Your question is not very clear to me. What do you mean with: "messy blessed text messes"? I searched for something in your recent posts, quickly, I cant find something relevant.

You got good replies (see LanX's one). As he said bless is used to add something like a flag to a reference. The flag says: I'm not from here. I come from Whatever::Package so see there to see how I behave. When some method of this blessed reference is called (a method is simple sub) the first parameter received will be the object itself, generally named $self but just as convention.

A full minimalist example

use strict;
use warnings;

# usually this is defined inside a perl module
# at ./Whatever/Package.pm
package Whatever::Package;

# this is the constructor. generally called new but is not a rule 
sub new{
    # we will receive the class name as first argument
    my $class = shift;
    # and just need to return a reference (an anonymous hash {} in thi
+s case) blessed into $class
    return bless {}, $class;
}

sub first {
    my $self = shift;
    print "We are inside package ",__PACKAGE__,
            " we received \$self because it is blessed into ",ref $sel
+f,"\n";
}

# usually this is defined inside a perl module
# at ./Another/Example/Package.pm
package Another::Example::Package;

# note the same NAME for the sub
sub first {
    my $self = shift;
    print "This method will no be called unless the object is blessed 
+into Another::Example::Package";
}

# usually the script will use Whatever::Package (defined inside a perl
+ module ./Whatever/Package.pm)
# but we can merely switch back to the default package 'main'
package main;

# again a sub with the same name
sub first{ 
    print "We are inside package ",__PACKAGE__," I'm not a method but 
+a bare lone sub\n";
}

# test the local sub
first();

# let 'instanciate' an object of the Whatever::Package class
my $obj = Whatever::Package->new();

print "\$obj is now a blessed reference. It is blessed into ",ref $obj
+,"\n";

# above we have 3 subs named first. Which one will be called?
$obj->first();
[download]

Start with the standard documentation. See package too.

If you can get a copy of the old but valid Perl CookBook read: