The Three Fates

            I was groggier than usual when I got up on Sunday, though I’m pretty sure I slept a good four hours. Some of the fog diminished gradually during yoga but it didn’t really shake away fully till song practice. I had to take an early siesta in the late morning though.

            I worked on my journal.
            I fiddled over the last couple of days with the concept of the three one-eyed shrews of Fate from Allen Ginsberg’s Howl to try to line them up with the three Fates from Greek mythology. By calling them “one-eyed shrews” Ginsberg has melted each Fate down to being a different unruly vagina.  The shrew of fate “of the heterosexual dollar” must be Lachesis, who determines how long someone lives. Perhaps the idea is that one needs money to keep going and a gay man like Ginsberg couldn’t make money without pretending to be heterosexual or else at least keeping quiet about being gay. Advertising (especially in the mid 50s when Howl was written) emphasizes products that enhance heterosexual relationships. We want “kissing sweet” breath to appeal to the opposite sex as depicted in the image of a man and woman; the one eyed shrew “that winks out of the womb” would have to correspond to Clothos, the one that spins the thread of life in the womb and Atropos, the one that cuts the thread of human life at the end, in Ginsberg’s depiction snips and tames the wild glory of an artist’s endeavors. It could be that Ginsberg is negatively sexualizing editors and critics here by effectively calling them unpleasant cunts. But each of these shrews of fate interrupts young homosexual love. So they must be the female icons that Ginsberg thinks pulls a young man into the heterosexual world, even if his first experiences with sex were homosexual.

            The sirloin tip roast that I bought a few days ago was approaching its best before date so I salted it, seared it and rubbed it with garlic, oregano, basil, black pepper and hot pepper flakes and slow-roasted it for about four hours. It was a little too well done.

            I watched the first two episodes of the 21^st season of South Park.  These kids went into Grade 4 in the fourth season and they’ve been there for 17 years. They should do an episode in which it’s discovered they are in a time loop but then forget. A time loop would also explain why Kenny has died so many times and yet turned up in the next episode.

            In the first story Randy and Sharon Marsh have a show called White People Renovating Houses; meanwhile the working class rednecks of South Park have all lost their jobs to computerization and so they start marching, protesting and waving Confederate flags (Colorado wasn’t officially on any side in the Civil War but there were sympathizers and regiments for both the north and south).

            The story arc for this season seems to be the relationship between Cartman and Heidi in which Cartman is unhappy because Heidi is not subservient to him and so he’s cheating on her with his Amazon Alexa, which always does what he wants. At the end he breaks up with Heidi.

            In the second story Cartman is back together with Heidi and explains to his friends that he had to take her back because she’d threatened to commit suicide. It turned out though that it was Cartman that had threatened to kill himself if she didn’t take him back. The boys got hold of the voice recording and were laughing about it together. This compelled Cartman to try to create a movement at the school to raise awareness about the possibility of him committing suicide but nobody cared. They were more interested in the real issue of distracted driving. About ten kids got killed by cars during the episode.

            Running parallel with the Cartman story is one about the bating of North Korea by the president of the United States. Tweak decided to try to resolve the issue by sending some cupcakes to Kim Jong UN. It helped until the president tweeted that Tweak probably took a dump in the batter. From then on all of North Korea’s animosity was directed at Tweak, encouraged by Trump, to the point that they sent a test missile over Tweak’s house.