The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Two Toke Tom asked me the other day why in holy hell do I write these stories. “Live in the moment, Skeeter,” he advised. “Let the past be the past.” Two Toke is a disciple of Be Here Now, living in the Eternal Moment. I could make the argument — and I do — that I’m just allowing the Past to live alongside the Present, but T.T. isn’t buying. To him, the past isn’t prologue, it’s just prolonged, at least by guyz like me.

He’s got a point, but I long ago stopped looking for Enlightenment. The world is a mystery to me and so be it. I guess I have a fondness, though, for what came before. I keep my old shack, I preserve my old stories. I figure nobody much cares, but history means something to me. The newcomers to the South End see the mizzus and me now as Old Timers, anachronistic pioneers on an island where the pioneers vanished long ago. Who cares who lived in the old Nesje house? Who cares if the little building south of us was the Bucklin Store? Who gives a damn if Bernie Road was named after Bernie Dallman and Dallman Road was too. The man is dead and gone and so what if his kinfolks are still here? It’s not like he was a famous war hero. Just a name on some roadsigns to the newcomers.

But there are ghosts among us. There are, I tell Two Toke after the 3rd or 4th, ripples in the continuum. Toss a stone in the pond and it eventually comes back. Tom smiles his Cheshire Cat smile and chuckles from across his kitchen table. We go back a long ways, Tom and me. We go back to when we both first came to the South End, two drifters looking for a future. I guess Tom found the present … and me, I found that too. Time is the great Trickster is what I think, but Tom and I both found what we were looking for, we just took different paths to getting there.

Two Toke says, late in another evening, “I do read your stories, man.”

I give him MY Cheshire grin. “I know you do, Tom. I write em for you. So you won’t forget.”

Tom’s eyes twinkle, they’ve grown so moist, and the light from them is like stars light years away, no telling how long ago, just a sparkle that arrives right now. “You’re a crackup,” he says in a voice I’ve heard before, a voice not so very far away.

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The Vice President came out yesterday for a national update from his Covid Crisis Center, the one his president used to give every day until the blowback got too wild for his hairspray to handle so he just declared the war on coronavirus a victory, told us to go back to work, go to church, go celebrate in a bar, fuggetabout wearing a plague mask. We did. Well, Republican states did. Course they’re now in full backtrack, their contagion statistics approaching total panic, 9000 yesterday in Florida, 16,000 the past three days in Texas, 40,000 sea to shining sea, hospital units approaching overload. Trump sat this update out, let his #2 come out to give faint praise.

I’m all for sunny optimism. Give a pep talk to the troops, offer hope, offer prayers, offer stimulus money, all fine and candy. But sunny optimism when you’re standing in a rainstorm that’s about to become a flood? Ignorance is bliss to some, but when I see all these folks down at the grocery store declaring their freedom, their god-given independence, by refusing to wear a mask because their fearless leader won’t wear one, it makes me wonder what brand kool-aid or light beer I need to avoid. Like the plague. Pence commended his boss multiple times. Things would have been so much worse without his valiant leadership. The sadness of watching a moron praise an even bigger moron is beyond words.

The kids are testing positive for the virus and the kids don’t die as easily as us old coots. That, said the perpetually smiling Mr. Pence, was real progress. Forget about these youngsters spreading it far and wide. Forget that the deaths in the Land of the Slave, Home of the Screed are the highest in the world. By far. Forget that the simplest of preventions, wearing a mask and avoiding close contact, would make all the difference in the world but these yahoos ignore scientific evidence and hope that shutting their eyes and saying I Wish It Were would restore a free-falling economy back to pre-pandemic levels. Stupid is as stupid does.

They tell me an election is at hand. A referendum on leadership. Now that our President has defeated the virus, he has turned to themes of Law and Order, Illegal Immigration, Voter Fraud, all those divisive tactics that landed him in the White House in the first place. Folks were so tired of government, or what they were told was government incompetence or government conspiracy, they rolled the dice on a huckster who said he would drain the swamp, little knowing he would just fill his swimming pool. It’s raining in America and this guy has made sure the government is hampered and constrained. No umbrellas for you! He wants ratings. He wants you to love him. He wants all those without doing one damn thing for you. Asked what his agenda would be for a second term, he doesn’t have a single item on a non-existent list.

What he said was ‘experience’ is an important word, a very important word. Almost as important as ‘talent’. Both very important, maybe impossible to tell which is more important. He sure couldn’t. And he sure couldn’t tell you why he wanted a second term. Here’s a word, a very important word he does understand, maybe more understanding than you can believe. FIRED. This apprenticeship was a bust. Go home, loser.

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