The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

When I got my Covid vaccination, hoo boy, was I a happy camper, glad I wouldn’t be coming down with the virus, spending a few quality weeks alone with a ventilator tube shoved down my gullet, waiting for a miserable death. A lot of folks around me decided for various reasons not to get the vaccine. Some were afraid of side effects, some believed Trump even though he himself secretly ran out and got himself inoculated, some just believed the whole coronavirus thing was a hoax. Who knows? And after I had mine, who cares? They can roll the dice. Polio? Probably a hoax too, all us little kids rolling up our sleeves for a poke in the arm when really it was all bogus, no doubt a scam perpetrated by the pharmaceutical industrial complex to make another few billion.

Now that we’ve reached about the maximum number of people who will willingly take the vaccine, it’s obvious we aren’t going to reach what the media calls herd immunity. This virus will just rattle around in the population that refuses to take the shot and over time it will mutate and eventually we’ll all be back to Pandemic Year One. Freedom, sometimes it isn’t quite as simple as it sounds. So … what’s a country to do? Well, since we don’t have federal guidelines we just wait to see what the governor or the mayor or whoever wants to weigh in on this stuff finally decides to do. Some just want to call it quits, let everyone go back to partying, let the chips fall where they may. Some are still trying to encourage folks to take their damn medicine. In fact there are incentives being offered for doing just that.

You didn’t feel like helping us end this pandemic, okay, how about we reward you if you get the vaccine? Money, chance at the lottery, free college education, beer, hunting license? There are a dozen inducements, each one varying by state or county or city. But the idea is to bribe the recalcitrant into rolling up their sleeves and helping the rest of us out. Call me cynical but I can’t imagine for a beer some redneck Covid denier is going to let the damn govamint stick a needle filled with god only knows what into his tattoo. Maybe a free hunting license, but I doubt it. Throw in the deer and okay, 50/50.

I suppose all of us suckers that happily took the injection are thinking if only we’d waited, maybe we could have gotten that free money or a car or maybe a vacation in some Covid-free paradise island. Well, there’s always the next pandemic. Lesson learned.

About a month ago I flew back to Wisconsin to help my brother move our father into an independent apartment down at the assisted living complex, what we called the Big House. Our mother had died there a few years back in the nursing units while the Old Man stayed up at the house and visited three times every day. She could never understand why he didn’t move down there with her, but we did. At the end she was hard to live with and when she died our father never mentioned her again. ‘Til death do us part’ must’ve meant something to him.

So we no sooner got him moved from his house to the new apartments when the entire complex went into Lockdown, some staff person having come up positive for Covid, which meant I wouldn’t see the Old Man the rest of my time back there, something we hadn’t anticipated or else we would have waited until the pandemic had settled down to something you could drown in a bathtub. When I left to fly home, he seemed to be acclimating just fine to his new accommodations, but about a week later he took a dive, seemed to lose his focus sounded a hundred years old even though he is 98 and made us wonder if he’d had a small stroke or old age had just caught up to him finally.

Either way we decided the time had come to move into the assisted living quarters, get some nursing help, have his meals delivered, let folks keep a watch on him. I made arrangements to fly out in a few days, a bit sad that we were moving him so soon but hey, it had to happen sooner or later. Just a lot sooner than we dreamed. Yesterday my brother called to say the Big House had gone into total Lockdown again, no visitors, nobody allowed in or out, no sons allowed to move their father to the other side of the building. Everything right now is on hold.

My brother and I aren’t the type who second guess themselves. We made a call and at the time it seemed like the right call. Now, of course, we might have done it different, maybe let him stay in his house another few months, then move him down to the apartments. Course, he might have gone downhill at home and that would be worse with no assisted living to move into if it were in Lockdown.

But … it looks like from out here we’ve put him in a very nice upscale penitentiary. And worse, he’s in solitary confinement. I suppose I’ll be back there before too long. If we can’t move him to the care units, I’ll have to bring him a cake. One with the hacksaw baked inside….

Well, okay, about a third of us in this country have been hacked. Social Security numbers, driver’s license, date of birth, all the necessary ingredients some crimninal in Belarus can sell to identity fraud specialists. I didn’t realize there were 3 or 4 companies that kept credit databases, much less 3 or 4 companies who were wide open to hackers. Silly me.

And here I was worried about Big Brother. The Damn Government, I mean, not Mark Zuckerberg. Turns out all of us are just one big happy data family, smooshed together in some internet Cloud that knows everything important about us. Now we’re sharing that information with hacker hoodlums. Swell. Just swell.

Back in the dark days of the 1970’s I lived with a bunch of freewheeling yahoos in Seattle and Gomorrah who majored in various studies at the University of Washington, but spent most of their time experimenting with drug abuse of various sorts ranging from hash oil production to laughing gas theft. They grew pot and they raised psilocybin mushrooms. They scored opiated hashish and they drank legal whisky. The place we lived in was a veritable criminal operation. ‘Honest, Officer, I only rent a room here.’

On our bulletin board we had a Social Security card pinned up. Ralph Speidel. The kidz had gone down to the local cemetery and searched for a deceased child, then gotten a card in Ralph’s name, they told me when I asked who Ralph Speidel was. ‘Just in case,’ they said. Just in case of what, I asked. ‘You never know,’ they replied. ‘We might need to go underground. Set up a new identity.’

Jeez, I thought at the time, these are drug addled paranoiacs. But they were playing with fire, stealing canisters of nitrous oxide from hospitals, selling various illegal drugs. Nixon was gone by then, the VietNam War was lost and the draft was over. These weren’t SDS roommates or Weathermen, they were college students doing a little research, nothing the FBI would find particularly interesting. Yet.

When I moved out a few months later to my ghetto home and some fresh roommates, I considered taking Ralph’s card with me but I left it on the bulletin board, just glad to be shed of these goofballs finally. Now, of course, in light of current events, I wish I’d snatched it. You just never know when a new identity might come in handy.

Every day in the Land of the Free you can read about homeless people. Folks living in their cars, moms with their kids camped under the freeway overpasses, people lying on heating grates on downtown sidewalks, even guys on the South End living in the woods. I don’t know either what to do to remedy this problem. I do know we have plenty of millionaires with more money than they could spend in three lifetimes but I suspect they’re figuring they might find a way to triple their life expectancy so that money might come in handy in the coming couple of centuries.

Up on the north end of our idyllic island there’s a 1.2 million dollar house the owners want the fire department to burn down. The fire department uses such donations for training purposes, set them ablaze and go through procedures for the time when it might be one of our houses. Not, mind you, that we necessarily have million dollar homes but … well, you get the idea. My neighbors burned their dad’s house down about 25 years ago. Looked like a nice house to me but of course I was living in our old shack then. One man’s ramshackle might be another’s mansion. They built a new home in the ashes and I built one too across the ravine. That ravine is kind of a metaphor, I guess, for the chasm that separates us. Nice folks, different world.

The million dollar hacienda up north isn’t a shack. It isn’t dilapidated. It is, actually, fairly new, richly appointed but alas, not in its owners’ taste. So rather than sell it to someone whose tastes might like that house, they’ve opted to burn it to the ground and build one to fit theirs. I don’t know what you think of this, but I find it positively immoral and don’t lecture me about freedom to do whatever you choose in the richest country on earth.

When I first moved to Seattle and Gomorrah, Boeing had pretty much shut down and mansions up near Volunteer Park were abandoned by owners who were under water, house worth less than their mortgage. Squatters moved in, what we would now call homeless people, and lived there for years until the economy picked up and new owners evicted them. I’m hoping the homeless get wind of this house burning b.s. and take up residence. Somebody needs a good shaming.

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!