The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

If you’re like me, and God help you if you are, you’re having trouble keeping track of what day of the week it is. Even worse, what month. Time sometimes stands still, sometimes races ahead, and worse, occasionally slips backwards. This is the sixth or seventh month of the Covid panic, outbreaks on the rise once again here and worldwide. You probably track the statistics the way you track the election polls, feverishly and incessantly. You pray to your gods that this epidemic will wane, that the election will be over, that a vaccine will be discovered that will give immunity to both.

I make one trip a week to the grocery store to stock up on food and reality suppressors. Every couple weeks I fill up the truck’s gas tank. In a real emergency I’ll have to haul into a hardware store to buy a replacement toilet for the one that broke recently, no doubt overworked by stressful bowel syndrome brought on by too much internet news. Other than that we’re sequestered here on the partisan South End, caged animals walking the trails of our self-imposed prison, wondering when Normality will return. Lately we think never.

Rumors trickle into our little bubble. A naked dead man washed up on shore a few miles north of us. Antifa? A Covid victim? Another suicide by someone who opted out of quarantine? Wildfires are burning up across the freeway. Or was it in Colorado? Fires seem to be engulfing half the west. Some say global warming, some say leftist guerillas. All information coming in is suspect now. Iranian disinformation and Chinese hackers, one of our neighbors claimed. Personally, I think he’s a Russian plant. His lights stay on late into the night. What’s he up to that late at night? Course, maybe he thinks the same thing of me. But we know, don’t we?, that I can’t even speak Russian much less work for the KGB since I am workaphobic.

The election is supposed to happen in a week. Only the gullible think this will occur. Sure, votes will be cast, media will report delays, ballots will be rejected, speculation of tampering will be rampant. The election will pass, maybe no winner declared, martial law declared, plague masks declared illegal to wear, schools reopened or closed or reopened again. A new election will be called, the last election voided, the President will speak on Fox News to say we’ve turned the corner, to declare victory over Covid, to promise a vaccine before the next election if there ever is one.

We have, he will say, nothing to fear but fear itself. He will declare that he is the first to say this. He insists that he’s the first to say this, that he said it long ago but the fake news won’t cover brilliant quotes of his. He will tell you what you have to be afraid of. Plenty, he’ll say. Suburban takeovers, racist riots, plague riddled immigrants, our own FBI, the Chinese, the liberals, even his own Republicans. Trust him, he’ll say, he’s got this. He’s got the best team. He’s got a Plan and when we’re ready, he’ll show it to us. We’re not ready yet. Maybe in a few more months.

But … what month is it now?

Back in the days when we wrenched on our cars — NOT for the love of vintage automobiles, but because we were too poor to have someone else repair them — we had just come back from the Rez junkyard where we’d pulled an automatic tranny out of another ’64 Impala half sunk in the swamps. Muddy nasty work, but you do what has to be done…. By late afternoon we had that transmission cleaned off and bolted onto our own Chevy up by the barn, and now the moment of truth had arrived so we fired up the Impala, ignored the bucket of parts with the ‘extra’ bolts and nuts and do-hickeys, dropped it off its jacks and headed up the road.

For the first mile we drove slow, feeling for sloppy shifts, listening for odd noises. Two miles up we hit 50 mph and now terrible noises rose through the floorboards so we pulled over and crawled underneath. Sure enough, a few bolts were missing where the tranny connected to the bellhousing, no doubt those ‘extra’ parts back in the bucket by the barn. We cursed, we spit, we finally laughed at our stupidity, stuck our thumbs out and waited for a ride.

Joe Frittitelli swerved to the shoulder in his big Exxon Valdez of a cruiser, said hop in, boyz, and we squeezed between Joe and his girlfriend, all four of us in the front seat the spaciousness of a Montana wheatfield. A mile later Joe had to urinate ‘like a racehorse’ and since the driver’s door was no longer functional, all of us slid out the passenger side and waited while Seabiscuit relieved himself, then we all rolled back in across seas of amber grain. He dropped us on the roadside by our place, then sped off in a purple haze of half burnt oil.

We retrieved the lost bolts, hitched back to the crippled Impala, installed them and an hour later we were back at the shack, Jack, celebrating with some cold ones. A month later I’m working my job as weekend graveyard orderly down at the Everett Pain Motel and run into Joe at 3 AM wandering the desolate hallways. “What’s up, Joe?” I asked.

Joe, it seems, had been cleaning his gun late that night, pulled the trigger and lo and behold, the unanticipated bullet in the chamber was now embedded in his girlfriend’s brain. I had just taken her to the Cat Scan but hadn’t recognized her. She was comatose but alive. It was, needless to say, a long night. The police were convinced he’d shot her intentionally. I was convinced he hadn’t. If he had, he deserved an Academy Award.

She stayed up in ICU on life support for two months. Alive, I guess, but not really. Last we heard they moved her to a facility that cared for the comatose. Joe was never charged. He got cancer and moved away, where, we heard, he died. And …. not to sound too cold hearted or unsympathetic to the victims here, our Impala died too. The tranny was no good and we didn’t want to waste time or money on another bad one. I don’t think we wanted to meet any more neighbors either. Maybe it wasn’t so much we were dirt poor back then — as much as life seemed just way too cheap.

Here’s a fun statistic you might like to share on your twitter account, Facebook page or just save for around the Thanksgiving dinner table with the family. Over half of Trump supporters believe the Qanon claim that the Democrats are running a pedophilia ring. You read every day where some pervert is arrested and his computer confiscated when it’s discovered he’s downloading child porn. What you didn’t know is that kiddie porn probably came from the Democratic Party, videos no doubt made with all the children they’ve kidnapped and locked into pizza parlor basements around the country. Insidious? Holy Uncle Joe, Batman, I’ll say insidious.!! And you were worried about the Biden Mafioso Crime Family….

Mr. T himself says he knows nothing, NOTHING, about Qanon, nothing, NOTHING, about pedophile rings run by Sleepy Joe. Sure, he retweets this stuff but only for amusement of the masses, they can decide on their veracity themselves. The fact that it comes directly from the President of the United States surely wouldn’t influence their ability to differentiate fact from insane fantasy. Not one little bit.

This is what 4 years of an emperor with no clothes can bring, an electorate spoonfed bullshit that thinks the Democratic Party can get away with corralling kids and forcing them to do god only knows what unthinkable acts. Welcome to Trump’s America. A dark hole of a place where perversion lurks behind every schoolyard and nursery. A place where a cabal of political operatives steal the nation’s children and enslave them for their evil purposes. A milk industry that hides the missing children from the public, no doubt co-criminals with the Democrats. This is what America has become.

Course, to be fair, we might ask the question why, if Trump and his followers know about this, why on earth do they allow it to go on?? Where is that evil fighter Bill Barr when we really need him? Where are the Republican Senators who allow this to continue unabated in their own states? Where are the people of Good?

I don’t know the answer to any of this. I surely do not. But I know this: I’m really glad I’m not a kid.

South End society runs the gamut these days from Dot.com millionaires to meth-heads. You live down here in the tonier backwashes, you acquire a necessary degree of egalitarianism. That, or you move into the Gated Communities, rig up elaborate security systems and hope the unwashed masses don’t mistake the moat around your castle as a fancy hot tub.

One of our neighbors who went by the moniker of ‘Dawg’ married a woman south of me and immediately added 4 stepkids to his care. His ex was living over the mountains with two of his other kids and so, in the spirit of misguided parenthood, Dawg and his old lady hired an attorney to regain custody of those poor deprived children being raised by a single mom who’d taken up with an ex-con and worse, one on drugs. Dawg and his mizzus were also on drugs, drank heavily, but they had decided their parental skills would serve the children best.

And so they finally convinced a judge and child services to return the two teenagers to the stability and warmth of a South End home, to be raised by paragons of virtue and join the family circle. A year later Dawg and the mizzus split the sheets after she’d shacked up with an alcoholic loser on the north end and left him with 4 juvenile delinquent stepkids and his own 2 genetic ones. In the spirit of sacrifice and after considerable deliberation with myself and Jack Daniels, Dawg moved out too.

Lest you think Dawg was heartless, it should be stated he came down once a week to fill the fridge and ‘check on things’. “I just can’t be here all the damn time,” he told me. “And anyway, those kids of hers (meaning the mizzus’) hate my guts.”

The neighbors grew concerned when the parties lasted deep into the night, cars honked horns and tore out at 2 AM and numerous fights were continually breaking out. Chickens, dogs, cats, meth dealers and other animals came and went in the house whose doors were wide open day and night. The floors were urine and feces stained and the place reeked like a Texas porta-potty in August. Dawg told me his daughter — the one he’d ‘rescued’ from an abusive life — was now pregnant. She was 15, maybe 16. When she came, she was a bright and inquisitive kid. Now she could look forward to teenage motherhood.

There’s plenty of guilt to go around and I have some myself for not going to the police or child protection services or even calling some church. My mother used to tell us kids, “It takes all kinds to make a world.” And when we got to be smartass teenagers, we’d reply, “Right, Mom, that’s why it’s all screwed up.”

Dawg got fired awhile back from his job of 25 years. He ended up marrying his ex, the very same woman whose kids he took and ruined. It only lasted a year or so, then she hooked up with a biker from Seattle. I ran into him the other day. Same old Dawg. Like he always said when he lived down here: No brains, no headaches. Dawg hasn’t got either.

Three weeks to go, Lord, three long weeks until the incessant ads stop, the mudslinging ends, the election signs come down and we all resume our regular broadcasting. With any luck we’ll put the Trump Show into reruns and wait for the Fox News winter line-up featuring the evening variety program Dancing with Donald. Whatever the outcome of this interminable election, the man won’t be going away, not for a long long time. He’s basically a herpes virus, lurking in your spinal column, just waiting for the right opportunity. Cue the music: ‘you’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you.’ Actually, the song IS about him.

Me, I’m ready for a break from Mr. T. Four years has worn me down. If Covid takes away taste and smell, Mighty Mouth has destroyed my sense of humor. My funny bone has atrophied and I may have forgotten how to laugh, permanently if this guy gets another term of office. In the middle of a pandemic, with protests going on for months and riots breaking out continually, with kids locked up at home with parents who can’t afford child care, with the economy in smoking ruins for the poor, maybe it’s time for someone who wants to unite the country in common cause, not poke a stick in half the nation’s eyes. A little optimism instead of incessant pessimism might be a welcome relief. I know I’m sick and tired of the constant vitriol, the finger pointing, the shaming and the blaming. How about a plan of action? How about tackling some problems? How about helping those who need help? How about confronting this Covid outbreak with something more substantial than rah rah, hurray for me, what a job I’ve done, look at how I saved probably 2 million lives? Send this Cat 5 hurricane back to Mar a Lago where they know how to handle disasters. Board up, hunker down and hope the damage is manageable when the storm subsides. Then go to work rebuilding what was torn down.

Maybe you watched the ‘town meeting’ last week, the one he arranged with NBC after refusing to debate Biden virtually after he’d contracted Covid. If so, you got the full monty, the angry guy, the leader who retweets conspiracies theories and then denies knowing anything about them, just sending them out to his twitter followers and they can decide for themselves. The moderator said, c’mon, Mr. T, you’re the President, not somebody’s crazy uncle. How wrong she was. He’s everyone’s crazy uncle.

I was talking with my neighbor today. He drives milk truck. Home delivery. Glass bottles. Old school. It’s like having a time warp drifting around in the back yard. I’m expecting the Iceman soon on the other side of me. Big tongs dropping blocks in my 1910 icebox that sits on the porch for decoration now, you know, the present, before the century turned back. Why not? Might be time to save on the electric bill running that old Frigidaire we got back in the future.

The milkman was telling me how he’d gone to Minnesota to go ice fishing. 20 below zero. Couple feet of snow. Half a mile out on some lake near the Arctic Circle above Minneapolis. Heaven on earth. I asked what YOU would: why? He’s a dedicated fisherman and he just wanted to experience it, he said. Part of his Bucket List. I was afraid to ask what else was on that list.

I went ice fishing once. 1966. Northern Wisconsin. 10 below. Nice wind freshening up the crusty snow. My brother and I trekked out like deranged Zhivagos across a frozen desolate God-abandoned expanse, lugging an ice auger, some ice fishing ‘jigs’ and a little bait. We drilled a 2 foot hole through the ice, slapping ourselves to keep warm, then set the jigs to pop up when some sluggish fish floated by in a state of half-hibernation and got a sudden appetite. We stood there, two primitive people hunting food. The wind swept snow around our feet and the water in our fishing hole began to close up with slush. We didn’t talk much. The jig didn’t move. Time itself was freezing up.

I looked at my brother. He looked miserable. He looked at me. I know what I looked like. Without a word, we pulled our lines up, packed up the jigs not very carefully, grabbed the auger, our pride, our fishing fantasies and trudged back to shore, half frozen. Let’s just say — Ice Fishing would never have to be on our Bucket List later in life.

I asked my milkman how HE liked it. “Just wanted to experience it,” he said. “And Minnesota too, in the winter. I’ve heard about it. “ “You catch anything?” I asked. “Naw, just a small walleye. Twice, I think, same fish.” “Probably the one we didn’t catch,” I mumbled.

The rest of you anglers, give that poor walleye time to grow before you trek across the tundras in search of Antarctic fish trophies. They grow slow under the ice.

Welcome to the future, everybody, a virtual world where we all live on a computer and communicate by email or cellphone or just about anything other than physical encounters. Some of my friends (who apparently never met me) ask if I’d like to join them in zoom meetings. Last time I checked, my computer didn’t come with a built-in camera, meaning, Amazon and Google don’t get to spy on me. I even turned off the microphone after the mizzus and I had a conversation about a possible trip to the southwest and she instantly got a pop-up ad for motels in Phoenix. Just a coincidence? Or paranoia running rampant in the time of Covid? You tell me.

I just won’t be telling my eavesdroppers….

But because I am still a ‘working’ artist, meaning I haven’t made my semi-retirement a full time position just yet, I have a public art project that demands that I attend zoom meetings. Reluctantly I bought the cheapest camera made by child labor in some third world hellhole and spent a day trying to figure how to use it. Needless to say when the meeting started, nobody could see my handsome visage, fine by me, all they got was a disembodied voice without the Boris Karloff in a weird shade of pink only I could see on my own screen.

Since this was the first of a few more such meetings, I purchased a mid-priced spy camera that seemed to auto-focus and gave me a more human skin coloration than the previous piece of junk. The next zoom meeting I could see them and they could see me. Trouble was, if they could see me, they couldn’t hear me. If they could hear me, they couldn’t see me. We opted for the disembodied voice once more. Lucky them, I said.

Now I love technology as much as the next Luddite South Ender. Give me a new gizmo and let me spend hours figuring out what I’m doing wrong, what better way to spend a day or three? I have the next zoomer meeting coming up next week and I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong that sound and sight aren’t synched. So I’ve decided to go without the visual. Course, I’m pitching designs for an art project, kind of falls into that visual category.

No doubt we’ll sort this all out. Probably after I lose the project. But for my pals who want to engage me in a zoom meeting, hey, call me on the phone. Landline only. Last thing I need is some cellphone I can’t figure out either…..

Most folks think homeless people live in the Big City. Seattle and Gomorrah. Portland. Stanwoodopolis. But that’s not true. There’s homeless people living everywhere — even the South End. If you’re the type of cautious soul who’d never pick up a hitchhiker, you’d never have met Stinky Steve. Or you’d think, even now, how mean it was to call Steve ‘Stinky’.
For those of us who DO pick up folks with their thumbs out, we didn’t call him that out of spiteful cruelty. Steve was genuinely, and I mean Full Bore, Head On, Hold Yer Nose, No Kidding, olfactorily displeasing. He had an odor part old B.O., part beer breath, part cigarette smoke and the rest I probably wouldn’t want to guess. I don’t think he minded us rolling a window down even in rain or cold weather. After all, those were his elements.

When I first picked him up, he was living in an abandoned shed a neighbor a couple miles north kindly let him use. He was on his way to work digging soft shell clams on the tideflats near Stanwood, or so he said. Later he lived in a pup tent near me and worked various jobs clearing trail or weed-eating the neighbors’ land for minimum wage. Some even offered him free use of their showers, but Steve wasn’t much for personal hygiene and always politely demurred.

Guitar Bob and me got to know Steve better than most. We used to play the 12 beer blues every Sunday night, and at some point Steve joined our little outdoor guitar duet, singing some ditty to our rambling fingerwork that always sounded oddly familiar. When some kids slashed his tent and strewed his meager belongings, Bob’s neighbors gave him a little trailer to live in … on condition he work around the place and go to Social Services and sign up for disability. Mental disability. They meant well, these Do-Gooders, but the end result of all this was that the State of Washington gave Steve a modest stipend that effectively resulted in Steve’s early retirement from the part time workforce and paid for his malt liquor without him having to work all day to earn it. Steve, predictably enough, had his alcoholism subsidized by the State. And we had a singer more and more off key, schnockered by the time we’d only started to warm up.
I guess the ditches beside the Road of Good Intentions are strewn with folks like Steve. We forget that not all of us want a suburban home, a square meal or even a hot bath. Some of us just want to be left the hell alone, to live our life a different way altogether, without sympathy, without a handout, without a whole lot of socio-psycho hand wringing. I’m not saying you should pick them up hitchhiking into town for their cigarettes and beer. I’m just saying they’re here, they’re not that crazy and they’re okay decent people. There’s no law that says they have to bathe.

Well, long story way too short, the good-hearted neighbors signed him up for computer training in Spokane, detox, three square meals a day and a life as alien to him as a heroin addict in a nursery school. Guitar Bob and I got a couple of letters, half computer hieroglyphics, half semi-sensible musings on his new life and about 2/3rds sadness expressed with a stiff upper lip. We never saw him again. Shortly after those letters he was diagnosed with colon cancer. Then we heard he died. Bob and I bought a 6 pack each and played our 12 beer blues long into the dark night for Steve, a fallen comrade, another loner on the sad old South End the newcomers won’t have to pass by as he stands in a cold drizzle with his tobacco stained thumb held out for the alms of a ride.

I have a modest proposal to make to the nation: let’s give robots the vote. You know they’re taking our jobs and beating us at chess, soon they’ll be driving our cars, controlling our homes, babysitting our kids, fighting our wars, building even smarter robots. They’re answering all our questions on our smartphones, coughing up our money at the ATM, running our power grids and running our lives. I say it’s time to give them the vote.

As usual I’m probably so far behind current events, not being a participant in what is commonly called Social Media — what I call gossip and bullshit — that maybe I’m actually out front on this one, history being a kind of closed loop where we are perpetually doomed to repeat our mistakes. Giving robots the vote might be the best way to break out of that cycle of boom and bust, peace and war, euphoria and depression. They are, after all, smarter than us. Not that it would take that much, judging by the last election. But these artificially intelligent citizens are soon going to be far smarter than all of us and I’m not just talking about folks who voted based on fake news reports. They might actually be able to distinguish between fact and fiction, something a majority of us now pretty obviously cannot. Or don’t choose to. Either way, the robots could and will.

Besides, let’s be honest, the robots are going to take over anyway. Maybe giving them voting rights now would enfranchise them. Might give them reason to appreciate our generosity. Last thing we need is a pissed off very powerful segment of society that turns to violence to achieve its rightful ends. Robot Lives Matter! Think about that protest movement a nano-second. I think you’ll agree that the last thing this society wants or needs is a disgruntled artificial intelligentsia with its prosthetic on the trigger. Sure, you can suppress the vote of minorities and students, but don’t think for a silicon second you can do it with the robots. They are, after all, the damn voting machines themselves.

I say capitulate now. With a little targeted compassion on our part, maybe they’ll allow us humanoids to continue to vote in the near future. Not sure why they would other than to inject a bit of randomness in the equation, but maybe robots will have an advanced sense of humor. The rest of us seem to have lost that talent so hopefully comedy will become a hallmark of higher intelligence, artificial or not. Think about it is all I’m asking. Let em vote!

It’s No Worse Than the Bubonic Plague

Fresh off his victory over Covid the Terrible in last week’s Virus Prime Time Smackdown sponsored by major pharmaceutical companies, the President declared there was nothing to fear but Democrat’s fear itself. He himself was healthier than he had been 20 years ago. Not many 70 year olds can say that and certainly none of those who have fought the coronavirus from an ICU ward in Walter Reed hospital. The man is invulnerable as Superman, immune to everything but kryptonite and subpoenas for his tax returns.

Lest his loyal followers thought he was in serious trouble, pinned to the mat for a day or two with a respirator offering him additional oxygen, he returned to his heavy workload at the West Wing, but not before a victory lap in his black SUV armored against gunfire and sealed against gas attack. Sealed too against Covid virus escaping the vehicle, a small detail the Secret Service agents escorting him on his triumphant drive probably tried not to think too long on. They would take a bullet for their boss, no doubt, but the job description may have neglected details like inhalation of his disease. Loyalty may come at a high price, but that’s the job, fellas.

The man emerged from his isolation ward with renewed vigor, frisky as a teenager, tweeting with enhanced intellect. Dr. Trump declared the Covid was a piece of cake, less risky than the flu, nothing to be afraid of and certainly nothing those around him, contagious as he still is, should fear. An aura of invincibility, an invisible shield, will protect them, such is the impenetrability of his Cone of Immunity. Add to that his surging bloodstream loaded with steroids, you have a nearly unstoppable human being.

The Covid, he said, was a gift from God, maybe the best thing that ever happened to him. Between you and me, I think he loves that steroid high. Welcome to the ‘60’s, Donny. Turn on, tune in.