your nose.

The crux of the discussion about TAM, and thereby what Carlisle, Schaerlaeckens and I had so much trouble codifying, is whether this will actually help an MLS middle class that suddenly seems to mirror the shrinking midsection of the American economic sector. Take it from Grant Wahl, who talked to an unnamed GM who called this offseason a potential “bloodbath” for players earning between $100K and $250K.

One longtime MLS GM tells me that this offseason could be a “bloodbath” for middle-class and veteran MLS players making between $100,000 and $250,000. The problem: The new collective bargaining agreement wasn’t agreed upon until March, and the salary budget per team didn’t go up nearly as high as some league GMs were expecting. As a result, several teams had to use far more allocation money than they had planned to get cap compliant in March—and now have much less allocation money than they had expected for next season. (Most GMs plan on how to use their allocation money more than one window ahead.) The longtime GM says to look for middle-class MLS players to suffer and in many cases have their salaries reduced.

Whether inwardly or outwardly, TAM was billed as a step-around to the lack of direct cap cash. Buy down a DP to “middle class” levels, facilitate more cap space and fit in players who are too expensive to fill out the bottom levels of sub-$100K contracts (of which, unfortunately, they are far too many in MLS) but not quite good enough to earn DP contracts. This is, most interject, where MLS needs a talent injection the most and where it is most underserved.

But does TAM really do anything at all to help the issue? This is where we split. And before I go any deeper, let me remind you that this was the work, at least on my part, of a mind doing its damndest to wrap itself around all this madness. I allow that I may be missing something. Our SparkNotes is broken.

Schaerlaeckens painted a convincing canvas to the broader point that more TAM cash helps the middle class grow. I said that it did not. Dive with me under the waves, if you will.

The minimum cap charge on a TAM player is $150K. The max is the top cap hit a team can take before hitting the DP ceiling, which is $436,250. A TAM player exists in that viscera. But we also know two other things about TAM players: teams can can buy down a current DP into this TAM threshold only if they replace him with a DP of equal or greater value, and they can only use TAM cash to buy down the salary of a player who “is earning more than the maximum salary budget.”

I’ll be honest and say I’m not entirely sure what maximum salary budget means in this case. MLS rules are fun like that sometimes. But whether that’s the threshold of their entire cap or something else (what, I’m not sure), the point is that the acquisition mechanism is taking you to the breaking point of your available money and then pulling you back off the ledge. You aren’t supposed to feel all that comfortable spending TAM cash. It helps shift, but it doesn’t solve.

TAM is more or less the redistribution of the cash trickling into the system from a leaky faucet. It is moving things around that already exist more than it is creating anything new.

But what it creates, and how much of it creates, is entirely misunderstood right now on a level that would make whole sense to other human beings. What is happening now has never happened before. Nobody really knows, least of all me.

My overriding argument in this Twitter back and forth (which nearly broke me, mentally), was that TAM does not create appreciable space for the middle class, it merely takes players from outside the system would would otherwise be DPs and jam them into MLS at contracts that take up space. This is not necessarily a net loss for the league, since more good players are always welcome, but it is a contrivance to sidestep arcane rules that are being piled on top of one another like callouses on top of a torn ligament that never fully healed. It does not create change for the middle class.

Oh, TAM might create some room, as players are pulled under the cap, but it isn’t itself there to generate a ton of space for other players would would be in that TAM threshold. If I have not lost you already to Edenville itself, this is where MLS needs to target its gaze. At least salary wise, the Andreas Ivanschitz types (though perhaps maybe a bit younger).

But the point was maybe that it was never intended to be a salve for the MLS middle class, really. MLS, in essence, is doing what it can to foster better player acquisition within the dizzying cityscape of scaffolding and constant construction it has created for itself. The problem is that there is one very simple fix to all this that MLS is scared to activate.

Why is MLS scared of throwing up the salary cap? That answer is multi-tiered, obvious on the surface and perhaps not so obvious in a lucid dream state. Oh sorry. Damn Proteus again.

We know via Wahl and others that a least some of the league’s GMs expected the cap increase to be higher than it was after the league’s recent CBA win over the players. The league’s salary cap of around $3.5 million is incredibly restrictive, and it comes with the caveat that the league has to stretch and bend itself to stay malleable for teams not only willing but bristling to spend more money on bigger players. The DP and TAM go hand in hand into the Protean world they created.

Maybe my favorite headline around the most recent round of cap questioning came from Forbes: “MLS is to salary cap what Donald Trump is to humility”

Increasing the cap would solve a lot of these problems – parity would decline, but who needs MLS parity at the Moon-high levels where it currently sits? – and create a handful of others MLS is seemingly loathe to approach. For one, there is the abiding question of why MLS players suddenly deserve more money (which is a misdirection of an answer), but the bigger white whale throwing up foam on the horizon is whether the league’s prized parity would take a crippling broadside by allowing more spending leeway between clubs. Seattle and LA would eventually seek to squeeze every ounce of utility out of a $10 or $15 or $20 million salary cap. The Chicago Fire and Colorado Rapids would not.

But the MLS “middle class” problem is so real because there is no actual space inside the current cap to foster one. There isn’t enough oxygen in the salary space to make room for a bunch of $60K-$150K players, some DPs raking in $450K against the cap and a bunch of middle tier guys. The goal should essentially be the flip the lower and middle tier, where rosters bustle with $150K-$400K players and players underneath that are either Homegrowns or unknowns.

And that’s what TAM is vaguely stabbing at, and its obfuscation from the public is a sign that MLS had to do a lot of gerrymandering to make it happen. The cap raise is easier, and better in the long run, but it is a fundamental alteration of the league’s slow-and-steady approach, and that strikes at the heart of the league’s previously held strategy. Maybe that’s the way forward right now from an economic standpoint. Garber knows the books better than us.

But the point is it certainly isn’t the more understandable one.