The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

If you listen close these days, you can hear the Four Horses of the Apocalypse thundering down the highway here on the South End. Some of my more paranoid pals are watching with growing concern the trajectory of Hurricane Irma down in the Carribean as it churns toward Florida. Two more storms are forming right there too and of course all are on the heels of Hurricane Harvey. Up and down the western coast the mountains and foothills are burning like the Maw of Hell.

“Probably going to have the Big One,” Little Jimmy is pronouncing over his plate of runny eggs easy over down at the Diner. He’s an unlikely prophet of doom, but for the moment he has the boyz’ attention. He sops up the orange goop with a flourish of rye toast, takes a small bite, then drops it back down in the coagulated mess. “Fires and hurricanes, earthquakes might be next.” Jim’s not a religious nut, but he’s been going through a divorce and who knows, maybe he’s got his own fault lines ready to shift tectonically.

Two Toke splurts a little coffee and chokes on what goes down his windpipe. When he finally gets cleared out, he says, “C’mon, Jim, you aiming to be head pastor?” Jim declares, “I’m just reading the Signs, Tom. Bad moons rising, see what I’m getting at?”

“I suppose the eclipse has something to do with all this?” Fat Freddy mutters from an adjoining table. Outside the air is hazy with the dense smoke of the Cascade fires that has swept into the Puget Sound, turning the sun a sunset red even at mid-day. It is eerie, we all would have to admit.

“I don’t know, Fred, I’m just saying …. Something’s going on. All these disasters one after the other, is it just coincidence?”

Tom motions to Brenda for a refill of what he’s lost to flabbergast. “Let’s not get carried away, Jim, we get fires every year and last time I looked hurricanes too. Way of the World.”

“End of the world maybe,” Jimmy said miserably. Brenda held the coffee pot hesitantly over his cup. “Got time for a refill?” she asks.

I guess it’s news worthy to report each and every professional athlete who decides to make a political statement by refusing to stand up for the national anthem. Personally, I’m still trying to figure out what the hell spangled means. Splattered maybe? My handy dictionary sez it’s plastic or metal objects that are shiny. I guess Betsy Ross’s old flags might have had sewed-on plastic stars, but I kinda doubt it. Not that it matters, it’s a song, not a Magna Carta.

When I was a teacher, the school where I taught always played the anthem every morning through the loudspeaker in each classroom. My kids would dutifully rise and put their little hands over their hearts and listen half heartedly to the words, probably no idea they came from the War of 1812. Me, I’d sit at my own desk. The kids didn’t know quite what to think of this treasonous act and were too timid to ask. And I didn’t feel it necessary to give them my reasons. My business, my class. Freedom in America.

When I was a kid myself in Georgia, we had to recite the Pledge of Allegiance every morning and then one of us would read a verse from the Bible. Even as immature as I was, something about this smacked of tyranny. When my turn came to pick a verse, I picked the shortest one in the New Testament: ‘Jesus Wept’. Short and sweet and it always got me a trip to the principal where I was treated like an atheist communist sympathiser. Mr. Crawford would sit me down in the little room outside his office and explain to me, a Yankee intruder in his Confederate fiefdom, that insubordination would not be tolerated. When I tried to explain that I had met the terms of my assignment by reading a Bible verse of my choosing, he glared down at me like I was the grandson of William Tecumseh Sherman, the man who burned a swath through the state in the Civil War, and said ‘You know what I’m talking about here, Little Man.’

Indeed I did. Indeed I do. These folks who won’t stand up for the Star Splattered Banner do too. You think it’s a free country, think again. The herd makes its demands and you pay a price for ignoring them. But like the weekend armchair patriots like to say, freedom isn’t free.

Jesus wept.

Now, a lot of us South Enders look a little dubiously at Dad’s Day. It sounds suspiciously like one of those STING operations for deadbeat dads delinquent on child support payments. Get us all down here, then throw the net. We can already see the headlines in the Conway Chronicler: South Enders nabbed in Paternity Sting.

NOT that I’m saying I’m a deadbeat dad. I know being an artist and a banjo picker sort of doesn’t help the image, but we all been down on our luck. Little Jimmy understands that. His mom’s a little less forgiving, but when the CD sales start rolling in and the big art commissions, she’ll change her tune.

What with all these studies proving that more than a quarter of men in this country aren’t the genetic fathers of their children, Fatherhood on the South End has taken on a whole new meaning in these modern times we live in. DNA tests take all the romance out of relationships, you ask me. The old family tree’s got some extra branches now. And I guess that’s good, but it sure takes some of the mystery away from sparking and courting. Personally I don’t care to find out half the South End String Band is related.

But it IS father’s day coming up. Won’t be long before dear old dad is just a Test Tube in some sterile lab. Sample # 74 Double X, blue eyes, dark hair, long fingers for the banjo. I like to think I got more to offer than a Petri dish. Although, Little Jimmy’s mom might not agree.

The Band was thinking of maybe lobbying for Father’s Day being a day of amnesty. You know: Give a Dad a Break Day. Or even a whole month. NOT that I’m saying the boys down here are looking for a way to skip the June payments. We were just thinking a little breathing room ….. you know, til the CD sales pick up.

White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said Thursday that cutting funding to several anti-poverty programs is “one of the most compassionate things we can do.”

These are the days where definitions get re-evaluated, where meaning is relative, where up is sometimes down. Wiretap is not the same as ‘wiretap’, enclosed quotes. One means wiretap, the other means, well, not wiretap. It all depends on what your definition of IS is. Compassionate, adjective: feeling or showing sympathy and concern for others.
Synonyms: sympathetic, empathetic, understanding, caring, solicitous, sensitive, warm, loving

Let’s use it in a sentence, Class: Compassionate conservatives care about the poor and the unemployed. Or another: Republicans are compassionate conservatives because they want to ensure a working mother in Detroit with three kids won’t see her hard earned dollars being spent on Meals on Wheels or Headstart. As Mr. Mulvaney stated in justification for cutting funds to low income programs, the poor would rather see their hard earned money going to beef up the national defense.

I mean, who wouldn’t!?? It boggles the senses to think conservatives even try to sell this logic. Cutting taxes for the poor or giving tax breaks to the wealthy? Which do I think their priority might be? Cutting Medicaid programs so we can upgrade nuclear stockpiles that I thought we were hoping to downsize? In my Alice in Wonderland Universe ‘compassionate conservative’ is an oxymoron. Quotes or no quotes. A person who tells falsehoods, what I call lies, is a liar. If he claims, when confronted with the lie, that he read it in an article that was in, say, Brietbart news which is mostly nothing but unsubstantiated fake news stories, it’s STILL A LIE! Oh, my buddy the liar told me that so it may very well be true. Seriously? Are we in first grade???

Day after goofy day our Comic-in-Chief tweets out a new sketch for Saturday Night Live. OBAMA ASKS BRITAIN INTELLIGENCE TO WIRETAP TRUMP TOWER! CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET OFFICE CAN’T BE BELIEVED! VOTER FRAUD IN MILLIONS, COST ME GREATEST POPULAR VOTE IN HISTORY! INAUGURATION TURNOUT BEYOND BELIEF, BIGGER THAN BARACK OBAMA’S!! WILL RELEASE TAXES WHEN IRS AUDIT IS COMPLETED!!! I GAVE MILLIONS TO CHARITY!!! NO CONFLICT OF INTEREST HOSTING WORLD LEADERS AT MY HOTELS!! I NEVER MET VLADIMIR PUTIN, DON’T EVEN KNOW WHERE RUSSIA IS ON A MAP!!!!!!!

Someone, maybe even the Republicans in Congress, needs to yank this boy out of class, walk him to the prinicipal’s office and reprimand him for constant lying. I know we can’t rap a ruler on his knuckles anymore and we can’t turn his fat little backside over a knee and give him an old fashioned spanking, but how much of this are we going to endure before some adults have had enough? Mr. Ryan, Mr. McConnell, when are you going to be sufficiently embarrassed?

Tyee Country Club is sort of a misnomer. Oh, they got a clubhouse all right. And they even have a pool. Plus some pool tables. What they don’t have is the golf course the local developer promised the new property owners in the slick sales brochures. He didn’t put it in the contracts, of course, and in the end he sold off the golf course lot by lot. Folks can live on Fairway Street and Back 9 Way, but if they want to actually play golf, they need to go up the road to Camaloch. Sure, people were mad as hell, but there wasn’t much they could do about it short of buying a gun and administering frontier justice. A stint of 5 to 10 for justifiable homicide wasn’t probably what they had in mind for their Golden Years.

I’m not much of a duffer. Last time up at Camaloch’s premiere course I took a Chicago buddy who’d never hit a golf ball in his life. We took three clubs each and plenty of balls just in case we lost a few dozen. Back then the fairways were designed for a very small acreage. Quite a few laid out right beside oncoming fairways. This might work fine for professional golfers, but for fellas who never play, this is like playing scrimmage in Iraq. We sent balls incoming toward approaching carts, bounced them across fairways to the right and fairways to the left. Titleists ricocheted off houses at the course’s edge. Dunlops rained down on putters working nearby greens. Divots flew like manhole covers next to IED’s.

The game, I’m sure, never attained greater excitement than our Chicago- style play created that fine summer day on the links of Camano. We finished 9 hard holes with a few balls left over and all but one club in our duffel, probably mislaid near a green. We asked in the clubhouse if anyone had turned one in, but when they inquired what club, what brand, I was at a loss as to either, although Chi-town Larry swore up and down it was a Goodwill 5 iron. We had two in our bag so I kind of doubted it. Let’s just say I didn’t think we’d need it any time soon. And whoever found it, I doubt he’d want it, but he’s certainly welcome to it, a small gift from one duffer to another.

I listened to a guy the other day on the radio postulating how, in a few decades or so, robots will be so ubiquitous in our lives that we’ll actually marry them. I know, I know, it sounds whacked. Until you take a step back and watch your friends with their ‘devices’. I know people who sleep with their cellphones. I don’t ask them questions, I don’t pry, I don’t pass judgement. But it does get you to wondering. Me anyway.

I called up a credit card company yesterday and got the automated voice operator. Except now, instead of the usual 4 options to ‘her’ questions, my robotic friend could understand what I asked outside the parameters of her options when I asked to speak to a homo sapien, nothing that would surprise you folks with smartphones used to chatting it up with Siri.

I watch with no small dismay the frantic and pervasive text messaging of kids these days (and now my own friends) who prefer digital communication over the messy face to face of human contact. They have pretty much abandoned phone conversations too, once the preferred domain of the shy, and now correspond with thumbs and 140 character maximum messages. We are bonding with our machines. The Flatheads, our local vintage car guyz, probably could explain this in 20th century terms, this love of their Buick 88’s and ’56 BelAirs, all that waxing and rubbing, but so far they haven’t entered into matrimony. Although … Fairlane Freddy sleeps in his a night or two a month when the mizzus is fed up with his drinking. If it could talk reassuringly to him, god only knows where things might lead.

Trouble is, we’re making these robots smarter than us. Probably make them more beautiful too. If you thought artificial intelligence was frightening, couple it with a movie star body. We’ll be slaves in the time it takes to say pornlove. I suppose we won’t have to worry about children so in one short generation the androids will have won, no doubt part of their master plan. We’ll probably think it’s worth the sacrifice. At least Fairlane Freddy will.