The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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!

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.

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.

The little park I caretake needs mowing once a week plus a little trail maintenance. Once in awhile I plant some flowers and shrubs which occasionally survive. The phone booth library gets vandalized regularly but lately we seem to be doing okay, books aren’t being burned and the windows haven’t been smashed since the last time when I replaced them with stained glass. I know, it’s only a matter of time.

You work as a park ranger, you grow a bit cynical, trust me. Dog walkers put their dog’s droppings in a plastic bag then deposit the plastic bag along the trail. I suspect they’re either dumber than the stuff in the bag or they just haven’t got the heart to take the bag home. Either way, I’m going with Option #1. This past year I have a gentleman who courts his girlfriend in the backseat of his car. He has the courtesy of using a condom which I know because he slings the condom out into the parking lot along with the wrapper it came with. Dog shit is one thing, semen in a rubber bag is quite another. For you delicate readers, I apologize, but remember, someone has to clean this stuff up and that someone is more than a little irritated.

I suppose I could install a surveillance camera and get this fornicator’s car license number, maybe track him down, haul all his used condoms back to him, probably have a nasty confrontation, plenty of cursing and shouting, possibly even something physical. Or I could go to the local sheriff station, the nice new one we built, and ask the deputies to be on the lookout for our Romeo sparking in the park. But … I was young once myself and short of money for motel trysts. I don’t want to ruin this guy’s evening with a cop tapping on his car window with a heavy flashlight, I just want him to dispose of his trash without resorting to continual littering. Geez, is that a lot to ask?

I’m thinking of trying this: put up a billboard size sign that reads HEY LOVERBOY!! DON’T THROW YOUR USED CONDOMS ON THE GROUND WHEN YOU’RE DONE! TAKE THEM WITH YOU. OR ELSE! The Park Ranger

I know. It probably won’t work. If it doesn’t then we go to Plan B. HEY LOVERBOY’S GIRLFRIEND, ASK MR. WONDERFUL TO STOP LITTERING WITH HIS FILTHY CONDOMS WHEN YOU’RE DONE!! THIS IS APPARENTLY YOUR BEDROOM SO KEEP IT CLEAN! Mom.

Who knows, it might work….

Just when you were starting to relax after a year’s paranoia about mutant viruses unleased on us, we get the sunny news that scientists are combining the genes of monkeys and humans. To develop organs for transplanting, we’re told. The same geneticists had tried splicing human cells to pigs and sheep, but none of the resulting embryos had lived longer than 19 days so naturally they turned to our ape cousins, hoping for better results. Gotta love these guyz, never say die. And never worry about unintended consequences either.

Now this might be good news for the chimps (although I sort of doubt it), but all I need these days is a breeding program for half monkey, half humans. I don’t really need any more Proud Boys running around storming the Capitol and trying to kidnap state governors they don’t like. And don’t get me started on that pig/human experiment. I’m trying to put partisan politics behind me for a few years.

I don’t really have anything against my ape cousins, but c’mon, the last thing we need is another minority to discriminate against. Chimera Lives Matter signs on front lawns, not what we want to see. And you know damn well there’ll be some pushback over this, whether or not these hybrids are immigrants or not, whether they can be citizens, can they vote, do we have to pay them minimum wage to pick our tomatoes and work for Amazon. The door is wide open for controversies we’ve scarcely considered.

But of course that won’t stop the mad scientists. No matter if they muddy up the gene pool with tadpoles bearing human heads. I mean, who wouldn’t pass up the chance to win a Nobel Prize with a chimpanzee that could play piano and star on the next generation of Kardashian shows? Give us all a 3-D printer and let us play God for awhile. I sure got some swell ideas of human evolution once I get my hands on a CRISPR gene editing machine that will fit in my shack. Course I don’t have any more monkeys back in the woods, but there are plenty of deer and coyotes. Sure, I’ll make some mistakes, but hey, isn’t that the fun of being a geneticist in the 21st Century. Lately, most of us would think anything would be an improvement after the last couple of elections.