The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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I just came down with my favorite yearly cold. Starts with a raw throat, moves into a cough, then comes the open nasal faucets. I get this cold so predictably that as soon as that first scratch in the throat shows up, I know exactly what’s coming next. I don’t even whine and whimper any more — I figure, let’s get this over with and Move On.

I used to dose up with cold meds, pull the cover over my head and go into a sort of rhinoviral hibernation. But the past few years my ‘effective’ cold remedies, the ones guaranteed to shut off the snot valve, have disappeared. I’ve been told you can get them ‘behind the counter’, sign a form, take an oath, leave a security deposit and go home with the real stuff. Oddly, my pharmacists tell me they no longer stock these. For this, I want to thank the Meth Heads of the world who stole or bought over the counter meds used to cook Crank. Nasty stuff, Crank. Addictive, hard to quit, ruins the user’s health real quick.

I grew up in the ‘60’s. Every drug fad that came along was, and I quote by heart the police and medical experts, “the most dangerously addictive drug we’ve ever seen.” To stop this latest scourge, they have seen fit to hide or abandon any reasonably effective cold pills.

The Meth Heads now are stealing copper wire, metal signs, bronze church bells and sculpture in my little park, about anything metal not bolted down that they can cut into pieces and sell to scrap yards. A lot of sculptures in the area are lost to these pillheads, at pennies to the dollar. It’s time to say enough is really enough. It’s time, I say, to legalize a drug for them. So we can have our own drugs back!

As far as stealing sculptures, maybe a mandatory art appreciation class before their script can be filled. Each time. I know we hate government and government regulation these days, all us Don’t Tread On Me Yahoos, but remind yourselves: we let them outlaw our cold pills and now only outlaws have cold pills. Now is the time to ask ourselves the Hard Question — will meth cure my cold?

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We got a token Republican in the Wednesday night Mabana Poker Club. Billy Bluff, we call him, mostly because he’s a piss poor bluffer. When he’s got a good hand he makes idle small talk. When he’s got a winning hand, he talks politics. Billy might as well send up an LED signboard announcing he drew a straight flush. But in case we missed the Signs, he bets low, hoping to keep the pot filling up until he can bet the maximum at the end, suckering the rest of us into staying with him.

He’s actually one of the new breed of GOP, meaning he hates the government and wants to stop funding about everything but the military and corporate subsidies. Taxes are too high, unions are ruining profits and killing jobs, drugs are legal, men are marrying men, Obama isn’t a real citizen, all the usual rants with a few more raves completely from Right Field. We don’t mind so long as Billy uses politics to telegraph his hand. Politics are expensive for Billy, but the thinks he’s just unlucky. That, or maybe he suspects we cheat, the cards are marked or the games are rigged. I guess in a way they are.

The night Billy drew 4 kings in 5 card stud on the first deal, I had 2 pair before the next deal. Billy got going on Secession. Bad sign before we drew a card. “Secession,” he declared, betting the usual fifty cents, see who’d stick, probably all of us. I tossed my half buck in and instead of raising, asked, “The South End, you mean?” Everyone ante’d up.

“You think everything’s about the South End, Skeeter. I’m talkin about Washington state dropping out.” He didn’t ask for a single card from Flat-top Fred who was dealing. Fred shook his head sadly. Real bad sign. Still, you never know, he might be bluffing. I took three cards, Pete took three, Ralph and Walter both took two. Fred dealt himself one. Billy tossed a buck into the pot non-chalantly. “State’s rights, I’m talkin here,” he said, a little too loud, meaning he had a helluva hand. “The government becomes oppressive, we got the right to leave, that’s what I’m sayin.”

Pete dumped in his cards right then and there. “You could always go to Canada, Bill,” Walter said, tossing a dollar. I looked at my new cards, 3 queens over my 2 jacks, full house. Maybe as good or better than Billy’s. Ralph stuck and Flat-top, sitting on a fat flush, raised. Ralph cursed and folded without even waiting for the bid to get back to him. My full house looked good, maybe too good, maybe not enough. “We already fought the Civil War, Bill,” I said. “You want slavery back or just lower the minimum wage?” I tossed my money in without raising, not real confident now.

Billy chuckled and raised us 5, the maximum bid we’d agreed to years ago. “I want my goddamn country back, Skeeter, even if we have to start over.” Flat-top groaned. “You could go to Quebec, Bill. They want to secede. You’d be in good company if you learn a little French.” He tossed a five in and raised a five. Ten to me. Those queens over jacks were looking weaker and weaker. But it was a full house. And now I was worried about Fred’s hand. “I don’t think they’d let him in, Fred. I got turned back the last try.” I was talking about my little incident with the border guards a couple weeks earlier. I pushed ten bucks into the growing pile, knowing Billy was going to raise us again. Maybe Fred too.
“Course they didn’t want to let YOU in, Skeeter. But I’m not going up to some country that’s more of a welfare state than we are. Get a grip. And get another five bucks out if you want to see this hand.” Fred took another look at his cards. A hard look. His confidence was waning fast as mine. “I hear Quebec is nice in the winter,” he mumbled and called with another five to the pot. I hated to, but I had to see his hand, so my five went in too. “Let’s see what you got, boys, cause I got a full house, queens over jacks.” Fred flipped a flush disgustedly into the chips and swore before taking a long slow miserable swig off his beer.

Billy laid one king, then another and then the third. He smirked, showed an ace, waited a long while, then dropped the fourth king. “All I know, children,” he said, “is the rich get richer. Clean livin’s what does it.” He pulled the pot into himself with great satisfaction. The world can sure be cruel when everyone’s lucky. If I’d had a lick of sense, I would’ve seceded a long time earlier.

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I’ve been AWOL now nearly a week, pretty much Laying Low, avoiding phones, credit cards and car rentals. Admittedly, it’s a primitive existence, fraught with danger, close to the ground and devoid of digital toys and devices. Actually it feels a lot like those early pioneer days on the South End when we were poor, TV-less and didn’t own a credit card. Of course, computers hadn’t taken over the world yet. Microsoft and Apple were just learning to crawl. And we weren’t occupied 24/7 keeping up with Yahoo news and social media and e-mails and twitter feeds and flash sales and text messages and cellphone calls and Netflix updates and internet shopping and all the rest of that instant connectedness to our fellow ants we can no longer imagine living without.

So far I’m surviving okay. Life does go on without Facebook updates. Admittedly it’s a lonelier existence not keeping abreast of ‘friends’ shopping adventures and movie ‘likes’, but I’m managing to fill the void. Give me another week and I’ll found a new religion, one not predicated on base 10, bits and bytes, possibly one that deposes the CyberGod of the 21st century, a religion that gives humankind dominion over computers.

Okay, I’m only joshing. TV has won. Smartphones rule. We will soon, very soon, become part cyber ourselves. We’ll surgically implant new and improved body parts. We’ll convince ourselves we’re in control. But … this is delusional. Welcome to the Collective, Friend! Embrace the Borg Hive. We won’t very much notice and the transformation will be painless and quick. Half automaton, half human? I don’t think so, not for very long. Get the Google glasses, buy an implant and 500 apps. Opt for bio-appendages, improved and virtually indestructible. And eventually require all citizens to upgrade their neuro-chips. Smart? Way smart. Pain free? Of course. Disease immune? You betcha! Human? Oh, right. Me paranoid? Wait a few years….

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I know what you’re thinking: I’m feeding you misinformation in case the Customs people who’ve no doubt cross referenced the readers of this blog and and are now readers as well are monitoring your computer records.  Maybe I never left the area.  Maybe I’m working an off-site secure computer back in the nettle hollows, living off the larder of snowbirds still tanning in Pahrump, Nevada, ordering pizzas and survival gear with phony names and numbers.  By now the Customs Swat Teams know who Skeeter is and the net is closing faster than habitat for deer  up at the clearcut by the Country Club.

Wait!  How would I know that’s been cleared if I’d left the area?  But why would I mention it if I hadn’t?  Life on the lam is a cat and mouse, life and death 3-D chess game.  The pursuers know all the moves, all the gambits, every turn and fake.  You have to think like them, but you have to think differently than their usual prey.  You need to be semi-insane.  You need a warped reality.  You need — do I need to say it? — to think like an artist, mangled synapses,  broken chromosomes, mutant mentality.  Take them down the rabbit hole with you and see how well they deal with a distorted reality, see what they ask Alice when they’re 10 feet tall.

Am I hiding?  If I am, I’ve been hiding all my life.  I’m accustomed to the funhouse mirrors.  I’m comfortable with the Jabberwock, the mad tea parties under tangerine skies, the bi-polar seasons, the non-linear logistics.  I’m at home with uncertainty.  I’m not looking for answers.  I’m not even looking for  questions.  Let’s see how the Authorities do when the signpost up ahead reads:  SOUTH END.  NO EXIT.  Then we’ll see who’s hunting who ….

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