The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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So okay, I got my 2nd dose of Covid Kevlar last week, a Pfizer vaccine probably chock full of micro-transmitters Bill Gates snuck in there to track my every move, information he could have just asked me to give him, not too much variation. I’m now bulletproof, at least for infection from the coronavirus, maybe not for autism, future cancers, 3rd limbs trying to grow and possible susceptibility to Qanon conspiracy theories. My voluntary Lockdown is over!! I even think my sense of humor is coming back … or at least mutating.

It’s been a little more than a year since Pandemic Paranoia swept most of the world and maybe half of this country of contrarians, disbelievers, Trumpists and other kooks and ninnies. When I mentioned to a neighbor, one who’d actually contracted Covid, that over half a million of us had died in this Land of the Free Thinkers, he told me no, they died all right, but probably from underlying causes. If you want to debate this kind of logic, be my guest, but me, not so much. I’m vaccinated — did I mention? — and folks who think Covid or E-bola or polio or wasting brain disease are phony, well, skip the vaccine and take their chances. I’m on their side now — a few less of these maskless conspiracy theorists is okay by me now that I’m officially immune.

Oh sure, the virus will probably mutate and we’ll need booster shots for the Variants. But eventually the variant viruses would whittle down the non-believers. I’d call it Darwinism … but that’s just going to invite more hostility and resistance toward us folks who wore masks and got vaccinated and lockdowned during the Plague of 2020. Let’s call it instead an Upward Intelligence Trend, the smart survive. Maybe it was an underlying condition too.

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I was minding my own business in the Pilot House Lounge and Bar — or at least tending to my beer and scribbling away in a notebook I always carry — when a guy I didn’t know parked at the table next to me with a cup of coffee. Army fatigue jacket, butch crewcut, aviator sunglasses hanging from a strap. Probably ex-CIA or retired corrections officer. He had his back to the ballgame on the bigscreen TV over the bar, apparently more interested in my antics. I tried to avoid eye contact, watched a bunt down the first base line, but he didn’t need a cue.

“Whatcha think of that drilling ban in the Arctic?” he finally asked. I looked up from my great American novel, took a slow sip of suds and studied him for motives. He didn’t offer anything obvious. Just a guy in a bar, a student of politics, no doubt.

“Okay with me,” I said non-committedly. And waited. “You rather have nuclear?” he countered. His coffee sat untouched. I sighed. Here we go …. “Okay with me,” I said again. Cap’n. Klink nodded.

“How about those Muslim terrorists, you okay with that?” I put my pen down. Slid my notebook to the edge of the table. Took a slow sip of beer whose taste seemed metallic now. Why me, Lord, why me? We were alone except for Jerry wiping down the bar that didn’t need wiping. The batter took a called strike. I looked at my inquisitor, some bridge troll out for a holiday.

“We don’t get too many down my way on the South End,” I finally said. “So you aren’t bothered?” he sneered.

“Oh, I’m bothered,” I said, feeling the blood rising. “I’m bothered right now.” He finally sipped his coffee and smiled. Now he was getting there. Strike two to the batter on the TV. I smiled back, hoping to cut off his air supply. It did — he dropped the phony grin. “Whatcha think of us white males turned into second class citizens?” he fairly snarled. I laughed out loud this time. Jerry looked up. Behind him a baseball landed in the outfield stands. I left my beer half finished and stood up to go.

“Try not to be a victim, friend. Especially if you’re white and male. Doesn’t leave much for those terrorists to take from you.” Jerry waved so long and gave me a quizzical arched eyebrow. The pitcher put a baseball in the manager’s hands and headed for the showers. Me too.

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Ever since I got my 2nd Covid shot I seem to have an urge to buy Microsoft stocks. And I don’t usually buy any stocks so this is unsettling. And that purchase of Cortana I made? I don’t even know what Cortana is. Worse yet, I show a receipt for a Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 that I have no recollection of buying. What this can mean is anybody’s guess. On the up side, however, I seem to know, without really trying, most of my friends’ whereabouts at any given time day or night. The ones who haven’t had their inoculations yet don’t show up on my internal GPS, which makes me really suspicious.

In fact suspicion seems to be my main emotion now. I used to trust in my own instincts, trusted facts, trusted my government, trusted the Lord, trusted the warranty on my truck, trusted the advertisers on TV who told me late at night I could get two of the same item if I only paid shipping and handling. Now I wonder how much is that shipping and handling, maybe three times what the item I’m getting two of costs. And those drug ads during the evening news? I wonder now if they really cure what ails me or if all those side effects that take half the commercial to list are going to require additional pharmaceutical purchases, probably manufactured by the same company the way Purdue Pharma is going to make an antidote for oxycontin. The truth is, I don’t trust my advertisers any longer and if I can’t trust American business, who do I turn to, the Chinese? Geez, didn’t they infect us with Chinavirus?

I wake up now worrying about those poor kids in the pizza parlor basement being abused by Democratic cannibals. Yesterday I was afraid to go near the windows where lasers from outer space could place me in their gunsights, incinerating me and my banjo in a nano-second. Today I heard another mass murder was staged to make it look like violence was rampant in my country. A few days ago Asian American women pretended to be killed by another phony psychopath. It never seems to stop. When I go to the grocery store I can’t help wondering who are human and who are Lizard People. My god, maybe, just maybe, they’re ALL Lizard People. With guns!!!

What I’m wondering now is if that Covid vaccine is making me a Lizard Boy. I’m afraid to look in the mirror to check if my tongue is forked, my skin is scaly, my eyes have vertical slits. Something strange is happening, I know that much. For awhile I thought Trump would fix this, save the country, make it great again … now it looks like he wasn’t the savior after all. Now that I’ve joined Qanon, I’m already thinking of quitting but I hate to turn tail and run. Although … I do seem to be growing a tail.

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Most of us artists are too sensitive for this world. We’re delicate flowers, blooming nocturnally, our precious scent wafting on the tidal emanations of the moon and lost before dawn. By day we’re ambivalent about our talents. We torture ourselves with questions of skill and worse, of imagination, wondering if we made a mistake pursuing a trade whose rewards are certainly not monetary in a society that judges us by our profit and loss. In daylight we dance with our demons. By nightfall we listen to bacchanalian howls echoing from ravines back in our suspect imaginations.

We are our worst critics. We are our biggest admirers. The push and pull could drive an ordinary person crazy. It certainly does us. Caught between that spark of creativity and the dark shadow it costs, we are trapped between the jitterbug and the dirge, yo-yos to our own ambivalence, see-sawing away until paralysis or delirium gets a grip on our inner child, the spoiled brat who craves attention but wilts under criticism.

And god help us if we find ourselves suddenly ‘marketable’. Try a new style, a variation, an experimental approach, but the buying public may only want that last painting, the hit song, the first novel. The pressure will be to replicate, to plagiarize ourselves, to stay with the tried and true and tired. The saleable. Even the Masters sold out. Dali signing thousands of prints, Picasso scribbling iconic doodles, the spark slowly dying while the money rolls in. It’s a trap, a curse, a blessing, a living. A starving artist, and you can quote me, is a far better artist than a famous ones in their old age, nine times out of ten. The trouble is, eight of them will just give up.

What I tell the kids I sometimes inflict my wisdom on is this: get a part-time job to pay the rent, don’t buy a new car, live frugally, do NOT go into debt. And above all else, keep making art whether it sells or not. And if it sells, keep pushing your limit. Keep experimenting. And whatever you do, don’t amputate ears or other body parts. It’s only art, not life and death. Or you can do what I do and tell yourself every damn day, it beats working for a living….

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Little Jimmy was on his second or maybe his third last beer of the night down at the Covid-spaced Pilot Lounge the night he’d gotten his 2nd inoculation so naturally he was celebrating. Maybe a little too hard. Jerry’s grandson had just been accepted into a prestigious private college, a fact that he announced with a toast ‘to the kids’, at which point Jimmy’s ebullient mood did a 180.

‘My kids,’ he said solemnly, ‘are still paying off student loans. Joe’s got a job at Amazon, a mortgage that weighs a ton and just barely hangs on. Ronnie’s out of rehab, totally broke. He just gave up, all I can see. Wasn’t it supposed to be our kids would do better than us? What the hell happened to this country?’

Well, you want to kill a buzz, this is one way to go about it. Two Toke, kidless and not exactly the Poster Child for the American Dream, declared ‘noboy promised us a rose garden, Jim.’

Little Jimmy gave that pearl of wisdom a fat snort of derision. ‘I wanted more for my kids. I expected more. That’s what America was all about, a ladder up to the next rung. Or a rung on the next …. Hell, you know what I mean.’

‘A bigger slice of the pie,’ TT said, not exactly trying to help. ‘Bigger house in the suburbs, trips to Greek islands …’

‘Better vintage wine,’ Jerry tossed in. ‘Two chickens in every pot!’ Harry chimed. ‘Two pots for every chicken!!’ Did I say that?

‘Don’t you guys get it?’ Jimmy moaned with emotion. ‘It’s a downhill slide now. And you think that’s okay?

‘Make America great again?’ Jerry asked, risking a quick end to the night, and sure enough, Jimmy gulped his last last beer and declared it was time to go home. Jerry lives in a 4000 square foot McMansion on the bluffs overlooking views of Mt. Rainier, the Olympics, Whidbey Island and the Saratoga Straits. He retired at 45, a dot.com millionaire, been bored ever since. The rest of us layabouts basically retired early too … but without stock options or 401-K’s or pensions.

TT watched Little Jimmy put on his coat forlornly, muttering ‘night, guys’ and head for the door. ‘Too bad I don’t have kids,’ Tom said, finishing his own drink and standing up to leave too. ‘I guarantee they’d be a rung up on me. But I doubt they’d be happier.’

Downward mobility on the South End never was much of a cause for concern, I guess.

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