The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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With garden planting already under way, I’ve been searching for seeds. Usually I roll into the nearest hardware or grocery or garden supply store and load up on whatever seeds I need, plenty to choose from, some organic, some not. This year I found the display racks pretty much empty. So I did what any modern gardener worth his manure would do, I went online. I found some of what I was searching for, not all by any means, and the price was at least double what it would be ordinarily. After a few days of letting my fingers do the walking, I let my credit card to the talking.

I recalled back in those early plague days long ago when not just toilet paper was being hoarded, but yeast and flour too. I’m a bread maker so it was more than marginally disconcerting to discover some of the basic ingredients were unavailable, although I already had a large supply of wheat berries, seeds, grains, molasses and flour stored up. The other day a friend who sells us beefalo called to let me know he’s swamped with calls from desperate people wanting him to sell them meat. Another buddy mentioned that freezers were selling out all over. You could order one, but hell might freeze over before your meat got frozen in a new cooler.

The latest tactic to avoid food shortages in these End Times seems to be the purchasing of baby chicks. Wait a few weeks and you got eggs by the dozens and even fricassee once you’re sick of omelettes. You can use the chicken droppings on the garden, double your lettuce production. E-I-E-I Oh! We’re all going back to the land, maybe buy a couple calves, build a barn behind the garage.

What are we to think? Are folks expecting the plague zombies to surge into their grocery stores and clean out the shelves to the last loaf of white dead bread? Are they planting gardens, growing food, storing meat and pizzas, baking bread and fermenting homebrew? If the internet goes offline suddenly, you can bet your crop of zucchinis that panic will ensue within minutes, gun safes unlocked, doors bolted, a siege mentality spreading across the Home of the Brave. Only those with guns and cans of pork and beans will survive. Looters will decimate the sad little backyard gardens and no freezer without a kryptonite lock will keep the hordes from emptying their booty.

I give it a month before the rabbits munch down the lettuce and the carrots and the neighbor dogs feast on the chickens out in the crummy pen thrown up by the sandbox. Maybe two before the bread making experiments and the brick-like loaves stop seeming worth the trouble. Three before the bathtub gin starts poisoning entire neighborhoods. Believe me, we’ll clamor for an end to the quarantine. Death by virus might seem a welcome relief.

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The trouble with times like these where the Idiot King twitters whatever happens to spark across his busted synapses, is that there’s no one left to revel in the crazed lunacy that lies at the smoldering heart of a nation gone batshit crazy, no one who covers politics with a guano shovel rather than an Apple laptop, no one who sees the humor in the dystopian ruins of post-rational America where Medals of Freedom are passed out like consolation prizes to crooks and crankpots. Somewhere, I have no doubt, a few refugees of the drug wars must be bunkered into their underground warrens, chronicling this Mad Hatter era with a jaundiced eye and a needle still dangling in a pock-marked arm with soft chuckles at the damage done.

Slug another beer, slam a shot of Jack, skip wiping the chin and head right for the coke, the waning of Pax Americana has got to be good for another punch line or two. A reality show huckster becomes President! What satirist worth his advance would scrib a plot so preposterous? And yet. And yet. Heeeeeere’s … Donny!! He says what’s on his mind and the masses love a politician who tells it like it is. Or isn’t. Or who cares, the man is a showman, a clown, an angry bully, a narcissistic idiot whose blowhole spews gaseous venom. He’s entertainment from dawn to dusk. He’s the President of the United States, proof the syphilitic disease that’s burrowed into the national consciousness has festered and grown. Orange hair covers the tumor, the white eyes from the suntan goggles practically glow, the piggy lips pout and spit … step right up, ladies and gentleman, step right up, the Angry Rich Man, 25 cents, see him rage on the stage, watch him burn his enemies, witness the Sight of the Century!! 25 cents. Step right up! The Pissed Off President!! You voted for him, now see him snarl in person!!

A bull in the China shop, all right. He’s got a hunch the coronavirus numbers from the experts are too high, way too high. Just a hoax, folks. Stay calm, he’s got this covered, vaccines will be at your pharmacy tomorrow. Meanwhile, you got symptoms, go to work, nothing more than a cold, really, nothing to worry about. You’ll feel fine before you know it, ignore the chill and fever, the hacked up chunks of lung. He says the experts can’t believe how knowledgeable he is about medicine, about disease, about all things scientific, probably good genetics. After all, he has a relative at MIT. Smart guy, seriously smart, no wonder he’s a genius president. Genetics — beats studying. Let the morons study, he’s got hunches.

If a neighbor said this to you, you’d laugh in his face, tell him to sober up. When the Idiot King says he’s wearing really fine clothes, his attendants describe the color and fabric. We have a pandemic under way, we have economic problems, we have global warming as an existential threat, we have international crises.

But … he has a hunch.

I have a hunch that the country is sliding toward a slow insanity, where we believe only what we want to believe and the rest is phony. We follow tweets, we spend half the day on Facebook, we text rather than talk on a phone, we live in our own virtual bubble, quarantined from reality. Call the doctors, I think we’re sick…. Go to the office anyway, we’ll be fine. I’m sure of it. We’re in good hands. Everything’s okay.

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If you’re wasting time reading this instead of fumigating your house and property for coronavirus, you must be one of the countless many who are reassured that the epidemic coming to a town or neighbor near you is in good hands with the new Pandemic Czar, the veep, the man himself, Mike Pence. Sure, he fought the remedies for needle exchanges to reduce HIV back when he was the Guv of Indiana, but that was more about morality and Biblical teachings than it was hardcore science. Mike, in hindsight, probably wishes he’d read the tea leaves of public opinion a bit earlier, but it was Indiana so c’mon, let’s cut him some slack. Unless you’re old enough to remember when he claimed cigarettes didn’t make smokers sick. Doc Pence, faith based prognoses.

I did notice, however, the Prez didn’t call him the Pandemic Czar, that was me. In fact, he’s not really sure this coronavirus, even if he could remember the name correctly, was the real McCoy. Might get worse, might not, who knows? But … just in case, he brought in the Big Dog, Mike. If things go wrong, if things do get worse, if this cold or whatever it is starts killing people, especially people in this country, well, you can’t blame Donald. No, he put his second in command in charge. The buck will stop there.

Sure the Center for Disease Control stated unequivocably the virus was coming, sooner, later, who knows, but it was definitely coming. The President, thinking like his Medal of Freedom recipient, Rush Limbaugh, that this was just another hoax by the media and the leftists, claimed this was the same as that Russian interference stuff. Pandemic? They don’t think so. Fake news? There you go….

Mike stated today that the risk was really pretty low for this colonvirus or whatever the scientists are calling it. No need for panic, not much to be afraid of. He’s meeting with Congress and they’ll work out the details for a budget. If that doesn’t make you afraid, nothing will until bodies are being tossed in corpse carts for incineration down at the crematoriums for the diseased.

But me, why worry? Pence and his task force have the situation well in hand. You know, if they’re right about Rush and his Chicken Little theory…. Otherwise, you may need more than a hepa mask and two months worth of Costco supplies to see you through.

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