The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

With garden planting already under way, I’ve been searching for seeds. Usually I roll into the nearest hardware or grocery or garden supply store and load up on whatever seeds I need, plenty to choose from, some organic, some not. This year I found the display racks pretty much empty. So I did what any modern gardener worth his manure would do, I went online. I found some of what I was searching for, not all by any means, and the price was at least double what it would be ordinarily. After a few days of letting my fingers do the walking, I let my credit card to the talking.

I recalled back in those early plague days long ago when not just toilet paper was being hoarded, but yeast and flour too. I’m a bread maker so it was more than marginally disconcerting to discover some of the basic ingredients were unavailable, although I already had a large supply of wheat berries, seeds, grains, molasses and flour stored up. The other day a friend who sells us beefalo called to let me know he’s swamped with calls from desperate people wanting him to sell them meat. Another buddy mentioned that freezers were selling out all over. You could order one, but hell might freeze over before your meat got frozen in a new cooler.

The latest tactic to avoid food shortages in these End Times seems to be the purchasing of baby chicks. Wait a few weeks and you got eggs by the dozens and even fricassee once you’re sick of omelettes. You can use the chicken droppings on the garden, double your lettuce production. E-I-E-I Oh! We’re all going back to the land, maybe buy a couple calves, build a barn behind the garage.

What are we to think? Are folks expecting the plague zombies to surge into their grocery stores and clean out the shelves to the last loaf of white dead bread? Are they planting gardens, growing food, storing meat and pizzas, baking bread and fermenting homebrew? If the internet goes offline suddenly, you can bet your crop of zucchinis that panic will ensue within minutes, gun safes unlocked, doors bolted, a siege mentality spreading across the Home of the Brave. Only those with guns and cans of pork and beans will survive. Looters will decimate the sad little backyard gardens and no freezer without a kryptonite lock will keep the hordes from emptying their booty.

I give it a month before the rabbits munch down the lettuce and the carrots and the neighbor dogs feast on the chickens out in the crummy pen thrown up by the sandbox. Maybe two before the bread making experiments and the brick-like loaves stop seeming worth the trouble. Three before the bathtub gin starts poisoning entire neighborhoods. Believe me, we’ll clamor for an end to the quarantine. Death by virus might seem a welcome relief.

The trouble with times like these where the Idiot King twitters whatever happens to spark across his busted synapses, is that there’s no one left to revel in the crazed lunacy that lies at the smoldering heart of a nation gone batshit crazy, no one who covers politics with a guano shovel rather than an Apple laptop, no one who sees the humor in the dystopian ruins of post-rational America where Medals of Freedom are passed out like consolation prizes to crooks and crankpots. Somewhere, I have no doubt, a few refugees of the drug wars must be bunkered into their underground warrens, chronicling this Mad Hatter era with a jaundiced eye and a needle still dangling in a pock-marked arm with soft chuckles at the damage done.

Slug another beer, slam a shot of Jack, skip wiping the chin and head right for the coke, the waning of Pax Americana has got to be good for another punch line or two. A reality show huckster becomes President! What satirist worth his advance would scrib a plot so preposterous? And yet. And yet. Heeeeeere’s … Donny!! He says what’s on his mind and the masses love a politician who tells it like it is. Or isn’t. Or who cares, the man is a showman, a clown, an angry bully, a narcissistic idiot whose blowhole spews gaseous venom. He’s entertainment from dawn to dusk. He’s the President of the United States, proof the syphilitic disease that’s burrowed into the national consciousness has festered and grown. Orange hair covers the tumor, the white eyes from the suntan goggles practically glow, the piggy lips pout and spit … step right up, ladies and gentleman, step right up, the Angry Rich Man, 25 cents, see him rage on the stage, watch him burn his enemies, witness the Sight of the Century!! 25 cents. Step right up! The Pissed Off President!! You voted for him, now see him snarl in person!!

A bull in the China shop, all right. He’s got a hunch the coronavirus numbers from the experts are too high, way too high. Just a hoax, folks. Stay calm, he’s got this covered, vaccines will be at your pharmacy tomorrow. Meanwhile, you got symptoms, go to work, nothing more than a cold, really, nothing to worry about. You’ll feel fine before you know it, ignore the chill and fever, the hacked up chunks of lung. He says the experts can’t believe how knowledgeable he is about medicine, about disease, about all things scientific, probably good genetics. After all, he has a relative at MIT. Smart guy, seriously smart, no wonder he’s a genius president. Genetics — beats studying. Let the morons study, he’s got hunches.

If a neighbor said this to you, you’d laugh in his face, tell him to sober up. When the Idiot King says he’s wearing really fine clothes, his attendants describe the color and fabric. We have a pandemic under way, we have economic problems, we have global warming as an existential threat, we have international crises.

But … he has a hunch.

I have a hunch that the country is sliding toward a slow insanity, where we believe only what we want to believe and the rest is phony. We follow tweets, we spend half the day on Facebook, we text rather than talk on a phone, we live in our own virtual bubble, quarantined from reality. Call the doctors, I think we’re sick…. Go to the office anyway, we’ll be fine. I’m sure of it. We’re in good hands. Everything’s okay.