Fog

           On Tuesday morning my guitar was in tune when I started playing and stayed that way through two-thirds of song practice. If no tuning is required the whole session only takes an hour but often it goes on for an hour and a half. There’s a certain level, when my humidity meter reads 40, where it says in tune, and that’s where it was this time. The heat was on in my apartment but outside there was a heavy fog that I imagined was serving as a protective cone against the demons that attack string harmony. The fog got thicker after 7:00 and turned white as the sun was rising.

            DuJuan walked across the street, waved and shouted up at me, “Happy New Year!” I’ve hardly seen him for the last few months and I assume that’s because he’s been getting a ride to work and that he only takes the streetcar now if his colleague is sick or otherwise indisposed.

            The wi-fi was down for a few hours in the afternoon. I worked on my essay a bit and tried to find connections between T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. Ginsberg had mentioned the three Fates and Eliot brought up Belladonna. The poisonous plant is called Atropos Belladonna and that’s where the drug atropine comes from. The Fate that rules over death is Atropos.

            I read most of Philip Roth’s “Defender of the Faith”, from the point of view of a Jewish army sergeant just returned from the European theatre in 1945. The war is still going on and he’s training new soldiers. Three of those soldiers are Jewish too and they keep asking for special privileges from him, like kosher food and passes to go to a seder when no passes are being granted to anybody. He keeps giving in to them out of guilt.

            I watched the third and fourth episodes of the 21^st season of South Park.

            In the third, Randy Marsh is on a campaign to eradicate all references to Christopher Columbus from North American society, including trying to get British Columbia to change its name to British. Evidence surfaces though that Randy is a hypocrite, because Randy used to be obsessed with Columbus and even dressed up like him for his wedding. He decides that his only chance is to get DNA tested in order to prove that he’s part victim, but he wants to make sure so he gives Native guy some money and then French kisses him just before giving the saliva sample. But the Native guy falls in love with him and starts giving Stan flowers and bringing his parents over to meet him. Stan’s saliva swab was inconclusive so they came back and gave him an anal test. He found out that he was 2.8 Neanderthal, which is the ultimate victim, since the entire species was wiped out.

Also, Randy misunderstands the term indigenous, and thinks that it means to be unfair, as in “Why are you being so indigenous to me?”

The fourth episode features the Coon and Friends superhero team plotting their movie franchise. Their plan is to start with Netflix because they’ll take anything. But their arch-nemesis, Professor Chaos has sabotaged their Facebook page by posting lies about them, like that they sneak into kids’ bedrooms at night when they are sleeping and poop in their mouths. Everybody believes it because it’s on Facebook. The adults of the town invite Mark Zuckerberg to come and speak but once he’s invited he won’t leave. He raids their homes and eats their food and when they protest he acts like he’s in a kung fu movie in slow motion, makes sound effects for invisible energy beams and declares, “You cannot block me!” In exchange for $17.50, Zuckerberg begins working for Professor Chaos to further undermine the efforts of Coon and Friends to start a movie franchise. The kids all attack Zuckerberg at once on the street and they have him on the ground while they surround and kick him. But Zuckerberg throws them off and begins beating up Jimmy, Token and Kyle. But that’s all part of Coon and Friends’ plan. The capture on Facebook Live, Zuckerberg attacking, a disabled person, an African American and a Jew. Zuckerberg is defeated and is forced to shut down Facebook.