The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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I love this pandemic vaccine roulette, a small window into how the world works when it’s confronted with a crisis that for us old codgers is life and death. A week ago I gave up trying to navigate the distribution rumors of a clinic up the road offering inoculations or the senior center crowd sourcing its limited supply and just decided to get my name on a list of potential survivors and see if new doses would arrive at some uncertain future date. Sure, I was bothered that my neighbors and friends found where to get theirs already while I was completely shut out … and okay, I was even pissed they didn’t bother calling to offer me their inside info, maybe figure if I delayed and died they’d have a less crowded neighborhood. Or maybe, more likely, they got theirs, screw the rest. It’s a dog eat dog world out there in Virustown.

But lately I’m reading about hospitals in the area, once they got their hands on the vaccines, called up their VIP donors, in some cases those who gave more than 10 grand to the hospital foundations, and offered them first dibs on the life-saving shots. Welcome to America, I guess, in case we underlings needed a clearer view from the back of the bus folks would be happy to throw us under if it meant they got into the lifeboats of the Titanic. Pardon my mixed metaphors, but hellfire, it just appears a bit callous for our health care providers to skip the folks who are fighting in the front lines of this pandemic to reward their rich benefactors.

Okay, I know this is how it works. The rich get richer and the rest of us get crappy health care. Move along everybody, nothing to see here. You had your chance to get rich and what did you do with it? Accept your poverty and shut up, peon! The wealthy are always first in line, you know that, and if you didn’t, you been living on the South End a little too long. If nothing else, this vaccine rollout should give you a chance to see how democracy works. If you thought it worked for you, I got some nettle land to sell you. If you aren’t on a ventilator by then….

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More than a few times, writing satirical pieces for this blogsite or the Crab Cracker, I’ve had to apologize for my so-called humor, dark as it is. Once I advocated for alpaca hunting and the owners of a fairly large herd of the cute little beasts threatened monetary reprisal for every one of their long-necked Bambis that were shot and killed by the over-eager hunters of the South End who might find their expensive pets easy prey. After over a decade I’m relieved to report that my attorney, Bubba Frisk the 3rd, hasn’t had to defend my meager estate from lawsuits over alpaca burgers at ungodly prices per pound.

Recently, however, I was forced once again to plead guilty to the charge of reckless endangerment with an unregistered pen to the folks who found my sadly wanting wit a bit much to endure any further. The owner of a South End mercantile (name withheld at the advice of counsel) called to tell me that his sense of humor had reached its entrepreneurial limit. “I’m trying to run a business here,” he told me, “and you’re giving us a black eye.” I wanted to respond with something sympathetic but self-defensive, like “gee, and I thought you were trying to run it into the ground.” Fortunately I held my sharp tongued humor in check.

In the end I said I understood. I said I apologize. I said it wouldn’t happen again … to them. He even suggested another mercantile, a competitor of theirs, that might be far more deserving of my barbs, I guess trying to be helpful. Believe me when I say suggestions for my humor are as welcome as demands for an apology. If folks take umbrage themselves for being the target of my mischief, why on god’s green earth would they think the competitors would be any more appreciative?

I want to offer ALL you readers my deepest and most sincere apology. I certainly didn’t intend lasting harm. Course the mizzus takes it personal … and when I even make sport of myself, I’m starting to get a little annoyed too. I blame it on Covid. I blame it on the partisan politics of our time. Okay, all right, I blame it on myself. Happy now?

Folks are just too easily convinced that when I make fun of someone, it might be them. Course you and I know, it probably isn’t. But that’s the trouble with shotgun humor, it’s imprecise. I was, rest assured, aiming at the neighbor.

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Lately we’ve been playing a shell game called Vaccination, a sleight-of-hand magician’s trick of trying to figure out who, where, when our vaccine might be available. A few days ago after a tip from a friend it seemed as if we might get a shot over at our sister island, Whidbey, at some drug store in downtown Oak Harbor. We made a reservation, then got an email alert that residents here on the South End could go to a closer pharmacy in a county not ours because evidently our vaccines were going to help their county out. A few days later we got another email alert that our first reservation had moved back two weeks, the closer one seemed to drop us, but no matter, the first one moved the reservation we had just had put back two weeks moved forward a week. Okay….

Meanwhile friends were informing us that they had received their vaccinations at a local private health clinic only a few miles north from us, but when we tried to see if we might get an appointment, their website informed us their supply of vaccine had already been exhausted. Please stand by. Yesterday we got a notice from the first place we’d contacted, something to the effect that supplies were limited and running out but rest assured, we would keep our place in line.

If you aren’t confused yet, you will be soon. Unless you were one of those who somehow managed to navigate the labyrinth and find the moldy cheese at the middle of a berserk maze…. Now, I’m not one of those yahoos who blame the government for everything from my broken shoelace to my bad haircut, but I hafta say, this rollout for a vaccine that we have known was coming for months and, dare I mention, seems INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT to our national health, our economy and our futures, is a total mess. Apparently in this sovereign state of mine the critical information is relayed primarily by rumor and Facebook, which, to me, are essentially the same thing.

It’s a sign of the times, I guess, that information now is funneled through the lens of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and now the right wing megaphones, monetized and uncorroborated, faith based social media. Sure, why not? We don’t trust government any longer. We don’t trust the news media. We wouldn’t believe in God herself is She came down with golden tablets to give us the facts.

But if the government wanted to use a social media platform to disseminate critical information, why not use the Skeeter Daddle Diaries blogsite? Good as any, better than some. If you don’t happen to be one of the readers of my fast breaking news blog, then I guess you won’t get your vaccination. Doesn’t seem fair, you say. Maybe if you’re lucky, one of the readers will email or call you to let you in on the latest developments where to get your Covid shot. Welcome to America, dude. And good luck. You’ll need it.

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The soon-to-be-dedicated Trump Library is nearing completion in a decommissioned underground parking complex in downtown Scottsboro, Arizona, once a subterranean multi-level car station for upscale shopping before burst pipes in the upper areas turned the lower levels into virtual cesspools. Drained and rehabbed in gold tile over concrete, the Trump Library boasts more than adequate parking spaces for the throngs expected to attend the grand opening this summer.

Despite the fact that the notoriously unread and possibly illiterate President left few if any written documents, the Library will have a plethora of computer stations with a compendium of presidential tweets in easy access. Of even greater interest to future historians and the general public, video downloads will replay most of the rally speeches Mr. Trump made between his many golf outings on jumbotron screens at the end of each parking level so that visitors can enjoy even in their vehicles without necessitating entry to the computer stations on Level 7.

While other presidents’ libraries house letters, memos, emails and various other written documents, the Trump Library will have few if any of those since the President, on advice from counsel, rarely allowed possible evidentiary content to be kept despite legal requirements to do so. According to Jonathon Trubsky, head librarian, this lack of documentation provides researchers with a much simplified and preferred avenue into the thinking and rationale of the Trump Administration. “Mr. Trump was a man of impulse and instinct,” Trubsky wrote in an introductory press release for the grand opening. “He had a photographic memory, apparently, and eschewed written materials. As he told the public many times, he had a very big brain. Ironically, that very big brain meant that his library would be a very little library, something the staff appreciates greatly.”

The Grand Opening is scheduled for June 15, 2021.

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