The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

So I’m in the middle of a screwup day, nothing going right, a trip to town to pick up items at UPS they can’t find, another to retrieve a lost microphone at the location of our last gig they said they had but don’t now, still more to correct mistakes in postcards, posters and ads for an upcoming Small Craft Advisory show, how can it get much worse, I’m thinking. Until I park at the grocery parking lot facing directly into the guy with the TRUMP vanity license plate and no, it wasn’t Donald himself, just a Kool-aid acolyte wizened behind his steering wheel scowling at any and all. Meaning me.
On the rear of his rig are all manner of hostile bumper stickers but the one that catches my eye before moving away from this creepy caricature of Yosemite Sam said SUCK IT UP, BUTTERCUP, TRUMP IS PRESIDENT. Being in a small rage myself already, I wanted to tap on his window and ask the obvious question, ya really think your boy is President? Buttercup. My usual mode of operation is never, ever, engage these people. They are mostly whacked, completely unhinged idiots without so much as a horny toenail on terra firma. Their world is inhabited by lizard people, Jews with lasers in outer space starting forest fires, Democrat pedophiles in basements beneath pizza parlors doing monstrous things to children before eating them. A conversation on these topics is not going to find us a middle ground in the end.

Yesterday a buddy stopped by to ask about those Lahaina fires in Maui, said a client he mowed lawn for, one with a MAGA hat he astutely assumed was a Republican, claimed the fires were started by corporations who planned to buy the smoldering beach front town at rock bottom prices. To his client this sounded reasonable, no further evidence required, just bedrock cynicism for government and now corporations. Buttercups too, I’m betting. My buddy said he didn’t want to provoke this guy and lose his gig over politics, a job is, after all, a job. If it pays well anyway.

No, the batshit crazies are on their own. And if, in the end, they outnumber the rest of us just trying to navigate the already complex universe of our humdrum lives and vote their creep hero back into office, then we can all be afraid, very afraid, not just for democracy as we once imagined it, but sanity as it may newly be defined.

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Lately there’s been some internet buzz rejecting the strategy of NASA to hurl signals into outer space, maybe make contact with some advanced species beyond our solar system. Decades ago we launched a craft full of a time capsule’s worth of stuff, everything from da Vinci sketches to Chuck Berry singing Johnny B. Goode, figuring, I guess that if the data dump of scientific memorabilia didn’t attract extraterrestrial tourists, the rock n roll might do the trick. Swell, it’s a little like the Wampanoag tribe sending out flyers to would be Pilgrims to come visit. Oh, and bring some of those smallpox blankets to trade, why don’tcha?

Maybe it’s the congressional investigations into UFO’s the past few months that got folks thinking about space visitors. That, or the Qanon folks suspect the Lizard People running the government are actually Chuck Berry aficionados. Either way, some of us terrestrials are rethinking the idea that visitors from outer space might really enjoy Disneyland and our reality TV shows. They might not agree with our humanoid tastes in art and entertainment, but they might really enjoy our taste. Barbecued homo sapien, mmm mmm, finger lickin’ good. The thought has occurred to a few folks that any alien capable of navigating across the galaxies might be far more advanced than the citizens of Earth who think landing on Mars was pretty special and who still can’t figure out what to do with spent nuclear fuel rods. I seriously doubt any galactic immigrants will bow down to the folks who binge watch the Kardashians.

The assumption must be, these people who look forward to First Contact, that an advanced alien species would naturally be not only intelligent but kind and even caring. Maybe bring us the recipes for happiness and time travel. Oh sure, we’d have to be super careful about space bugs and viruses and who knows what else we’d have no immunity for, but the good visitors would help us with that. Right? And no, don’t get going on Covid being some virus developed in a lab on Pluto, bad enough we got conspiracies about Wuhan vs wet meat markets, last thing we need is a trans-species mutation, forget about vaccines.

No, maybe we should just put a sign up, out by the moon maybe, that reads No Trespassing, This Means You! Let them know we’re not inviting anybody to our Thanksgiving Dinner. The last thing we need are some interstellar Pilgrims singing hymns, not Johnny B Goode. Go ask the Wampanoags how that worked out.

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Some days I don’t know why I get up early and read the morning news. I might just as well sleep in and then, prior to that first cup of joe, slam my thumb with a hammer so it will throb the rest of the day, helping me forget the world beyond the pain. But no, I walk down the path from the house to the mailbox, passing the rhododendrons in bloom, the birds calling from the shrubs, the sun filtering through the foliage of exotic trees … only to snatch my newspapers from their plastic coffin and head back up the trail reading snippets of the day’s insanity.

Today, what the meteorologist promised would be a warm and sunny prelude to summer, turned ominous and dark as I read about the number of folks in my America who believe completely in Qanon, about one in five of us. Or, as the article pointed out, more of us than any mainstream religion’s believers. I know I’ll be turning that over in my head all day long, trying to wrap my mind around the notion that 20% of my friends and neighbors believe there is a cabal of Satanists who control the government, media and financial worlds and oh, while they’re at it, run a child sex ring. If ignorance is bliss, heaven awaits you.

And here I was worried about the Covid plague … little guessing that the real menace was the worm that had burrowed into the brains of a sizeable percentage of my fellow countrymen and reduced them to paranoid babblers of cockamamie idiocies no sane person could possibly believe. The Dark Ages are back apparently and spreading a black sheet over the home of the brave, land of the feeble with no vaccine in sight and even if there was one, these folks would refuse to be inoculated by the pederast priests of their new enemy.

Wearing a mask probably won’t help now. The worm spreads on the internet, passed from ‘friend’ to ‘friend’, an invisible pod like the one in Invasion of the Body Snatcher, this one rewiring the circuits of the brains of their victims. Unplug your computer! Turn off your TV! Board the windows andbolt the doors! Do not answer your phone! But by all means, be afraid! It isn’t the pederasts who are coming for you.

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