The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Here’s a bumper sticker to replace the maskless yahoo I ran into at the local grocery store last week’s DON’T TREAD ON ME. How about DON’T BREATHE ON ME. With schools scheduled to return to the classroom in a month and with the country spiking in 40 states after nearly half a year of contagion that for awhile seemed to be settling down, we can’t get a federal commitment to fighting this Covid plague. We can’t even get a straight answer from the Man in the High Tower whether we should wear a mask or not. He certainly won’t. When Congress authorized payments to facilitate more and faster testing for the virus, the White House blocked its implementation. What the President wants is for the states to battle this out on a local level. Local control, better results. Although when it comes to authorizing federal law enforcement on the streets of Portland, inflaming the situation, federal control is better.

If you’re confused about what this Administration’s policy is, join the club. If you think there is a policy, wake up. Even Republican governors, mayors and legislators are alarmed. When the White House team of rivals attacked Dr. Fauci as being wrong most of the time, even the dumb refused to be dumber. Despite the President’s reassurance that this epidemic will just fade away, a beautiful thing to watch, it won’t and everyone outside the Bubble knows it won’t. When he tells Fox News in an interview this weekend that eventually he will be proven right, even his most ardent admirers wiped the smile off their maskless faces. The man may be more of a menace than the disease he refuses to fight.

History will not be kind to this President. And as the election looms, neither will his former friends and allies, his enablers who watched in studied silence as blunders and buffoonery circled like hungry vultures overhead. Why rock the boat when it was sailing high above the waterline with an economy that made millionaires of their fellow stock investors? Sure, the folks in steerage were making minimum wage bailing water, but the unemployment rate was low, surely an optimistic sign.

But now the economy has bottomed, primarily the result of ineptitude on the bridge. The captain is morphing into Queeg, mutinies on all sides, paranoia driving him to listen only to his inner voices and the pipsqueak Kushner. No one can be trusted, maybe not even Jared. Rumors are circulating that the officers are against him. Fox News has turned softball interviews into perplexingly hard questioning. He claims to be one of the highest IQ people on the planet, acing, in fact, his recent medical intelligent test. Chris Wallace, the Fox interviewer told him he too had taken that test. It asked them to identify a picture of an elephant. Wallace didn’t ask the President if he’d gotten that one right, but the rest of us on the S.S. America know, the correct answer is it’s what’s in the room at the White House.

In the 1300’s when another round of bubonic plague was sweeping the floor of civilization, a marauding army of Tartars set siege to Caffa, a port city on the Black Sea. The citizens there, fearing contamination, refused to surrender to the infected army so the Tartars, mightily piqued at this unseemly lack of camaraderie, catapaulted some of their dead over the battlements of the walled city. Velkommen indeed.

A friend of mine was in one of our local grocery stores recently on the wild and unwalled South End, a provisioning locus for State Park refugees fleeing the plague cities of Seattle and Gomorrah and a quickie mart for us residents who ran out of beer or wine and dreaded the nightmare run five miles north to the IGA. Not a mask on a single employee. When the manager was asked why not, given the Governor’s edict that all retail shops and all citizens should wear one, she was told the staff had medical exemptions. ‘How many employees do you have?’ she asked and was told, with a straight face, 27.

I suppose we should applaud our local retailer for hiring the sick and the infirm. Although I wonder what maladies, besides Covid, they might be harboring at that cash register. This past week’s editorial page in our local fishwrapper featured an angry letter from a local man who claimed it was against God’s will to wear a mask. And furthermore, it was unconstitutional to infringe on his personal, and I suppose, God’s freedom. I can only suppose the Constitution has some bill of rights not to wear masks. Or shoes or shirts. Or pants. We apparently have the right to infect our fellow citizens. God’s will be done.

These are tough times in the Land of the Plague. Partisan politics takes precedence over sound medical advice and in those places where the Lockdown was lifted and the partying commenced, the virus has proven immune to political debate, surprise surprise. Other countries have managed to contain the contagion, but here, we subscribe to the Don’t Tread on Me, I Can Do What I Want philosophy. So much for the idea that we are all in this thing together. Better to let the virus run its course and the survivors can carry on. Another few months of this and I expect to see catapaults launching the dead over the gated communities.

This is Year One in the Plague Era. If you follow the death reports, the daily Covid cases, all the statistics from all the states, you can monitor the slow and inexorable spread of the virus. If you’re holed up in your Covid cocoon with only the weekly grocery run wearing your mask and your shields, you have plenty of time to read plague predictions, even time to research pandemics throughout history. It’s a frightening read. Millions dead of bubonic, AIDS, smallpox, cholera, flu, you name it, it ravaged the civilized and uncivilized world.

Occasionally I peek at the coronavirus stats for the world, the nation, even the counties of my state, Washington. My county, Island County, for the past month or so had a death toll of 12. A few days ago we were listed as 11 dead. I figured a misprint, checked the following day and the day after, but nope, 11 dead now. This is great news for those who think the plague is a political prank or a liberal hoax. Even better news for those who believe the President when he claims the virus will just fade away. Not only will it fade away, the dead will return to life!!

I love magical thinking as much as the next superstitious anti-vaccine yahoo, believe me. I want to throw my plague mask in the trashcan and go back to partying with my pals down at the local watering hole. If I get sick, so what? Survival of the fittest, right? Except, I don’t want to believe in Darwinism, none of that scientific hocus pocus baloney you get every day in the fear infested media. And if I die of this disease, well, a chance in 12 I’ll return to the living, how’s that for statistical analysis? And don’t get me going on zombies. Nobody is talking zombie here.

All I’m saying is, like the President, let’s be optimistic. This thing is headed in the right direction. Be of good cheer. Stop doomscrolling. Stop worrying. We’re going to be fine and even the dead will be home soon. Count on it. But stop counting.

If you thought the Kung Flu came from China, like your President does, maybe it’s time to wake up. If you thought the Chinese Flu was developed in a lab or came from some so-called ‘wet’ market in Wuhan, forget about it. The truth is out there, as they used to say on the X-files. The truth is stranger than fiction. Or, more to the point, fiction is truth and truth is fiction and the folks on Facebook no longer argue which is which. Who cares, really, when we’d rather have interesting lies than boring truths.

You think this comet Neowise showing up in our solar system at the same time as the coronavirus was a coincidence? C’mon, think about it. UFO’s are circling the planet like bees around their disturbed nest. The government knows all about this, but they’re keeping it secret, as always, lobbing you misinformation about Russian election interference and Twitter hacks to prevent us citizens from asking too many questions. Like where did this comet come from? And why is it here? Who sent it and what do they want? Remember when the European Space Agency landed on a comet a few years back? What did they find there, eh? And why didn’t they let us in on that secret?

I looked at this comet a few nights ago. If that tail doesn’t look exactly like a sneeze loaded with coronavirus hurled across a crowded room by a maskless contagion superspreader, I don’t know what does…. Aliens are out there, my friend, and trust me on this, they are not your friend. They are planting the seeds of destruction in our atmosphere even as you sit there blithely reading this, unaware of extraterrestrial dangers. They have sent the Messenger of Death in the form of celestial bodies that we ooh and aah over, little suspecting we are being washed by plague mists continuously as the comet streaks over our heads. And you thought chemtrails were frightening! You thought vaccines were scary!

Another existential threat, can’t you see that for what it is? This isn’t pixie dust, pal, this is space plague. Oh sure, they’ll find a vaccine for it, you can bet your supplemental health insurance on it. But what’s really in it? Antibodies from another galaxy, that’s what. Go right ahead, let these enablers shove a syringe in your arm, but don’t come crying to me when your body starts to grow scales and your appendages begin to double. Don’t say I didn’t try to warn you.

Here it is again, Groundhog’s Day in the Land of Covid. I think it’s Wednesday, or was Wednesday, or will be again tomorrow, but I’m not sure what week of what month. I vaguely remember the 4th of July awhile back but it might have been last year, I’m not prepared to wager any bets or testify under oath. I talk to my old man who’s 97 years old every day and invariably ask what’s new? He pauses to think for a minute or so, then invariably answers, Nothing.

He lives by himself, rattles around his two bedroom house, watches the news on two TV’s, cooks himself three meals a day, reads his subscription magazines that pile up, naps, watches movies at night until he falls asleep on his recliner. Next day he gets up and repeats the above. He likes the routine. Life distilled right down to its essence. Me, I’m not 97. But I’m locked in a similar routine and I really don’t like the same routine.

Oh sure, I love watching the news, reading the morning papers, digesting whatever new pandemic statistics roll in, marveling at the Trump Show, waiting for the election commercials to start gathering steam. Who wouldn’t? But if you ask me, like my old man does every day, what’s new? I’d be less than honest if I didn’t say Nothing. Grocery shopping once a week. There you go, there’s something different. Or fix the broken washing machine, a happy break in the monotony. Mow the lawn, same as last week, but this is this week, different, see?

Last night I hauled down the road at nearly midnight. Took two binoculars and a camera plus a small telescope hoping to find the comet that’s visiting our little solar system. Sure, it’s probably sprinkling viruses into our atmosphere, but hey, any visitor is welcome by me. I stood for half an hour in the middle of the highway without a single car driving by, looking toward the Big Dipper, and lo and behold, there it was, a small slash of light in the distance, my celestial intruder. I was gobsmacked. I was tickled pink. I was transported out of my ennui for at least a short time. A comet! In all my life I’ve only seen a couple. Admittedly this one was a little shy of a Double Rainbow event but I’ll jump up and down for any comet anytime anywhere. When my old man asks me today what’s new? I’ll say Comet. Tomorrow, of course, I’ll say the same thing if I manage to see it again tonight. Tomorrow is Wednesday probably, the day after I saw the comet. The day the conspiracy theorists start to spread the rumor that the comet brought Covid.