The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

So ask yourself, if you refuse to take the Covid vaccine out of suspicion that the government or Bill Gates or Doc Fauci are planning to turn you into a robot or simply outright kill you, why would you believe that a veterinary de-worming drug would be just the cure and prevention for the virus? Because cows don’t get Covid? Or that Fox News runs a story touting its beneficial effects? Paranoia only runs one direction, apparently. Government bad, Trump good. If he says bleach would kill the infection, hell, drink a glass, be my guest.

We got plenty of South Enders here who think mask wearing is the equivalent of handcuffs, that vaccinations are mind control, that Covid is really a phony pandemic no worse than the common cold. They think those of us who buy into the conspiracy are nothing but sheep. And if we weren’t sheep before the injections, we will be after, slaves to Big Brother. Most of these folks, if they bothered to check, would find a smallpox vaccine scar on their left shoulder. Who knows, maybe that’s what’s happened to their logical thinking, the cowpox left them devoid of rationality. Okay, that’s probably not true except on far left media sites, but I know this, we don’t have smallpox ravaging our populations anymore. Something definitely to be said for that.

The truth is, if any of us believe in such things anymore, there’s no point arguing with folks about masks or social distancing or vaccinations or school closures, it’s a total waste of time and probably leads to arguments, fights, family breakups, divorces and eventually rioting in the streets. Show them videos of victims on ventilators struggling to breathe, show them that repeatedly, they’ll tell you more people die from the vaccines than the virus. You say the sky is blue, they’ll tell you that’s a libtard lie to hide the fact that the sky is the color of chemtrails.

Now we got governors who fan the flames, mandate against mask mandates, scream government overreach as they overreach, figure maybe they’ll be the next Trump. The Lt. Gov. of Texas blames the blacks for the Covid surge in the Lone Star state. Add a little racism to the pandemonium, why not? As long as we’re whistling in the dark, toss in a dog whistle too.

I got my vaccinations a few months back. I wear a mask, mostly to protect others, and it looks like I’m protecting folks who don’t want protecting, nothing to fear for them but nano-trackers and the common cold. When the booster vaccine is available, I’ll take that and the one after that and probably the ones coming from here on out. We might have won the battle against Covid if we’d all done the same, but hey, it’s a free country. Like my right wing pals like to say, Freedom ain’t really free. Ignorance is its own kind of prison. So go ahead, drink the horse drug. We’ll all help pay the ER bill.

When I was a little sprout, we would make the pilgrimage back to my parents’ homes in Northern Maine. If Maine conjures up visions of lobstermen and weathered Cape Cod clapboard houses on the rugged Atlantic coast, let me disillusion you. Northern Maine is not scenic, not postcard picture whatsoever. It is poor, mostly peas and potato fields where the Great Northwoods threatens to reclaim its territory, some logging and plenty of drinking. Like a lot of America in the harshest climates, it belongs to another era.

Our grandparents’ houses, most of the time we went back, lacked indoor bathrooms. On my dad’s side, there was an attached shed off the kitchen and further off that was a two seater outhouse, which, if you want to be accurate, was sort of an indoor outhouse, something I’ve never seen before or since. My mom’s folks’ farmhouse sported an outdoor outhouse, one seater. They were potato farmers, living hand to mouth, and most of Gramp’s carpentry went into additions for the kids they kept having, not, apparently, for fancy double hole outhouses. That, or they were more private in their restroom etiquette.

What we had when we visited was a thundermug. You see em in antique stores now, usually an enameled metal pot with a lid but sometimes porcelain for the Martha Stewart crowd of the early last century. When we came to the South End, we had a working indoor toilet, something folks usually inquired about before they visited the first time, relieved we were so newfangled modern. But our stairs to the bedroom was nearly vertical so I did what my grandfolks did, I kept a chamber pot up there, emptied it every morning, no need to brave those skinny stairs you had to turn sideways to ascend or descend.

The last year or so the toilet in the shack kept backing up. I’m not going to shock you with tales of the attempted repairs, but I finally gave up. We had a few visitors (and ourselves) who stayed down there with apologies for the non-functioning toilet, but hey, here’s the thundermug, save you an accident on those stairs, no need to thank me. Which, I guess, might explain the diminishing number of guests this year.

But I digress. The point is, and yeah, I plan to get to it, the point is I finally decided to return to the 21st century whatever it took. Today I dragged out the old antique model and hauled in a new crapper, one that advertised itself as ‘pressurized’, whatever that means, but what I hoped would mean the contents of the bowl would rocket out at the speed of sound to somewhere else, not just swirl around and possibly flood over the rim like in the past. To be honest, my expectations of success were low. To be totally honest, I didn’t think I had a rat’s chance, but I really hate to admit to defeat and I really hated to go back to using my outhouse back in the woods, not that I mind, mind you, I just remember the woman who came to a studio tour a dozen years ago, desperate to use the loo that was out of order and ended up back in our spider infested one seater back in the nettle forest. Believe me, I never want to see a look on anyone’s face like hers when she was done. Some folks appreciate their modern luxuries. As you can see, I was doing this for them.

Oh sure, Albert was smart, real smart, I’ll give him that. Knew a lot about relativity, black holes, time warps, all that voodoo stuff nobody here on terra firma cares much about, especially now that science is pretty much on the way out for half the population. So he says, yeah, like he’s a psychiatrist too, that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Big whoop. Maybe he never heard that when you conduct an experiment, say looking for subatomic particles, the results change depending on the guy running the experiment. Same thing, do it again and again, but different result.

So okay, I tore down my last acoustic guitar I built over a year ago, pre-Covid, don’t ask me why, I just did, all right? I’d built 5, figuring the next one would be an improvement, and the one after that might be, well, maybe not perfect or anything, but surprisingly good, possibly more than good, even amazing. Halfway through the teardown I felt Albert breathing down my neck, whispering his little litany about insanity and repetition and expecting better results, kind of like having some punk walking behind you with a stick after dark dragging it across a picket fence, ominous beyond reason.

I had hoped the lessons I learned from those 5 guitars might serve me well, but the first 2 didn’t, the first 3 weren’t much improved, and the 4th, well, it seemed worse. And here I was deconstructing the last one, making a mess of it, growing impatient, wondering why I was going to the trouble and listening to the ghost voice of Mr. Unified Theory of the Damn Universe, give me a break. At one point I almost smashed the thing on the shop table I was so pissed off at how it was going, maybe give Albert a quick review of the Big Bang or Galactic Entropy, but, being the mellow man I am, I just smashed some other stuff and plowed gamely on.

I will make no more guitars. How’s that for a learning curve? How do you like that for a definition of Sanity? The trouble is, though, you put your nose to something like this, give it your best shot, try to improve, try to learn from your mistakes, try to justify the hours and the days and the weeks you spent, only to come up short … and that little worm of failure starts to eat at you, starts to make you question all the other misadventures you tried, the other follies that seemed worth trying at the time but, in retrospect, seem, oh, silly or stupid or just incredibly wrong-headed. And then the worm digs a little deeper and you start to think maybe this is the story of your life, these wrong turns, these pratfalls of projects, this whole way of looking at things, until you stand at the edge of your own personal black hole, and yeah, okay Mr. Super Smart, you’re looking at what might be your own insanity, too late to change all the mistakes now, just line up those 5 guitars and listen to them not so gently weeping in your nightmares.

At least they’re not banjos. That would be a madness unendurable. Although I’m certain my next banjo will be a masterpiece….

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.

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.