The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

“Don’t Be Afraid of Covid”

Whoo hoo, a couple of days in Walter Reed with the best medical care taxpayer money can provide and our Leader wants us to know there is nothing to be afraid of with this so-called pandemic. Just a little bitty virus. Can’t even see it. Might not even be real but if it is, it’s tiny, nothing to worry about. The 215,000 dead folks in his country, not to mention the one million worldwide, might differ. If they were alive.

The man drinks his own Kool-Aid obviously. He hops in a car with a few poor Secret Service men so that he can wave at his fans out on the street, forget worrying about the men who risk catching the disease in close quarters with him, he has an adoring throng to wave at through his tinted window. I bet these guys have something to fear. The idiocy of this is beyond comprehension. Just keep telling the public everything is fine, the plague is almost over, kids need to get back in schoolrooms, businesses need to get back to work. Nothing to see here, just move along, folks, everything is under control. To prove it, he shows a video of himself signing important documents, obviously no virus is going to keep our superman bedridden. So what if the papers are blank, he’s doing the people’s work.

That optic works for me. Blank pages, big signatures. The glass isn’t half full or half empty, the glass has a hole in the bottom. This pandemic, c’mon, it’s a hoax. Not gonna fool our President. He was back in the White House PDQ. Course, the intensive care unit and half the attending physicians are there too. Just in case he has trouble breathing like he did two days ago. Wouldn’t look good to let this hoax thing get out of control.

Meanwhile the folks who won’t wear masks, who crowd into bars and restaurants in states that agree with the President, who watched him bounce the coronavirus off his chest in no time flat, they’ll keep spreading the disease and they’ll vote for the guy who tells them science is wrong and they’re right.

I say don’t be afraid of Covid, be afraid of Trump. But then, I might just be a coward.

My mail lady drove up our long driveway yesterday to deliver a package. She’d driven past my shack and tried to find me there, but no … so she drove up to the house and I came out to get my mail and my package and to thank her, once again, for going a bit beyond expectations. Today her boss is being grilled by the House of Representatives for pulling mail boxes out of cities, for yanking huge sorting machines from post offices and for slowing down delivery. I’m expecting next week they’ll stop issuing stamps.

In 1775 the colonies started the first national post office with none other than Ben Franklin as its chief. Two and a half centuries, if my math is close. There are those who argue the Postal Service should be privatized, the same folks who don’t trust the one we got with delivering fairly and promptly this year’s mail in ballots. Right. Let the CEO’s have a shot at it. Course when they have to deliver to the last mailbox in Noplace, Utah or Backwash Camano, you can bet the cost of a stamp will shiver yer timbers.

I might worry a little more about this absentee and mail-in ballots if I weren’t so worried about polling machines that keep no paper trail. I might worry too if the President himself wasn’t mailing his own in. I’ve been voting by mail for a long time now, better than hauling down to the Little Church in the Ravine to vote like I did the first decade or so when I moved here. Something kind of creepy about casting ballots in a church, you ask me. And I know you didn’t.

So yeah, I’m a big fan of the Post Office. Call me a socialist and knock my hat crooked, but when something is working, why break it? And, in full disclosure, I’m still one of those anachronists who write handwritten letters, one sitting right here ready to take down to the mailbox. Old habits are hard for me to break, I guess.

So much for the disease that was a hoax. So much for mocking those who wear a mask. So much for that ‘cure’ the President took himself. So much for the disease that would disappear, the one that the Chinese cooked up. Those happy days are gone. Trump is officially the latest statistic.

I know none of you wish our man in the high tower ill. Or his loving wife. We’re not partisan rabid animals, after all, hoping for tragedy to befall our beloved President. But speaking for myself, I was happy he caught the Covid. If anyone deserved a dose, this was the guy, the one who knew how bad the pandemic would be back in winter but decided not to panic the populace. The one who said behind closed doors this virus outbreak would be fine since he wouldn’t have to shake peoples’ hands any longer. The heartless character who wanted to go back to normal and if that meant sacrificing a few folks, so be it, the economy needed saving too. The happy warrior that claimed no one had come down with coronavirus at one of his maskless rallies. That guy.

Of course this could just be more fake news. An April Fool’s joke in October. Just kidding, folks, the Donald might tweet today, Gotcha! His doctor might roll out on Fox and Friends to say his patient was doing just fine, nobody on Planet Earth could beat a virus like his boy could beat a virus. Nobody. The man is a rock. Healthiest president ever! He could armwrestle Teddy Roosevelt to a whimpering cry of Uncle. We shouldn’t worry that the man is old or obese, risk factors for others, not for Dynamo Donald. He’s up in his room watching Fox, eating burgers, swilling diet pop. He’s fine, worry about the virus.

Better yet, or worse, worry about the folks he exposed the past few days. Sleepy Joe was quite a distance away behind his podium, but hellfire, a constant stream of projectile insults were spewing in wave after wave of covid tsunami. Pity the folks in meetings, pre-rally gatherings, staff, reporters from Breitbart. Better get tested, folks. The hoax is real. The joke’s on you. Now, just maybe, you’ll see we’re all in this together. Denial is no longer immunity.

I’m old enough to have seen more than my fair share of Presidential debates, some good, some not so good. I can remember Nixon sweating under the hot lights in the Kennedy debates. I remember poor Quayle in the Veep debates trying to summon the ghost of Kennedy before his opponent said he knew Jack Kennedy, he was a friend of Jack Kennedy, and you, sir, are no Jack Kennedy. I watched George Herbert Bush looking at his watch, bored with the whole proceedings. Mostly I remember candidates squaring off on issues, debating substance, looking for a right hook to the chin that would finish off their adversary.

Last night I watched a debate, if we can call it that, like nothing I’d ever seen before, not even the Trump/Clinton smackdowns. This one, well, what do we make of it? Unhinged? Deranged? Unsightly? All of the above? Sure, let’s be generous, it was all of the above and a lot more. An uglier performance would be hard to imagine without punches literally thrown, hair pulled, shirts torn, biting and scratching with overturned podiums and microphones used as mallets. It was live wrestling without the wrestling.

I guess the President figured if he simply bullied and interrupted continually, his flustered opponent might become so exasperated he’d make gaffe after gaffe. All Biden really had to do was look halfway composed, even a bit confounded by the flailing Trump. What Trump must have been thinking is anybody’s guess. At least until he got to the pointed questioning by moderator Wallace whether he would condemn white supremacists. Kind of a softball really. Just say sure, you bet, who wouldn’t? Instead he flustered and blustered, asked who Wallace was talking about, what right wing hate groups, only to have the helpful Biden suggest the Proud Boys. ‘Stand back and stand by’, the President of the United States answered immediately.

Holy KKK, Batman, are you k-k-kidding? The head of the FBI just finished testifying in Congressional hearings the biggest threat to this country was right wing extremists and you’re calling on one of the most organized of the racist bunch to stand by??? Stand by for what, Mr. President? Shock troops to protect the white suburban women of America?

Nobody expects clarification today, nobody expects an apology. I remember when George Wallace ran for President. I didn’t know George Wallace, I was no friend of George Wallace, but you, Mr. Trump are definitely a George Wallace. Mission accomplished, Mr. President. Mission sadly accomplished. Trust me, no one needs to sit through another debate like this. Put a fork in your eye, you’re done. Deservedly so ….

If you claimed to be worth 10 billion dollars, and you probably don’t, you might expect to pay some serious pesos to the IRS every year. I mean, unless you had a few legitimate deductions. Like bankrupt casinos, say. Or payouts to porn queens to maintain a discreet silence. But would it seem unlikely that in the past 15 years you paid out nothing for 10 of those and 750 bucks two of those years? Mr. T., when asked about this, claimed he had paid very large amounts. We’ll see them as soon as the audits are completed, he told us again. Those audits apparently are very slow.

I suspect that in Mr. T’s mind, 750 bucks is excessive. I would tell you that my own were 10 times that, but … you’ll have to wait until my own audit is complete. What I can say without advice from my fixer — I mean my attorney — is that most of us in this country pay 10 times that. Right off hand, the only folks I know who pay what Donald pays are Amazon and GE and about 50 other corporations on the Fortune 500. This is what is called capitalism and if you’re scared pantless about encroaching socialism, trust me, the vultures have already eaten your BVD’s so quit sweating, you’ve been taken to the cleaners already.

In America the rich write the tax laws. The rich can afford lawyers and tax accountants who can decipher the legalese and navigate the labyrinth. It may be that everything these corporations and Trump Inc. declare as legitimate deductions are on the up and up. 70,000 dollars for his haircuts? Well, the man has to look his best. 100,000 for Ivanka’s stylist? Sure, why not? I spent 15 dollars on my one haircut last year and I forgot to deduct it. Stupid me. I once went to England and my buddy who was an accountant said let’s go to a cathedral, look at the stained glass and you can write off the whole trip. I said I couldn’t do that. He said it’s perfectly legal. I said it might very well be, but it wouldn’t be right. Stupid me.

While giving the wealthy tax breaks, we’re running up trillion dollar deficits. As the pandemic lockdowns drag the poorest of us into crisis mode, we stopped giving unemployment aid to the worst off. If any of you think we’re all in this predicament together, I have a golf course in Florida you might like to buy. Great tax deduction when you add up the losses.

A lot of the newcomers to the fabled South End build their mega-mansions with their yards left menaced by 100 year old 2nd growth nettle forests. The first windstorm slamming them with 80 mph hurricane force winds triggers frantic calls to their insurance agent … when the power and phone service return.

It’s only a matter of time before they realize their woodland retreat is a potential deathtrap and, better safe than sorry, they decide to clearcut the property. Worst case, they can put in a 9 hole golf course with sand and water traps and never miss the forests that brought them here in the first place. The eagles and deer can migrate back inland a ways among us poorer residents, the ones with handicaps too high for golf.

Course now they need a tree expert. Or at least some logger bonded and insured with references a long resume in the woods industry. Trouble is, the logging era on the South End is pretty far back, mostly black and white photos down at the Historical Society and Tourist Information. So … after some futile internet searching, they invariably get to Jimmy the Gyppo.

Jimmy’s been topping trees for suburban worriers ever since the log market went to pot, medical and otherwise, and the price of a board foot of timber nettle plummeted to less than the cost of hauling it to the mill over in Arlington. He figured out the real money was in One-Offs, either before or after they were on a roof, didn’t matter to him either way. When clients asked if he was bonded and insured, he’d just laugh. That’s why you got the home insurance, he’d say, knowing full well their options were fairly constricted.

Jimmy the Gyppo didn’t come cheap and he even charged to haul the downed trees away. Then he sold the firewood off a flatbed down by Tyee Store, what he called a Two-fer. The rich folks didn’t mind. The whoppers Jimmy regaled them with, spitting tobacco plugs across a pansy garden, made them feel a little like pioneers, breaking soil for the next expansion of the American West, bringing civilization to the wild old South End before finally deciding to move on to the sunny southwest where the winters were dry and there were no forests left to threaten their vacation homes.

I recently had a buddy who advocated that the government, rather than pay out trillions in Covid unemployment compensation and business relief, pay each of us 125,000 dollars to infect ourselves with the virus, thereby achieving herd immunity and sparing us further deficit spending. Basically the Administration is promoting the same idea. But without the 125,000 buck incentive.

Lately I’ve been feeling happily isolated from the Herd. Course, I don’t have kids sequestered at home learning their ABC’s from a laptop instructional video, we don’t have rent payments backing up like a plugged toilet, we aren’t worried about the jobs we lost or the jobs that aren’t coming back, we live in a part of the world where social distancing was pretty much the norm and our routine wasn’t disrupted greatly by the plague. If you offered me a quarter million dollars for the two of us to infect ourselves, I suspect I might have to turn it down. Not just because one or both of us might die or be greatly diminished by the virus, just that money seems like a poor incentive when we’re already living in a South End paradise.

It’s a grand thought experiment though. How many of us would take the money? I suspect quite a few, especially if you were younger. You got a couple kids, you could walk away with half a million. Not bad for snorting up a shot of covid. If you were old with underlying medical conditions, maybe the gamble would look like a sucker’s bet.

My buddy thinks this would save the economy. Sweden thought the same way. Nice try, Stockholm. Course, Sweden never quite reached herd immunity, just ratcheted up their mortality rate. But they didn’t have to pay anybody to catch the coronavirus. The reward was the right not to wear masks and drink in crowded bars. For a lot of Americans that would be incentive enough, forget the cash incentives, some big savings!

For the good of the herd! Try that as a slogan for the upcoming election. Probably about as rallying a cry as Wear Your Damn Mask, Dimwit!

The South End Senior Center—what the wags at the Marina and Bait call the Senile Center—is basically a pole building down by the Camano Cut and Curl, about a stone’s throw from the now defunct Tyee MegaStore. A pole building, for those unfamiliar with architectural stylings, is a metal sided structure constructed with beams instead of stud framing. Barns and shops are often built this way. So is our Senior Center. Cheap and stout enough.

The Center has a Board and it has a small staff—which is Jenny Hancock and various volunteers who man (well, okay, woman) the desk and phones. Jenny has the only room, other than the unisex toilet in back, that has its own door. This makes it perfect for the occasional dance and their annual fashion show, the flea market fundraiser and their gala auction, capital G, that brings in most of their yearly funding.

The auction used to be held at the close of the flea market, sort of an afterthought. Year after sorry year, the stragglers would bid on bad local art the artists couldn’t sell or give away on the Mother’s Day Studio Tour, plus the usual items from South End biznesses. A day of fishing Jesse’s Deep Sea Charters. Believe me, an hour would be plenty. Or a perm at the Cut and Curl. An hour of acupuncture down at Pins and Needle Therapy. Whoa, Nelly, you can imagine the bidding wars!

Just before they decided to throw in the towel on the auction, Jenny convinced the board to go Gala. Meaning, basically, play dress-up and serve wine and beer, charge an entry and serve coldcuts and cheese with crackers. The first year the Center made 5 times what they HAD been making. The second year they doubled that and on the third they served hard liquor. And made even more. Two Toke Tom is lobbying for medical marijuana sampling, but he’s not on the Board.

The Center is raising money now for a new building. The toxic mold is starting to be an issue and anyway we’re feeling growing pains, not so much from all the new immigrants as that demographically we’re inexorably moving into our senile years. If the auction keeps on improving, we might just make it. Believe me, 3 martinis and even the Bait Shop Boyz will bid a day’s wages for an hour with Janice, head dominatrix at the Pins and Needles.

The salon chairs have started to fill up down at the Cut ‘N Curl beauty parlor at the newly vacated Windy Rear Realty office. Real estate might have gone virtual but the hair styling business is completely hands-on and now that the island has moved into Phase 2 of the Covid epidemic, folks are clamoring for a haircut. Jennie Fitch, the new owner who moved the shop out of the flood zone of Stanwoodopolis, jumped at the chance to locate closer to home here on the Virus-free Zone of the South End, something scientists should probably take a closer look at, see if our nettle pollen might be a natural antibody. The past few weeks business has been brisk, if not actually hyper. She and her fellow stylists, Rhonda and Ronald, have been staying late most nights to keep up with their appointments, something Jennie is glad for and not just for the extra income. Her 30 year old son has returned home, her home, to live in the back bedroom while he ‘sorts things out.’

“I read today that over half the kids between 19 and 30 are living with their parents,” Ronald was saying through his paisley print mask, snipping happily on Carol Abercrombie’s bleach blond curls before touching up those dark roots showing after months without a treatment. “I tell you girls, I’m glad I’m gay without children. No way could I handle having them bringing that nasty virus home to poppa.”

“Oh, Ronald, you don’t know what you’re missing, the joy of children,” Carol Abercrombie said. “Drugs and sex and cooking for them what they won’t eat.” She laughed. “At least my little dear won’t be coming back to live in the basement.” Her little dear, Brandon, was serving 5 to 10 for a drug deal gone bad a few years back in Everett. The State could find housing for him, she said to Ronald who muttered There but for the grace of God. “You do what you can,” she muttered back as blond curls gathered on her black apron.

“I should be so lucky,” Jennie said. “Jonathon moved back three months ago after Covid ended his job. Now he watches TV and expects me to cook and clean and do the laundry. Just like old times. His father tells me it’s only temporary but now I have two of them. Grown kids, lazy and no help at all.”

“Marital bliss,” Ronald intoned happily. “See what I’m missing.”

Everyone laughed but Jennie. This damn plague, she was thinking. She picked up her cellphone and called Nancy Baumgarter. “Nancy, I got an opening late today if it’s not your supper hour. No, I don’t mind a bit staying open late. Great, see you at 7. Bye now.”

Ronald grinned. “Looks like the boys will have to fend for themselves again tonight.” Jennie chuckled. “Looks like.”

I’m looking out my front window this morning and all I can see is this yellowish haze that is half smoke and half fog and about a third the ground-hugging swamp gas from rumors generated by viral internet addicts. Swirling in this soup of toxic crap is the latest scare: Antifa is starting these fires that are burning up millions of acres in the West. That’s right, urban anarchists are running amok in the grasslands and forests just over the mountains. Evidently, they’re tired of firebombing police stations and tossing Molotov cocktails in unlocked police cars.

I guess it’s time to take the fight to the ranchers and the farmers and the loggers on their own turf, torch their homelands and suffocate the rest of us. You bet. No doubt they had a meeting in their secret hidey-hole in Portland, then fanned out to put a match to the forests of Utah, Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Arizona and California, exactly what you’d expect Antifa to do, right? Right? Go out where nobody lives and burn their cropland. Good thinking, right? Right?

This is what we have now instead of real news. We have idiotic conspiracy theories that offer no proof and certainly no intelligence. I figure the whackjobs who resend these messages from the Russian GRU Fancy Bear military counterintelligence units have no clue that they’re helping the commies sow doubt in our country with their brainless propaganda. The Russians figured us out, apparently. We’re clueless sheep so bored with our lives we have nothing better to do than surf the Net for National Enquirer quality stories that satisfy our pent-up anger and resentment toward … toward … well, most everything.

We’ve lost all perspective. We don’t know our anatomical parts from a hole in the ground. We actually believe there’s a cabal of pederast perverts who kidnap our kids, hide them in a bunker beneath a D.C. pizza joint that doesn’t even have a basement much less a torture chamber, then … my god in heaven! say it isn’t true!! … they eat the kids.

Now, you might ask yourself, if this were true wouldn’t we see milk cartons with a dozen photos of missing children every time we ate our cereal? But no, we don’t ask ourselves. We accept this sick pablum and better yet, we retweet, we forward the email, then we go back for more. Mother of God, what kind of idiots have we spawned out there in La La Land??? Maybe, just maybe, Antifa has the right idea. Burn the damn place down and let’s start over.