The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

So I’m in the airport check-in line and the guy in front of me is giving the TSA an earful about his rights as an American citizen. He’s not wearing a plague mask even though we’ve passed 100 signs telling us travelers they’re required at all times in this facility. By the time he’s bending their ears about being forced by the federal government, the damn government, to drink his pop before going through screening I figure I’ll be here for another half hour while they put him on the floor and do a cavity search in front of the rest of us compliant citizens. I’m praying that he won’t be a fellow passenger on my flight, the one who gets the place turned around so he can be taken into custody back where we flew out of.

Freedom for some folks is just nothing left to complain about. No shoes, no shirt, no service must be practically a call to arms. A friend of mine has a neighbor who drains his septic into the ditch by her house, no doubt another freedom fighter. The guy next door on the other side likes to shoot his automatic assault rifle after midnight, testing the patience of the sleeping neighborhood, maybe see who wants to confront him. The cops don’t care to so why would she? I need to reread that second amendment, see if the right to bear arms means the right to shoot them night or day below my window.

This pandemic has certainly brought out the new Minutemen, folks who think the government has a boot on their necks. Nobody has the right to tell them anything. And watching them storm the Capitol a few short months ago, I got an eyeful of what freedom means to them. More for them, less for me. You wonder why I live at the end of an island at the edge of a continent, it wasn’t to escape the reach of Rome, it was to escape these yahoos. That kind of freedom, trust me, is getting harder to find.

Some days I don’t know why I get up early and read the morning news. I might just as well sleep in and then, prior to that first cup of joe, slam my thumb with a hammer so it will throb the rest of the day, helping me forget the world beyond the pain. But no, I walk down the path from the house to the mailbox, passing the rhododendrons in bloom, the birds calling from the shrubs, the sun filtering through the foliage of exotic trees … only to snatch my newspapers from their plastic coffin and head back up the trail reading snippets of the day’s insanity.

Today, what the meteorologist promised would be a warm and sunny prelude to summer, turned ominous and dark as I read about the number of folks in my America who believe completely in Qanon, about one in five of us. Or, as the article pointed out, more of us than any mainstream religion’s believers. I know I’ll be turning that over in my head all day long, trying to wrap my mind around the notion that 20% of my friends and neighbors believe there is a cabal of Satanists who control the government, media and financial worlds and oh, while they’re at it, run a child sex ring. If ignorance is bliss, heaven awaits you.

And here I was worried about the Covid plague … little guessing that the real menace was the worm that had burrowed into the brains of a sizeable percentage of my fellow countrymen and reduced them to paranoid babblers of cockamamie idiocies no sane person could possibly believe. The Dark Ages are back apparently and spreading a black sheet over the home of the brave, land of the feeble with no vaccine in sight and even if there was one, these folks would refuse to be inoculated by the pederast priests of their new enemy.

Wearing a mask probably won’t help now. The worm spreads on the internet, passed from ‘friend’ to ‘friend’, an invisible pod like the one in Invasion of the Body Snatcher, this one rewiring the circuits of the brains of their victims. Unplug your computer! Turn off your TV! Board the windows andbolt the doors! Do not answer your phone! But by all means, be afraid! It isn’t the pederasts who are coming for you.

Once again us folks down at the South End lag far behind the entrepreneurs in Stanwoodopolis. Why do we invariably read in the paper about those enterprising innovative capitalists who beat us every time to the punch? Is there something in our well water that stunts our imaginations?

This week I read in the Stanwoodopolis Gazette how a couple had bought aging alpacas at pennies on the hoof, then killed them and blended the meat into a savory pet food. We got old horses down here. Donkeys too. Not to mention llamas and alpacas — all of em eating hay and oats without much economic return to their owners. The government will pay you 1000 bucks to take wild horses and some of those folks quick turned around and sold them to meat processors. What a concept: take these tired old animals and grind them into fresh dog food. Geez, when the dogs get old, grind them up too! You got a practically endless food chain and profit margin.

Now, admittedly the folks who originated this meat market marvel fell afoul of the laws governing the humane treatment of animals in their care prior to butchering them. Turned out their animals weren’t really all that old, mostly 1-4 years, kind of kids really, and the owners weren’t feeding them much either, basically starving them. Poor animal husbandry, you ask me, and the vet who accompanied the sheriff thought so too just before they confiscated the herd. Not even a good business plan, starving the little guys instead of fattening them up. Quite a few died of malnourishment afterwards, a damn shame to waste that meat, some might say. Well, the owners …. The rest of us probably felt like they ought to be ground up themselves and fed to the dogs.

All I can say is it gives entrepreneurism a bad name. And just another excuse for us layabouts down here to avoid capitalist enterprises. As usual ….

I’m out in the Dairy State right now, halfway into moving my father from an independent living apartment to the assisted living one at the far wing of the complex he’s been at less than a month. Part of the building is in Lockdown, part in quarantine, so you can imagine the logistics of moving furniture and the rest of his belongings are fairly daunting. So far so good. Last move a month ago we managed to get him into the apartment, then the entire complex shut down, no one out, no one in.

This time we’re crossing fingers and throwing the dice, moving piece meal in case the cell doors slam shut once again and he’s locked into a mostly empty apartment, no visitors, no exit. The place is called Attic Angels, what I now call Attica. Tomorrow, Allah willing, we move the last stuff, bed, kitchen table, chairs and … him. Once we move him we can’t visit on the lockdowned side he’s moving to. I fly home the next day but my brother won’t be able to visit until, hopefully, a few days later when the 14 day quarantine expires.

Strange times. Meanwhile life goes on. Yesterday my brother and I went to the Toyota dealership to pick up a van he’d ordered months ago. Sharks in the kiddie pool, believe me, when you walk inside where the sales personnel wait filing down their teeth. Standing at the main entrance, my mask on and a South End String Band ball cap on my long hair hanging below my collar half a foot, who should I see but a friend we’d just seen two weeks ago. Now you might walk up and surprise him by just being here 2000 miles from home, but me, no sir, I bounced up and greeted him with my best land shark imitation and a ‘What kind of vehicle can we put you in today, sir?’

Well, fun is fun, but finally I dropped the mask and dropped the act. It took him a second to rearrange reality, but we had a good laugh. By the time my brother had title to his new van, my pal’s friend had bought a car too. On our way out I strolled over to their table and said, ‘I trust our sales staff met your expectations.’ Tomorrow I’m going to send him a survey asking him to rate that service. Life, as the philosophers say, goes on ….

There was a study recently — I know, who believes those anymore? — where college students were tested with smart phones on them, with smartphones in their packs and with smartphones left in an adjacent room. Nobody used them, nobody answered calls, nobody googled anything, but in the end the kids with phones on their person scored worse than the ones with phones in their packs. The highest scores were those of the students whose phones were left in the adjoining room. I would’ve loved to know how kids — if there are any left — would score if they had never owned a smarty phone at all. The conclusion the researchers reached was something on the line that smartphones make us dumber. Since I don’t own a smartphone, you can well imagine my pleasure at learning this. Or, if you’re a slave to the device, you’ll say I’m full of shit and the study was faux science.

I got a buddy, Computer Carl, who was the first guy I knew who bought a GPS. He visited us with it proudly mounted on his dash and we all listened — in amazement — to the female voice in perfect enunciation — command us to turn left, proceed point six miles, turn left again, or if we screwed up, recalculate and order new revised instructions. Carl, being a techie, gleefully obeyed her every edict.

Invariably we’d be driving home down the island and the smarty pants GPS lady would tell him to turn left at the corner where we always go straight, no doubt calculating distance, not time, and Carl, who never remembered the route even after two or three dozen visits and one hundred trips, would turn left. No, I’d say each of those 100 times, go straight, but Carl trusted the GPS more than me, a 40 year resident, and — here’s my point — more than HIS own memory. This is what we’d call now, Google Brain. Why trouble yourself learning and memorizing (and possibly using) that stored information if you can just google it up?

Maybe when I have Alzheimers I’ll have a better answer for that. You know, if I can remember where I put my smarty phone….