The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

My calendar is going backwards. So are my clocks. Every hour, every day now, the past is coming up fast. The future I had been counting on optimistically is now in the rearview, objects not closer than they appear, fading into the distance. Can this be possible? Have we stumbled into some kind of wormhole? Some alternate reality? Am I living my life in reverse?

Today, for instance, it was decreed by executive order that there are only two sexes, male and female. A few days ago we had a moving scale of gender identity. You could even change sex if you wanted to. But not today. Today was a few years ago. Women could serve in the military, even ( lucky them), go into combat. But the clock ticked backwards overnight. Another few days and women will be back in the kitchen, cooking dinner for us men. I can’t explain it, I just wake up every day farther in the past.

While I was sleeping, apparently the old President became the new President. Maybe he ordered the clocks turned back, hell if I know. Yesterday we thought gays and trans should be given the same rights as everyone else. We thought immigration was what made this country great, cheap labor if nothing else, a melting pot with minimum wage as the fire boiling the pot beneath it. Now we’re rounding up the foreigners, setting up internment camps, loading detainees on trains. Is it still 2025 or have we slipped into the World War 2 calendar?

I’m at a loss to explain it. And now I’m afraid to go to sleep, fearing what a backwards Ichabod Crane will find. Maybe I’ve been wrong all these years. Maybe sex is binary and the Bible is right. Maybe minorities should stay in their place, at the bottom. Maybe slavery was okay and the South understood American capitalism better than me. Maybe we Americans have nothing to learn from the past, certainly nothing to be embarrassed by. I sure hope so because we’re going back there. They say those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. I’m starting to think we didn’t forget it, we were just afraid of the future.

So you say you want government off yer back? Sure, I get it, all those EPA regulations that try to keep corporations from polluting the air you breathe or the water you drink, who needs that kind of nanny state? You don’t believe global warming is caused by us humans burning fossil fuels, why hobble big business with unnecessary attempts to keep greenhouse gases at low levels? I got it that you think vaccines are a dupe for a dope, just a way to put transmitters in your bloodstream so you can be tracked. Drain the swamp, eliminate government agencies, cut some budgets (but not Medicare or Social Security). Get government down to the size you can drown it in a toilet.

Taxes too high? Okay, lower them mostly for the wealthy and the corporations. Maybe room for a small reduction in yours too. Gut the IRS, nobody likes the tax man. So what if the big boyz hire attorneys and accountants to pile on the spurious deductions, you’d do the same if you were rich, wouldn’t you? You want government off your back, but maybe not out of your bedroom, not out of your sex life. Ban abortions, go after the trans folks, define what gender is, legislate what marriage is, why not, it probably doesn’t affect you.

Go ahead and nominate a drug-using guy like Goetz to be in charge of the Justice Department, hide his underage affairs, look the other way, none of our business, right? Let him go after the officials who indicted the ex-President. Use the power of the office to show them who’s boss now. If not Goetz, choose a fawning nazi sychophant like Kash Patel. And no, I understand, this isn’t government on my back or yours, it’s government retaliating against folks who have it coming. Folks who live in the Swamp. Not the new guy, he’s draining it. Obvious to anyone with two or more eyes.

Tired of listening to scientists and those uppity elites from the coasts? Who isn’t? Bring on RFK and put him in charge of vaccines and fluorides. Sure, he’s got some strange ideas but that’s what we need now, the stranger the better. And all the better for media ratings! Government doesn’t have to be all wonky anymore. It’s entertainment!

It’s a New Morning in America. Fox News celebrities can run things now, not elected officials, not career bureaucrats. Billionaires will take the helm and help us little people up the ladder. The business of America will once again be business, unbridled, unregulated, full steam ahead. Government? We don’t need no stinking government!

Los Angeles is burning this week. I was at a neighbor’s yesterday and she was preparing plans to escape our island when the fires reach here, wanted to know if she should get her own boat or just hope to use another neighbor’s. I said we have a couple, probably have to charge plenty for a fiery evacuation, though. Okay, she didn’t find that funny. End of the World humor while Rome is burning doesn’t really cut it.

This is the Doom and Gloom era, global warming, glacial melts, sea level rise, Category 8 hurricanes, biblical floods, bird flu fears, pandemics, untreatable bacterial infections, Artificial Intelligence, overpopulation, glacial melting, religious wars, genetic manipulation and even the old nuclear jitters. The closet of midnight anxieties is overflowing and the boogieman is crawling out from under the bed. Sure, add Wildfire to the list. And did I mention earthquakes and tsunamis? Course, let’s not forget zombies. If our current infatuation with all things Undead is any indication, this might be the one to worry about.

Probably gonna take plenty of planning to survive the coming Apocalypse, I’m figuring. A year’s supply of food and water. Probably need a fallout shelter to store it in. Garlic and crosses to keep back the vampires. Might have been a bad move living on the end of an island with only one road off to the mainland. Or maybe … well, might just be the best place to be, far from the mayhem, cities ablaze, neuro-toxin missiles raining down, pestilence everywhere, robots taking over. Hard to say, flip a coin, luck of the draw.

Me, I’m glad to be at the far end of the continent, water lapping at our shore. Worst case I’ll rent or sell kayaks and rowboats to the evacuees. Not sure what I’ll do with the profits once civilization has collapsed but I might as well be the last Optimist. I can be the guy who turns out the lights when everyone else has left, if nothing else.