The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The other day I was clearing brush down by the road when I heard horns honking and engines revving, a cacophony audible from half a mile away. I put down my sickle and waited to see what parade was going to pass by me on its way to the head of the island. Half a minute later a convoy of trucks proceeded past me at half the speed limit, TRUMP 2020 signs propped up in the pickup beds, American flags half tattered from the wind shear snapping in the wind, horns blaring, lights on emergency blinkers. At the head of the line was Big Walter dressed in military camo, MAGA hat worn proudly, arm out the rolled down window, an assault rifle in the gunrack behind him. When he saw me standing by the side of the road, he gave me a big thumbs up and yelled, ‘Resistance is futile, Skeeter!!’

Rather than yell something obscene back over the road roar, I just stood at attention and gave him a salute. Okay, one finger only. Big Walter thinks he’s the Commandant of the South End Militia these days, the patriot who’ll guard the county’s ballot drop box against possible tampering, the guerilla warrior who’ll take on the Antifa when they turn up after Trump’s victory to protest what they’ll claim is a bogus election, the gunslinging take-no-prisoners vigilante who’ll guarantee liberty for the white males of the country who he claims are under siege and discriminated against.

Behind his lead vehicle came a ragtag assortment of Walter’s militia. Fat Phil and Little Jimmy rode together in a Ford 250 jacked higher than the gigantic tires looking like an escapee from a monster truck show. Behind them came a couple of half tons, one dump truck, a WW Two jeep, two flatbeds, three or four vintage cars and trucks and oddly, taking up the rear, Two Toke with his battered Volkswagen van circa 1966, peace signs plastered all over it and a Grateful Dead insignia hand painted on the front . Behind him were the half dozen poor folks who were stuck in the traffic jam, probably embarrassed to be part of the parade. Or maybe not.

Two Toke grinned happily, shot me the peace sign and I just shook my head as he rolled past in that micro bus like an acid flashback to the Viet Nam protests of our political youth. Here we are again, I thought, back where we started, nothing much changed. I picked up my sickle and went back to slashing sticker bushes and blackberries. By spring they’d be grown back and I’d be at it again.

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One week to go until the referendum on our current Leader. Post-covid, he’s on the campaign trail asking his troops to come out and guard the polling stations, cautioning that the mail-in ballots will be fraudulent, declaring that no votes should be counted after midnight on the day of the election despite many states having laws that declare ballots will be counted later if they meet the postmark. The winds of change are in the air, fragrant as a smoldering leaf mulch fire.

I talked to my neighbor whose mother died last night in Wausau, Wisconsin. The covid spike there in that fair city is 50% of those tested are covid positive. The outbreak started, oddly enough, when the President came there and his troops, all drunk on the Kool-aid belief of the virus as a left wing media hoax, stood shoulder to shoulder in Trumpstep solidarity. The GOP legislators who are running close elections are turning up these days with masks on, stepping a political distance away from the SuperSpreader himself, a sure sign that his coat tails aren’t going to help but instead pull them down too.

Polls are predicting a possible massacre. To which the Republicans counter that the polls were wrong last time. They weren’t wrong the last mid-term and they won’t be wrong this next time either. Key states lined up for Mr. T by 77,000 votes and the electoral college fell his way. You want to bet they’ll fall that way this time, call my bookie, I’m happy to give you odds. 538, the Nate Silver polling algorithm, gives the odds at 88% that Biden will beat this guy like a recalcitrant mule. 538 puts the bet on the Senate at 74% the Democrats will take over.

I’m ordinarily not one who thinks the government should be completely in the hands of one party. But after the last four years of incompetence, lies, racism, xenophobia, narcissism, corruption and impeachable behavior glossed over by his sycophantic minions, well, I’m ready for some adults to run the show for awhile and hopefully not get too power crazed.

The writing’s on the White House wall. The country knows this Covid response was a stupid senseless mess and they will vote accordingly. Trump himself sees what’s coming. Check and mate. Time, he figures, to tip over the checkerboard. If he’s ahead at midnight Nov. 3rd, well sir, that’s a victory. The rest he’ll fight out in the Supreme Court. And you wondered why the Barrett woman was rammed through in record time ….

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If you’re like me, and God help you if you are, you’re having trouble keeping track of what day of the week it is. Even worse, what month. Time sometimes stands still, sometimes races ahead, and worse, occasionally slips backwards. This is the sixth or seventh month of the Covid panic, outbreaks on the rise once again here and worldwide. You probably track the statistics the way you track the election polls, feverishly and incessantly. You pray to your gods that this epidemic will wane, that the election will be over, that a vaccine will be discovered that will give immunity to both.

I make one trip a week to the grocery store to stock up on food and reality suppressors. Every couple weeks I fill up the truck’s gas tank. In a real emergency I’ll have to haul into a hardware store to buy a replacement toilet for the one that broke recently, no doubt overworked by stressful bowel syndrome brought on by too much internet news. Other than that we’re sequestered here on the partisan South End, caged animals walking the trails of our self-imposed prison, wondering when Normality will return. Lately we think never.

Rumors trickle into our little bubble. A naked dead man washed up on shore a few miles north of us. Antifa? A Covid victim? Another suicide by someone who opted out of quarantine? Wildfires are burning up across the freeway. Or was it in Colorado? Fires seem to be engulfing half the west. Some say global warming, some say leftist guerillas. All information coming in is suspect now. Iranian disinformation and Chinese hackers, one of our neighbors claimed. Personally, I think he’s a Russian plant. His lights stay on late into the night. What’s he up to that late at night? Course, maybe he thinks the same thing of me. But we know, don’t we?, that I can’t even speak Russian much less work for the KGB since I am workaphobic.

The election is supposed to happen in a week. Only the gullible think this will occur. Sure, votes will be cast, media will report delays, ballots will be rejected, speculation of tampering will be rampant. The election will pass, maybe no winner declared, martial law declared, plague masks declared illegal to wear, schools reopened or closed or reopened again. A new election will be called, the last election voided, the President will speak on Fox News to say we’ve turned the corner, to declare victory over Covid, to promise a vaccine before the next election if there ever is one.

We have, he will say, nothing to fear but fear itself. He will declare that he is the first to say this. He insists that he’s the first to say this, that he said it long ago but the fake news won’t cover brilliant quotes of his. He will tell you what you have to be afraid of. Plenty, he’ll say. Suburban takeovers, racist riots, plague riddled immigrants, our own FBI, the Chinese, the liberals, even his own Republicans. Trust him, he’ll say, he’s got this. He’s got the best team. He’s got a Plan and when we’re ready, he’ll show it to us. We’re not ready yet. Maybe in a few more months.

But … what month is it now?

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Back in the days when we wrenched on our cars — NOT for the love of vintage automobiles, but because we were too poor to have someone else repair them — we had just come back from the Rez junkyard where we’d pulled an automatic tranny out of another ’64 Impala half sunk in the swamps. Muddy nasty work, but you do what has to be done…. By late afternoon we had that transmission cleaned off and bolted onto our own Chevy up by the barn, and now the moment of truth had arrived so we fired up the Impala, ignored the bucket of parts with the ‘extra’ bolts and nuts and do-hickeys, dropped it off its jacks and headed up the road.

For the first mile we drove slow, feeling for sloppy shifts, listening for odd noises. Two miles up we hit 50 mph and now terrible noises rose through the floorboards so we pulled over and crawled underneath. Sure enough, a few bolts were missing where the tranny connected to the bellhousing, no doubt those ‘extra’ parts back in the bucket by the barn. We cursed, we spit, we finally laughed at our stupidity, stuck our thumbs out and waited for a ride.

Joe Frittitelli swerved to the shoulder in his big Exxon Valdez of a cruiser, said hop in, boyz, and we squeezed between Joe and his girlfriend, all four of us in the front seat the spaciousness of a Montana wheatfield. A mile later Joe had to urinate ‘like a racehorse’ and since the driver’s door was no longer functional, all of us slid out the passenger side and waited while Seabiscuit relieved himself, then we all rolled back in across seas of amber grain. He dropped us on the roadside by our place, then sped off in a purple haze of half burnt oil.

We retrieved the lost bolts, hitched back to the crippled Impala, installed them and an hour later we were back at the shack, Jack, celebrating with some cold ones. A month later I’m working my job as weekend graveyard orderly down at the Everett Pain Motel and run into Joe at 3 AM wandering the desolate hallways. “What’s up, Joe?” I asked.

Joe, it seems, had been cleaning his gun late that night, pulled the trigger and lo and behold, the unanticipated bullet in the chamber was now embedded in his girlfriend’s brain. I had just taken her to the Cat Scan but hadn’t recognized her. She was comatose but alive. It was, needless to say, a long night. The police were convinced he’d shot her intentionally. I was convinced he hadn’t. If he had, he deserved an Academy Award.

She stayed up in ICU on life support for two months. Alive, I guess, but not really. Last we heard they moved her to a facility that cared for the comatose. Joe was never charged. He got cancer and moved away, where, we heard, he died. And …. not to sound too cold hearted or unsympathetic to the victims here, our Impala died too. The tranny was no good and we didn’t want to waste time or money on another bad one. I don’t think we wanted to meet any more neighbors either. Maybe it wasn’t so much we were dirt poor back then — as much as life seemed just way too cheap.

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Here’s a fun statistic you might like to share on your twitter account, Facebook page or just save for around the Thanksgiving dinner table with the family. Over half of Trump supporters believe the Qanon claim that the Democrats are running a pedophilia ring. You read every day where some pervert is arrested and his computer confiscated when it’s discovered he’s downloading child porn. What you didn’t know is that kiddie porn probably came from the Democratic Party, videos no doubt made with all the children they’ve kidnapped and locked into pizza parlor basements around the country. Insidious? Holy Uncle Joe, Batman, I’ll say insidious.!! And you were worried about the Biden Mafioso Crime Family….

Mr. T himself says he knows nothing, NOTHING, about Qanon, nothing, NOTHING, about pedophile rings run by Sleepy Joe. Sure, he retweets this stuff but only for amusement of the masses, they can decide on their veracity themselves. The fact that it comes directly from the President of the United States surely wouldn’t influence their ability to differentiate fact from insane fantasy. Not one little bit.

This is what 4 years of an emperor with no clothes can bring, an electorate spoonfed bullshit that thinks the Democratic Party can get away with corralling kids and forcing them to do god only knows what unthinkable acts. Welcome to Trump’s America. A dark hole of a place where perversion lurks behind every schoolyard and nursery. A place where a cabal of political operatives steal the nation’s children and enslave them for their evil purposes. A milk industry that hides the missing children from the public, no doubt co-criminals with the Democrats. This is what America has become.

Course, to be fair, we might ask the question why, if Trump and his followers know about this, why on earth do they allow it to go on?? Where is that evil fighter Bill Barr when we really need him? Where are the Republican Senators who allow this to continue unabated in their own states? Where are the people of Good?

I don’t know the answer to any of this. I surely do not. But I know this: I’m really glad I’m not a kid.

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