The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I didn’t hear about the Straight Pride march in time to attend. As a white guy, straight male, I’m like a lot of Trump supporters, angry as hell that I’m being persecuted for being white and male, straight and of European descent. Seems like these days the only people getting Medicaid and Food Stamps are anybody that isn’t me. It just ain’t right. It just ain’t fair. If anybody needs a break, it’s us Caucasian country club boys.

Sure, it may look to some that we’re the 1%, rich as Midas, getting all the tax breaks, but lemme tell ya a little secret: it’s lonely at the top. Look at Trump, how many hate the guy. And why? For being rich. And white. And male. Think how he feels, the most despised person in the world. The only folks who like him are, well, white, and male, and rich. Okay, even some of the poor like him. If they’re white and male and straight. And some of the women too, if you want to know the truth, if you can even handle the truth. If they’re white and evangelical.

Lately we’ve been inundated with everything from the #MeToo Movement to Black Lives Matter. The immigrants even want to point accusing fingers at us white guyz. And now the gays and the transgenders. They want to use my bathroom, for godsake. How am I spozed to take a piss with some character who might be half a woman watching from her stall? The Bible didn’t say God was created in her image, let me tell you straight up. Check it out for yourself, Trump’s favorite book. Mike Pence wouldn’t be caught dead with a straight woman much less one with what he has between his legs. Not that I’ve given a lot of thought to what the Vice President has between his legs … trust me on that too. Straight as an arrow, that’s me. Whiter than white. And persecuted for it!!

No, I missed the Straight Pride march. But I sure am glad my fellow Aryan brothers organized it. Let the losers call us Nazis, maybe it’s time to take a stand. We’re rapidly becoming the minority in America. It isn’t right. What’s the point of being the 1% if folks don’t fear us? If money can’t buy happiness, why do these people want to take it away from us?

Hurricane Dorian, packing winds over 200 mph and pushing a storm surge of up to 25 feet, is hammering the Bahamas right now. The Bahamas are almost all under 30 feet above sea level. Meaning, well, you get the picture. If you want to see what rising oceans mean for the future, this week will give us all a frightening sneak preview. The Trumpster was so concerned he canceled his trip to Poland, supposedly to take a hands-on approach to the incoming disaster, but actually to play 18 holes of golf. His handlers argued that he was paying close attention with advisors bringing frequent updates. Considering his warning that folks in Alabama should be prepared to evacuate, I’m guessing the updates came from his caddy.

What, him worry? Alfred E.’s got nothing on the Golfer-in-Chief, that’s for certain. But it is, after all, Labor Day and I’m sure you’ll agree that even the hard-working President of the Yew Ess Aye deserves a vacation. Trade wars are easy, he tells us, but c’mon, you and I know it’s actually hard. He just doesn’t want us worrying about him. Trump famously castigated Obama for taking time off from his job to play a few rounds of golf, but that was then, this is now and the job is harder, maybe the hardest it’s ever been in history. Why the man has played 229 days of golf in his first two and a half years on the job. GolfNewsNet, a must-read site for those who want to stay abreast of our duffing prez, states that he has played golf or spent time on his golf courses 22% of the time since being elected.

This, of course, is how billionaires conduct bizness. Off the tee. It’s where the deals are brokered and if the man cheats a bit, welcome to the world of high stakes finance. And sure, it costs a bit to fly to these golf courses with a full entourage of secret service folks, but would you rather have a stressed-up Leader of the Free World? No, I didn’t think so. Let’s be honest, he wasn’t going to stop Hurricane Dorian anyway. Not unless it was going to make landfall at Mar-a-Lago. In which case he’s got his hand on the nuclear button. Lose Mar-a-Lago and where would the next G-7 summit be held?

So Rome burned while Nero fiddled, if we’re to believe our 8th grade history books. The emperor of the most powerful country the world had ever seen had supposedly gone mad and started the fire In Rome A.D. 64, then played his violin while the city burned. Nero, legendary in history for something he probably didn’t do…. Making Rome Great Again, by destroying it if necessary.

Ah, the good old days, back again. Our own Nero just went to the G-7 summit, skipped the climate hearings since he doesn’t believe in global warming, probably sat in his room, not with a fiddle, but a couple of TV sets tuned to Fox and Friends, fuming that the allies he’s repeatedly kicked aren’t interested in his tariff war with China.

Meanwhile … the Amazon rainforests are burning. Greenland’s glaciers are melting. The planet, this fragile little ball of crust surrounded by water, fueled by a molten core and held together with gravity that keeps the atmosphere glued to the surface, spins on its axis as it hurtles through the universe. Why worry? It’s done just fine up til now. You know, if you don’t count meteor strikes and super volcanos and ice ages.

There is something apocalyptic about viewing the Amazon smoldering from satellite images. We’re burning what we call the ‘lungs of the world’, the place we get over 20 % of our oxygen and where C02 is absorbed, the rainforest where more than half of the world’s estimated 10 million species of plants, animals and insects live. If this isn’t an existential threat, I guess there are no existential threats. Sure, why would the New Nero sit in on the climate discussions? The Brazilian equivalent to Trump has let these fires burn, even blamed his political opponents for setting them when the truth is the fires are started by illegal miners and farmers. Gold fever. Same as our fossil fuel industry. Money to be made. The future can take care of itself.

I don’t know and neither do you how much damage is being done while we tune our banjos and string up our fiddles. But to sit and watch the Amazon burning, my god, Nero looks like a choir boy. And to think, we put this madman in office.

Stanwoodopolis, like all little burgs up and down the Puget Sound, is experiencing growth pains. New schools, housing subdivisions, roads, infrastructure, you name it, the little planning department goes through personnel like suet through a goose. They’re underpaid, overworked and highly stressed. And businesses are packing up from down at the flood plain and evacuating before the tsunami of insurance premiums inundates them.

So when a new business opportunity knocks on their door, they’re all ears. The permit for a large scale compost facility at the end of town was contentious, you better believe. The good citizens of Stanwoodopolis already have the sewer lagoon next door across the highway and the thought, or the odor, of one more rotten acreage was too far a bridge. After plenty of acrimony the city council denied the composters their dump site. No doubt the Welkommen sign that would read SOMETHING IS ROTTEN IN STANWOODOPOLIS had something to do with their decision.

This week another business venture application was heard by the Planning Board and the City Council. Seems a start-up crematorium wanted to open up its furnace right there in downtown. You might think denying the compost site might have been precedent aplenty to deny the burning of bodies, but you’d be mistaken. The Council, in a carefully worded approval, stated that since restaurants emit odors in nearby locations, they could not find legal reason to deny the application on the grounds of noxious odors. I guess the difference between a burger smell emanating from the Duck Inn and the odor of human flesh may not be all that great. Who knows, the traveling public, upon sniffing the wafting breeze of the new crematorium, might subliminally hunger for the Monster Burger down the street. Great for the restaurant business, not bad for the funeral home and probably a revenue source for Stanwoodopolis. What’s not to like?

Personally I think a contest for best sign is definitely in order. Me, I like one that takes its cue from Whidbey Naval Air Base: Pardon Our Odor, It’s the Smell of Freedom. I’m sure the rest of you have your own preferences. Like Two Toke Tom’s: Stanwoodopolis, Your Last Stop. Let’s get the Chamber of Commerce on this as soon as possible. The tourism potential is too immense to be put on hold. Or, as one of the Flathead Car Guyz said down at the Diner, Stanwoodopolis, wake up and smell the coffins.

Our president recently stated, when asked why he didn’t attend the G-7 conference on climate, that he was the most environmental president ever. Like most endeavors of the man, he is far and away the most competent. The others at the conference took up donations for a paltry few million to fight the Brazilian rainforest fires, something the Brazilian prez pooh-poohed unless Macron apologized personally to him for previous slights. While world leaders throw sand in their playmates’ faces in the sandbox of world politics, our Environmental President tackles issues mano y mano, no need for alliances, no need for spending much money, no need for petty squabbles among former allies. No, cut right to the chase.

Take these pesky hurricanes. Right now there’s a tropical storm bearing down on Puerto Rico, the second hit after Hurricane Maria that pretty much devastated the island nation. Oh sure, he could have spent billions helping our own citizens rebuild, but … why bother when another one is going to smack them anyway? Heartless, you say? Not really. Because the Enviro-Man has a Plan. Not just any ordinary garden variety plan, a really Yuge plan.

Nuke em! You heard right, Mr. Timid. Drop a nukie egg right down the eye of those storms, blast those winds to smithereens. If you think for one New Yawk minute there’s time for environmental studies or computer simulations of what might happen when we detonate an atomic bomb in a swirling wind of 100 plus miles per hour, you don’t know our President. He’s got NO time for fake science, buddy. He’s given it plenty of consideration, you can bet your Greenpeace membership card on that. Drop it and see what happens, a real time experiment.

And Puerto Rico might be a good first drop. Sure don’t want to wait til it hits the Mar-a-Lago resort, a lot of billionaire guests wouldn’t care to be irradiated, I don’t care if it does bring the winds to heel.

Albert Einstein wasn’t afraid to drop the first atomic bomb. Because his big brain had done the calculations! And Donald Trump isn’t afraid for exactly the same reason. He understands the atom is our friend. And if you want to defend hurricanes as Acts of God or simply the whim of Mother Nature, be my guest. Even so, the Emviro-Prez has your back. Remember that when you’re voting next fall. Tree huggers aren’t going to stop hurricanes. Put that on your liberal little bumper sticker, why don’tcha? Better yet, try NUKE THE ‘CANE!

Yesterday I saw where the meat industry and the cattle rustlers had joined forces to lobby for legislation that would effectively prohibit the vegetarian crowd from labeling their garden fixins as ‘meat’. Impossible Burgers, Beyond Meat, etc, all made from peas and carrots, blended with secret spices and god only knows what else, to taste like hamburger would be banned from advertising as some sort of faux meat. Same tactic as the dairy industry going after soy ‘milk’ and almond ‘milk’ and polyester milk or any other goop not using a cow’s udder.

Now you ask me, and I know you wouldn’t dream of it, meat has been tampered with anyway. You think a Big Mac is pure meat? My milk has sugar and vitamins and who knows what else added. Is it still milk? Do I think soy milk is milk or are we consumers so addled by Trump that we just believe everything we’re told now? Beyond Meat sort of declares right out of the rodeo chute that it isn’t meat, it’s beyond that stuff. Impossible Burgers, same thing.

So just in case you did decide to come to me for nutritional advice, me being the Picture of Health, I volunteered to be the guinea pig for these new vegetarian products. Yep, I bought a package of Beyond Burgers and I also bought a package of ground sirloin, made a few patties and grilled them to South End perfection on the grill. I admit, I figured the faux meat would be like a tofu turkey dog or a boca-burger of mushrooms and soy pellets, not real tasty unless you were living in South Sudan, not the South End. But … lemme tell ya. I see now why the cattle industry and the meat packers are clamoring to put the skids on these burgers. They not only tasted as good as my sirloin hamburger, they tasted better.

And just to put the fear of Oscar Mayer on them, they even had the mouth feel of meat right down to something that simulated bits of gristle. You wouldn’t guess in a blind taste test, these weren’t meat. Peas mostly. Just like hamburger. Don’t ask me how they do it, maybe we wouldn’t even want to know any more than we want to watch sausage production. But yeah, the meat industry ought to be afraid, very afraid.

I mean, c’mon, wouldn’t half of us switch to something healthier than red meat if it tasted the same or better and was actually good for you? Wouldn’t the folks concerned about farting cows and global warming rush to the Impossible Burger in a stampede? You bet your colonoscopy they would! Where’s the beef now, Wendy?

Give it a try, is all I’m asking. And pay no attention to the pop-up ads on this blog site for similar product lines. Not my doing….

Everyday, more Trump. Trump … Trump … Trump. A water torture of dripping tweets, outrageous declarations, petulant tantrums. Never ending. Constantly updated. And always more crazed. Yesterday he labeled the Danish Prime Minister a nasty woman for treating him badly by refusing to negotiate a real estate deal for Greenland. Then he canceled a state visit to the land of Hamlet. Kim Jong Un is busy across the Pacific testing intermediate missiles, but that’s no big deal, he tells the Japanese who are strangely troubled by their nuclear neighbor. The big deal was Greenland.

Now he’s calling himself the Chosen One in his dealings with China, the Lion of Judah and the King of Israel in the Middle East, the God-King here on earth. Let the nations of the planet tremble, he is the Second Coming. Irritate him and he will breathe fire on your people. Try to reason with him and he will raise your tariffs. If the entire world is plunged into a new recession, so be it. Mighty is his will and terrible is his wrath. He no longer has or needs advisors, so great is his intellect. He keeps an army of court jesters, mostly in cabinet posts, that he rages at, compliments, ignores and eventually fires. If and when he resorts to having them executed, his followers will cheer heartily.

These are the best of times, these are the worst of times, these are quintessentially Trump Times. Madness rules the Kingdom and all semblance of order has been banished. What does it matter if we are thrown into chaos, what we want, what we expect, what we seemingly demand are daily plot twists that hold our collective interests. Crazy? Not if it boosts the ratings. Insane? Not if every waking hour Trump holds our attention.

Some say we should invoke the 25th amendment. Remove the madman from office before he does more harm than what he has wrought already. You know and I do too, we’re the madmen, we’re the crazy, we’re the hopelessly insane. We tune in to this the way we hunger for a good catastrophe, TV cameras focused 24/7 on the dead, the victims, the carnage. And then we move on to the next mass killing, the next hurricane, the next flood, the next car pile-up, the coming pandemic, the future economic crash.

When life has become a reality show, you definitely need a good narrator.

Johnny the Hammer runs Piranha Brothers Construction with his partner Crazy Eddie. They fight tooth and nail, but for a time in those halcyon years when most of Seattle and half of California were migrating north like spawn crazed humpies, they had enough work that they could run a house or more each and stay out of each other’s hair. Well, at least Johnny had hair. Under his baseball cap, Eddie was bald and pale as an ostrich egg, although not near as smooth. More than a couple of times he’d been coldcocked by beams coming down on his noggin in mishaps and the result was he had permanent lumps in that hard skull of his that never subsided.

Johnny says that’s what makes Eddie so damn stupid — all the sense he ever had got knocked out of him early. Still, he builds a better house than Johnny and even though Johnny hates to admit it, he calls Eddie when some blueprint gets overly complicated or a fancy roof design’s flashing gives him too long a pause. Besides a magnetic attraction to toppling 6×6’s, Eddie’s got a head for details and complexity. Can’t read well, but he visualizes every stud and roughout as if he had a photo developing in the darkroom of his brain.

Johnny must’ve told this story a hundred times of Eddie getting all excited about the new shop that opened on the South End. Nails and More. This was back in the days when the two still could call themselves friends, still worked on one house at a time. If they had one to work on…. Eddie had been arguing with the counterman at the Lumber Yard over some charge he had questioned and, by god, he was ticked off by the end of the argument and eager for a new vendor. Any vendor. Even if it meant driving off island and paying cash.

One morning he took off mid-hammer stroke on the McMansion the Crosby’s of Palo Alto were having Piranha Bros. build on the bluffs of the west side and drove his one ton old Ford up toward Elger Bay Store where the sign he’d noticed that morning had finally seduced him with its siren call: NAILS AND MORE GRAND OPENING

He was hoping a little too hard the ‘MORE’ was lumber and possibly even some electric and plumbing.

Maybe it was too little coffee. Maybe too much. When he got inside the door and before his eyes could adjust from full sunlight, Sherri, the new owner, greeted him with a Come right on in, I’m Sherri and you’re my first customer and I’m not going to charge you for this visit. On the house!

Hoo boy, Eddie couldn’t believe his ears. Visions of free shingles, siding, 2×6’s, bandoliers of nails for his pneumatic —- all floated up like a Christmas in Camaloch. When his eyes finally adjusted, he realized his mistake. Couldn’t come right out and admit it, naturally, so Eddie, indeed, unwittingly became Sherri’s first customer. Full nail trim and cuticle treatment, but he passed on the ‘More’. “Gotta get back on the job,” he mumbled and fled into the sunlight.

Eddie dated Sherri for awhile that year and it was remarked upon by all the Piranha Bros.’ crews how, despite the cuts and callouses, Eddie’s hands were as immaculately manicured as a golf course green. Course, never in his presence.

When the Board of the South End Senior Center met last month at what was the old Tyee Grange Hall, now the SESC, members were caught off-guard when Brenda Bodice, the newly elected President, proposed changing the name. “We need to make this a Big Tent,” she argued strenuously in the face of what she assumed would be a recalcitrant Board. “We have to expand the Mission,” she cried, waving her half full paper Starbucks cup the way a general would hoist his sword atop his horse. In fact it looked as if Brenda might stand on her chair the more animated she became.

“Aw, Brenda,” Jim Swenson, newly elected Vice President and current highest volume realtor up at Windy Rear’s last remaining office on the island after closing satellite offices this past month, “we argue this chestnut every new President. New name, same game, you ask me. What’re you proposing we call it anyway, the Senile Center and hope we draw the dementia crowd?” From his perch near the back door, Jerry Cook guffawed. Maybe, he chortled, we could play Jeopardy with them, see who can remember the clue long enough to hit the buzzer.

Mandy Van Horne, whose mother had just been diagnosed with Alzheimers, scolded him. “Instead of making fun of the afflicted, Jerry, maybe you could button it up and give your humor a rest. I think it’s tired.” Jerry started to mouth off once more but thought better of it. Mandy was not a woman you want to offend. Her ex-husband Wally could tell you some terrifying stories if you needed proof.

“We need to draw a younger crowd,” Brenda forged forward. “Half our membership is dead or will be soon. Same as what happened to the Tyee Grange. You have to give the kids a reason to come down and they’re sure not coming down to a Senior Center for bingo night if they’re not seniors. Is that hard to understand?”

Elizabeth Aalmgren wondered what they would want to do with kids anyway. ‘We going to bring in rap bands?” she asked sarcastically. Brenda, not about to be dissuaded easily, said, “We can figure that out once we get a new name. I don’t know, Liz, maybe some music for the younger crowd isn’t a bad idea. They sure aren’t coming to hear the South End String Band play old time fiddle songs from two centuries ago, I know that.”

“What about calling us just The Center,” Jerry said. “Easy to remember.” Mandy threw him a glare and Jerry immediately threw up his hands. “I didn’t mean it to be funny, Mandy. Sorry, geez, don’t take it the wrong way.”

Phil from Whidbey Bank suggested Tyee Center. Donna from Albertson’s Funeral Home thought Community Center would be neutral enough. Jim Swenson declared he didn’t want to change the name at all, think of all those stationary changes, addresses, email accounts, “c’mon, it would be a total headache. Plus, think of the history. We been the South End Senior Center for twenty-five years. Why change it now?”

The meeting lasted an extra half hour until Phil said he needed to get home to watch the latest installment of some show he recommended to everyone, in its 3rd season and a little late to start. Jim wanted out too so he proposed renaming themselves the South End Center. Phil seconded it, Brenda grumbled, Elizabeth said let’s do it and Jerry voted yes too, motion passed, meeting adjourned. Brenda turned out the lights, locked the doors and walked to her car in the dark parking lot. Rap bands, she was thinking she’d have to look into that. Somebody down at the high school must know a few….