The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I just got my first blackmail letter. Maybe you get them infrequently, but I live a pretty scrupulous life, as you probably know. So when I found this in my inbox, believe me, I was shocked. Shaken to my core. Suddenly paranoid. Probably I should have gone directly to the police, but … with the protests and riots and vigilantes, I knew there was no time left for the gendarme to investigate a crime that didn’t directly involve violence. Although! The tone of the extortion letter certainly didn’t rule out suggested mayhem if I didn’t cough up some future request for money or …? Or what?

This is the email I received last night:
What’s going on, my man? My son reports that he saw this guy in a beat up old cowboy hat dressed in clothes that look like he slept in them and slowly realized that it was you, the stained glass wizard of the south end.
OK so far. But, I just could not believe my ears when he said that you were driving not your old beat up, cow pasture, red-neck pickup but, (and I can barely get the words out of my mouth) a brand new Prius?? Tell me it ain’t true? You haven’t gone over to the dark side more often associated with them high-brow folks who live north of the Mason Dixon line, more familiar to newcomers as Mountain View?? I mean, how you gonna carry your still around? And how is it gonna look when you and the South End String Banders show up in fancy new wheels. My god, man, your rep is surely gonna take a hit.

My blood stood still reading this. Believe me, I wanted to change my email address, disconnect my land line or even move to another county. I’ve watched enough cheesy TV cop shows to know that blackmailers never stop. Once they have their claws in you, the demands escalate faster than riots after pepper sprayings. The next message would undoubtedly be for a small amount to keep quiet. The one after that, who knows? Acreage? Musical instruments? My unsold stained glass windows? All of the above eventually, I’m betting. Especially when my extorter learned the worth of my homemade instruments and stained glass panels and fell into an inchoate rage.

So I did what any red blooded American would do in these dire circumstances. I wrote him back with my own demands.

As my commander-in-chief would tell you, these are damnable LIES, faux news, some sick conspiracy and obviously a pathetic attempt to extort money from poor old Skeeter. Your son was no doubt drunk or drug addled or both, probably huffing hi octane directly from the pump and mistook some wretched geek for myself. Get your boy some help before it’s too late!! I can recommend any number of discreet dry-out houses if you need the ones that require references. We can let this sordid attempt at blackmail die quietly on the vine. As you well know, nobody would believe this story anyway. I do NOT wear a beat up old cowboy hat nor wear clothes that look slept in. Mine are what we call weathered. And my truck, albeit possibly riddled with two or three ‘bullet’ holes from flying lawnmower rocks, is certainly not a redneck pickup, rather a well traveled and vintage half ton with the proper patina. Exactly, patina!

But I will say, not so much in self defense as simple justification, the mizzus’ car gets twice the mileage of that vintage truck of mine. My new motto and possibly the epitaph for Skeeter’s headstone: 65 mpg. Your son asked if it was a bit sluggish on acceleration. Tell him what a Tesla does in full stomp mode. Hang onto yer hat!! Not that Skeeter would ever be seen driving a Tesla. No sir, not unless he took off the cowboy hat.

Needless to say, the tactic, so far anyway, has worked. Let this be a lesson to all future blackmailers.

About 7 hours ago I turned 70. Welcome to the new 60. Or the new 50. Or whatever. I think they mean years, not IQ, but I suspect it’s not years. It’s only been about an hour ago that I woke up to discover I was now a septegenarian. If I lived in a society that revered its elders, I would be a king. But as you probably know, we live in a society that finds older people mostly embarrassing. Actually, after mostly old white people elected Trump as president, I do too. So much for that adage that age begets wisdom.

I thought maybe this would be the year I was forced into retirement. When the pandemic hit, I figured for sure this was the year. But if 70 years have taught me anything, they proved time and time again don’t count yer chickens before they hatch, that cackling you hear may not be fowl. We had two colossal maples fall behind the house and so the year began with a major job of bucking, splitting, hauling and stacking firewood, 12 cord so far and plenty more to go. You think that’s retirement, you been watching daytime TV too long.

My day job, the stained glass stuff, well, that had pretty much dried up. I lost a couple projects the past few years in Utah and Alaska, made the finals but missed the championship ring. Those don’t come along very often anymore in these times of fiscal restraint. Alaska gutted its public art program, no more out-of-staters allowed now that the oil subsidies up there are dwindling to trickles. I had organized a local craft show that featured the best artist/craftspeople we could round up, held it two years but this year the plague canceled it. The glass and the guitars I’d made for it, hoping maybe to sell some of those instruments, well, they can just clutter up my studio another 12 months, probably longer. So hello retirement, I figured.

I offered the county a donation of a 21 foot long mural of glass for their new Administration Building, figuring I might as well keep working even if I have to work for free, maybe delay the Big R a few months.

But like I said, eggs aren’t chickens and so when I got notified I’d been picked for a glass commission by the WA Arts Commission, I put the rocker back in the corner, cast off my lap blanket and put away the drool bucket. Maybe it wouldn’t be the end of a glass career just yet. Next year probably. Yep, I can just about hear that chick pecking at the shell, almost breaking out.

These are tough times in the Land of the Free Home of the Brave judging by the reactions to legitimate protests and illegal rioting across the country and, really, across the world. Oh sure, we could make this a political statement, accuse the antifa or the boogaloos of fomenting further divisions in this already partisan land, but really, why bother when the divisions are already Grand Canyons without any zipline for entertainment?

This week the town of Snohomish, antique mall central, went on full alert after the police reported that left wing looters might be driving up from Seattle and Gomorrah to smash, loot, pillage and rape. Antifa, oh no! Vigilantes drove in to offer their guns and their patriotism to the city police department and then about one hundred of the good ol’ boys with assault rifles, pistols, shotguns and who knows what heavier armaments guarded the business district. The fact that some were drinking gave the new Alamo a definite festive flavor. I know there’s nothing I like more than a good vigilante tailgate party, assault rifles and liquor always a recipe for fun. Throw in a Confederate flag or three during a protest against white supremacy and the recent killing of a black suspect in Minneapolis by a white cop, well, sir, now we’re talking a real good time, southern style. I’m betting folks brought a rope just in case the opportunity arose for a good old fashioned lynching.

The KKK is still alive and well in America. Along with dozens of other white supremacist variations. Nice to see them linking arms with our local gendarme, full blessing of the police chief and the mayor. Just good citizens helping out. No need to wear a white hood these days, much less a plague mask. You get these uppity blacks demanding equal opportunities, well, somebody’s got to protect the mansions and the country clubs. And the women, don’t forget the women. Apparently a lot of us are still living in 1880.

If I wanted to prove the protesters correct, this is about all the evidence I need. Racism isn’t easy to eliminate, may never be, but we can certainly tell those good ol’ boys to take their guns and their rebel flags and their open containers home. Nice to know the sheriff thinks they’re okay. Hell, he didn’t even have to trouble himself to deputize them.

The yahoo with the MAGA hat who put a hand on the front grill of Recon Ron’s grocery cart in the organic food aisle probably didn’t know Ron was a Green Beret in Viet Nam from ’66 to ’69, not with that belly sticking out of the Grateful Dead T-shirt and the gray ponytail poking out in back under his Boston Red Sox cap. Ron’s gone a bit native down here on the South End, hangs out with Two Toke Tom most evenings and plays a mean hand of poker with our Wednesday night crowd, mean because he bets without caution and we never know his bluffs from an inside straight. No, the guy who put the brakes on Ron’s half full cart would’ve thought here was some lardass gone-to-seed retiree, not a Marine with a bronze star.

‘Wuzzup, Dog?” the smirking fellow without a plague mask asked. “You one of those people afraid of viruses?”

Ron was wearing a white bandana. Apparently his interrogator interpreted this as a flag of surrender. To the germs. “Minding my own business here, dog. Being careful. Something bothering you?”

“Oh yeah, man, something’s bothering me. All you people wearing your stupid masks, closing down the stores , the bars, everything, yeah, that bothers me. “

Now Ron is not a mellow fellow. I’ve seen him go rogue and it’s not something I want to see ever again. But this was, after all, a grocery store, not a tavern. He asked the guy, “You don’t believe there’s a contagion out here?” to which the guy said, “Hell no! Just a flu, man, just a boogie man. I don’t buy it, not one bit of it.”

Ron said, “100,000 people have already died from it, you thank that’s a cold? Lemme ask YOU something — how many Americans died in Viet Nam? You heard of that war, haven’t you?”

“People die, man, that’s why it’s called war.”

Ron pulled his bandana down, sighed and said, “100,000 in four months, friend. That’s nearly a thousand a day — if you believe in math.”

“Like I said, man, people die, the way it goes, ya know?”

“Oh, I know … man. Believe me, I know. It wouldn’t kill you, though, to put a mask on. Hide that ugly face a little. But if you don’t let go of this cart …” Ron let that threat hang, gave him a steely stare and pulled his mask back up.

“Oh, okay, tough guy. Buy your little fruits, hide out in the cereal aisle, why don’tcha?”

Ron shoved the cart slightly with a quick hard push. The kid let go of the grill. “Live in fear, man.”

“Morons like you, what choice do I have? Beer cooler’s on the other aisle — in case you get lost with your head up your ass.”

Some other time, some other place, this might’ve gone bad. The kid seemed to consider that route, maybe thought about consequences, but in that moment of hesitation Ron turned his cart and walked away. Like I said, we could never tell if he was bluffing.

I got a friend, Green Thumb Barry, who has an incredible garden and arboretum over on the east side of the island, plenty of sun, lots of compost and chicken manure, everything plants love. He grows exotic stuff. A banana tree stands near his cabin, even has small bananas some years. Sure, he wraps it in the winter. I know we live on the banana belt but even they need protection in the monsoons. You walk around his grounds and you spend half your day asking what is that little flower or that strange shrub or this odd fruit out in the orchard. He plants South American root crops, Australian ferns, white kiwi, hybridized peonies, rare irises and unusual rhododendrons. The place is riotous with flowers and foliage. Yesterday I was tripping through the tulips, photographing what I’d never seen before and he wondered out loud why he went to all this trouble.

“Whaddaya mean?” I asked, bent over shooting some delicate little bloom I asked the name of but forgot immediately.

“Nobody ever sees this,” he said glumly. “What good is it if no one comes here?”

I capped my camera and stood up. Vines hung from overhead on trees he’s planted long ago. Hummingbirds scrabbled in the Chilean fire tree that was living up to its name with a thousand deep orange flowers that drew them to its nectar. Bees buzzed and birds yammered, practically his own temperate jungle, arboretum and nursery all in one. The living roof of his his new greenhouse was even blooming, everything fecund and spreading as far as we could see. Maybe Adam and Eve felt like Barry. All that paradise and no visitors. Kind of a living hell, I guess Barry would think.

“You kidding me?” I asked and he shook his head sadly. “What’s the point? I’m the only person who sees this most of the time. Look at this,” he said and under a tree peony I could just barely see a delicate little striated frond with a tall spike of yellowish flowers starting to open. “Nobody will ever see this. Just me. ”

I said, “I don’t know, Barry, you want to sell tickets, start a garden show, set up as a nursery? You got kind of a paradise going here, enjoy it.” Barry just muttered and shook his head. Maybe Eve felt the same way, took a bite of the snake’s apple and figured it might change her luck. I guess it did. Might have been easier to change your way of thinking, seems like to me. Paradise is hard to find for a reason, apparently.

Things are heating up in Covid-plagued America. Friday night the Racist-in-Chief spent some time in his underground bunker where Secret Service agents entombed him, ostensibly out of fear for his life when protesters stormed the White House perimeter, but possibly to keep him from making any further statements about … well … anything. Radicals outside were already tossing gasoline, why add more fuel to the flames? Two days later and presumably out of the bunker, the President has yet to urge calm or call for healing. Instead he twitters his little rhyming threat that when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Probably should have stayed in the safe room below without his smartphone. Hopefully the SS agents learned their lesson.

Enough is sometimes enough. The video of the cop killing a handcuffed, prostate black suspect by taking a knee the way Colin Kaepernick did on the football field to protest exactly this sort of injustice was plenty enough to jolt a sleepy populace to wide awake nightmare. Kaepernick paid a price for his prescience and this white cop will pay one too. The rest of us, some on the burning streets, some watching safely from our self-imposed isolation, we will too.

I suspect, though, the message will be fairly muddled. One placard I saw read THE REVOLUTION STARTS NOW! Right, Comrade. I was in Madison, Wisconsin during the Viet Nam riots after the assassination of King and Kennedy, tear gas, smashed storefronts and University buildings, looting, mayhem, call in the National Guard. We thought the revolution was starting back then too. Ho ho. Nixon went on to bomb Cambodia, the country went its merry way and all us protesters ended up with families and middle class jobs. So much for our little rebellion.

Fast forward fifty years, half a century. Racism is endemic, income inequity is pervasive, corporatocracy rules. The divisions in this country are as wide as they were back in the 60’s. The economy may come back after this pandemic lockdown, but I suspect the jobs for a lot of folks won’t. Stockholders will be okay, but not the people who make minimum wage, not the folks whose jobs are outsourced to robotics. There’s a smoldering rage just under the surface of sunny America and we’re watching it live on TV or on the streets.

Maybe it is the beginning of the revolution. Back in the summer of 1970 the Armstrong brothers and two cohorts bombed the Army Math Research Center and killed an intern in the Pharmacy building next door, pretty much putting the knee on the throat of that revolution where it died with a small whimper. I was wrong then about the optimism for change and I’m probably wrong now. But it feels like, once again, it’s hard to breathe.

Not really having ever suffered from anything approaching toxic masculinity, I guess I’m not the likeliest candidate to weigh in on this newest malady to follow in the footsteps of the Covid-19 disease. But … that’s never really stopped me before . After all, these are the End Times, the new Dark Ages where science and reason have been soundly debunked by the superstitious and the paranoid. We’re all experts now that the old experts have been fired and sent packing to their underground labs or sequestered offices or whatever whistleblower hell awaits them. Good riddance to the purveyors of bogus rationality! We got hunches. We got gut. We got a Man in Charge who has a very big brain so I ask you who needs some Ivy League elitist PhD to confuse us with complicated jargon?

The Give me liberty or give me Covid crowd have had just about enough of faux science. They want a haircut, they want their ballgames, they want a beer down at the corner bar, they want to eat their Whopper inside not out in the car. They don’t need to wash their calloused hands every time they touch something, they don’t need to wear a girly mask, they aren’t going to quit shaking hands and they sure as hell aren’t going to live in fear of being within 6 feet of anybody. Freedom ain’t free, buddy. That’s why they carry an assault rifle with them when they protest. And why some proudly display a Confederate flag. Because they know revolts never really end when they’re dealing with a corrupt and illegal government! Eternal vigilance is a small price to pay for Liberty, pal.

So sure, the lamestream media liars want to put a label on patriotism, call it toxic masculinity, as if it was legitimate to lockdown the citizens. God only knows what scheme they have in destroying the economy and enslaving the People, but if it takes toxic masculinity or whatever they want to call it to fight back, then get ready for some serious testosterone on steroids! Forget about some bullshit vaccine that will only cause their kids autism and weaken their own immune systems, the virus, if there even is a virus, won’t kill the strong and they’re the strong. And here’s some news for the rest of the sheep out there, what doesn’t kill them will only make them stronger. That’s right, a known fact, it’s been proven. And even if it hasn’t, it’s still true.

You know we’ve reached the end of our rope when folks start talking about this Covid plague requiring courage in the face of little bitty viruses, maybe time to man up and treat this like a war, meaning, folks go off to fight and we all know many won’t come home. The cure is worse than the disease, they cry. So I figure they’re trapped with the mizzus and the furloughed rugrats, all of them slowly going insane. They can’t even get into a courthouse to file divorce papers. Their backs are against the closet wall and by god, they’re ready for a haircut and they mean right now, mister!

Across the Land of the Free folks are rising up, MAGA hats worn proudly over uncoiffed hair, wrapped in American flags and NRA decals, demanding their kids go back to school. They think the kids are basically immune to the plague and only old farts like me die of it. Put em back in those classes, they’re missing out on some quality education! Overcrowded classrooms?, sneezing on each other?, big deal. Open up America! Liberate Michigan! Stop the Tyranny! Let us shop at the mall!!

Hard times in the Home of the Brave, for sure. If you listened to Fox News, you too might swing Libertarian or just Contrarian, convinced that we could weather a spike in the Covid epidemic, well worth the price of a few friends dying on a faulty ventilator. Convinced probably that Dr.Fauci was involved in a scheme to profit from any vaccine that might be miraculously discovered that would save the world if only every man woman and child were inoculated with two bucks going into Tony’s pocket. A third of Americans think a vaccine already exists and is being withheld from us, probably the same folks who believe Big Foot carries the anti-virus.

If the quarantined fatigued are correct, well, we shot holes in our economy for no good reason. Although I think you know they will have a conspiracy theory for that too, the most likely Deep Staters’ desire to bring on a recession to ruin Trump’s chances at another four fabulous years. But trust me on this, there will be plenty more theories based on Russian bots and Breitbart paranoia. The real pandemic isn’t the Covid virus, it’s the stupid gene.

But if they’re wrong, if we exit the quarantine too early, well, you know and I know, that was probably the Secret Plan all along, catastrophic death counts, hospitals overwhelmed, a global depression, the end of capitalism as we know it. You can’t trust the Deep Staters, you can’t trust anybody! Go outside and prove me wrong. Stay indoors and prove me wrong. Go ask Alice, when she’s 6 feet deep.

My morning news brought me the cheery information that one third of my fellow incarcerated plague avoiders had mental health issues due to the effects of the Lockdown. If you live here on the South End, that is welcome news. It means that our mental health is improving radically, don’t ask me why. Maybe just as simple as that misery loves plenty of company. Even if that company can’t come around very often.

The rest of the shut-ins across America, well, this sudden break in normality, something we here are accustomed to, must be a shock to their reality. For maybe the first time they are confronted with life lived mostly in their heads. No wandering down to the malls, no vacations, no extramarital affairs, not even the distraction of their jobs. Just the day in day out of four walls, online shopping, toilet paper searches, plague masks, quick in quick out grocery shopping, kids underfoot, spousal arguments, nothing much to relieve the menacing monotony of life endured during the Plague.

Naturally they turn to the panaceas we Enders always resorted to, drinking and drugs. But of course, they’re amateurs, unlike ourselves who have built tolerance and defense systems for years, and so tragedy is pretty much assured. Arguments with the kids, petty squabbles with the mizzus, shouting at the dinner table, eventually domestic violence of the worst sort. Nothing we aren’t familiar with here, but elsewhere, this is unexpected and completely without our boundaries. Little wonder a third of the country, wallowing in self-pity and smoldering rage, fueled by conspiracy theories on the internet and partisan politics everywhere they turn, are slowly going batshit crazy.

Here on the slap-happy South End, we channel these psychoses, we work with them, we mold and shape and fine tune the neuroses that drive others to suicide or debauchery. We embrace the weird, we celebrate the abnormal, we idolize the insanity. In other words, we became artists. Not, I repeat, not that I would advise the rest of my fellow citizens to follow in our footsteps. Like drinking and drug abuse, a life of art must be taken slowly. Too much too fast is a recipe for tragedy and certainly no cure for pandemic psychosis, which means I’m afraid I have bad news for the rest of the country. The cure is probably worse than the disease.

44% of Republicans are convinced Bill Gates is using the coronavirus to infect millions so that he can implant microchips with the vaccine and then … well, who knows? Track them? Control them? Make slaves of them? About 19% of Democrats think the same thing. I must be watching the wrong newsfeeds and reading the wrong newspapers because I had no idea Bill was doing this, not a clue. Actually, I thought that was what Mark Zuckerberg was up to with Facebook. Tracking us, controlling us, making stupid slaves of all of us. Goes to show, I need to pay more attention. The tech boyz are working overtime while I’ve been snoozing.

So, if we’re to believe these statistics — and I’m sure 44% of Republicans and 19% of Democrats don’t — the pandemic isn’t just a hoax, although maybe it is maybe it isn’t, what it is is a grand conspiracy by the man who brought you the home computer to scare the bejabbers out of gullible citizens so that they’ll jump at the chance to get a vaccine to save their lives and then, and then! he’ll implant something, a microchip apparently, that will receive signals and turn every sucker who got the cure into a mindless servant of Bill Gates. Kind of like what they are already, servants of Microsoft, only now he wants more than just their money and their allegiance, he wants Total Control!! He wants to be Head Body Snatcher!!

Any way you look at this, it’s frightening. Half my fellow shoppers at the grocery store, especially the ones who don’t wear plague masks, believe Bill Gates is an evil genius. (Actually I believe most of the Tech Boyz are evil geniuses, but for a slightly different reason.) Half the folks that live around me are probably stocking up on garden seeds, toilet paper, wheat flour and yeast, buying freezers and filling them with locker meat, snatching up chicks at the feed store, all in the vain attempt to prepare for the day which is coming soon the rest of us are minions and slaves to Billy Gates, Mindmaster of the Universe. Half the yahoos that drive by our house are hoarding guns and ammos, building bunkers, boarding up their homes, getting ready for the rest of us who will be coming to take away their chickens and their TV’s and their computers.

In other words, half the people I meet and half the people I don’t meet, are certifiably 100% batshit crazy. Sure they look normal. Sort of. Sure they speak coherently. Most of the time. Course they seem just like you and me. Me anyway. Not sure anymore about half of you. But deep down, back in the sloppy recesses of their gelatinous brainpans, they’re totally whacked, probably soak themselves in tubs of nanobubble bath that will protect them from aliens and computer commands, babbling like drunk porpoises half the night behind double locked doors.

I might not care if they wallowed in their bubbly insanity or shopped beside me or drove past me, but here’s the thing. The nutjobs VOTE! They already voted in the biggest nutjob whacko to swerve down the American pike in my lifetime and maybe anyone else’s. What are they capable of doing next?? And they think Bill Gates is scary? The computer was supposed to open the doors to all the knowledge in the world with a couple clicks on a keyboard. Who knew what Bill was really up to? And now who knows what half of us are either….