The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

When I was a kid down in the red clay district of Georgia, us little munchkins did what most brats did. We played tricks on each other. You know, when we weren’t busy frying ants with magnifying glasses that concentrated infrared rays or putting frogs on railroad tracks. I know, we were bad kids. And we will no doubt have to spend the rest of our sorry lives atoning for this kind of cruelty to animals and ants. Or, if you’re Hindu, we can expect to come back in the next Rotation on the Wheel as frogs. Serves us right, I guess.

We had a kid in the hood, little Jimmy Sutton, the cop’s son who was always following us older punks around, wanting in on our games of marbles or whiffle ball, generally making a nuisance of himself, not a bad kid really, but … you know, we needed somebody as our scapegoat. We weren’t all that mean to Jimmy … except maybe one time when we fed him ‘smart pills’ to make him as intelligent as, well, us. He was hesitant to take them but the urge to be as all-fired smart as the rest of us was too much to resist and finally he took the handful of rabbit turds we’d found earlier and munched them down. I still remember the look on Jimmy’s seven year old face before he spit those smart pills out. And yeah, there’s a special place in Hell for all of us for pulling a mean-ass stunt like that on a poor little kid.

My point here, before I forget completely in a wash of self-abasement and apologetics, is that folks are too damn gullible. They believe conspiracy theories of the most outlandish variety, they believe Donald Trump tells the truth most of the time, they think science is a bunch of bunk, they read the National Enquirer, they join the weirdest sects with the most insane leaders, they watch Fox News, they believe in UFO’s and Bigfoot and haunted houses even though they’ve never seen any ghosts or flying saucers or giant hairy creatures. And worse, they’re NOT seven years old. Short of offering up a handful of rabbit turds marketed on late night TV and sold with fancy packaging down at the Nutrition Outlet as Intelligence Enhancers, I don’t know what to advise these folks. I bet Jimmy Sutton doesn’t believe these hoaxes. And for that, I hope Jimmy is grateful to us little bullies who set him straight on the road to truth, justice and what used to be the American Way. If not, I hope he’s got a good job in the White House.

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