The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Google cars came out with some statistics recently. Driverless cars don’t have accidents really … and the few they do have are cars with drivers running into them. Some of the boyz in the Flatheads, our vintage car club, were flabbergasted. They’re old school guyz who revel in memories of souped up engines, backroad drag races, cue ball shifter knobs and dangling dice on the rearview. They love their rods, they love their memories and they go apoplectic to imagine a future of robot automobiles they can sit in the backseat and read a paper. They have fond memories of other uses for that backseat.

“The Age of the Automobile is coming to an end,” I made the mistake of saying to Two Toke Tom at the Diner where it was overheard by half the Flatheads at the breakfast pow-wow where they’d pushed half the tables together to make room for about a dozen car enthusiasts. Their Packards and Chargers and 88’s were lined up outside the plate glass like an outdoor Museum for Testosterone, right next to Tom’s beater with the cracked windshield and the missing front quarter panel, all gleaming with fresh wax and loving care. I might have been wiser announcing we ought to confiscate guns in an NRA meeting.

Freddie, the head honcho Flathead, jerked his head in the direction of my blasphemy. “What are you drinking, man???” he practically shouted. Brenda spilled coffee on Harry’s hand, missing his cup by a quarter mile. “Yeoww!” he hollered in pain. The whole café was now on Alert. “I only mean the day is coming when cars will drive themselves. They don’t have accidents, Fred, and if they don’t have accidents, guess what the insurance companies are going to demand? You want to drive your big Dodge, fine, but guess what they’ll charge your Charger for the privilege?”

“Over my dead fender, Skeeter.” Two Toke raised his cup. “Amen, brother Fred, Amen.”

“All I’m saying, Fred, is half the folks out there on the road these days aren’t driving anyway. They’re text messaging, they’re talking on the phone, they’re wobbling over the center line and they’re drifting onto the shoulder. They go from 60 mph to 30 mph. I don’t know what all they’re doing behind the wheel, but it sure isn’t driving. Might be okay with me if they let the computer do that for em so they can pay attention to their smartphone.”

Fred snorted and the assembled Flatheads snorted in agreement. Brenda mopped up Harry’s table and dried his hand. Harry would live, Two Toke would get a good laugh on me later and the Flatheads would all drive down Memory Lane with rumbling mufflers, KaHooga horns, mohaired upholstery, big fins and whitewall tires like mastodons crossing back over the Bering Strait to a garage somewhere in the Pleistocene.

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I’m starting to realize I live in a nuthouse. Every day I wake up and the howling is louder from down the block, the crazies banging their heads and smearing god knows what on their walls, a cacophony of madness that disturbs my sleep. They think most everything is a conspiracy of some insidious sort, plots by the government, deep state master plans to control their lives, schemes by the corporations to manipulate them in evil ways. The election was a fraud, the Plague is phony, climate change is a hoax, Black Lives Matter is an insurrection, General Robert E. Lee is a true American Hero, the list never ends.

This week the Conservative Political Action Conference cheered when they were told the vaccinations for Covid hadn’t reached the percentage the current Administration had hoped for. Hurray hurray! It’s something like applauding when the fire truck gets to the apartment complex completely ablaze too late to save the occupants. Hurray! Hurray! Government employees, those fire fighters, bad, bad! They claim the government is going door-to-door encouraging you to get vaccinated. Supposedly to protect yourself and your neighbors. Oh, right. Like our government cares? What next, door-to-door gun confiscation, they ask.

Their hero, D.J. Trump, actually snuck out and got himself and his mizzus, wait for it, yup, vaccinated, jumped right to the head of the line. Didn’t want to make a public scene of it, just wanted to protect himself. When he contracted Covid, he got all the drugs and care a President is entitled to, but … god forbid he would admit that he might have died without those extras that you and I wouldn’t have access to. That’s leadership. Real leadership.

I talked yesterday to some folks from Eastern Washington. They don’t believe the Covid is real, just another form of a flu, nothing to see there. I mentioned how over 600,000 Americans had died of that form of flu, call it what you want, the Spanish Flu was nothing but a flu either. They said they didn’t believe the numbers. Forget about arguing that the numbers are probably under-reported. Nice folks, but hey, it’s hard to have a discussion or a debate when anything you say is countered with a simple I Don’t Believe That. They did mention that they made a homemade concoction of elderberry remedy in a gummy bear to ward off colds and flu for their kids. Worked too!

What do you say to that? Do you hope their children contract Covid to prove your point? Or do you run to the supplement store and buy remedies for that loud howling in your ears every morning? Money back guarantee, no doubt.

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A lot of my cohorts are boiling mad about the folks who refuse to vaccinate, blaming them for the latest surge in Covid cases, hospitals filling up and kids dying of the virus. They blame them for the mask mandates that are being imposed and the shutdowns that are sure to come. When they see footage of anti-vaxxers and Proud Boys attacking journalists, they see red. When they hear the governor of South Dakota welcoming the 700,000 bikers at their yearly Sturgis rally, they go practically bonkers. If you get can calm them down for a few moments, they’ll grow apoplectic about Texas and Florida where mandates are handed down outlawing mandates, what my pals see as government intervention to prevent government intervention.

I can’t say I blame them for their outrage. I’d like to move beyond the plague, maybe turn my attention to the Afghanistan civil war, another wasted effort by the United States, trillions of dollars, lives lost, a hopeless quixotic attempt to bring democracy to a country barely out of the Stone Age and apparently happy to stay there. We never really learn, do we? Korea, Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan, not quite ready for prime time, but we figure, this City on the Hill, we can bring the news to these folks even if we have to ram it down their throat. Somebody forgot to tell the powers that be these people have a civil war on their hands and nothing we do is going to change that. I mean, Duh.

They just have to fight it out, terrible as it is to watch, but nothing we do will prevent it. Course, we could always just sit back and sell them weapons, get it over with soon as possible. Twenty years in Afghanistan. Now we’ll blame the Democrats for leaving too soon. Or we’ll blame the Republicans for declaring we would be leaving (too soon). Some folks want to stay there another 20 years, some folks want to shut the door, pull the shades and pretend it never happened.

My war was Viet Nam, something about a Domino Effect, communism sweeping through Indonesia. The French gave up and their civil war kicked right back into gear. The Russians left Afghanistan and … well, here we go again. The Taliban are back, fun loving warlords that they are. Maybe Putin is itching for a sequel, but I sort of doubt it. And don’t look for Kabul Part 6 from our own Department of Defense. We took awhile, but I suspect we learned our lesson.

Meanwhile, back at the farm, my cohorts are mad as hell and they say they aren’t going to take it anymore. MAGA folks and Proud Boys are bashing in the Capitol doors, taking it to the street. I guess we got our own civil war to worry about here. Hopefully some Do-Good country won’t decide to intervene.

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Sometimes, when you think you might be the only person who can save the world, you have to commit acts that you know are wrong. The surf instructor who murdered his two kids with a spear gun and left them in a ditch told police that he knew killing them was wrong, but … the fate of the world was in his hands. The kids, he had learned through visions and dreams, were going to grow into monsters that would threaten life on this planet because they had serpent DNA.

I don’t know. Maybe they did. The Lizard People, as you must have heard, are among us. Alien beings infesting our gene pool. I suppose our surf instructor might have tried one of those DNA testing sites, see if maybe the serpent DNA was really mostly Balkan or Southern Mediterranean. A buddy of mine has 1% Neanderthal. If they can detect Neanderthal DNA, for sure they could find lizard DNA. Course, the surf dude was pretty certain his kids had serpent DNA without any damn test, which, at least for me, raises the question, where did they get it? Mom sleeping with alien invaders? Or … and this is the most troubling, did they get it from him??? (Cue the creepy soundtrack.)

Qanon believers are multiplying faster than lizard genes in the Land of the No Longer Free and it might be time we thought about banning spear guns before mass spear gun killings become commonplace. These are weird times, definitely, what with Covid, bat viruses unleashed on the world, climate change, self-driving vehicles and rockets buzzing overhead with billionaire passengers. The idea that Democrats are keeping children for their sexual and culinary appetites isn’t so far-fetched in these times. Lizard People living among us? Sure, why not. They’re probably the monsters who want to vaccinate an acquiescent population, pump their DNA into the veins of the unsuspecting, then take control of the earth. Spear guns don’t kill, Lizard People kill.
Don’t wear a mask, don’t get inoculated, don’t worry, be happy. The surfers of the world may unite and save us despite ourselves. And whatever you do, do not, I repeat, do not get one of those DNA tests. Just gonna ruin your day.

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Don’t, whatever you do, put down on their death certificate as the cause of death, Covid. It’s just too damn embarrassing. They never believed the lies of the mainstream media, not one bit, that coronavirus was worse than the flu. Don’t put Flu down either as a cause of death. Too close to home. No, put Underlying Causes. That’s it. Underlying Causes. Their relatives will be relieved and that, after all, is what matters, no point rubbing salt into their collective wounds.

I run into folks all the time who deny the claim that over 600,000 of us red white and blue Americans died of Covid. Not true, they say. Bullshit, they say. I say what do you mean and they reply most of these victims died of, wait for it now … Underlying Causes. The Covid was just the little shove over the edge apparently, but what killed more than half a million of us was … Something Else. At this point in the conversation I usually head for the door.

Nevertheless, it’s revealing that there are places in this country where the coroner will list other causes of death rather than Covid. I suppose he could put down Stupid, but that’s nearly as embarrassing as Covid. The sad point is that after a year and a half of this pandemic, with a vaccine that would save their lives, they refuse to get an inoculation. And sadder yet is that this decision is pretty much correlated to political party affiliation. Cause of Death: Republicanism?

Thanks a lot, Fox News, for spreading the doubt among your viewers, all you commentators who got vaccinated. Cause of Death: Tucker Carlson? Or the hundreds of social media sites spreading misinformation. Cause of Death: Facebook?

I guess Underlying Causes pretty much covers all of the above. But … I would prefer to list something a little more specific, even if we avoid calling it Covid: Darwinism. Course, most of the deceased don’t believe in that either. Rest in Peace, y’all.

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