The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Right after I’d graduated college and quit my job as 8th grade teacher — deciding, I guess, I’d had my fill of institutional learning — I applied for a job as ‘food manager’ of the University’s Student Union. I’d been supervisor of the dining hall that served most of the old dormitories on the Univ. of Wisconsin lakefront for three years so I was hired to run a dining hall, an ice cream parlor and a grill on the side of campus where engineers and folks who wanted a career that would result in well-paying jobs would go to eat. Unlike the Union on the lakefront where folks who majored in Renaissance English or Poly Sci came to plot the Revolution, this being the late ‘60’s, early ‘70’s, when idealism trumped fiscal survival. Good Karma was all we needed.

I lasted three months, not long after the Union South Poisonings in which multiple students and staff ate the potato salads left under the heating lights to grow bacterial toxins. Hell if I knew mayonnaise would spoil so quick. I was good at managing a hundred employees. Food, not so much.

Dave, my boss who ran the entire Union, asked how I could not know that. I told him I had a degree in Useless Information, not Food Science. ‘You knew that when you hired me,’ I said as my no mea culpa, but in the end I pled guilty and told him I would move on soon as he found a suitable replacement, which took no time flat, some former military cook. The days of my employees smoking dope in the freezer with me were about to end. The General would tighten their ship, count on that, Mister!

Dave wanted me to go back to school, get a degree in Restaurant and Hospitality. Good jobs, he pitched. ‘Well paid. You could go anywhere and find work.’ Dave was a good guy, even after I refused to wear ties, dress up or act adult. I think he saw me as the kid he never had, but he could steer from delinquency to the straight and very narrow.

Course, I had bigger dreams. A month after I’d trained Col. Hardass my job, I walked into a Humane Society that needed a kennel worker, two bucks an hour, no managerial responsibilities whatsoever, got hired on the spot, started the very next day. The rest, as they say in the movies, was history. I was on my way ….

The Chinese just brought back a few pounds of moon rocks. Awhile back the Japanese hauled in some comet dust. Won’t be long before we excavate Martian soil and send it back to Earth too. You might expect, if it isn’t true already, that Qanon or some other reality-free zone will report on the alien viruses that these extra-terrestrial geologic immigrants have unleashed on our unsuspecting population. Right alongside the story of the Martian landing hoax conspiracy.

After all, comets are suspected of ‘seeding’ the planet with rare elements that made life possible here at home. And probably Mars. And maybe the moon. Forget building that beautiful wall on our southern border, buddy, maybe you need to worry about the Killer Virus from Mars. Hopefully our space scientists are using advanced screening technologies to insure the Lunavirus doesn’t escape the confines of their highly secure labs. You know, the way they do with the ones they’re making here on planet Earth.

Me, I’m not so sure. We send out satellites to the end of our solar system looking for life forms that might like Chuck Berry, figuring, I guess, that any species that rocks to Johnny B. Goode must be the variety that won’t see us and our pals as food. You know, intelligent beings like ourselves. The kind who wouldn’t wage wars over religious differences, the beings who wouldn’t overheat their planet or exhaust its resources, the species that believed in provable facts not Venusian mumbo jumbo, smart folks like ourselves who evolved big brains without really believing in evolution. Those beings…

So yeah, bring that space dust here, see what’s hiding in it. Probably benign. Harmless. You know, like us ….

So we got these yahoos — let’s call them investors — teaming up through social media to buy some piddly ass stocks nobody in their right mind would gamble a 401-K to buy, figuring to drive the price through the ceiling by ganging up on their buy bids. They buy some stock called GameStop, the largest video game retailer, operating 5,509 retail stores throughout the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe, so what if I’ve never heard of it, and in no time flat the price jumps from a yearly low of two and a half bucks to just under 500 american dollars.

Now, all of this would seem kosher in a world where Tesla stock shot up astronomically even before Elon could start selling his little battery run cars, making him the richest human being on Planet Earth. Nobody denigrated Elon Musk, well, at least not for getting rich on his stock options…. But when this crowdsourced party of know-nothing investors hit the jackpot, the market pulled the plug on their trading. Why? Because the hedge fund millionaires who had made investments in ‘instruments’ that specialize in betting against the success of GameStop (hence the term hedge fund, as in hedging their bets) suddenly found themselves on the wrong end of the deal and lost billions with a B in a flurry of electronic trades, well, no doubt some calls got made to the croupier in New York, scream and yell No Fair to the line judge at the SEC, make threats against who knows who down at the Dow Jones. And voila, trading shut down, mister, and I mean Right Now!

Welcome to the rarified world of high finance. Collateralized debt obligations, derivatives, collateralized loan obligations, futures contracts, short sales, annuities, swaps and options and warrants, probably nothing you didn’t study in high school economics classes, right? The Big Boyz are hiring PhD mathematicians and physicists to run complex algorithms and formulas, dreaming up schemes for monetizing about anything you can buy trade or sell, then calculating odds for profit, figuring out infrastructure to speed the time between buying and selling faster than the competition. Is the system rigged? you might ask and the answer depends on whether or not you’re some schmuck like me who dials in an order from some brokerage or other and maybe a few minutes or longer get a piece of the American Pie. The Big Boyz are trading in nano seconds. Something goes sideways, they have computer programs to bail before you can say Smith Barney.

I heard some talking head yesterday saying the kids driving GameStop prices up through crowdsourcing were going to turn the stock market into a casino, all just a big crap shoot, nothing based on actual worth of a company or a corporation. Well, call me stoopid and slap me with a three dollar bill, but I think the game has been rigged a long time. What happened in Wall Street stayed in Wall Street, just like Vegas. All well and good until the card counters rolled in.

Odds are you were like me, just get past the elections, get to the Inauguration, let the fetid dismal fog clear and maybe, just maybe, we could get back to some semblance of sanity in this country. The emperor without clothes would slither back to his golf course and his reign of terror would end. Okay, it’s been less than two weeks and from my vantage point down here at the bottom of the food chain, not much has changed. Oh sure, we got a new leader and yeah, the Senate flipped, signs of optimism if you’re not a Qanon Kool-Aid addict who thinks the inauguration was photoshopped and Trump is still president and will be recrowned king very very soon. Course, some of those Qanon addicts are now in the Congress.

The enemy is within. And Trump has decamped to his Mar-a-Lago golf compound to receive kisses and condolences from his old pal Minority Leader McCarthy who hopes to mend fences and keep the masses restive without going full berserk. Obviously the little incident in the Capitol Building a few weeks back has receded to nothing more than an amusing anecdote for the Republicans, children acting out, no need to worry. That Hang Pence talk was just good sport. Nothing to do with the stolen election that D.J. Trump won by huge margins ….

Yesterday I was surprised to learn that the forest fires in California were actually started by Jews firing lasers from outer space. Although later I heard that no, they weren’t started by the Jews, they were actually started by Elon Musk. It’s hard to get accurate information, apparently, in this brave new world of technological marvels. Rep. Greene from upstate Georgia has suggested the best way to deal with Nancy Pelosi is to put a bullet in her head. If you thought Congress might sanction this dangerous assassination talk, you’ve been asleep the past decade or three. The days of dealing with Richard Nixons are long gone. Say hello to government by the Three Stooges. Poke em in the eye, smack em with a hammer, put a bullet in her head, it’s all good fun. The barbarians are at the gate, the lasers are aimed at Smokey the Bear, the truth is out there somewhere but I guarantee you most folks won’t find it.

I love a good holiday as much as the next yahoo … but c’mon, this Groundhog’s Day business, let’s be honest, the Chamber of Commerce out there in Pullmyleg, Pennsylvania has pulled a fast one on those of us who take meteorologic prediction seriously. Down here on the convergence zoned South End, No Way is a groundhog going to see his shadow on Feb. 2nd. Even if we had groundhogs! This thing just gives Science a bad name. And lately, the last thing it needs in these superstitious, fake news, impeachment trial, end-of-the-world times is a black eye over some mammalian hairball on the East Coast seeing its hairball shadow (or not) and then extrapolating that to El Nino or asteroid strikes on Wall Street or global warming.

Which is precisely why some of the more empirically minded boyz down at the Mabana Body Shop have been searching, in a deductive sort of methodology, an alternative Predictor of winter longevity. Hellfire, if this Covid lockdown makes every day the same as the last one and the one coming tomorrow, we figure there’s no point in fighting endless monotonous inevitability. We’ll just pull the covers up, collect unemployment and wait patiently for our vaccinations. This is how civilizations thrive: they figure out tides and seasons for planting schedules and harvest times and earlier happy hours.

The model the boyz constructed over the past decade or so is a local paradigm that utilizes a 5 gallon polyethylene bucket of fresh caught Dungeness crabs —- I KNOW you’re going to point out they’re illegal this time of season, but listen, we’re putting em back when the data is collected. Spirit of the Law, if not the Letter and that, in a clamshell is the very essence of the South End Way. —- So you got a pail of clacking claws and now you bring out a dog, any dog, any breed, random sampling, see? And you let the pooch check out the crustaceans. No shadows, no hibernating drowsy marmots. And if the crab gets a lock on Snoopy’s snout, voila, studies have shown that is a true omen of an early spring. The dog schnozz slips the noose, 6 more weeks of sleeping in. Or six more months of a spiking pandemic. Probably both.

Simple. Like Einstein says, the more elegant the theory, the higher the probability it’s correct. And the boyz down at the body shop will tell you, the accuracy here is in the 90 percentile range, statistically astounding. We’re not claiming, like those unabashed self -promoters in Pennsylvania, that this will predict spring or the end of Covid for the entire country, but for all us Left Coasters, rest assured, Feb 2nd now has science as its bedrock foundation. We’ll leave it to the South End Chamber of Commerce how they want to capitalize on it. Crab Dog Day. Nice profitable ring to it, don’t you think, kind of like a cash register. If we can keep PETA at bay….

I love this pandemic vaccine roulette, a small window into how the world works when it’s confronted with a crisis that for us old codgers is life and death. A week ago I gave up trying to navigate the distribution rumors of a clinic up the road offering inoculations or the senior center crowd sourcing its limited supply and just decided to get my name on a list of potential survivors and see if new doses would arrive at some uncertain future date. Sure, I was bothered that my neighbors and friends found where to get theirs already while I was completely shut out … and okay, I was even pissed they didn’t bother calling to offer me their inside info, maybe figure if I delayed and died they’d have a less crowded neighborhood. Or maybe, more likely, they got theirs, screw the rest. It’s a dog eat dog world out there in Virustown.

But lately I’m reading about hospitals in the area, once they got their hands on the vaccines, called up their VIP donors, in some cases those who gave more than 10 grand to the hospital foundations, and offered them first dibs on the life-saving shots. Welcome to America, I guess, in case we underlings needed a clearer view from the back of the bus folks would be happy to throw us under if it meant they got into the lifeboats of the Titanic. Pardon my mixed metaphors, but hellfire, it just appears a bit callous for our health care providers to skip the folks who are fighting in the front lines of this pandemic to reward their rich benefactors.

Okay, I know this is how it works. The rich get richer and the rest of us get crappy health care. Move along everybody, nothing to see here. You had your chance to get rich and what did you do with it? Accept your poverty and shut up, peon! The wealthy are always first in line, you know that, and if you didn’t, you been living on the South End a little too long. If nothing else, this vaccine rollout should give you a chance to see how democracy works. If you thought it worked for you, I got some nettle land to sell you. If you aren’t on a ventilator by then….

More than a few times, writing satirical pieces for this blogsite or the Crab Cracker, I’ve had to apologize for my so-called humor, dark as it is. Once I advocated for alpaca hunting and the owners of a fairly large herd of the cute little beasts threatened monetary reprisal for every one of their long-necked Bambis that were shot and killed by the over-eager hunters of the South End who might find their expensive pets easy prey. After over a decade I’m relieved to report that my attorney, Bubba Frisk the 3rd, hasn’t had to defend my meager estate from lawsuits over alpaca burgers at ungodly prices per pound.

Recently, however, I was forced once again to plead guilty to the charge of reckless endangerment with an unregistered pen to the folks who found my sadly wanting wit a bit much to endure any further. The owner of a South End mercantile (name withheld at the advice of counsel) called to tell me that his sense of humor had reached its entrepreneurial limit. “I’m trying to run a business here,” he told me, “and you’re giving us a black eye.” I wanted to respond with something sympathetic but self-defensive, like “gee, and I thought you were trying to run it into the ground.” Fortunately I held my sharp tongued humor in check.

In the end I said I understood. I said I apologize. I said it wouldn’t happen again … to them. He even suggested another mercantile, a competitor of theirs, that might be far more deserving of my barbs, I guess trying to be helpful. Believe me when I say suggestions for my humor are as welcome as demands for an apology. If folks take umbrage themselves for being the target of my mischief, why on god’s green earth would they think the competitors would be any more appreciative?

I want to offer ALL you readers my deepest and most sincere apology. I certainly didn’t intend lasting harm. Course the mizzus takes it personal … and when I even make sport of myself, I’m starting to get a little annoyed too. I blame it on Covid. I blame it on the partisan politics of our time. Okay, all right, I blame it on myself. Happy now?

Folks are just too easily convinced that when I make fun of someone, it might be them. Course you and I know, it probably isn’t. But that’s the trouble with shotgun humor, it’s imprecise. I was, rest assured, aiming at the neighbor.

Lately we’ve been playing a shell game called Vaccination, a sleight-of-hand magician’s trick of trying to figure out who, where, when our vaccine might be available. A few days ago after a tip from a friend it seemed as if we might get a shot over at our sister island, Whidbey, at some drug store in downtown Oak Harbor. We made a reservation, then got an email alert that residents here on the South End could go to a closer pharmacy in a county not ours because evidently our vaccines were going to help their county out. A few days later we got another email alert that our first reservation had moved back two weeks, the closer one seemed to drop us, but no matter, the first one moved the reservation we had just had put back two weeks moved forward a week. Okay….

Meanwhile friends were informing us that they had received their vaccinations at a local private health clinic only a few miles north from us, but when we tried to see if we might get an appointment, their website informed us their supply of vaccine had already been exhausted. Please stand by. Yesterday we got a notice from the first place we’d contacted, something to the effect that supplies were limited and running out but rest assured, we would keep our place in line.

If you aren’t confused yet, you will be soon. Unless you were one of those who somehow managed to navigate the labyrinth and find the moldy cheese at the middle of a berserk maze…. Now, I’m not one of those yahoos who blame the government for everything from my broken shoelace to my bad haircut, but I hafta say, this rollout for a vaccine that we have known was coming for months and, dare I mention, seems INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT to our national health, our economy and our futures, is a total mess. Apparently in this sovereign state of mine the critical information is relayed primarily by rumor and Facebook, which, to me, are essentially the same thing.

It’s a sign of the times, I guess, that information now is funneled through the lens of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and now the right wing megaphones, monetized and uncorroborated, faith based social media. Sure, why not? We don’t trust government any longer. We don’t trust the news media. We wouldn’t believe in God herself is She came down with golden tablets to give us the facts.

But if the government wanted to use a social media platform to disseminate critical information, why not use the Skeeter Daddle Diaries blogsite? Good as any, better than some. If you don’t happen to be one of the readers of my fast breaking news blog, then I guess you won’t get your vaccination. Doesn’t seem fair, you say. Maybe if you’re lucky, one of the readers will email or call you to let you in on the latest developments where to get your Covid shot. Welcome to America, dude. And good luck. You’ll need it.

The soon-to-be-dedicated Trump Library is nearing completion in a decommissioned underground parking complex in downtown Scottsboro, Arizona, once a subterranean multi-level car station for upscale shopping before burst pipes in the upper areas turned the lower levels into virtual cesspools. Drained and rehabbed in gold tile over concrete, the Trump Library boasts more than adequate parking spaces for the throngs expected to attend the grand opening this summer.

Despite the fact that the notoriously unread and possibly illiterate President left few if any written documents, the Library will have a plethora of computer stations with a compendium of presidential tweets in easy access. Of even greater interest to future historians and the general public, video downloads will replay most of the rally speeches Mr. Trump made between his many golf outings on jumbotron screens at the end of each parking level so that visitors can enjoy even in their vehicles without necessitating entry to the computer stations on Level 7.

While other presidents’ libraries house letters, memos, emails and various other written documents, the Trump Library will have few if any of those since the President, on advice from counsel, rarely allowed possible evidentiary content to be kept despite legal requirements to do so. According to Jonathon Trubsky, head librarian, this lack of documentation provides researchers with a much simplified and preferred avenue into the thinking and rationale of the Trump Administration. “Mr. Trump was a man of impulse and instinct,” Trubsky wrote in an introductory press release for the grand opening. “He had a photographic memory, apparently, and eschewed written materials. As he told the public many times, he had a very big brain. Ironically, that very big brain meant that his library would be a very little library, something the staff appreciates greatly.”

The Grand Opening is scheduled for June 15, 2021.

Okay, let’s see a show of hands. Who thinks, like Donald J. Trump does, that he’s the greatest president in our nation’s history? C’mon, now, don’t be shy, we can’t see your faces, much less your hands. Who thinks Mt. Rushmore should have another face carved into the mountain even if we have to erase one of the other, lesser, presidents to get Donald’s face up there? Really? Nobody?

All right, put your hands up if you think the Trumpster was the worst president in American history. I got mine up, just so you know I’m not hiding my biases. And I’m smiling this morning after watching him board the helicopter and then Air Force One before jetting off to nurse his wounds and cheat at golf in Mar-a-Lago. It feels like a weight lifted off finally after four long years and maybe we can breathe easy again. Okay, okay, you can put your hands down now, both of them. Later we’ll tabulate the votes and get back to you with the results. Course, as you know, half the country will assume this poll was rigged. Probably by the Lizard People.

It’s been awhile since my high school history classes. It’s even been awhile since I taught history in 8th grade. Most of the presidents get pretty short shrift in those textbooks. I mean, how much do you know about Millard Fillmore? Not much, I’m betting, maybe not a bad prez, mostly just forgettable. Herbert Hoover left us with the Great Depression, but I’m not sure we can blame the guy for that. Not totally, anyway. Gerald Ford I do remember. Although, really, I can’t remember much, not that that makes him a bad president, just the poor guy who filled in when Nixon resigned instead of being impeached. William Henry Harrison was president about one month before dying of typhoid or pneumonia or god only knows what. Can’t really say he was the worst, just the shortest, which, considering who just left office, I’d say might have been a small blessing.

You go down a list of Presidents, you probably couldn’t rate them high or low or in the middle. Lincoln we like, Jefferson too, Andy Jackson some like but he wasn’t one of my favorites, sort of a proto-Trump, a raging racist, a bully, a man who didn’t care much for the rule of law if the rules got in his way. Which they did.

But Donald J. Trump. History will not be kind. Impeached twice, the king of emoluments, nepotist-in-chief, dog whistler, bully with or without the pulpit, liar extraordinaire, anti-media, a demagogue of a sort I don’t think we’ve seen prior and hopefully won’t see again. In the final days of his four year reign he pardoned cronies and crooks, refused to concede a democratic election and finally called for his faithful to storm the Capitol where a pitched battle ensued that resulted in people killed but not, as per the plans of some who breached the building, to take Senators and Representatives hostage, possibly even assassinate them. Oh, and did I mention the 400,000 dead from the virus he did virtually nothing to stop from wreaking havoc on his minions?

Does all this make him the worst president in our two and a half century history? I think we all know the answer. And no, it’s not the Lizard King.