The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Every morning I get up out of a warm quilted bed ready to face the day ahead … only to find this continuing source of irritation and dread. I suppose I should linger under the covers a lot longer, maybe all day. Or cancel our subscriptions to the newspapers and turn off the news on radio and TV. After all, I’m not going to be consulted on the replacement of Obamacare. Even if I did know it was going to be very complicated.

Politics, like the stock market, is really driven by the mob mentality, not so much data and facts, alternate or otherwise. It’s psychological. Or pathological. Once the money boyz lose faith in the Dow Jones, the bulls lose hope and the bears start stalking. Same with politics. Create a sense of foreboding and fear, then look for remedies. We may have nothing to fear but fear itself, but believe me, fear is plenty. Today, on the heels of the president’s speech to the Congress and the nation, the bulls are running.

Spring supposedly is right around the corner. Snowdrops are blooming by the mailbox and back in the woods. Daffodils are up. The wild currants are showing blossom. So okay, it snowed this morning. But tomorrow is March, coming in, I guess, like a lion. I’ve been spending most of my time, when I’m not torturing myself with the news, cutting firewood in the back 40. The wood is for the year after next, meaning, I have hope that in another year, I’ll still be alive and kicking, that the world will still rotate okay, the sky will not be falling and the nation will survive and us too.

I suppose Global Warming will keep encroaching, the polar bears will starve, the oceans will rise and the health care system will go backward. The rich will get richer and the immigrants will be slowly rounded up and deported. Who knew that immigration reform would be so complicated? Who knew global warming would be too? Who knew life beyond the golf courses and the resorts was so messy?

Today I got band practice. Gonna take my 5 string banjo and join up with the rest of my musical cronies and pound out some lively versions of Celtic and old time and even some rock and roll to get ready for our St. Pat’s day gig at the gnarliest bar in Stanwoodopolis. Something about a banjo. Pete Seeger’s banjo had this written on the drumhead: ‘This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It to Surrender’ Kind of optimistic, you ask me, but I will say, when I play mine, it’s hard not to feel good about the world. Who knew music would have that kind of power?

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