The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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If you listen close these days, you can hear the Four Horses of the Apocalypse thundering down the highway here on the South End. Some of my more paranoid pals are watching with growing concern the trajectory of Hurricane Irma down in the Carribean as it churns toward Florida. Two more storms are forming right there too and of course all are on the heels of Hurricane Harvey. Up and down the western coast the mountains and foothills are burning like the Maw of Hell.

“Probably going to have the Big One,” Little Jimmy is pronouncing over his plate of runny eggs easy over down at the Diner. He’s an unlikely prophet of doom, but for the moment he has the boyz’ attention. He sops up the orange goop with a flourish of rye toast, takes a small bite, then drops it back down in the coagulated mess. “Fires and hurricanes, earthquakes might be next.” Jim’s not a religious nut, but he’s been going through a divorce and who knows, maybe he’s got his own fault lines ready to shift tectonically.

Two Toke splurts a little coffee and chokes on what goes down his windpipe. When he finally gets cleared out, he says, “C’mon, Jim, you aiming to be head pastor?” Jim declares, “I’m just reading the Signs, Tom. Bad moons rising, see what I’m getting at?”

“I suppose the eclipse has something to do with all this?” Fat Freddy mutters from an adjoining table. Outside the air is hazy with the dense smoke of the Cascade fires that has swept into the Puget Sound, turning the sun a sunset red even at mid-day. It is eerie, we all would have to admit.

“I don’t know, Fred, I’m just saying …. Something’s going on. All these disasters one after the other, is it just coincidence?”

Tom motions to Brenda for a refill of what he’s lost to flabbergast. “Let’s not get carried away, Jim, we get fires every year and last time I looked hurricanes too. Way of the World.”

“End of the world maybe,” Jimmy said miserably. Brenda held the coffee pot hesitantly over his cup. “Got time for a refill?” she asks.

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Rainin rainin rainin, original song written and sung by Laura Goldberg

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Jihad Jimmy, last time any of us South End yahoos talked to him, was holding court at the Thursday AA meeting a month ago. Jimmy had kicked his drinking problem but now he had a religion problem, maybe not to him, but for the rest of the assembled abstainers, for sure. Jimmy had grabbed the first lifesaver that floated by when he was hopelessly adrift in a gin-filled sea and I suppose it could’ve been music or woodworking or yoga …. But no, Jimmy found four nicely dressed folks at his door one inebriated afternoon who asked if he’d care to discuss Scripture.

Good timing! Brenda, his long suffering wife and breadwinner the past two years, had left him the day before and in his drunken despair, Jimmy had sense enough to reach out for proferred help. Always nice to find a Sign or an Omen when you’re free-falling over the cliff of your imagination and believe me, Jimmy was expecting the Bottom.

Addiction, whether it’s alcohol or Heaven, makes True Believers of us. I’m not saying they’re equal, especially when you see Jimmy clean himself up, dust himself off and return to the world of the living. Course now J.J. is talking Rapture. Revelations. End Times. Sign of the Beast. He finds Signs everywhere now. He’s a prophet, although he never claims it. He just Sees what’s obvious, just wants to share it with us Lost Souls.

Just for once, I’d like a religion that loves THIS world. That doesn’t think the Next World is gonna be better. Maybe Jimmy’s going door-to-door with 3 other Jimmy’s, knocking on broken hearts, broken dreams, broken hopes. Maybe they’re saving lives, hell if I know….

Brenda’s doing some clerical work for Windy Rear Realty. It’s okay, she says. Twenty hours a week, not too stressful. She told me he’d stopped by her house a week ago. Wanted her to leave with him and start over. He’d changed, he said. He was sorry. He asked forgiveness before it was too late. “Too late?” she asked. “Too late for what?” “The Rapture,” he told her. “You’ll be left behind.”

Left behind?? “Jimmy,” she says to him, “that sounds exactly like heaven to me.”

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