The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Suppose you woke up one fine morning and discovered the place where you live was actually an insane asylum. You could tell yourself all these fellow inmates were the crazy ones, all those nutjobs raving half the night, even the caretakers with their whacky conspiracy theories, they were the mental defectives, they were the stark raving mad. Not you. No, not you.

The world is a slippery place, a quicksilver concept of shifting realities, one day this the next day that. Some of us put our faith in religion, some in science, some just go with some kind of viral flow that seeps across the internet like a brain eating plague. People believe what they want to believe these days. Virtual reality is perfect for the folks who feel beleaguered by the old reality. Dreary jobs, dead end careers, bad marriages, deferred dreams, kids who didn’t turn out well, who knows? The world wasn’t what they’d hoped for, wasn’t what their leaders told them it would be, wasn’t fun, wasn’t easy, wasn’t much of anything the ads promised. All lies, all broken promises, all just bullshit.

The government, the corporations, the politicians, even the movie actors, phony phony phony. Who ya gonna call? Who ya gonna trust? Who ya gonna believe anymore? Somebody’s to blame, right? Somebody must be winning while you’re losing, right? Somebody’s got the power, the money, the secrets. The game is rigged, you know that at least. Maybe the Masons, maybe those Rosicrucions, maybe the Jews, maybe Hollywood, maybe the welfare queens, maybe the immigrants, maybe the Democrats, maybe the high tech CEO’s, maybe, just maybe, all of them. There’s a conspiracy going on. To keep you down, to keep you pacified, to keep you from finding out what is really what. Q knows. Q anon has the news. The President, that king of conspiracy theorists, tells you they’re good Americans. But he doesn’t, wink wink, nod nod, know very much about them.

Suppose one fine morning you wake up and discover the insane have taken over the asylum. Find out YOU were the enemy. And all along you thought you were the sane one. Maybe, you think, there actually was a conspiracy. The loonies were planning how to do this all along. One state senator at a time. One Representative. A Governor here, a Supreme Court judge there. The President himself. One fine morning you wake up and everything has changed. Everything. And you might find yourself asking who really is the insane one.

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I’ve been cooling my heels in the Tire Shop in town getting a flat tire fixed. Sitting here in the communal waiting room I got pulled into the crackerbarrel talk with a few fellow customers when the palaver turned to government excess, corporate greed, pharmaceutical warnings, health care costs, pretty much the gamut of modern grievances in this dystopian world we now live in.

Did YOU know, for instance, that the government was dropping chemicals into the atmosphere to halt global warming? No? Or that John Wayne’s lung cancer was caused by nuclear testing outside Las Vegas where he rode his horse? You could see the mushroom clouds from your hotel room on the Strip.

Did you know that arthritis was the result of wheat harvested after being sprayed with Roundup, that gluten intolerance was actually chemical poisoning? No, you hadn’t heard that? Did you realize the EPA Superfund cleanup of the Duwamish River in Seattle got hauled a few miles north and dumped off Magnolia? You didn’t?

I bet you also didn’t know the oyster farms up north were so polluted they couldn’t grow baby oysters. No? Actually, it’s partly true, but not because of pollution, it’s because of acidification of the ocean. Bet you the ‘chemtrail’ is causing it. Along with celiac disease, irritable bowel syndrome, autism and presidential neurosis.

My tire repair didn’t take long, but enough time to cover some fairly major conspiracies, from government experiments on us rodents to ‘Deep State’ cabals. My new friends didn’t trust anybody or anything. Although … they did like their health care which cost way too much, but it was better than what Trump and his pals were going to do. If I had said I liked rainbows, they’d have told me they were oil sheens reflecting off the atmospheric poisons, a sure sign I would have rheumatoid arthritis in a month. The world was a mess and its leaders were evil. We were doomed, that was pretty much the gist of things. One guy said he was spending his grocery money to get the struts on his Honda fixed, had to do all four, cost a fortune. Damn car companies anyway! Damn tire place too!

My tire guy saved me finally, said he’d put my spare back up under the truck bed if I showed him where I’d hidden the gizmo that hoisted it up. I said I’d do it when I got home but he said he might as well do it, save me crawling on my back later. When the spare was in place, I asked what I owed. “On the house,” he said. “No charge, sir.” You know and I knew too after listening to my new pals in the waiting room, some kind of tire conspiracy was at work. I’m still trying to figure out what their game is.

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