The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

So okay, the President was wrong about this coronavirus thingy being a hoax. I know, he said he was on top of this pandemic way before anybody else. Meaning, I suspect, he realized fairly soon the hoax wasn’t a hoax and the virus wasn’t a cold. And yeah, he was off by a bit on opening up businesses and churches by Easter. He didn’t say which Easter, did he? The man is trying to put an optimistic spin on this plague, how can you fault him for that? If he looks like a cheerleader at the beginning of the bubonic, well, give him high marks for trying to rally the team. Even if they are coughing up lungs. Someone’s got to encourage us to try harder!

Just because he doesn’t practice social distancing himself and refuses to wear a mask to protect others, c’mon, that would just give folks watching the appearance that he’s afraid of a little virus. He wouldn’t even have himself tested in the beginning. No germ is gonna make him crawl!! The rest of us, those tests are coming any day now. We might not even need tests once that vaccine gets distributed. Any day now, he’s been telling us, and I know, some of you fault him for unwarranted optimism, but would you rather he told you the truth, that a lot of you and your family will probably die before that kind of discovery is made? It’s why he tells you that quinine treatment looks very very promising. It’s why he tells us a relatively untested vaccine is coming Soon. It’s why he suggests we look into drinking toilet bowl cleaners and disinfectants and maybe even shine a UV trouble light up our asses. Not because he really thinks it’s a good idea, he just thinks it might be a good idea … and then everybody jumps all over him when idiots take him seriously and drink Lysol. You can’t blame him for people’s stupidity and for godsake don’t say they voted for him so they get what they deserve, all right?

When he said Liberate Michigan! Liberate Virginia! he didn’t mean start a revolution, he just wanted to support the folks trapped in their houses with the mizzus and the rugrats. He didn’t mean what he said and he doesn’t say what he means. You could read it anyway you want, I guess, but why not be charitable? When that Georgia governor threw open the doors and returned to pre-pandemic normal, didn’t Trump berate him for idiocy? Consistency is for fools who never want to be re-elected, trust me on that one.

Course now he wants to bring the kids back to school this fall. Kids, he says, don’t really get the Covid. Positive thinking, see what I mean? He told you if the number of deaths in this country stayed below 60,000, he would declare it a victory. Now that we’ve passed that number, actually 3 times the 60,000 and more coming every day, he finally can tell you his team, Pence and Kushner and the boyz, well they kept that number from being in the millions. You didn’t need to hear how dangerous this pandemic thing was back in the beginning, but he knew. He knew before anyone else. And that, in case I have to spell it out, is what makes a great Leader. Mission Accomplished! Now go on out and party with a bunch of your friends.

Well, we are past the virtual conventions. Actually, considering Trump gave his nomination acceptance speech from the White House and his Sec. of State offered his endorsement while on a state sponsored trip to the Middle East, we are past conventions period. Laws too. So now we can go down the home stretch in what will no doubt be the ugliest of ugly elections in our history. Huugely ugly.

And in case the circus wouldn’t have three or more rings under the Big Top, we have police killings, Black Lives Matter protests, antifa rioting, white supremacists offering vigilante assistance, Post Office shenanigans, the continuing Covid plague, the whole shebang plowing fertile ground toward the November election which will no doubt take a few days to count all the late mail-in ballots. After that all hell breaks loose, count on that and take it to the bank.

Nobody is going to feel unsullied after a couple of months of mudslinging lies and horrorshow scare tactics. If this thing is close, batten down the hatches, a Cat 5 storm will flood the country until after Christmas into a bleak New Year. I’m like you, I’m really forward to what’s coming. America is going to be great. Again. What I think Mr. T meant, but misread his teleprompter, was America is going to be greater. You might even get tired of so much greatness. Our suburbs are going to be safe for white women. Again. Our employment numbers are going to be the best in history. Again. Not like they are now. Like they were back when America was great the first time. Or was that the second? The stock market is going to keep going through the roof so if you have a job you might consider calling your broker. Or get one. Use that payroll tax break. By the time you have to pay it back your stocks should double. That’s how the Big Boyz do it and now you can too. In the Greater America.

In the second term, if Mr. T wins, racism will be a thing of the past. Although in this term it doesn’t exist. Biden wants to defund the cops even though he says he doesn’t want to defund the cops. There goes the cities. And the suburbs will be sure to follow, all those looters and rioters and rapists, worse than the immigrants, wanting equal rights when we all know they have equal rights already in the pretty great America but nothing like the greatness that’s coming to this land of the free.

My friends are worried this guy will get a second term. My friends obviously don’t want a greater America. They think the election will be rigged or that the guy won’t leave the White House if he loses. Some of them think he might start a war with North Korea or who knows who, wag the dog, declare a national emergency, make Ivanka queen, send in the troops to restore Law and Order, ban MSNBC and the NY Times and lock up Bezos for distorting the truth in the Washington Post. Me. What, me worry? I’ve already seen what a great America looks like. I’ve already learned what kind of fellow citizens I have in this already great country. I know for a fact that we get the Leaders we deserve. Me worried? No, I’m scared to death….

By now you probably realize that the world you thought you lived in is not the world you actually live in. You thought the Covid Plague was keeping you from what used to be normal, that it was ravaging across the land, killing tens of thousands, 186 thousand, but now you realize the Pandemic was defeated by the courageous and farsighted actions of the President you thought you disliked. In fact, the man you thought was selfish and cruel is actually very kind, maybe the most unselfish and most kind person in this country. You thought he was racist but then you must have noticed that people of color at his convention gave testimonials to the opposite. His kids tell wonderful stories of his wonderfulness. You think they would lie?

He is the Defender of law and order but you thought he was actually guilty of impeachable acts, you thought he was in violation of a prohibition to use the White House for political gain, you thought maybe he was using the office to enrich himself and his wonderful kids, you thought the military was enjoined from being used for photo ops and you thought the Post Office was doing an okay job. See? You aren’t living in the Real World. Those riots in some of our major cities, they’re the work of Joe Biden and his gang of radicals. Bet you thought the incivility was on Donald’s watch, didn’t you? That’s because your anger blinds you to the Truth. He will make our cities safe again when he’s re-elected. Although they’re the safest they’ve ever been, but he’ll make them safer again. That’s his promise to you.

And the economy? Best it’s ever been but next term it will be even better. Those millions of unemployed? Don’t worry your faux news-filled head over it. More jobs are on the way, better jobs, higher paying jobs, maybe enough money for all of you to invest in the stock market where the real moolah is. And when you get the real payoff, you’ll also get a tax break. That’s his promise. If you’re smart, you’ll start shopping now like there’s no tomorrow … although tomorrow will be even better than it is now.

Those coal jobs are coming back, North Korea will turn over their nuclear weapons, Isis is defeated, the Taliban are on the run, Covid is cured. Miracles happen, Virginia. Santa is real. And yes, he’s in the White House and Christmas is coming to America. Again and again. Make out your list. Trust him, you’ll get everything your heart desires. You just have to believe. And stop reading the news.

Yesterday I drove over to Hutchison Park and the Little Library that has been vandalized a few times the past couple of weeks. I have been mouthing off about a mural that was airbrushed in the worst part of Seattle and Gomorrah around 1978, one where I chatted with the artist and lamented that in a week it would be desecrated. He told me it wouldn’t, that the community would respect it for what it was, Good Art unselfishly donated to them. Turns out he was right.

So I decided if I’m going to talk the talk, I needed to walk the walk. When I went over to the Little Library to board up the broken windows, the cyclone fence guyz were repairing the battered and busted up old one that had gone unfixed for four or five years, what to me was an indication that nobody cared about this little park and for that reason invited vandalism. Maybe, I told myself, this was the right time to upgrade the library, give the park a bit of new aesthetics, see if the improvements might not offer a Protective Art Shield to the place. What the hell did I have to lose other than a day or so of work building a stained glass replacement for the broken glass? Right?

Right? So yesterday a crabbing buddy of mine helped me clean up the broken safety glass, pull out the book racks and install a 2 foot by 3 foot framed stained glass replacement window. I suspect he thinks I’m a total idiot to put a bullseye on that library. And I suspect he might be right. But … I’m willing to put it to the test. If I’m wrong, okay, a day lost, a lesson learned and another notch in the belt of my cynicism. What are ya gonna do? I’m trying to put art in all our public places on our island and in Stanwoodopolis. If this is quixotic, or simply self serving, which a lot of folks think it is, then I’m kidding myself. Or I’m a fool. Or both.

But if I’m right, maybe, just maybe, this little island will become an Art Island, not just my stuff but the art of dozens and dozens of us, hundreds of us. Not everyone will be happy about that, trust me. Some folks think Camano could have stayed pristine and rural, just happy farmers tending their radish, milking their goats. This art stuff, it’s changing the pastoral ambience, it’s too modern, it’s not in keeping with the commuter crowd and the rich retirees. It belongs in the cities down the freeway, not here, not in their faces. Who’s paying for that? they’d ask when we built the Visitor Center and Sculpture Park and I would answer, not you, pardner. All a donation. And they would say, well, I hate it anyway.

I get it. Some folks wouldn’t hang a poster on their drywalled walls, much less a watercolor or an oil painting. Sure don’t need it, sure don’t want it, wouldn’t hang it if you gave it to em free. Sometimes, I guess, you just have to give it to em anyway….

One of our newspapers gives the Covid stats county by county each and every day. For a long time our county, Island County, had 11 deaths. A few weeks ago it surged to 12. Uh-oh, we thought, the spike has finally hit, time to hunker down even more, avoid all outside human contact, wear a mask even around each other. But then, miraculously, a few days later the number of deaths returned to 11. This week the number suddenly shot up to 13, a percentage rise that looked like Brazil or what’s about to hit Sturgis, South Dakota after the Harley Rally. We started locking the doors, bolting windows and avoiding each other.

The other day I noticed the death toll had reverted back to 11. You can imagine the toll this roller coaster ride is taking on our mental equilibrium, which, in my case at least, was already suffering plague vertigo. What I suspect, and I’m sure my conspiracy theorist cronies will agree wholeheartedly, is that the dead are rising up, returning to life and possibly being secreted away to some Deep State laboratory for further study or horrible experimentation. Or both!! That, or the Covid virus is something that escaped from government labs working on a plague that makes zombies of its victims, probably Republican zombies if my guess is correct.

That’s right, the Undead are going to vote! Mail in, walk in, whatever it takes. And worse, they’re no doubt among us now, infecting the population, killing them then bringing them back to life. Or some semblance of life. Republicanism is the new Zombie-ism. If you don’t believe it, check Qanon for proof. It’s all there, the quotes from doctors at the Z Lab, statistics of the death toll’s shrinking totals, the irrefutable studies by bots in the think tanks, all of it. Don’t just believe me, believe the Q!

The GOP convention is ongoing now. The President promises huuge surprises. I hate to give you a spoiler alert, but … no one will die very long of Covid under his watch. He has the Lazarus Cure, far better than any vaccine that would probably cause autism or worse. The newly undead will be forever grateful as should we. No doubt he’ll have their vote. Undertakers, maybe not.

Suppose you woke up one fine morning and discovered the place where you live was actually an insane asylum. You could tell yourself all these fellow inmates were the crazy ones, all those nutjobs raving half the night, even the caretakers with their whacky conspiracy theories, they were the mental defectives, they were the stark raving mad. Not you. No, not you.

The world is a slippery place, a quicksilver concept of shifting realities, one day this the next day that. Some of us put our faith in religion, some in science, some just go with some kind of viral flow that seeps across the internet like a brain eating plague. People believe what they want to believe these days. Virtual reality is perfect for the folks who feel beleaguered by the old reality. Dreary jobs, dead end careers, bad marriages, deferred dreams, kids who didn’t turn out well, who knows? The world wasn’t what they’d hoped for, wasn’t what their leaders told them it would be, wasn’t fun, wasn’t easy, wasn’t much of anything the ads promised. All lies, all broken promises, all just bullshit.

The government, the corporations, the politicians, even the movie actors, phony phony phony. Who ya gonna call? Who ya gonna trust? Who ya gonna believe anymore? Somebody’s to blame, right? Somebody must be winning while you’re losing, right? Somebody’s got the power, the money, the secrets. The game is rigged, you know that at least. Maybe the Masons, maybe those Rosicrucions, maybe the Jews, maybe Hollywood, maybe the welfare queens, maybe the immigrants, maybe the Democrats, maybe the high tech CEO’s, maybe, just maybe, all of them. There’s a conspiracy going on. To keep you down, to keep you pacified, to keep you from finding out what is really what. Q knows. Q anon has the news. The President, that king of conspiracy theorists, tells you they’re good Americans. But he doesn’t, wink wink, nod nod, know very much about them.

Suppose one fine morning you wake up and discover the insane have taken over the asylum. Find out YOU were the enemy. And all along you thought you were the sane one. Maybe, you think, there actually was a conspiracy. The loonies were planning how to do this all along. One state senator at a time. One Representative. A Governor here, a Supreme Court judge there. The President himself. One fine morning you wake up and everything has changed. Everything. And you might find yourself asking who really is the insane one.

The ladies at Jolene’s Gift and Boutique were eating their bag lunches in a corner of the back storeroom they’d converted into a break room. Microwave, coffee maker, mini-fridge and a small TV hooked up to a crummy antenna they’d mounted on the back of the building and run a coaxial hookup thru a window. Since their usual soap opera wasn’t on for another 5 minutes they were watching CNN’s coverage of Trump’s tax returns.

“You imagine losing 900 million dollars?” Alice said, munching her cucumber sandwich. “How many lifetimes would it take to make that much?” Shelly laughed, put her iced tea down and pretended to do the math. “Oh, too many if you mean ours? Maybe with plenty of reincarnations.”

From behind her cup of coffee Katie volunteered, “My Jim could lose that much at the casino in a year too if he had it when he walked in. Heck, he may have lost nearly that already. I sure don’t see a paycheck these days. Goes to the tribe.”

“White man’s guilt,” Alice observed with a smirk.

“Maybe he can write it off as a loss,” Shelly suggested. “Isn’t that what Donald did, gamble and lose?”

“Or a charitable donation to the Indians,” Alice tossed in. A commercial for the Washington Lottery came on with improbable timing, its snappy slogan appearing at the end: You cannot win if you do not play. Katie groaned. “Jim should have that tattooed on his fat ass.”

“More like you cannot lose if you do not play,” Shelly suggested, taking one final gulp of her cold coffee and considered pouring a fresh cup, then decided her stomach was already upset.

“You suppose he really is rich?” Katie asked aloud.

“Jim, you mean?” Alice asked and laughed.

“The rich don’t pay taxes,” Katie muttered, “so I guess he must be rich.”

“And the best part?” Shelly moaned, “ it’s all perfectly legal.”

“He claims he’s the only one who can change the laws because he knows how to use them so brilliantly. Brilliantly, he said,” Katie added bitterly, switching the channel to the Young and the Resentful.

“We must be dumb as rocks,” Alice pronounced. Katie got ready to go back to her register. “I might vote for him, though.”

“Dumber than rocks,” Alice reiterated.

“He got rich, didn’t he? And we’re working for minimum wage.”

Shelly got up too. “And we pay taxes.”

Alice turned off the TV. “Dumb as rocks.”

About 45 years ago I lived in a rough part of Seattle and Gomorrah, vacant lots, drugs, gun running, white slaving, stolen goods sold door to door, my introduction to life in the urban ghetto, quite a wake up call for a young idealistic hippie. A few streets over from my house was a block on Yesler Street and 12th where the cops not only patrolled but parked for long stretches to surveil a notorious tavern that called itself a club, not a bar. One day, walking by, I came across a guy with an airbrush painting the warehouse wall facing that gin joint. I asked him what was up and he told me he was painting a mural the length of the block on that concrete block wall. When I heard that I shook my head and said man, they’ll deface that before the paint dries, but he only smiled and said he didn’t think so. ‘They’ll appreciate the art. They won’t touch this.’

I wasn’t an artist then but I thought this yahoo had been eating fairy dust to think the animals down on that block wouldn’t graffiti up his monumental work in a day or two. 25 years later, when I paid a nostalgia visit to my old haunts, that mural was as vibrant and unmarked as when he painted it. Trust me when I tell you that made an impression on me. When committees would ask if I thought my own murals would be vandalized, I would tell them this story. They were about as convinced as I was back then talking to my anonymous artist.

Twenty years ago I became the project manager for the new Visitor Center on the island when our contractor finally got weary of dealing with us artists and went back to his day job. We put sculpture and art on the grounds, built a small Center with a modern design and dropped a 15 foot by 15 foot stained glass window in the front. Folks would drop by to chat with me that summer, about half just wondering what we thought we were doing, who was paying for all this crap, why were screwing up the rural character of their bucolic existence. Bottles were repeatedly tossed against the building and the glass, pellet guns put holes in the mural, a couple of our sculptures were stolen. My faith in the prophesy of that muralist long ago was a bit perforated too.

So yesterday when I went over to measure the broken window some vandals had smashed, intending to put a stained glass panel in as a replacement, figuring, I guess, that my little library in the old 60’s telephone booth would be vandal proofed if it had more art in it, not just literature, imagine my disappointment to discover the door had been shot out and another large window too. Needless to say I didn’t bother to measure anything other than my despondency. Today I’m thinking about my muralist down there in the ghetto and his art that still resonates nearly half a century later. My own mural at the Visitor Center sports bullet holes and cracked panels and the building itself has been kitsched up with posters of animal butts and adolescent humor. I tell myself someday those posters will come down and the Sculpture Park we built will be honored by the citizenry. I tell myself that as I just finished a 21 foot long mural for the island’s new Administration Building which I’m donating. This is the 20th donation of glass murals, something I do to bring an aesthetic to the island and to the area. That’s what I tell myself. And some days I even believe that. But not today. Today I feel like Don Quixote, not just tilting at windmills but moronically building them. And no, I don’t know what I’ll do with that smashed up Little Library of mine.

The South End Little Library has suffered more than its share of indignities since its grand opening a year or so ago. Vandals the first week tossed books from their shelves in the GTE repurposed phone booth, burned a few, then painted obscenities on the glass windows. Bringing literacy to the denizens of the backwashes here, I realized as head librarian, was going to be no easy task. But really, book burning? It wasn’t as if the burnt volumes were controversial. One was a child’s book about a rabbit and … well, it was hard to decipher through the burnt cover. So who knows, maybe a gay rabbit. Or a rabbit that used curse words. Or an atheist rabbit. Or these illiterates just didn’t like rabbits.

A few months ago the shelves were pulled out of the booth and the books strewn across the lawn to spend a soggy night in the rain before I discovered the mayhem, too late for about six dozen books. For a week I closed the library, put up a sign that the closure was due to vandalism, then debated with myself whether to restock the shelves. No good deed goes unpunished down in this neck of the dark woods. Ignorance is bliss, they tell me, and maybe I was trying to bring my own brand of religion to the unwashed masses who already had Trump to worship.

My little park, a five acre tract with some nice firs and cedars along its trails, is a magnet for garbage disposal, midnight trysts and miscreant hidey-holes. We’ve had broken glass strewn across the parking area, camouflaged pits dug back in the woods with sharpened sticks waiting for unwary hikers, staging areas for stolen goods hidden in the brush, used condoms tossed nightly. Trees and shrubs I’ve planted have been dug up and stolen. Sculptures have been swiped, grills purloined, rocks thrown into the grassy areas to make mowing a shrapnel nightmare. Being the head ranger has been a study in negative human behavior.

So when I went over a few days ago to mow and found the window of the library smashed out with a bottle, I can’t say I was very surprised. No doubt the work of anitfa, left wing radicals and those pesky anarchists tired of looting the urban swamps. Federal troops would likely be mobilized to help me guard this place now, good news. Although library use would probably hit rock bottom. Price you pay for Stormtroopers protecting the Homeland, I guess.
After mowing I went home, got rakes and brooms and returned to clean up the mess. Sure, I grumbled, I whined, I shook my fist. But what are you gonna do? Indeed. Right now I have a hole in my little biblioteca where the rain and the wind can come through. I’m thinking maybe boarding it up rather than replace the glass for future missile throwers. Paint something on it maybe. You know, see if art can soothe the savage beasts on the barbarian South End. I know, fat freakin chance.

The Flatheads were parked at the Diner, their vintage machines waxed and gleaming in the packed dirt parking lot. They meet every Wednesday morning, rain, shine or engine check warning, slide a few tables together, then hold court as they argue after-market carburetors and auto body strategies. And, of course, politics du jour. The rest of us customers either avoid Wednesdays or else come for the show as a willing audience. I count myself in the latter.

Today’s improv started out with a lively discussion of Jerry’s newly purchased ’50 GMC 5 window pickup, original paint, completely stock, nearly immaculate except for a small rust hole in the left quarterpanel. The Flatheads debated whether Jerry should leave the original paint alone or go for a new spray job, an old argument between the purists and the car show enthusiasts.

But somewhere between the spray booth boyz and the ‘let er be’ crowd, the conversation veered without warning into the deep ditch of this year’s elections. Fairlane Frank, a proponent of two tone Fords, had tossed a fork with a clatter on to his half eaten chicken fried steak, splattering white gravy across the formica DMZ. “Trump’s no Republican,” he growled in a mouthful of rage and food. “He’s hi-jacked the whole party.” Pat, proud owner of a 1972 Gremlin and recipient of countless jeers and guffaws, cheerily suggested the time might be right for a 3rd party. “The Know Nothings,” he suggested as a name.

And so it began…. Bel Aire Bobby retorted that we already have that party, opening up a wild round of just which party qualified before Brenda, coffee pot in hand, said, “Maybe you boys should stick with 4 barrel carburetors and dual hemis, leave the politics to the professionals.”

Frank started to object but Brenda stared him down with her headlights on high beam while she poured seconds and thirds. “Frank, I’m makin minimum wage here. No benefits, no insurance, no 401-K. Now my kid needs an operation. Trust me, you don’t want to get me going on politics.” And with that, she whirled to the next table. None of the car guyz said a word for a full minute. Like the man said, all politics is local. But when they left, the tip from the boyz, usually measley, was enough to buy Pat’s Gremlin and pay for a paint job to boot.