The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

So you don’t like your job, probably hate your boss, think you should be paid more for all the hard work and overtime you put in, maybe your co-workers look like mindless drones these days and retirement seems a lifetime away (it is!) … but quitting isn’t an option, not when you would lose your health care and your apartment, the apartment that already costs more than you can believe.  What’s a person to do?

Well, apparently, quit in place.  Stop killing yourself.  Stop sucking up to your boss.  Refuse to take overtime.  Slow down, relax, daydream a bit, take a long lunch break, sneak a joint in the john.  It’s a brand new workplace.  The go-go years have gone gone gone, good riddance.  The company treats you like a robot, act like one.  One pace, steady and slow as she goes. Do as little as possible, same as they would do for you.  They’re no longer loyal to you employees, why be loyal to them?  This is the New Work Ethic.  Congratulations and welcome to your new cubicle.

Personally, I always believed in Quitting.  Seemed like a good strategy.  Course, apartments didn’t cost an arm and a leg back then and health insurance wasn’t in the cards.  Pensions, 401-K’s, fergettaboutit.  I was part of the gig economy decades before it had a name and by the time it did, I was self-exiled to the South End where employment was marginal to non-existent.  So I did what the rest of us layabouts did down here, worked for myself.  Sure, the boss was a jerk, but that’s the joy of self-employment, you can look him in the eye and tell him to go to hell.  Won’t affect your wages one iota.  And end of the day you can have a beer or two together, gripe about the same issues, maybe decide neither of you will work the next day.

I recommend it.  But quitting in place.  I dunno.  Seems like the days would just be interminable, slowing down, dragging feet, avoiding work.  You like that kind of job, maybe be a traffic sign holder, SLOW, STOP, for a construction company.  Hours like years, days like a lifetime.  Personally I like to work if I’m going to work, put a back into it, feel like it was worth the effort.  Time flies even when it’s not much fun.  But … don’t say you heard it from me.  And whatever you do, don’t tell my boss.

Maybe you read about the mega Inflation Reduction Act that just got signed into law, the one that addresses climate change and prescription drug prices and health care subscriptions … and gives money to fund some auditors for the IRS.  According to the social media platform Hair on Fire. com, this is nothing short of hiring Nazi accountants to raid your bank accounts, haul you in for tax fraud and probably throw you and your children into jail for non-compliance.  Just another government intrusion into your personal life and worse, your personal finances.

Now, if you’re like me, a guy near the bottom of the economic totem pole, I honestly doubt the IRS will come to my door, turn me upside down and shake the pennies and nickels from my pockets.  What I do think they’ll do is finally go after the corporate tax dodgers who use questionable deductions, shaky strategies and outright tax dodges, fully expecting no audit, no accountability and no risk for taking a shot on their tax forms.  Who wouldn’t if you had high powered CPA’s and tax lawyers on retainer who say, well, it’s worth a shot.

I’ve never understood why Joe Sixpack would be afraid of the IRS.  Buddy, the laws were written by the rich, not by the factory workers or the fast food folks, whatdja think?  Or were you thinking at all?  C’mon, Joe, the game is rigged and if you haven’t figured that out since 5^th grade, you need to get off social media and pay some attention to the alarm bells in your head. The rich don’t get richer because they follow Instagram and Tik Tok, they get rich because you do…. Wake up and smell the money, pal.  They wrote the tax laws, amigo, and they have attorneys and CPA’s and accounting firms to worm their way around the intricacies the rest of us won’t understand in a lifetime of Turbo-Tax fill-ins.

So if you read that the IRS is arming themselves with AR-15’s so they can come to your rental apartment or your trailer door to squeeze another couple bucks from your puny wages, think it through a little harder, why don’tcha?  You really think some white collar decent wage goon is going to audit you, find that math error on your 1040-EZ, probably lose money on the time spent, but report back to his supervisors that the investigation lost hundreds of dollars but hey, we put it to the guy all right, we showed him who’s boss, he won’t forget to doublecheck his additions and subtractions next year, that’s for sure!  So yeah, stop the IRS from collecting from the rich and the corporations.  You probably feel okay about funding the Defense Department  all by yourself.  Or do you think we have an army so they can subjugate you next?

Oh, and here’s something else.  They don’t need to.  You’ve already volunteered for slavery.

I got a pile of friends who claim to be envious of my so-called Lifestyle.  Get up when I want, work for myself, do what I feel like doing, live off the calendar and my wits and off the beaten path.  Who wouldn’t like that?  Unless we factor in the poverty, the hand-to-mouth, the lack of pensions or retirement.  There’s a reason hippies became extinct and it has nothing to do with an asteroid slamming Earth.

As the mizzus will gladly attest, I took this road — this choice? — because I don’t play well with others.  And certainly not managers, supervisors or most any other bosses.  I didn’t like the city.  I didn’t like most jobs.  Okay, all jobs, any jobs.  And since poverty never scared me, the Path of Least Resistance led to here, a place remote and cheap, and not surprisingly, a backwash without much opportunity for employment.

Perfect!  All I had to do was learn a few skills.  Carpentry, plumbing, electrical, truck repair, subsistence living.  Education — it never really ends.  Something they  neglect to teach most of us in school.  The School of Hard Knocks doesn’t need a post-graduate program.  Tuition’s not exactly free, but it’s reasonable.

Folks who claim to be envious of my lifestyle really aren’t.  They didn’t have the appropriate skill sets.  If they did, retirement would be easy for them, a hippie vibe with a fat income guaranteed.  Who could ask for more?  But … like I always say, it takes more than a little while to learn bohemianism.  And if you’ve spent most of your life paying for insurance policies to protect yourself from the vagaries of existence, chances are it’s too late to become a latter day beatnik.  Don’t feel bad, you’re probably the Lucky Ones.

The Flatheads were holding court at the Diner the day after the FDA approved the women’s new sex drug.  Lined up like an ad for an automobile museum, their Nashes and Oldsmobiles, Packards and Pontiacs gleamed in this summer’s endless sun.  Tork ‘The Wrench’ Anderson was musing over his Santa Fe Omelette how life was going to be nitro-charged from here on out.  “I may have to start jogging again,” he declared to the assembled geriatrics, “just to keep up with the mizzus.”

Randy, who once owned the O-Zi-Ya Body Shoppe before he sold it and retired, put down his second cup of decaf coffee and shook his head sadly.  “After my last heart attack I decided to slow down on the bedroom.  Too much stress on my ticker.”  Freddie howled from the next table.  “I bet Cindy thought her prayers were finally answered.”  Randy closed his eyes and nodded.  “I don’t think the pink pills are for her.”

Brenda breezed through the back room about then with a coffee pot.  “Whaddaya think, Brenda?” Joey asked when she poured him a refill.  “Gonna be a big run on that women’s Viagra?”  Brenda stopped, all eyes on her as if she were the Dr. Phil of the Women’s Health Movement.  “That depends, I guess.”  “On what?” Freddie asked, holding out his empty mug, big grin on his.

“If you’re hoping a little pill is gonna make you old farts look good, I got some bad news for you boys.  You’re expecting a miracle.  It’s like those cars outside there.  They’re waxed up and ready for show, but you know and I know, what’s under the hood isn’t much.”

Ralph said, “Ouch, Brenda, that’s kinda cruel.”

“Sorry,” she laughed, “but you did ask.”  She held the coffee pot up. “More octane, fellas???”

Who doesn’t love a good pandemic? Now that Covid has receded into our collective past of plagues, we’re treated to the guessing game of which disease is waiting in the wings.  Will it be monkeypox that sprints ahead or the avian flu?  How about polio, that creepy little virus from the past, emerging once again in municipal water systems? SARS? Ever heard of Langya virus?  Get ready, it’s about to go viral, at least in the news.  West Nile?  MERS?  HIV-AIDS?  E-bola scare ya?

They tell me there are more viruses on this planet than there are stars in the universe.  That’s a boatload of potential pathogens, all mutating like mad in a changing climate, most benign but it only takes one, right, to make your life a living flesh eating hell.  We all enjoy a good horror story, I guess, but lately the scares are real, end of the world kind of unhappy endings.  We’re all waiting expectantly for the Green Plague, stepchild of the Black One which killed off a goodly portion of the human inhabitants here on Earth.  You know, the planet we’re trapped on.  Bolt the doors, don the masks, immunize yerself!  The pestilence is coming, the pestilence is coming!

Out there in the jungle, here in the barnyards, down in the municipal water system, the little buggers are watching and waiting for their chance.  Maybe they’re coming in from all those rockets returning from outer space, alien bacteria and viruses and bugs, oh no!  What chance do we earthlings have against intergalactic plague?  None, I’m betting.  No N-95 hepa mask is going to save you, kiddo, not a hope in hell.  The monkeys spread it.  Bats.  Those Chinese labs.  The CIA experiments gone sideways.  Who you gonna call?  Doc Fauci?  Half the country thinks Doc Fauci made a fortune off Covid.  If you can’t trust your doctor, who can you trust?  Tucker Carlson? If you don’t believe in science, what chance do you have to survive the next pandemic?  Count on this: calling it a phony political plague won’t keep you immune.  That kind of superstition didn’t work in the Middle Ages and it won’t work for the next Black Plague.  The bugs are real.

But … on the bright side, at least the news media has something else to scare us with besides politics and war.  Lucky us.