The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Jeff Bezos is like a lot of the whiz kid, bang up tech boyz, plenty of smarts, too much money and a penchant for imagining a sci-fi world in their own lifetime. There are plenty of folks who applaud the new Rockefellers, but I’m not one of them. I want them to go away. The moon is a good start, but Mars is even better. Hopefully they’re dreaming even bigger. Leave the solar system, guyz, and be quick about it.

Bezos answered a few questions in Amazon’s stockholder meeting last week, some folks particularly disturbed by the colossal carbon footprint envisioned by same day deliveries, drone technology, and packages containing a toothbrush cushioned by plastic airbags in cardboard boxes that are 100 times larger than the brush delivered by fleets of self-driving trucks and drones. Bezos really didn’t address those concerns, just sees a future so bright we’ll all wear radiation shield sunglasses in our cyclindrical cities orbiting throughout the galaxy, little self-contained communities drifting along in their bubble like boats on a river beneath tangerine skies. You bet.

The trouble is, these self-made bazillionaires have the wherewithal to manifest their vision. And the capability of making this particular planet which I’m kind of fond of, a living hell. If you’re rich enough, you too might board the next city leaving earth’s gravity. Not sure what jobs you’ll have, but hopefully money is as unnecessary as the filthy air and polluted water you’re leaving behind. Utopian dreams by the tech wizards! Oh boy!

Not to sound too Earth chauvinistic, but I like the place. I’d like to take care of it for awhile longer, not just assume folks who feel the need to monetize every profit-making aspect of it have the right to muck it up to the point they’ll want to move on to some new colony to exploit when the resources are sucked dry and the the sky rains poison. I’d prefer to get my Amazon delivery a little later if that would would help. But if Bezos isn’t willing to listen, even to his shareholders, I might have to vote for folks who would make Amazon pay taxes, who would think twice about their packaging, who would hold Bezos’ feet to the fire of global warming. Short of that, hurry up, Jeff and build those rockets. Hopefully you’ll be a passenger on the first plane to leave.

After the boy king’s meltdown yesterday prior to a meeting with Pelosi and Schumer to discuss the way forward on infrastructure, what the Prez had promised a couple trillion for but probably figured out he had no way to fund without raising taxes, Pelosi suggested we give Trump an Intervention. That’s apparently D.C. speak for a Time-Out. Go to your room if you’re going to act like a spoiled brat!! I guess an intervention is half way to an impeachment. Or no supper.

Mama said there’d be days like this. Course, Trump’s mama didn’t. He’s the bully who hits back harder than he got, a big guy in a board room of yes-men and sons-in-laws and kids dumber than a box of one color crayons. Sure, they were afraid of him. One minute raging, the next minute lost in a TV program. But are you gonna criticize Daddy when you know he’ll make you rich?

Pelosi maybe has a point. Actually her point is the end of a sharp stick. She’s figured out how to rile the little fella, make fun of the pathetic boy without seeming mean spirited, just concerned he might be, oh, a little overworked, a little out of his league. It must be tough, running a country with so little talent and unwilling to hire decent help. Wouldn’t hurt to take a break, play some extra days of golf down at Mar a Lago, have some laughs with Rudy Giuliani, forget about the subpoenas and lawsuits and investigations for awhile. Watch a little more Fox and Friends, maybe redecorate Trump Tower. Unwind a bit. He seems ragged as a muskrat with a leg in a trap, all teeth and spit, fang and blood, but not going anywhere any time soon. Take a break, Don, do all of us a world of good.

Pelosi says she’s praying for him. Praying for the country. Nice touch, ma’am, let the evangelicals feel your pain for him. For the Yew Ess of Aye. For all of us. Obviously they’re not praying too hard except for the lives of the unborn. Nancy can pray for them too. Me, I’m praying for that Time-Out. A real long one….

I got most of my education from the School of Hard Knocks. To be fair and completely honest (ho ho), I also graduated from a college with a double major, neither of which I used to find a career or even a viable means of livelihood. What finally served me best was wanting to keep learning, try out new avenues, read books and teach myself, see where the highway led, mostly detours and dead ends. I won’t say everyone should try this at home, but hey, the learning part for sure. Nothing wrong with continuing education even though most folks seem to think graduation is pretty much when it should stop.

Lately, though, we’ve all been getting an education whether we want one or not from the Trump University. Mitt Romney recently said “Here’s what I know: Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He’s playing the members of the American public for suckers. He gets a free ride to the White House, and all we get is a lousy hat.” Mitt is basically right, but he’s forgetting that we’re also getting quite a tutorial in New American Politics, 101. I doubt in our lifetime so many of us have focused so laser-like on the minutiae of Supreme Court nominations, impeachment proceedings, sausage making, foreign policy decisions, nepotism, cabinet appointments or various Constitutional deliberations. We even know what the term ‘emoluments’ means now. Put that on a red baseball hat and call it a mortar board cap. You’ve graduated with honors!

But … like my first run at the sheepskin fit for hanging on the office wall, it may not mean all that much if you can’t or won’t apply it to life skills. What we’ve mostly learned is that so-called Christian values are more malleable than we previously thought. The end certainly justifies the means. You want an end to Roe v Wade, pretty much everything is okay to get it. Honesty? It’s definitely a 20th Century relic. Patriotism? Ask Putin for help on that one. Compassion? Don’t make me laugh. We’re nasty sumbitches now, Homey. The weak need to get out of our way.

Maybe we do get the leaders we deserve, sad to say, and maybe we can still teach old dogs new tricks. It may take the pups to do it, kids fed up with this pathetic do-nothing-sensible government we have now, but if any of them want to tackle the existential problems of our time, they need to get rid of the Trump U. graduates. They know anyone running for President whose sole modus operandi is to beat Trump, well, they’re not the ones who will solve global warming, student debt, nuclear proliferation or income inequity. Trump isn’t the problem, he’s just the con-artist CEO of Trump U. It may just be time to try that School of Hard Knocks and forget about bogus degrees. Time’s running out.

It’s not every day … or even every year you get to look down into an eagle’s nest. They are, after all, perched high in the firs where they won’t be bothered much. They like a good view of their hunting grounds and probably a better view of raiding crows who seem to be fond of attacking their huge adversaries. Today I watched one of the adults sitting on the two newly hatched chicks (one is one day old, the other two) and the only thing that seemed to ruffle his or her feathers was a passing crow. She watched it like a hawk.

Me, I am too. Here’s a couple shots from my aerie above theirs. Next times, I’m bringing a tripod. National Geographic, eat yer heart out…

I’ve been out of the Loop lately, walking the Pacific beaches over on Washington’s pristine coast on the Olympic Peninsula. No wi-fi, no newspapers, no TV. I know, it’s hard to imagine in this day and age. Cold turkey from the Trump news cycle. Forget the 12 step program, just Total Immersion. Or Aversion. After a day or two the shakes settle down a bit, the fever abates, the absence even grows fonder. Just the slow rolling of waves endlessly soothing, endlessly churning, endlessly washing the sins of the world. Or something delusional like that….

But we’re back now in cell tower range, back to the endless crawlers of the news cycle, back to … yup, Trump stunts. Trying to catch up after a 72 hour hiatus, forget it, too much backlog and like they say out on the coast: Backlogs Kill! Or was it beach logs? Either way, they both probably do.

We’re evacuating personnel from Iraq and deploying a carrier fleet to the Gulf. Sounds ominous. We’re sending troops to the Mexican border, maybe to staunch the Iranian Revolutionary Guard from slipping through. And we escalated a war with China. A trade war anyway. Some other Cracker state has banned abortions. Trump pardoned a crook who wrote a book on what a great president he is. Jared has come up with a ‘new’ immigration plan. Immigrants on the border are being flown to Democratic counties in Florida. Half a dozen more Democrats have thrown their hat in the ring to run for President. The Attorney General is re-investigating FBI ‘spying’ on folks in Trump’s election campaign. Three days out of earshot and the world has destabilized in our absence. I doubt we’ll ever take another vacation again unless we’re hoping for an apocalypse. It’s too stressful coming back to a dystopian America every time.

We had a friend who trekked Nepal for a month and when she returned, she experienced what she called ‘culture shock’. Too much traffic, too many cereals in the grocery store, too much media, too many emails, too much stress, too much overload on every level. I know exactly what she meant. After only a few days…! Today I plan to go down to the beach. Walk in the woods. Work on a stained glass window. Maybe China will pay for it. Sure, China will pay for it.

I listened to a report recently on public radio extolling the virtues of using Instagram to further an artist’s career. As an artist with a career in definite need of a jumpstart, I paid close attention, figuring maybe a tutorial in social media might be just my ticket to fame and fortune. They featured two artists, the first being some guy I’d never heard of (no surprise since I don’t subscribe to Instagram) who painted colorful murals but apparently didn’t make enough money to quit his day job. So, using the power of a photographic platform, he marketed his art on T-shirts and coffee mugs. Sometimes he tried out new mural designs, see what folks bought and what folks wished he’d never drawn. Democratic art, I guess, vote for the winning design.

The other artist was a painter and she was doing okay on Instagram but complained how it sucked up all her time trying to stay current, keep posting, respond to her fans and adoring public. She admitted she was thinking of dropping off the social media rat race, maybe spend some time making art instead. She mentioned how her fanbase would almost always respond negatively to about anything new or different she was trying out — they only wanted the tried and true.

There are folks I’ve been unfortunate enough to meet who think good art is defined by its sales potential. If it sells, it’s good. If it doesn’t, probably bad art. Nice, I guess, to have a quantifiable definition. Jeff Koons’ stainless steel rabbit just sold for 91 million dollars to the dad of our current Secretary of the Treasury, Steve Mnuchin, making Koons the greatest living artist of our time. Give me a break. The guy’s a PR guy who couldn’t, as one critic once said, carve his name on a tree, the kind of putz who photographed himself having anal sex with his Italian porn star wife and calling it art. Jeff would have loved Instagram.

I don’t pretend to be the final arbiter of what good art is. I just know it isn’t what sells the most. Otherwise I’d probably be printing T-shirts and coffee cups with stained glass designs, probably only the ones my clamoring fans bought multiples of. The danger, at least to me, of being an artist is falling into the trap of following the money. I’d rather have a crappy day job if money was the goal. Which, I guess, is why I was a graveyard shift orderly for 10 lousy years. Okay, a crappy night job. Beats boxing up those T-shirt orders, if nothing else.

You know it’s a dangerous world when driftwood becomes a deadly predator, but I suppose it’s best to stay on guard at all times. You just never know what lurks around the corner! Beach logs lurk around my corner this morning. Seemingly benign but … waiting to pounce on the unsuspecting.

Kalaloch. No doubt a Hoh tribal word for Killer Dead Trees. Fortunately it’s pouring down rain this morning, no chance we’re venturing down to the beach where the logs are piled high. We watched a sea otter hump out of the tide and directly into the waiting maw of those logs, last we’ll see of it, I bet. Let his demise be a cautionary tale for us visiting humans. No wonder the sea otters nearly went extinct, they’re obviously slow learners.

Kalaloch beaches are strewn with dead razor clams, crabs, sand dollars — all no doubt victims of beach log attacks if my scientific acumen is accurate. And I think you know by now it is. Of course there are other warnings on the National Park kiosks. Sneaker waves. Rip tides. The dangers are plenty. Falls off the bluffs. Slugs the size of pythons. Antibiotic resistant mildew. Maybe we made a mistake coming here. It was supposed to be a mellow vacation, not a jungle safari.

If we’re smart, we’ll play it safe and stay put, forget venturing down onto the sandpits. Although coming in, I did notice the signs warning about tsunamis. Evacuation Route, they said. Maybe we should just start now….

I’m about as anachronistic as any old geezer I know. I hate newfangled gizmos so much that can track my every move, my every purchase, my every tweet, my every everything, it almost makes me a certified Luddite. I don’t want a cellphone attached 24/7 to my person, I don’t want a refrigerator I can adjust the temperature with the cellphone I don’t own, I object to GPS devices in my truck, my car, the mizzus’ laptop or the baby carriage. Don’t want surveillance cameras monitoring the shack. I don’t want to be on Facebook or Instagram or any other social media platform to keep myself informed about conformity. I don’t watch Fox News or MSNBC for my ‘news’, I just buy a couple of newspapers. I don’t plan to be an integral cog of the Borg Hive. Just sayin.

But … I do think the folks who believe coal is coming back, that fracking is perfectly safe, that oil will power our future, well, these folks are the real anachronists. These folks who lobby for pipelines and more refineries, who pine for regulations that allow car companies to lower MPG’s, who think global warming is liberal bullshit, who love the Drill Baby Drill rant and think we should keep burning fossil fuel until the last oil drum is hauled up out of the earth, these folks make me look like a visitor from the future.

Somebody needs to give them the news: the planet is warming up, buddy, and that ain’t fake news. I get it, you don’t want to drive an electric car. You don’t want to use the sun to power your entertainment center. You don’t like the look of wind farms and you don’t care for tidal generators. You like gas, check. You like a car that pollutes, check. You think ‘clean coal’ is ready for a breakthrough, double check. You think natural gas power plants are the future, bingo. You believe what you hear from the GOP, that climate change is a hoax and all those scientists are wrong, happy days for you!

Wake up, pal, the future is calling you on your cellphone. Your kids are starting to sweat, just in case you didn’t notice. They think maybe something needs to be done and done pretty quick. Check your engine light, pardner, the one blinking red on the dashboard. It’s time for more than an oil change. It’s time for a complete overhaul. Wrap your pointy little head around it, the revolution is coming.

Well, the bad news arrived this week and no, it wasn’t about our favorite President or Global Warming. It wasn’t even about the buildup of arms near Iran or the launching of intermediate missiles in North Korea. Venezuela was even pushed off the front page. Not that these aren’t all definite or even existential threats, but a United Nations science report was released warning us that if we do not wise up as many as a million species on this planet will become extinct in the next hundred years.

I know, faux science. So what if 20% of the earth’s species bit the bullet over the last century, you’re thinking. We got plenty more where those came from and probably even some brand new ones incubating in the jungles even now. Ebola, AIDS, swine flu viruses, hey, they’re rolling in to replace the ones dying out, right? Hopefully we’ll lose a few pests, poison ivy, mosquitoes, antibiotic resistant fungii, the cold virus, Herpes and the Trumps, all those questionable species that make our lives a living hell. Nettles too!

Course that isn’t exactly how it works, is it? We got this whole interdependency thing going, this Web of Life, that means when one species dies, plenty of others suffer, kind of like losing the Democrats and now look what we got. But I digress. As usual. My apologies. Take mosquitoes instead. There’s always folks who want to introduce sterile male Anopheles into the environment to put a stop to Zika or the black plague, but how many birds live on eating mosquitoes? What happens to them? And if those particular birds die, what dominoes are next?

You get rid of Trump, maybe you end up with Bannon or some other alt-right dickhead. Okay okay, I’m off subject here again. Sorry. My point is this. I was up on my roof the last two days, scraping sixteen species of mosses, lichens, small
bonsai trees in the gutter, an entire universe of mushrooms, alien byrophytes, plus all their attendant bacteria and god only knows what else munching merrily in the flora that makes my roof an interdependent world of decomposing fir needles, leaves and windblown seeds. I argue with the mizzus every year that we need to let this live in peace, that we must learn to coexist, that science is now on my side on this.

But I’m always outvoted one against one. So if a few hundred species died the last couple of days, don’t point an accusing finger at me. And anyway, there are 999,900 left. Although … I may have unintentionally set off a dire chain reaction. With a little luck maybe the Trumps will be the next victim in a domino of extinctions. Wishful thinking, I know, but a man can dream, can’t he?

The Southendomish was a proud tribe, versed in the ways of the salmon and the whale before their numbers diminished to squat. Members of the tribe were scattered to the four points of Puget Sound, denied tribal rights given the others by treaty and left to scrounge what few clams and mussels and crabs they could. When the whales became scarce and the hunting grounds crammed with vacation homes, the Southendomish were nothing but a fading echo back in the nettle ravines, a myth now to the locals where once their canoes ruled the waters.

History, even for the white invaders, is continually lost to rot and rust and ruin, but for the Southendomish, little remains of their culture, not the language or the customs or their fishing skills. Oh, a few clam middens here and there. An old carving in a tree on the bluff at the Head where dozens were killed by a landslide below. An occasional stone weight for sinking their woven nettle fishing nets. But there are no photos, no oral histories, no living memory of the tribe.

So when the good city of Everett found a dead whale beached on their waterfront, the folks down there, unaware and uncaring of the noble history of the Southendomish, decided to tow the bloating beast to the former hunting grounds of the island here, a fresh indignity to the legacy of the natives, to decompose into a putrid and incredibly obnoxious smelling pile of rotting blubber not even a starving crow would approach. It arrived two days ago in an isolated cove near the Head, forty feet long, who knows how many tons. The South End evidently has been designated an unofficial cetacean burial ground, a compost pit for the NIMBY’s across the water far from the olfactory hell that now emanates from down at the beach. Thank you very much. What’s the next gift, smallpox?

If we could gather enough concerned neighbors, we would happily return the favor. Haul down our own unwanted compost waste, our sani-can pumpings, our poopscoop collections, our seafood leftovers, our dirty Pamper diapers and dump them on the waterfront of the privileged rich, a fair trade. But in the end, don’t think the Southendomish will be avenged. They won’t, not by a long shot.