The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

My old man just turned 97. He still lives alone in his own house, still cooks for himself, watches way too much television, still drives his car to the grocery store, doesn’t go out much, grows a garden in the backyard. He strictly keeps his routines, likes a bowl of ice cream every night and cookies after every meal and has pretty much given up on politics. If you were to ask him about the Pandemic or Trump or the coming elections, his answer, now a mantra, is invariably the same: Crazy World.

It would be easy to suggest that his lack of interest in the world of current events is primarily the result of short term memory loss or merely boredom with the nonsense of our politics these days. But … I prefer to think maybe he has hit on the Correct Attitude, one that might help him make it to 100 without the stresses we politically involved –or political junkies, more accurately — have weighing on our daily grind. Possibly, I think hopefully, there comes a point in the affairs of men where the ugliness and the vicissitudes of the world recede into the background, just another commercial before the next episode of whatever TV mini-series he’s watching any particular night on his too complicated to operate big screen.

Crazy world. Yah. Even with this Pandemic raging, the petty politics rear their heads. Folks are dying in unheard of numbers, at least in my short 70 years, and more are going to follow. Fear has been unleashed on the land and those that fan those flames are blowing hard with all their might. My father fought on a PT boat in the Pacific during World War Two, an 18 year old kid with a mounted 50 caliber machine gun on the bow, saw plenty of what war buffs like to call ‘action’, and came home to a fairly long run of peacetime. I suspect the vagaries of our partisan political shenanigans seem a bit less earth shattering to him than to me and my pals. Korea,Viet Nam, Iraq One and Two, Afghanistan, they all pale compared to his war. The Pandemic? He remembers polio. Folks want to throw open the restaurants and the movie theaters, he could care less. Folks want to re-elect Trump? Crazy world, he’ll say. Who among us would disagree?

There are days when I can hardly wait to get old.

I’ve been busy lately, something I recommend to any of you who spend half the day following news feeds about Trump or Trump and the Coronavirus or more Trump until you think the world has gone mad or has become toxic or, actually, both. If you find your walls closing in and you begin making a placard with something like OPEN THE STORES or LIBERATE MY STATE, you can be sure you’ve been infected with Trumpovid-20. Symptoms are a raging brain fever, sweating from the tongue, chills at night and tasteless dinners. There is no cure at this point. No real tests. No antibodies either, which means if you avoid the news for a day or two, chances are the next Trump Tweet will bring on further symptoms.

I cannot stress this enough. You must get yourself busy. Otherwise the temptation to scroll through the horror that is the internet these plague days will overcome your willpower. Distract yourself. If it means building a musical instrument you have no skills to construct, that’s okay. It will occupy your mind with total frustration, if nothing else. It certainly did mine. The danger, of course, is the longer the plague rages … or Donald Trump rages … the chances are you will end up, like me, with a house full of musical instruments. I recommend you stop at two or three then take up a different hobby. Learn a language, preferably something like Mandarin, incredibly difficult, hopelessly so if you’re my advanced age. All the better. If you’re my dad’s age, learn a program on the computer. All he can do is get and forward e-mails. The rest of the machine is basically useless other than a couple of google sites my brother set up for him. I recommend Photoshop or a CAD program, but practically any will suffice in frustrating and confusing you to a degree that all other incoming information will be shut out.

Do not, I repeat, do not go back and watch old World Series games, past tennis matches or any sports events that occurred in the past. This is a reminder of what has been lost in the Pandemic. You do not want to be reminded of anything that was the world pre-Trump or pre-plague. If there is a difference…. Focus on the task you have set yourself. Do not learn the Mandarin phrase for Dump Trump. It will not help you no matter how satisfying it might feel at first. You will end up learning only Mandarin obscenities. And no, they won’t help either. They are a Dead End. You need a detour. A new highway. An impossibly hard hobby.

If you are reading this, I hate to tell you, but you aren’t BUSY ENOUGH!! Read a book instead. Or better yet, write one. War and Peace, something similar spanning generations with too many characters to keep track of. Despite the temptation, do not make Donald a character!! It is not cathartic, trust me. Okay, forget the book writing. Mandarin, start with that. By the time you learn to say ‘hello, I want to visit your beautiful country’, the plague might be over, the election might have removed you know who from office and life can return to some kind of normal. Trust me, you need to stay busy until then….

祝好运
Zhù hǎo yùn

Now that most of us underlings in the American plutocracy have learned that we are superfluous beings, non-essentials and persons without portfolio, the time is definitely ripe for a spiritual renaissance. Some may receive the news that their worth is negligible with great surprise and much rending of hair, but not me. I have known that bit of information since leaving the hallowed institutions of higher learning with degrees that were, like myself, worthless. Little wonder I moved to the South End. So it may be appropriate that the New Religion for these pandemic times we live in will come full fruit from these barren nettle regions. Nonessentialism. You can have your empty existentialism, your anachronistic Catholicism, your aggrieved Judaism, your battered Protestantism, your whacky New Ageism, your even whackier Evangelicals, they’re as meaningless in the Plague aftermath as Aztecan blood sacrifices on the pyramid steps after Cortez romped across their lakebed valley in the name of God and Gold.

It’s pretty obvious the keys to the Kingdom are no longer ascertained by a person’s success or wealth. The Protestant Ethic of old is deader than Martin Luther. If you thought your money and power were signs from On High that you would be granted entrance to the Pearly Gates, think again, pal. Even the rich are exempt from those criterion now. No, this is a New Era, not a New Age, forget about Aquarius. We could choose to live in Fear. Fear of joblessness, fear of poverty, fear of coming socialism and the nanny state, fear of the Virus, fear of science, fear of what our President might suggest next from his medical kitbag of panaceas. The economy is wrecked, the virus is still growing, the Age of Reason is finished. Superstition and half cracked conspiracy theories rule the land while Dread spreads like a dripping fog from sea to no longer shining sea.

This is the time for new paradigms, new religions, new politics. But … let’s be honest here, the meek aren’t going to inherit the earth, the monk in the cave isn’t going to emerge from the Dark Ages with illuminated manuscripts, a hundred Hail Mary’s aren’t going to absolve your sins or win any more football games, the games are rigged. It’s dog eat dog now, the emperor has no underwear and no clothes, the peasants won’t get cake to eat and the promise of some bullshit afterlife is a joke.

Nonessentialism, my friend. Pick up a pitchfork and head for the Amazon offices. The boyz in the corporate towers already know what you’re only starting to comprehend. You don’t matter, just a cog in the machinery of 3-D printing currency. Wake up, buddy, and smell the rot, it goes deeper than a couple of apples, it goes to the bottom of the barrel. Nonessentialism, the belief in pretty much nada. You’re on your own and about time to face the obvious. You don’t matter, you never did, and you know what? Maybe that’s not a bad starting point. Nonessentialism. You need to make the world in your own image, not the world all those yahoos who kept you down, who underpaid you, who promised you rewards … later on. Embrace it. Same as we South Enders do and always have. Nonessentialism. Now you know where you stand. Time to do something with it.

Now that the protests against the government closing down beaches and biznesses have started to make the nightly news, we can rest assured the Defenders of Freedom will provide themselves as canaries in the coal mines they would like to keep digging. I was hoping some reporter might ask these anti-government folks if they had cashed their stimulus checks. Or applied for the unemployment compensation that offers 600 bucks extra every week. Or if the geezers in the crowd with the MAGA hats wanted to stop payments on their Social Security benefits.

To be fair, we all want to come out of this state-mandated quarantine. And eventually some poor bastard in the bureaucracy will have to decide what exactly the right time will be to open up barbershops and restaurants, ballparks and concert halls. Roll the dice and wait for the backlash from trolls and the discontented. There won’t be much winning on this bet. But plenty of losers. The Coronavirus-in-Chief won’t be making that call, that’s a bet you can definitely win.

Folks want to go fishing, dammit. And they want to get a haircut. Down in Georgia, they’re going to get their wishes and I wish em luck. Catch a bass for me, whydon’tcha. Personally, I’m real glad they get to be the guinea pigs for what might result with early withdrawal from coronavirus safety measures. If they’re right, we can all go fishing. If they’re wrong, Georgia is a long ways away from the South End. Even if I did live there as a kid. Maybe we should salute them as the heroes, even the Essentials. Like the black prison inmates in Tuskeegee for syphilis experiments. Or U.S army personnel on the front lines of the first atomic bomb detonations. Somebody’s got to go first. Right?

And not to sound too heartless, but hey, these folks who feel tyrannized by their government, who feel imprisoned in their homes, who fly the flags that say Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death, well, step right up. Us cowards salute you! And honestly, I wish you all the luck in the world. I think you’re going to need it and maybe a little more.

I live so far from reality that it’s hard for me to imagine how this Pandemic is going to alter the alignment of the earth on its axis. But I’m not so removed from the daily newsfeeds that I think we will ever return to the way we were. The virus may not beat us, may not kill most of us, may not even be as bad as our worst fears, but it will, like Osama bin Laden and his kamikaze jets crashing into the World Trade Towers, change everything. There will always be a pre-nine eleven. It will be years before we understand what constitutes post-coronavirus.

The President is slowly starting to ‘get it’ in regard to this epidemic. He got the part where the economy is going to tank, that much his inward looking brain could manage. He thinks this thing will be over by Easter, then by summer, certainly by the Republican Convention aka Trump Rally. It doesn’t take a visionary to realize the economy won’t just turn back ON. In this era of globalization the wrecked economies of countries who couldn’t pour a huge % of their GDP’s into saving themselves are going to take a brutal whipping and decades to recover. Vaya con Dios and see you at Easter, if the government’s response is any indication.

They’re on their own. Just like the states here in the Yew Ess Aye. National inventories of medical supplies? Not for the governors who didn’t show enough gratitude for the Presidential favors he’s bestowed. Not for the citizens of their states. Kommisar Kushner declares that the national supplies are national, not meant for individual states. You tell me what national means when most of these states are in lockdown. D.C.? Or maybe for the President and his family? The Republican Senators and Representatives? Maybe to offer to N. Korea and Iran as some sort of bargaining chip?

I’ve never really been a state’s rights kind of guy, but I might be leaning that way these days. If the yahoos in Florida and Kansas want to hold church services, okey dokey. If the congregation in Georgia wants to attend huge funerals, I’ll send flowers. But let’s blockade the South, Mason Dixon on down, toss in Texas. Build a Wall, I say, and put razor wire around Mar-a-Lago. And sure, charge it to the federal government, well worth the cost this time.