The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

When historians look back on this very strange and terrible time, they will have a field day. If I were 18 and matriculating in some university, I’d sign up for a history major, figuring there would be enough work for myself and thousands of others studying the current President and his regime of halfwits for the rest of our lives. Job security, you bet. Biographies and scandals and intrigue and pornstars, egotistical maniacs, syphilis, plague, hush money, insanity. Who would you rather study in the history of the world than Donald J. Trump?

Today is Memorial Day weekend here in the Land of the Free, Home of the Apprentice. Plague menaces the country and the world. Our Leader, who has declared the pandemic to be a war, spent his days golfing and tweeting. His tweets mocked the Speaker of the House’s alcoholism (she doesn’t even drink), fat shamed the woman who ran for Governor of Georgia, accused a TV personality of possible murder, called his former Attorney General a coward, attacked former president Obama for his playing golf, called his current opponent lazy and his previous opponent a skank, continued supporting conspiracy theories of the Deep State, called a veteran on Memorial Day itself a fraud and a liar, threatened to move the Republican convention out of North Carolina if they adhered to social distancing recommendations … well, in other words, another typical day at the office.

And yet, and yet … this very unpresidential president has the support of 40 some percent of the country and nearly 90% of Republicans!! Unwrapping that little statistic could be a life’s work for professors in major universities. And of course if the man wins re-election, he’ll hire his own professors to write his history. If he doesn’t … well, you know he’s not leaving the Ovoid Office without a finale. And that’s assuming he even allows an election to take place at all. Lots of plot twists for those who like their Netflix serials never to end!

Memorial Day. You might think this would be a time for healing thoughts, a shared remembrance of those who gave everything, an acknowledgement that this country owes a huge debt to the fallen. You might even think this would be one of those moments we set aside partisan resentment and political pettiness to stand together, if not 6 feet apart, at least as One. You might, if you were born yesterday, think this would be the moment to remember the 100,000 dead from the coronavirus. Naaah. No way. Fuggetaboutit! Consoling sentiments, high ideals, shared commitments? You gotta be living in 2016 or earlier. History is being rewritten. Lucky folks who get to study it later!

In our collective overdose of all things Pandemic, all of us awash in the flotsam of overcrowded hospitals, plague cruise boats, mass masking on airline jets, protestors with assault rifles in state capitol buildings, kids at home zooming today’s lessons, body counts on the news, we sometimes lose sight of the victims whose names won’t appear in any newspaper accounts, on television interviews or radio reports. I’m talking, of course, about the millions of sequestered lovers whose affairs with married folks have been placed on permanent hiatus.

I was on the phone the other day with Wanda Milkowski, my old bus driver friend from our early days here on the then unpopulated South End. Wanda was married when she drove bus with me for the Stanwoodopolis school district, but she split the sheets with Teddy after she discovered he was shacked up with Lisa, a neighbor she was, or so she thought, pretty good friends with most days she was driving her afternoon route. These things happen with some frequency during the monsoonal winters of our island, the stuff of daytime soaps and underactive imaginations, nothing we aren’t accustomed to … until of course it happens to you. Wanda was a mess for a few months and during that time we became crying towels for one another.

Wanda, oddly enough, never remarried, can’t imagine why. Trust issues, I suppose or just deep scars that never quite heal. I’m no psychiatrist, just an empathic listener, and no, in case you’re wondering if this is another daytime soap opera, Wanda and I were platonic as neutered swans. She didn’t remarry but holy libido, Batman, the girl could fall in love at the drop of a hat. Not mine, mind you, but half the layabouts on the South End shared a mattress with Wanda. She was one of those rare women you wouldn’t call a beauty, but my god, every man jack of us boys commented on that something, that unnameable something that sparked wanton lust in us. Pheromones maybe, hormones crashing against our primitive brainpans. I couldn’t say, but I certainly wasn’t immune either. None of us could understand Teddy’s wandering eye, that’s for sure, and we spent many an hour over a flood of beers pondering it down at the Pilot Lounge.

Wanda might have broken up more marriages than alcohol down here on the lonely South End, which is saying a lot. But with this Pandemic in full rage and the men in her life quarantined with their wives, she’s become isolated and depressed. “I should have asked John to leave his wife,” she lamented on the phone. “He said he wanted a divorce and I should have pushed him.” She was referring to John Watkins, the vet at the animal clinic, an occasional poker player at our monthly card game, the kind of gambler who never bets a hunch, just a careful mathematician, no taste for a bluff.

“Wanda,” I said, “you would have been miserable with John around all the time.”

“I’m miserable now!” she howled. “You sure you wouldn’t care to drop by and visit, Skeeter?”

“Wanda, you said you were miserable, not desperate.” After a long silence, I said, “I’ll call you again tomorrow, I promise.” I have to confess, I haven’t called back. Yet. I guess I’m hedging my own bet.

People ask me all the time why do we put art in schools anyway? Why do we spend money on pretty little do-dads and frills when we could buy more books or hire more teachers?

It’s a good question. When I first met with the art committee for Panther Lake, we were in the old school. It was old and pretty ugly. But now you got a new school. Which is drop dead gorgeous. Beautiful architecture, beautiful building, state of the art teaching equipment. I’d be willing to bet you buckaroos learn better in this school than the old school.

The idea is to create an environment where we ENCOURAGE you guys to learn. To explore. To use your IMAGINATIONS. To ask questions and look for answers. We want you to feel safe and we want you to have all the tools you need to do that. Computers and books and all the rest. We also want you to have gymnasiums and ballfields so you can exercise and play, cafeterias so you’ll get good meals, all this so you can have healthy bodies which is important for healthy minds.

And the last thing we add to all this is ART. Some folks don’t value art very much, but I’ll tell you what, art is all about a couple of things. One, it hopefully makes your school a more interesting and beautiful place. And if it’s good art, it makes you look at it and wonder about it. It makes you realize there are other ways of seeing the school, of seeing the world.

I hope when you look at the art, it makes you want to wonder what it is, what it means, what maybe the artist meant. Good art makes you think about it. It isn’t just pretty, it’s different and it asks you to examine it.

I called the glass murals we put in Panther Lake the Metamorphosis Series. You know, like tadpoles turning into frogs, or catepillars making cocoons then coming out as butterflies. They both change into something totally different. It’s a little miracle, really. I built a pond where I live just so I could have a place for the frogs to lay eggs and hatch into tadpoles and then grow into adult frogs. Amazing.

But the REAL DEAL is that you guys are the tadpoles. You guys are going to change as you learn and grow. Who knows what you’ll be, right? I didn’t know I’d learn to be an artist. But I did. A few years ago I built my own house. Every bit of it. I never built much of anything before, but I did it. I built a sailboat and I learned to sail. I built a banjo and I started a band and then I became a singer.

What we want for all of you is to understand that life is WIDE OPEN. You can be whatever you want. We want you to see this school and your life as full of opportunities and options. We want you to explore and be curious. What we want you to SEE, what we want you to understand, is that the one real art is making YOUR own life. You get to create yourself. But to do that you have to see what possibilities there are out there. You have to develop your IMAGINATIONS and your CREATIVITY.

And that’s why we put art in, to give you some small idea of what your imagination can do. Not so you can become artists like me necessarily, but so you’ll bring art and imagination to WHATEVER you want to do. So you’ll make everything you do more interesting, more unique, more YOU. And if you can do that, I guarantee, you’ll turn into a butterfly and you’ll learn how to fly and that’s really why we put art in schools and libraries and all the other public buildings we can, not just for you kids, but for us big kids. We all need to grow wings.

Down at the South End’s premier tonsorial emporium, Joe Waltham’s barber shop behind the O-Zi-Ya wrecking yard has been open every day but Sundays during the Covid-19 Lockdown. He’s got the red white and blue barber pole out front even though it no longer rotates and he’s got an American flag the size of a billboard hanging from the peak of the roof where it just about but not quite touches hallowed ground. The boyz at the Diner call him G.I. Joe, maybe because he’s a Viet Nam vet, maybe because he’s a patriot in the culture wars. Joe is what we call a Hard Ass, not much of a sense of humor, quick to rile, definitely not a man you want to get started on an argument.

G.I. thinks the Covid panic is a hoax. He thinks the government is using it as an excuse to ruin his business and everybody else’s. “Look at how they’re sending everybody a check,” he muttered at the Diner the last week it was still serving breakfast before opening his shop. “Tell em not to work and then send em money. Socialism, that’s all it is, a way to make us sheep, pay us Not to work, make us reliant on government. It’s all bullshit. I got a right to work, I got a right to run my business the way I want and nobody, not the government, not the Governor, nobody can tell me otherwise.” Most of us agreed with that last part. Nobody tells G.I. much of anything.

Course that doesn’t stop Two Toke from telling him something. He’s stirring the pot the way he’s stirring another dollop of sugar into his already sweetened coffee. T.T. hasn’t seen the inside of a barber shop in who knows how many years judging by the shoulder length hair he usually keeps in a pony tail under his baseball cap, what G.I. has referred to more than once as a jackass tail, not that Two Toke minds, he’s just glad to have hair at all in his old age. “You think they invented the plague, Joe? You think maybe they created the virus in the first place at some lab and dropped it on us? If it’s a hoax, you figure the body counts are bogus?”

“Just like Nam,” Joe shot back. “Phony numbers. The government’s a bunch of damn liars, you can count on that.”

“Well…..” T.T. watches Joe over the rim of his cup, taking a long sip while the rest of us around the long table start to dread what’s probably coming next. “You figure all those doctors are liars too?”

“All I’m saying is I’m going to take my chances this epidemic is nothing but a bad cold, a flu bug, same as we get every year. We don’t tell people to stay home, hide, shut your business, quit shaking hands, be afraid. People die every year, Tom, that’s a fact.”

A couple of the boyz nodded in agreement. None of us knew a single person who contracted Covid, much less died of it. I don’t think any of us do now, a couple months later. Two Toke shook his head and set his cup down. “I wouldn’t care if someone gave you the virus, Joe, but the idea is to keep it from spreading, you know, to the rest of us. I can live without a haircut for awhile.”

“Tell you what, Tom, your next one is on me, no charge, totally free.” The boyz waited for T.T. to stop spooning another bag of sugar into his coffee. Two Toke finished up, licked the spoon and smiled. “Freedom ain’t Free, G.I. But thanks for the offer.”

I’m not sure how many of us have been shorn by Joe since the Lockdown ordered barber shops and hair salons to close. But I hear that he’s doing fine, plenty of folks who think a haircut is worth the gamble. My own hair is getting pretty long again. I can live with it that way.

Lately I’ve noticed my newspapers offering strategies for keeping sequestered rug rats entertained now that schools have been closed and the kids are trapped with their parents. I guess the internet and their Nintendos aren’t enough, although judging from my friends’ grandkids, they could live for years with just a cellphone and maybe food slipped under their doors occasionally. It isn’t the kids we should be worried about, it’s those parents. And … the adults without kids.

This Pandemic is a lot like retirement. No more office, no more commuting, no more friends at work, no more routines. Weekends no longer exist. Movie theaters are shuttered, churches closed, retail stores are boarded up. You can’t even get a cup of coffee at Starbucks unless you want to take it with you and there’s no library that will let you in the door so if you care to read, you better have a decent collection in your bookshelf.

Everyone thinks retirement will be the answer to their miseries. No more crappy job, no more useless work, no more asshole boss. Paradise here we come! And then it’s just home repairs, lawn mowing, laundry, CNN or Fox News running all damn day long, the same churned up rehash spewing from a TV the size of a drive in theater screen. There’s not enough popcorn in the world to make this scenario look good. Paradise? More like the second level of Dante’s Hell. And you better hope you and the mizzus have some love spark left, otherwise, hello alcoholism!

This is the grim reality of the plague. Death by boredom! Course, that’s why I’m here, to help. Skeeter’s Fun Things to Do While Waiting For the Vaccine. Subscribe today and you’ll receive not only my list of hobbies to try out and books online to order from the library, but also daily updates from the White House Covid-19 Task Force, briefings on the current death spikes in states that prefer to ‘live free or die’, reports on pandemic politics and much much more. Of course, you pretty much already get those. In addition, we’ll send you our bestselling brochure: Home Repairs You Can Do Yourself Without Tools, ordinarily a $50 dollar manual for the couchsurfer, yours free with your subscription. But … act now and you’ll receive, at no extra charge, just some minor shipping and handling, our 10,000 piece jigsaw puzzle of Donald J. Trump at the Mayo clinic, bravely interacting with doctors sans mask, suitable for framing when completed, a wonderful artwork to hang on your wall. And … we’ll send detailed instructions on making that frame. Without tools!

Order today and relax knowing the Pandemic is in good hands. Yours will be busy with other things.

Some folks down by me in these Southern Latitudes have been, what we scofflaws call, ‘Living off the Grid’. They work when they have to, get paid under the table (in the local parlance, meaning, they take only cash) and they don’t report wages to the IRS or the State. I run into wealthy folks up north who do the same thing when the opportunity presents itself. Some people call this tax evasion — and it is — but these folks see it more as what any sensible yahoo would do if he had the chance. Me and my professorial pals call this Cognitive Dissonance, a fancy five buck word for jamming the square peg into the round hole, then proclaiming it a pretty good fit.

My neighbor Gyppo John hit 65 the other day. He’s never paid one dime in taxes, federal state or local other than sin and sales tax on his necessities. He always works under the table, takes only cash or barter and lives pretty much hand to mouth. As far as the government is concerned, John pretty much doesn’t exist. Well, at least til he showed up to sign on for Medicare. I figure what the hell, we’re gonna pay for John’s healthcare anyway, might as well do it through Medicare as all those unpaid ER visits he has after his logging accidents. Dangerous work, logging. Probably exactly the kind of work insurance companies hate to cover. That, and radio antenna repairmen and kamikaze pilots.

John and I were quaffing a cold one when he got to wondering, about two of my beers into the evening, if maybe he could get Social Security benefits too as long as the Government was making him more comfortable in his Golden Years. Imagine his surprise when I sadly informed him Social Security was kind of a pension fund. Your money in, your money out. “Sorta based on your taxes, John,” I said, popping a third can and handing it over, something I guess John was getting too accustomed to.

“You mean I can’t get Social Security?? What the hell kind of security is THAT????” he practically shouted, his can foaming. My can, I mean. “I can’t keep logging til I’m 90!”

Probably true, I agreed, but what I thought to myself was Karma’s gonna be a hard road for some of us South Enders too smart for our own good by a country mile. No doubt it would cost me plenty in additional beer to help John get through those grasshopper winters. But mostly for me to listen to the sob stories.

Just when the unemployment numbers look like they’re heading into Great Depression range, the Republicans are balking on handing out any more stimulus or aid to anyone but the rich. Big Farma just got some money to keep the milk and meat production going, okay by me, but when it comes to, let’s call them the Little People, hell no, they aren’t going to help those who didn’t help themselves. The Big Boyz helped themselves all right, snapping up small business loans like they were rewards for using their TARP money from the first recession to buy their own stocks rather than trickle anything down to their employees.

The latest chutzpah from the GOP is to float the idea that the Little People, the folks who can’t pay the rent, who are behind on their credit cards, who lost their jobs, who probably lost their health insurance too, they can use their retirement money early to help them out of a tough situation. Up to 10,000 bucks would be taken out of their Social Security payments, plus a little interest for Uncle Sam. This is the Republican equivalent of letting them eat cake. Their own cake. But you owe the government some frosting later.

Part of what triggered the Great Recession was refusing to throw money at the problem, just stand back and see how it shakes out. If no one has money to spend, nothing good shakes out, everything grinds to a halt. It’s why we study history, to learn from our mistakes. States are going to bleed money with this Pandemic bringing business to a standstill. Taxes won’t be coming in, rents won’t get paid, landlords will go broke, more homeless, more health care issues, on and on. If deficits were the problem, maybe we wouldn’t have voted in corporate tax breaks a couple years ago under the GOP, but now, oh yeah, deficits are bad once again. Deficits will drag us down. Deficits will cut into profits and CEO salaries. It’s the Deficit, Stupid! Why would we bail out blue states who couldn’t control their budgets? Let them go bankrupt, Mitch McConnell advocated recently, as if any bankruptcy laws cover states going broke.

Compassionate conservatism was a lie back when and it’s a joke now. Compassionate corporatism, you bet. Welfare for the rich, count on it. Trump in 2020? Bring back Marie Antoinette, why don’tcha? Well, actually we got Melania. If it takes a Depression to wake this country up, I say bring back the guillotine too. Heads ought to roll, I don’t care if there’s nothing in em.

This morning in our fishwrapper paper there was a letter to the editor asking if all us citizens would rather see low taxes or would we prefer libraries and parks and concerts and art in our lives. She obviously wanted to raise taxes to support all those amenities that make life more ‘meaningful and aesthetic’. Being a so-called artist, and particularly one who makes his living from taxes that fund public art like mine, you bet your buttsky I want to raise everybody’s taxes. Even mine.

But I have to question the timing of this call to arms, you know, given that the Pandemic has wrecked the economy. It just feels a bit, oh, I don’t know, a little tone deaf asking for more money to fund my favorite things when folks are being laid off, quarantined, kids at home from their furloughed schools, health care no longer covered, worrying about paying next month’s rent or even the damn credit card minimum. I sure don’t want to Scrooge them, they got all the misery they can handle right now.

Anyone who thinks this post-Pandemic is going to be quick and painless needs to pinch themselves with a vise-grip. Hard. Wake up, the world is going to be a lot more dog eat dog than it was a few short months ago. People are scared, can’t you see that? They’re stocking up a lot more than toilet paper, let me tell you. They’re buying freezers and filling them with locker meat. They’re hoarding yeast and flour in case bread disappears on the grocery shelves. They’re buying guns down at the pawn shops and gun stores. They’re expecting something a little different than concerts in the parks or poetry readings down at the library. Despite the sunny assurances of their rich President that the economy will come roaring back soon, that the plague will end before you know it, that the good times are right around the corner, they can see this will be a grueling haul back to anything resembling normal.

Raise their taxes? Sweetheart, the government is throwing money at these people the way GI’s threw candy to the kids from jeeps and tanks in liberated cities during World War 2. Normal? In your dreams…. Meanwhile, let’s clean up the rubble.

The fallout from this little experiment in socialism to mitigate the plague’s disruption of lives and businesses, well, hold onto your hats, you haven’t seen nothin yet. I watched my public art dry up for years after the Great Recession when legislatures went into budget slashing mode so I can hardly wait to see what this Depression will do for the future of parks and libraries and arts. We’re going to find out what folks think is essential all over again. Somehow I doubt it will be me and my art. Unless I start making movies for Netflix….

My old man just turned 97. He still lives alone in his own house, still cooks for himself, watches way too much television, still drives his car to the grocery store, doesn’t go out much, grows a garden in the backyard. He strictly keeps his routines, likes a bowl of ice cream every night and cookies after every meal and has pretty much given up on politics. If you were to ask him about the Pandemic or Trump or the coming elections, his answer, now a mantra, is invariably the same: Crazy World.

It would be easy to suggest that his lack of interest in the world of current events is primarily the result of short term memory loss or merely boredom with the nonsense of our politics these days. But … I prefer to think maybe he has hit on the Correct Attitude, one that might help him make it to 100 without the stresses we politically involved –or political junkies, more accurately — have weighing on our daily grind. Possibly, I think hopefully, there comes a point in the affairs of men where the ugliness and the vicissitudes of the world recede into the background, just another commercial before the next episode of whatever TV mini-series he’s watching any particular night on his too complicated to operate big screen.

Crazy world. Yah. Even with this Pandemic raging, the petty politics rear their heads. Folks are dying in unheard of numbers, at least in my short 70 years, and more are going to follow. Fear has been unleashed on the land and those that fan those flames are blowing hard with all their might. My father fought on a PT boat in the Pacific during World War Two, an 18 year old kid with a mounted 50 caliber machine gun on the bow, saw plenty of what war buffs like to call ‘action’, and came home to a fairly long run of peacetime. I suspect the vagaries of our partisan political shenanigans seem a bit less earth shattering to him than to me and my pals. Korea,Viet Nam, Iraq One and Two, Afghanistan, they all pale compared to his war. The Pandemic? He remembers polio. Folks want to throw open the restaurants and the movie theaters, he could care less. Folks want to re-elect Trump? Crazy world, he’ll say. Who among us would disagree?

There are days when I can hardly wait to get old.

I’ve been busy lately, something I recommend to any of you who spend half the day following news feeds about Trump or Trump and the Coronavirus or more Trump until you think the world has gone mad or has become toxic or, actually, both. If you find your walls closing in and you begin making a placard with something like OPEN THE STORES or LIBERATE MY STATE, you can be sure you’ve been infected with Trumpovid-20. Symptoms are a raging brain fever, sweating from the tongue, chills at night and tasteless dinners. There is no cure at this point. No real tests. No antibodies either, which means if you avoid the news for a day or two, chances are the next Trump Tweet will bring on further symptoms.

I cannot stress this enough. You must get yourself busy. Otherwise the temptation to scroll through the horror that is the internet these plague days will overcome your willpower. Distract yourself. If it means building a musical instrument you have no skills to construct, that’s okay. It will occupy your mind with total frustration, if nothing else. It certainly did mine. The danger, of course, is the longer the plague rages … or Donald Trump rages … the chances are you will end up, like me, with a house full of musical instruments. I recommend you stop at two or three then take up a different hobby. Learn a language, preferably something like Mandarin, incredibly difficult, hopelessly so if you’re my advanced age. All the better. If you’re my dad’s age, learn a program on the computer. All he can do is get and forward e-mails. The rest of the machine is basically useless other than a couple of google sites my brother set up for him. I recommend Photoshop or a CAD program, but practically any will suffice in frustrating and confusing you to a degree that all other incoming information will be shut out.

Do not, I repeat, do not go back and watch old World Series games, past tennis matches or any sports events that occurred in the past. This is a reminder of what has been lost in the Pandemic. You do not want to be reminded of anything that was the world pre-Trump or pre-plague. If there is a difference…. Focus on the task you have set yourself. Do not learn the Mandarin phrase for Dump Trump. It will not help you no matter how satisfying it might feel at first. You will end up learning only Mandarin obscenities. And no, they won’t help either. They are a Dead End. You need a detour. A new highway. An impossibly hard hobby.

If you are reading this, I hate to tell you, but you aren’t BUSY ENOUGH!! Read a book instead. Or better yet, write one. War and Peace, something similar spanning generations with too many characters to keep track of. Despite the temptation, do not make Donald a character!! It is not cathartic, trust me. Okay, forget the book writing. Mandarin, start with that. By the time you learn to say ‘hello, I want to visit your beautiful country’, the plague might be over, the election might have removed you know who from office and life can return to some kind of normal. Trust me, you need to stay busy until then….

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