The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Here it is, Day One of my new 12 step program to quit. So far, so good. No chills or uncontrollable shakes, no night sweats, no spiders crawling up the walls, no violent outbursts of unspecific rage, no crawling to the closest friend for a fix. I know, it’s only been a few hours —- the worst is yet to come.

Still, I’m optimistic I can beat this addiction. Course, to do it, I needed to change my routines, stay off the internet, avoid friends who mean well but would only hasten the eventual ‘falling off the wagon’. I need to refocus my attention, get myself busy, leave town. Right now I’m waiting for a plane to Chicago, then on to Wisconsin.

Wisconsin should be the perfect tonic. Autumn colors, crazed football fans, deer hunters, Indian Summer, rural roads, school buses back on their routes. Back to my roots, a nice trip down Nostalgia Boulevard, maybe go down to the U.W. campus and bask in those memories of halcyon days back in ’68, a zit-faced kid with his future waiting to embrace his hopes and dreams. You know, before the Siren’s lure of his addiction.

Maybe Wisconsin isn’t the best choice, I’m thinking now. That year, 1968, the campus exploded in violence, anti-war riots, National Guard bivouacked on the football field, curfews and student boycotts, the year —- years, really —- when the addiction began with its tiny tentacles growing in my still-forming brain. The Chicago Convention, Johnson, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, Nixon, Agnew, Cambodia, Watergate, all spreading like a toxic mycelial mat across my synapses. Easy to see in hindsight, not so obvious back then.

50 years later and this monkey rides my back like a giant tick sucking blood, engorged to monstrous size. Killing it might kill me. But we’ll see, won’t we? Maybe by Day 6.

Meanwhile, one step, one day at a time. No newspapers, no news, no debates about impeachment, no mas, no mas. Politics Anonymous. Nobody said it would be a cakewalk. My plane is about to board. Wish me luck!

Oh, and if you get word Trump has been impeached … go ahead and call me. ASAP.

Hits: 246