The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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.

I stumbled into a lumberyard the other day and noticed a sign by the 2×4’s that read $7. Last time I looked a 2×4 cost 2 bucks and some change. The sticker shock made me check the price of plywood just to see if maybe some new employee with glasses fogged by his Covid mask hadn’t screwed up the price inadvertently, but nope, the ½ inch plywood was 3 and a half times what it was last sheet I bought not too long back.

Ditto the 2×6’s and the treated lumber and the cedar decking. All I can figure is either Covid killed a helluva lot of trees, driving the prices sky high or it killed the loggers who refused to wear masks. Whatever, this is another dark side of the pandemic, no doubt another conspiracy by the damn Democrats to raise the cost of a home and ruin the American Dream for the average citizen.

My old roommate from our Slacker Years when we were content with poverty, living the Dream down at the South End, came up recently for a visit. I had the shack then and a mortgage of $24,000 with a monthly payment of $180. Easy living! If you didn’t mind shack life. And we certainly didn’t. Known to the local lumberyard as the Piranha Brothers, we built two additions to that shack, one a backroom I used as a stained glass shop and the other, a kitchen addition, room for a sink and cabinets plus a 1920’s electric stove and a 6 foot by 3 foot clear cedar slab for a table, probably worth a bitcoin or three in today’s speculative lumber market.

We built with 2×4’s and 2×6’s, probably spent a couple hundred bucks to frame both, same with the plywood siding, go Martha Stewart with tarpaper then nail on the cedar shakes scrounged from various sources and voila, you got yourself some elbow room, mister, maybe not Architectural Digest, but nice for the price.

Now, of course, I’m considering taking them apart. Gotta be worth more as vintage 2×4’s than a tax appraiser’s assessment of a deteriorating hundred year old hovel. I’ll even pull the rusty nails, only cost slightly more than what the lumberyard wants for inferior wood. And … environmentally correct to recycle. Yep, sounds like a win win to this old Piranha Brother.