The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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The yahoo with the MAGA hat who put a hand on the front grill of Recon Ron’s grocery cart in the organic food aisle probably didn’t know Ron was a Green Beret in Viet Nam from ’66 to ’69, not with that belly sticking out of the Grateful Dead T-shirt and the gray ponytail poking out in back under his Boston Red Sox cap. Ron’s gone a bit native down here on the South End, hangs out with Two Toke Tom most evenings and plays a mean hand of poker with our Wednesday night crowd, mean because he bets without caution and we never know his bluffs from an inside straight. No, the guy who put the brakes on Ron’s half full cart would’ve thought here was some lardass gone-to-seed retiree, not a Marine with a bronze star.

‘Wuzzup, Dog?” the smirking fellow without a plague mask asked. “You one of those people afraid of viruses?”

Ron was wearing a white bandana. Apparently his interrogator interpreted this as a flag of surrender. To the germs. “Minding my own business here, dog. Being careful. Something bothering you?”

“Oh yeah, man, something’s bothering me. All you people wearing your stupid masks, closing down the stores , the bars, everything, yeah, that bothers me. “

Now Ron is not a mellow fellow. I’ve seen him go rogue and it’s not something I want to see ever again. But this was, after all, a grocery store, not a tavern. He asked the guy, “You don’t believe there’s a contagion out here?” to which the guy said, “Hell no! Just a flu, man, just a boogie man. I don’t buy it, not one bit of it.”

Ron said, “100,000 people have already died from it, you thank that’s a cold? Lemme ask YOU something — how many Americans died in Viet Nam? You heard of that war, haven’t you?”

“People die, man, that’s why it’s called war.”

Ron pulled his bandana down, sighed and said, “100,000 in four months, friend. That’s nearly a thousand a day — if you believe in math.”

“Like I said, man, people die, the way it goes, ya know?”

“Oh, I know … man. Believe me, I know. It wouldn’t kill you, though, to put a mask on. Hide that ugly face a little. But if you don’t let go of this cart …” Ron let that threat hang, gave him a steely stare and pulled his mask back up.

“Oh, okay, tough guy. Buy your little fruits, hide out in the cereal aisle, why don’tcha?”

Ron shoved the cart slightly with a quick hard push. The kid let go of the grill. “Live in fear, man.”

“Morons like you, what choice do I have? Beer cooler’s on the other aisle — in case you get lost with your head up your ass.”

Some other time, some other place, this might’ve gone bad. The kid seemed to consider that route, maybe thought about consequences, but in that moment of hesitation Ron turned his cart and walked away. Like I said, we could never tell if he was bluffing.

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I got a friend, Green Thumb Barry, who has an incredible garden and arboretum over on the east side of the island, plenty of sun, lots of compost and chicken manure, everything plants love. He grows exotic stuff. A banana tree stands near his cabin, even has small bananas some years. Sure, he wraps it in the winter. I know we live on the banana belt but even they need protection in the monsoons. You walk around his grounds and you spend half your day asking what is that little flower or that strange shrub or this odd fruit out in the orchard. He plants South American root crops, Australian ferns, white kiwi, hybridized peonies, rare irises and unusual rhododendrons. The place is riotous with flowers and foliage. Yesterday I was tripping through the tulips, photographing what I’d never seen before and he wondered out loud why he went to all this trouble.

“Whaddaya mean?” I asked, bent over shooting some delicate little bloom I asked the name of but forgot immediately.

“Nobody ever sees this,” he said glumly. “What good is it if no one comes here?”

I capped my camera and stood up. Vines hung from overhead on trees he’s planted long ago. Hummingbirds scrabbled in the Chilean fire tree that was living up to its name with a thousand deep orange flowers that drew them to its nectar. Bees buzzed and birds yammered, practically his own temperate jungle, arboretum and nursery all in one. The living roof of his his new greenhouse was even blooming, everything fecund and spreading as far as we could see. Maybe Adam and Eve felt like Barry. All that paradise and no visitors. Kind of a living hell, I guess Barry would think.

“You kidding me?” I asked and he shook his head sadly. “What’s the point? I’m the only person who sees this most of the time. Look at this,” he said and under a tree peony I could just barely see a delicate little striated frond with a tall spike of yellowish flowers starting to open. “Nobody will ever see this. Just me. ”

I said, “I don’t know, Barry, you want to sell tickets, start a garden show, set up as a nursery? You got kind of a paradise going here, enjoy it.” Barry just muttered and shook his head. Maybe Eve felt the same way, took a bite of the snake’s apple and figured it might change her luck. I guess it did. Might have been easier to change your way of thinking, seems like to me. Paradise is hard to find for a reason, apparently.

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Things are heating up in Covid-plagued America. Friday night the Racist-in-Chief spent some time in his underground bunker where Secret Service agents entombed him, ostensibly out of fear for his life when protesters stormed the White House perimeter, but possibly to keep him from making any further statements about … well … anything. Radicals outside were already tossing gasoline, why add more fuel to the flames? Two days later and presumably out of the bunker, the President has yet to urge calm or call for healing. Instead he twitters his little rhyming threat that when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Probably should have stayed in the safe room below without his smartphone. Hopefully the SS agents learned their lesson.

Enough is sometimes enough. The video of the cop killing a handcuffed, prostate black suspect by taking a knee the way Colin Kaepernick did on the football field to protest exactly this sort of injustice was plenty enough to jolt a sleepy populace to wide awake nightmare. Kaepernick paid a price for his prescience and this white cop will pay one too. The rest of us, some on the burning streets, some watching safely from our self-imposed isolation, we will too.

I suspect, though, the message will be fairly muddled. One placard I saw read THE REVOLUTION STARTS NOW! Right, Comrade. I was in Madison, Wisconsin during the Viet Nam riots after the assassination of King and Kennedy, tear gas, smashed storefronts and University buildings, looting, mayhem, call in the National Guard. We thought the revolution was starting back then too. Ho ho. Nixon went on to bomb Cambodia, the country went its merry way and all us protesters ended up with families and middle class jobs. So much for our little rebellion.

Fast forward fifty years, half a century. Racism is endemic, income inequity is pervasive, corporatocracy rules. The divisions in this country are as wide as they were back in the 60’s. The economy may come back after this pandemic lockdown, but I suspect the jobs for a lot of folks won’t. Stockholders will be okay, but not the people who make minimum wage, not the folks whose jobs are outsourced to robotics. There’s a smoldering rage just under the surface of sunny America and we’re watching it live on TV or on the streets.

Maybe it is the beginning of the revolution. Back in the summer of 1970 the Armstrong brothers and two cohorts bombed the Army Math Research Center and killed an intern in the Pharmacy building next door, pretty much putting the knee on the throat of that revolution where it died with a small whimper. I was wrong then about the optimism for change and I’m probably wrong now. But it feels like, once again, it’s hard to breathe.

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Not really having ever suffered from anything approaching toxic masculinity, I guess I’m not the likeliest candidate to weigh in on this newest malady to follow in the footsteps of the Covid-19 disease. But … that’s never really stopped me before . After all, these are the End Times, the new Dark Ages where science and reason have been soundly debunked by the superstitious and the paranoid. We’re all experts now that the old experts have been fired and sent packing to their underground labs or sequestered offices or whatever whistleblower hell awaits them. Good riddance to the purveyors of bogus rationality! We got hunches. We got gut. We got a Man in Charge who has a very big brain so I ask you who needs some Ivy League elitist PhD to confuse us with complicated jargon?

The Give me liberty or give me Covid crowd have had just about enough of faux science. They want a haircut, they want their ballgames, they want a beer down at the corner bar, they want to eat their Whopper inside not out in the car. They don’t need to wash their calloused hands every time they touch something, they don’t need to wear a girly mask, they aren’t going to quit shaking hands and they sure as hell aren’t going to live in fear of being within 6 feet of anybody. Freedom ain’t free, buddy. That’s why they carry an assault rifle with them when they protest. And why some proudly display a Confederate flag. Because they know revolts never really end when they’re dealing with a corrupt and illegal government! Eternal vigilance is a small price to pay for Liberty, pal.

So sure, the lamestream media liars want to put a label on patriotism, call it toxic masculinity, as if it was legitimate to lockdown the citizens. God only knows what scheme they have in destroying the economy and enslaving the People, but if it takes toxic masculinity or whatever they want to call it to fight back, then get ready for some serious testosterone on steroids! Forget about some bullshit vaccine that will only cause their kids autism and weaken their own immune systems, the virus, if there even is a virus, won’t kill the strong and they’re the strong. And here’s some news for the rest of the sheep out there, what doesn’t kill them will only make them stronger. That’s right, a known fact, it’s been proven. And even if it hasn’t, it’s still true.

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You know we’ve reached the end of our rope when folks start talking about this Covid plague requiring courage in the face of little bitty viruses, maybe time to man up and treat this like a war, meaning, folks go off to fight and we all know many won’t come home. The cure is worse than the disease, they cry. So I figure they’re trapped with the mizzus and the furloughed rugrats, all of them slowly going insane. They can’t even get into a courthouse to file divorce papers. Their backs are against the closet wall and by god, they’re ready for a haircut and they mean right now, mister!

Across the Land of the Free folks are rising up, MAGA hats worn proudly over uncoiffed hair, wrapped in American flags and NRA decals, demanding their kids go back to school. They think the kids are basically immune to the plague and only old farts like me die of it. Put em back in those classes, they’re missing out on some quality education! Overcrowded classrooms?, sneezing on each other?, big deal. Open up America! Liberate Michigan! Stop the Tyranny! Let us shop at the mall!!

Hard times in the Home of the Brave, for sure. If you listened to Fox News, you too might swing Libertarian or just Contrarian, convinced that we could weather a spike in the Covid epidemic, well worth the price of a few friends dying on a faulty ventilator. Convinced probably that Dr.Fauci was involved in a scheme to profit from any vaccine that might be miraculously discovered that would save the world if only every man woman and child were inoculated with two bucks going into Tony’s pocket. A third of Americans think a vaccine already exists and is being withheld from us, probably the same folks who believe Big Foot carries the anti-virus.

If the quarantined fatigued are correct, well, we shot holes in our economy for no good reason. Although I think you know they will have a conspiracy theory for that too, the most likely Deep Staters’ desire to bring on a recession to ruin Trump’s chances at another four fabulous years. But trust me on this, there will be plenty more theories based on Russian bots and Breitbart paranoia. The real pandemic isn’t the Covid virus, it’s the stupid gene.

But if they’re wrong, if we exit the quarantine too early, well, you know and I know, that was probably the Secret Plan all along, catastrophic death counts, hospitals overwhelmed, a global depression, the end of capitalism as we know it. You can’t trust the Deep Staters, you can’t trust anybody! Go outside and prove me wrong. Stay indoors and prove me wrong. Go ask Alice, when she’s 6 feet deep.

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