The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Well, okay, about a third of us in this country have been hacked. Social Security numbers, driver’s license, date of birth, all the necessary ingredients some crimninal in Belarus can sell to identity fraud specialists. I didn’t realize there were 3 or 4 companies that kept credit databases, much less 3 or 4 companies who were wide open to hackers. Silly me.

And here I was worried about Big Brother. The Damn Government, I mean, not Mark Zuckerberg. Turns out all of us are just one big happy data family, smooshed together in some internet Cloud that knows everything important about us. Now we’re sharing that information with hacker hoodlums. Swell. Just swell.

Back in the dark days of the 1970’s I lived with a bunch of freewheeling yahoos in Seattle and Gomorrah who majored in various studies at the University of Washington, but spent most of their time experimenting with drug abuse of various sorts ranging from hash oil production to laughing gas theft. They grew pot and they raised psilocybin mushrooms. They scored opiated hashish and they drank legal whisky. The place we lived in was a veritable criminal operation. ‘Honest, Officer, I only rent a room here.’

On our bulletin board we had a Social Security card pinned up. Ralph Speidel. The kidz had gone down to the local cemetery and searched for a deceased child, then gotten a card in Ralph’s name, they told me when I asked who Ralph Speidel was. ‘Just in case,’ they said. Just in case of what, I asked. ‘You never know,’ they replied. ‘We might need to go underground. Set up a new identity.’

Jeez, I thought at the time, these are drug addled paranoiacs. But they were playing with fire, stealing canisters of nitrous oxide from hospitals, selling various illegal drugs. Nixon was gone by then, the VietNam War was lost and the draft was over. These weren’t SDS roommates or Weathermen, they were college students doing a little research, nothing the FBI would find particularly interesting. Yet.

When I moved out a few months later to my ghetto home and some fresh roommates, I considered taking Ralph’s card with me but I left it on the bulletin board, just glad to be shed of these goofballs finally. Now, of course, in light of current events, I wish I’d snatched it. You just never know when a new identity might come in handy.

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Every day in the Land of the Free you can read about homeless people. Folks living in their cars, moms with their kids camped under the freeway overpasses, people lying on heating grates on downtown sidewalks, even guys on the South End living in the woods. I don’t know either what to do to remedy this problem. I do know we have plenty of millionaires with more money than they could spend in three lifetimes but I suspect they’re figuring they might find a way to triple their life expectancy so that money might come in handy in the coming couple of centuries.

Up on the north end of our idyllic island there’s a 1.2 million dollar house the owners want the fire department to burn down. The fire department uses such donations for training purposes, set them ablaze and go through procedures for the time when it might be one of our houses. Not, mind you, that we necessarily have million dollar homes but … well, you get the idea. My neighbors burned their dad’s house down about 25 years ago. Looked like a nice house to me but of course I was living in our old shack then. One man’s ramshackle might be another’s mansion. They built a new home in the ashes and I built one too across the ravine. That ravine is kind of a metaphor, I guess, for the chasm that separates us. Nice folks, different world.

The million dollar hacienda up north isn’t a shack. It isn’t dilapidated. It is, actually, fairly new, richly appointed but alas, not in its owners’ taste. So rather than sell it to someone whose tastes might like that house, they’ve opted to burn it to the ground and build one to fit theirs. I don’t know what you think of this, but I find it positively immoral and don’t lecture me about freedom to do whatever you choose in the richest country on earth.

When I first moved to Seattle and Gomorrah, Boeing had pretty much shut down and mansions up near Volunteer Park were abandoned by owners who were under water, house worth less than their mortgage. Squatters moved in, what we would now call homeless people, and lived there for years until the economy picked up and new owners evicted them. I’m hoping the homeless get wind of this house burning b.s. and take up residence. Somebody needs a good shaming.

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So you don’t want to get vaccinated for the Covid? We understand, we really do. Who knows what’s in that goop they’re injecting into your arm, what kind of nano-trackers Bill Gates put into the mix, what creepy side effects you’ll wake up to some foggy morning in 2025? So, fellow Denier, what we want to do is offer you some incentives for risking your freedom, your sanity and possibly your life to inject yourself with a vaccine that might protect you and the rest of society from the Plague that rages around us.

How about a beer if you take the needle? New Jersey will give you a beer, buddy. Bud Lite, anyone? Up in Maine you can get a free hunting license. Fill the freezer with moose meat for the winter. Hell, for the entire year! Maryland will actually pay you 100 bucks (money, not deer) to vaccinate. Course, you got to be a state employee, not some welfare queen. Detroit will pay 50 to anyone who drives someone to the vaccination sites, better than Uber. One county in Texas has put up a quarter million dollars to offer gift cards to those who get their shots. There’s even free lottery tickets for a chance to win a million dollars and all you have to do is roll up your sleeve. All over this great land cities and counties and states are scratching their heads how to get the reluctant to belly up to the bar for their dose of Pfizer or Moderna or that bloodclotting Johnson and Johnson.

Plenty of folks down here on the South End don’t seem to care about herd immunity. I guess they just don’t see themselves as part of the herd. Rugged individualists, them. Vaccines are for sissies and losers. So what inducements would it take to tempt them into the clinic, you ask. What price bribe for hypocrisy? A free day down at Hutchison Park, no entry fee? One trip to the county dump, no charge, haul down your truck tires and broken furniture, maybe a chance after all these years to clean up the yard? How about a Get Out of Jail Free card, use it when the deputies search your van with the busted tail lights and find your stash?

Need more incentive? How about a gift certificate at the Bud Hut? A free breakfast at the South End Diner? Hell, make it a dinner! And bring a date. Whoa, how about this one??? A waiver from a full month of child support. That is correcto, Jim Bob, no garnished wages if you take the dose. And as an added incentive, one liberal shot of Jack Daniels when you roll up that sleeve. All of us will thank you when it’s done. Welcome to the herd!

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You got to love folks who worship their dead Leader. Out in Colorado police raided the clubhouse of the Love Has Won cult where the bereaved followers of Mother God had made a shrine of her mummified body, placed it caringly in a sleeping bag, painted glitter on her desiccated face and decorated it with Christmas lights. I don’t actually know how you mummify a body these days, but I suspect these folks just let it dry out in the living room and tried not to notice the odor.

I remember when Kohoutek, the comet, arrived in our little corner of the solar system, there were folks who believed the guy who claimed it was coming to take them to a better place. Just line up single file, folks, the spaceship has plenty of room, you don’t need a ticket, you won’t need a passport, no money no problem. Salvation was on its way.

Some religions are crazier than others and some are truly batshit insane, but they’re nearly all built around some kernel of whacky that flies in the face of logic or reality or plain common sense, the point evidently you have to let go of that to reach another plane, a higher plane, a better place. Folks just want to find God or heaven or … anything better thanThis, that’s what I used to think. But now, living in the post-Truth era of internet crackpot conspiracies and nutty theories, I think people are just gullible idiots, not necessarily stupid but really what’s the difference?

UFO’s, Bigfoot, pizza parlor pederast cannibals, lizard people, the whole menagerie just howling for some acolytes, some believers, some cracked taxidermists to prop them up and decorate the corpse with Christmas bulbs. God Mother, why not? Maybe they’re hoping for the Resurrection, maybe they’ll write the Testaments, maybe this will be the next great world religion, good as any, better than some. I know this, I should’ve gotten on that Comet.

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We have a little rental house next door we lease out via Airbnb. Usually folks stay a few days, but sometimes they rent it for a week or more, even a month or two. Because it’s an old 1940’s cottage, the mice have their secret highways in and out if we’re not there to put out traps so when Karen got a text two days ago from our current guests who’ve been up there three weeks that they’d seen mice in the place, she groaned and told me the news. Since I have been catching mice in the shack the past week, I can’t say I was surprised.

I know she didn’t want to tell them to get out the mousetraps we keep up there in the closet, but really, what are their options? Move out and look for a motel? Chances are they’ve been around the little vermin and probably know the drill. If not, welcome to the country. And just so you know I’m not totally a hard-hearted SOB, I can tell you that once I used to catch mice with one of those Have-A-Heart traps, the kind that has a spring-loaded wheel that, triggered by a small peck on the bait, slings the little guy into an adjoining holding cell where he waits until I take him across the road or back in the woods and place him on parole, not even a leg bracelet to monitor his whereabouts, which, you can bet, are a bee-line back to the shack. That bit of squeamish liberal guilt ended when the mice started getting caught in the cage’s wheel and mangled like roadkill.

So I tried the bucket of water trick with the string across the top and a dangling piece of cheese. It works, by the way, but imagine the poor mouse swimming for who knows how long until exhaustion gives way to drowning. Trust me, it interrupts a good night’s sleep. And sure, there’s D-Con, some poison that thins their blood until they hemorrhage. Nothing too humane there. I even, and I know I will pay a visit to Hell for this, bought one of those sticky pads thinking that the little guys would get stuck on it and I’d be able to take them back in the woods and set the free. If you’ve never done this, DON’T!! These should be banned by the animal Geneva Convention as nothing less than a torture device. You cannot remove the mouse without tearing his little legs off. It was ghastly and I will pay dearly. And should.

So a mousetrap, horrible as it is, seems like the quickest most humane dispatch of the little mammals I can think of. But like Karen fears, what will the guests think? Nobody really wants the cute buggers in the house with them, but maybe killing the bastards is a bridge too far. Today we got a text that James had caught two of them in the traps. He said he was a city boy, Boston, and was no stranger to these kinds of intruders. Which was a relief to her. ‘What should I say back?’ she asked me, still a bit worried about our guests’ reaction to the invasion of mice. ‘Tell em I can give them recipes if they want.’

I suspect she didn’t send that message.

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