The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Little Jimmy’s been predicting the global economic collapse for so long all of us at the Pilot House Lounge have started greeting his entrance at the door, not with a hearty How Are Ya, Jimmy Boy, but a solemn Is THIS the Day??

“Laugh all you want, you chuckleheads,” he says good naturedly. Even he’s realized the End Isn’t Near, it’s just, according to Jimmy, delayed. Meanwhile the Dow and S&P and Nasdaq are at record highs, proving once again, if it needed proving, the rich get richer and the rest of us spend ours on beer at the Pilot House, some kind of inexorable law of economics we layabouts do not question even if we bitch about it at our equivalent of the Federal Reserve quarterlies, all the good it ever does.

Some day Jimmy will probably wake and the world economy will start to slide, Monetary Armageddon will drop on all of us and only Jimmy will survive the Apocalypse with his gold and his silver buried out back by the old prized Buick Roadmaster up on blocks waiting restoration, another fiscal hedge in his extensive strategies, most of which he shares with us goombahs but a few he worries might go viral here on the South End and devalue the worth of his intricately devised plans at post-inflationary survival. Money won’t be worth doodly, he tells us after a few high gravity IPA’s. “Forget about stocks, bonds, CD’s or any those IRA’s you boys think will give you a fat retirement.”

We boys, of course, howl and pound the table. We never get tired of investment counseling from the likes of Jimmy. Plus it’s cheap, not like the swindlers back in the day who fleeced the Little Church in the Ravine congregation for their life savings, biggest Ponzi scheme in the country up til then. Jimmy’s not selling anything, only wants to wake us up before the Crash, before it’s Too Damn Late, basically his duty as a friend.

“What if I’m right?” he asked us assembled yahoos, ‘what’ll you do then?” Fairlane Fred, mid sip, put down his bottle with a thump. “Jim,” he said, sounding seriously ominous, “we’ll come and take what you got. Isn’t that what friends are for?”

It was a few weeks after that before Jimmy joined us again at our Economic Summit. We figured he was reburying the Krugerrands.

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