The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

We just came home from a road trip to the deserts of America. I don’t mean the barrios and ghettos of Yuma, Tucson, East L.A. The real deserts, cacti, gila monsters, border patrol. We drove through Mojave and now that we’re home I read today that the Flat Earth guy, Mike Hughes, strapped himself into his homemade rocket and blasted off for the stratosphere where, he told reporters, he would be able to look down at the planet and see a disc with its oceans held in place by ice at their edges.

I’m used to climate change deniers, folks who maybe never been in a greenhouse or even their own house when the sun was shining through the front windows, people who probably think they just inadvertently turned up the thermostat and forgot when the room got hot. Science wasn’t their subject in school. No doubt they majored in recess or football. Football without a helmet.

I think our boy in the Mojave rocket did actually wear a helmet. But as we learned this weekend, a helmet isn’t much use when the missile explodes in a fiery crash back on the flat earth seconds after launch. Tragic? Sure. A man has the right to follow his dreams, doesn’t he? We’re all guilty of stupid stuff. I’ve even managed my fair share. This week even…. But, c’mon, if I wanted to prove the earth was a flat disc, would I belt myself into a missile so I could take a picture with a camera to prove the ball we thought was earth was really a deep dish pizza? No, I would dig a hole to the other side, couldn’t take long, although the danger would be falling through into outer space. Probably make more sense to use the photos the astronauts have already but where’s the danger, the romance, the press coverage?

This same guy jumped over 100 feet in a Lincoln Town Car stretch limo, set a Guinness World Record even, probably because a flat earth’s gravity isn’t all that much to keep a limo tethered to terra firma.

A man, of course, has to do what a man has to do, but suicide by rocket is maybe pushing the envelope a bit too far. One small flight for man, one giant step backwards for mankind. Put that on his tombstone down there in the hot flat desert. Rest in Peace, Mike. The flat earth is your home forever.

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