The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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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.

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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….

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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!

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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.

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