The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I was reading in the fake newspaper we get every morning how a dead grey whale had washed up on the shores of Everett’s industrially pristine waterfront, so to minimize the rotting smells of blubber decomposing in the unseasonable sunshine, the DNR folks were going to tow it to ‘an undisclosed location on Camano Island’. For those of you not versed in the topography of our fair island, let me explain that the only place remote enough for cetacean disposal is the South End, an eight mile stretch of shoreline with high bluffs from our place to the opposite side where houses end and a desolate stretch of beach forms the Head where few humans interrupt the gulls and eagles.

So me and the mizzus grabbed a camera and went in search of the carcass before decomposition would make it unapproachable even by telephoto if the wind were blowing the stench in our direction. The tide was minus 2, making the circumnavigation possible without being caught half way and forced to hunker down up in the driftwood logs against the eroding bluffs to wait for hours before proceeding further. We had fair winds and a warm sun in our face. We were on a mission: to find the great grey whale.

We walked to the Head, photographing eagles and Mt. Rainier, but no whale sightings. Plenty of whale holes where the beasts had plowed the sandbars for ghost shrimp, but not the bloated body of Moby. We plunged ahead, turning north past the Tulalip tribes’ tidelands at the southernmost point of the island, the true South End, where a century back their people had been killed in the dozens by a landslide while encamped in the very place we now walked. Ahead lay 3 or 4 isolated coves, perfect for the dumping of giant marine carcasses far from human habitation. I figured one of those would be the burial ground.

A fever not unlike that of Ahab took possession of me, an obsessed quest for the great mammal, dead or alive, it no longer mattered. We stumbled across rough cobbles, past shipwrecks, below eagles’ nests, around landslides, over sandflats soft with the cavities of a million clams, all the while expecting the whale, always the whale, around the next bend, behind the fallen boulders, but no, there was no whale by the time we reached Tyee and its ghetto of beach houses jammed relentlessly together between the base of the bluffs and the rising sea levels.

The whale, we learned later, hadn’t yet been towed. It was arriving that night. This morning I’m debating whether to walk the Head again. The fever has yet to abate. The great fish is out there. Dead as last night’s fevered nightmare. Dead, but not gone. Somewhere on the remote stretches of the South End, she rises, thar, thar she rises! You know and I do too, I will have to return as well.

And when the bloodlust diminishes, when the great grey beast has bleached white its bones in the relentless sun of the South End, we will, all us inhabitants down here, collect our refuse, our trash, our composting detritus and hopefully barge it down to ‘an undisclosed location’ in that pristine city to the south, a fair exchange, the very least we could do to return the favor.

Maybe you get up every morning, like I do, dreading the latest tweets, the next outrage, the newest cracks in the Constitution and you think, like I do, just 20 more months, if we can just weather a little more than a year and a half, we’ll wake up to a Return to Normalcy, we’ll have survived the madness, we’ll take back our lives. But then you pick up a paper, like I did today, and read that Billy Graham’s braindead kid thinks Trump deserves two more years, ‘reparations’, he calls them, for the injustice of having Mueller investigate his contacts with the Russians and now that Barr has declared complete exoneration for any possible obstruction of justice, well, time to toss out the Constitution and give our Leader a few bonus years.

You can’t make this shit up, you really can’t. When Pelosi raised the possibility of Trump declaring the 2020 elections bogus and refusing to leave office, she was echoing the President’s own attorney, Michael Cohen, who suggested just such a scenario. What you are learning, each and every pre-caffeinated dawn, is that everything is possible, no matter how twisted, no matter how illegal, no matter how improbable. There’s no use trying,” [Alice] said: “one can’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Alice is getting plenty of practice these days. More than six some days. Ten thousand lies since Trump took office, about ten a day, a remarkable record. And now we just take it for granted. ‘Ignorance is strength,’ Orwell said in 1984. Now we got a strong man in the White House. ‘Freedom is slavery. War is Peace.’ The news is fake. Up is down. The sky is falling.

Me and my friends are sick of it. We’re fatigued by the slow rolling tidal wave of idiocy, corruption, lawlessness, mendacity and ignorance. The GOP, watching their party taken over by thugs and crooks, has decided to go along in order to survive. Survive as what? Toadies to a mad king? My friends used to believe a price would be paid for such cowardice, but we don’t anymore. We just hope and pray we can survive til the next election. We hope the madness will end then. “But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked. “Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.” Most mornings, that seems to be true. But then, what is true anymore….?

My sense of humor went on strike yesterday. Nothing I could say or do, not even a considerable bump in the minimum wage I pay her, would convince her to come back, not even for a trial run. ‘Where you gonna go?’ I asked in a painfully pleading voice. ‘None of your business,’ she called out over her shoulder. I offered early retirement, vacation time, full health care, but nothing doing. I said at least leave me a phone number where you can be reached. ‘I need you more than ever,’ I admitted. ‘These are terrible times. If a man can’t laugh occasionally, he’ll go insane.’

‘Welcome to the club,’ my sense of humor growled just before slamming the door on the way out. I confess, I haven’t been attentive to my S.O. H.’s needs of late, but I didn’t think things had gotten so far beyond remedy. Sure, I read the papers, newsfeeds, blogs, all things political and yeah, it makes me eternally pissed off seeing my country run by punks and thugs as if they were operating a crime syndicate in a third world country. I mean, I did notice that my chuckles were few and far between, my drinking had picked up a notch, my messages to friends were growing darker, my response to phone solicitors was no longer amused, but I didn’t realize I had slipped into a steady dripping funk. Sinister thoughts were entering my fevered head, fantasies of terrible accidents befalling our dear Leader, subpoenas and impeachment wishes, presidential untreatable syphilis and worse, much much worse.

No wonder my S.O.H. took a hike! What’s funny about wishing harm to someone? Even if you hate the sonofabitch? But of course the corrosive part of hating this guy was that eventually I started hating the people that voted him in. And the politicians who make excuses for him. And the Party that enables this totally undemocratic dickhead. My S.O.H. doesn’t handle that kind of toxin, nothing humorous about it, no great punchline here. The trouble with hatred is it has no room for my S.O.H., none whatsoever, and couples counseling isn’t going to help, no way. We might have stayed together for the children, but … we don’t have kids. So I can’t blame my sense of humor for this. She knew it was time to go. Well before me, I see now. Maybe we can work things out eventually, I’m hoping but not real optimistic. Meanwhile, I’ll just stew in my own bile and trust in the power of a vestigial funny bone. You never know, sometimes they grow back….

I guess one way to tell if you’re an old timer or not is if you remember ordering an item from, say, the Sears Roebuck catalog, by phone or by mail, then waiting a week or three for delivery. Patience might not be your middle name back then, but it was definitely a requirement for a happy life. Now, of course, we live in the world of algorithms, computerized programs operating at speeds of nano-seconds. You can’t get your internet to punch up a You-Tube in three seconds, you move on, disgusted. We want it and we want it NOW!

Amazon started one day delivery awhile back in the Mesozoic Era, free with a subscription to Prime. You pay a yearly fee and voila, everything you order from the Godzilla of merchandizers comes not only without a shipping charge but comes next day. Great gimmick. I have friends who only order from these retailers just for the convenience of fast delivery. I suspect there are others who think similarly. But along comes Walmart and Target, offering the same deal but without requiring a hundred plus bucks a year, so there goes Amazon’s leg up.

Or does it? Amazon isn’t king of the jungle for chuckles, my friend. No, they upped the ante with the promise of Same Day Delivery. Why should my friends have to wait 24 hours for the gizmo they ordered this afternoon? It’s the equivalent of ordering from the Sears catalog. In the 21st Century!! Maybe you’ve noticed the U.S. Postal trucks on Sunday in your cul-de-sac, well, they’re Amazon deliveries, no rest for the wicked. Day of rest? I don’t think so…. Already they’re testing drones for faster deliveries, possibly door to door if the FAA will let them rent all the airspace they need. But you know and I do too, Walmart and Target aren’t going to sit still for this. They’ll be offering similar delivery times as Domino Pizza, half hour or your money back. Let the drone wars begin!

Rumor has it that in the ulta-secret labs Amazon operates beneath Mt. Rainier, a honeycomb of experimental workshops and testing warehouses, the Bezos boyz are working feverishly on time travel strategies. Order that thingamajig this morning and you’ll have it yesterday. Impossible, you say? Tell that to Sears Roebuck.

I don’t know about you, but I just can’t get enough of these calls to re-open the Clinton e-mail investigations. If Lying Hilary hadn’t used a private server back when she was Secretary of State and letting the Libyan Ambassador be killed, poor Mr. Trump wouldn’t be under a cloud of suspicion right now by those despicable and petty Democrats. If she’d been Locked Up, Locked Up, we could move on to issues that need to be addressed in America the Great 2019. But no, instead we have the controversy of whether or not our Great Leader was guilty of obstruction of justice when, as we all know, he can’t be guilty of a crime to hide his guilt if there was no guilt to begin with. Elementary, Watson. Catch 22.

And how about Whitewater while we’re at it? The woman killed Vince Foster, everyone knows it, but we let her get away with it. Justice for all? Pretty obviously, we need to go back and dig a little deeper. Bodies are decomposing from Arkansas to D.C. You know it, I know it, the Republicans know it, everybody but those obsessed Democratic Donkeys know it. It’s a disgrace is what it is! A national embarrassment!

Thank God for Lindsay Graham is all I can say, a veritable Profile in Courage, both faces. The Senator is properly outraged. While his fellow senators called for Barr to resign, Graham called for investigations into those investigators of the investigations of Clinton, triple jeopardy be damned. Something fishy in Denmark, hethinks. Methinks I smell rot too.

These are partisan times, no doubt, but in the Heartland where hardworking Americans yearn to raise their families, keep their manufacturing jobs, heat with coal and go to church to worship their Christian God, they don’t want to hear about their President being badgered and baited, they want to know why their government isn’t getting to the bottom of this Hilary scandal. If it takes another investigation, well, sir, let’s have another investigation. And if that one doesn’t turn up some bones and bits of rotting flesh, by god, let’s get ourselves another shovel and let Mr. Trump do his job. We got ours.

The Presidential Election of 2020 should be a helluva mudwrestling venue if the latest tweets give us any indication. Should the Boston Marathon Bomber get to vote? Will those pesky Democrats take away your guns? Will the rich be taxed more than they can afford to pay? Is America headed toward socialism or fascism? Will we forgive student loans? Should college be free? Medicare for All? Drill baby drill?? Attack Iran? Build a border wall? Uncle Joe Biden entered the fray yesterday by declaring this was a race for the soul of the United States. I sure hope not but he may be right.

Like a lot of my fellow Americans I’ve grown more cynical than I’ve been since Viet Nam and Tricky Dick. Compassionate conservatism, if there ever was such a creature, died in the swamps of D.C. the last few years. The rich, like the saying sez, get richer … and the poor, well, someone’s got to pay for those CEO’s and hedge fund managers.

The great question of the next few months will be to impeach or not to impeach. Trump has declared he will let no staff be interviewed further, something about executive privilege, which in his definition covers everything and everybody. The Democrats have become the Scaredycats, afraid following up on Mueller’s injunction to investigate further might backfire, but it seems like the only way to require testimony from the Trump minions. The Republicans, as always, are content to watch from the sidelines while the Russians, needless to say, have been completely exonerated. Thanks, everyone, for a job well done.

Me, I’d impeach the GOP. Why not? We’ve thrown out the rules, the Constitution, common sense, science and any notion of right and wrong. We have a corrupt megalomaniac in the White House who isn’t afraid of confrontation, who isn’t afraid to break things that get in his way, who isn’t bothered by the nuisance of laws. And he’s backed up by a Party that would apparently turn a blind eye to most anything short of murder (maybe) if it meant they could fight on for oil and gas, deregulation, gun rights, a border Wall and abortion restrictions. At today’s hearings with the Attorney General being questioned about bias in the Mueller investigation, they used their time to demand further investigations into Hillary’s e-mails.

So yeah, mudwrestling it will be. Down in the pit and dirty as we’ve ever seen. Uncle Joe is probably spot on. This will be a fight for the soul of a nation that has lost its way. Maybe some of these candidates will take the High Road, but like Joe sez, the goal is to get rid of the cancer at the center of our country. I’m dreading the next year and a half, but the time has definitely come to take the gloves off. I’ll vote for whoever can rid us of this creep.

When I first moved to the South End, there were no eagles in the area. If I had company who asked about seeing a few of the national birds, I drove them 50 miles up north to Deception Pass where usually we could spot one or two working the channel with its whirlpools bubbling up baitfish. The first eagles to show up around me built a nest in the Tyee Store wrecking yard out back so they could hunt in the pond the store stocked with bass and trout. So much for the notion that eagles are xenophobic. They’re looking for easy food and if they have to nest in a Walmart parking lot, so be it.

A friend mentioned to me the other day that she had seen 19 eagles circling overhead above the beach. That’s more air traffic than an Amazon drone testing site. The eagles have definitely rebounded since lead poisoning nearly killed them off back in the 60’s. So when I was exploring a bluff a few miles south of here the other day, standing maybe 300 feet above the waterfront, I spied a lone fir tree below me and there, about 50 feet down was a new nest with an eagle sitting on her eggs in plain unobstructed view. Maybe you think big deal, so what? But ask yourself if you’ve ever seen the inside of a ten foot diameter eagle nest. We look UP at eagles’ nests and maybe if we’re lucky, across at one like the one that’s over at the state park the last few years.

But to have a view from above? C’mon, it is a big deal. Especially if you have a camera and are willing to come back every day to watch for when the eggs hatch and the parents bring in salmon or grey whales to feed the little tykes. Maybe watch them fledge, stepping off over the abyss and catching that first draft above Puget Sound. Needless to say, I’m going to keep the location to myself. I don’t need National Geographic or the Flathead Vintage Auto Club beating a rush hour path to the nest.

I probably won’t give the pair cute names and I won’t post photos of the hatchlings on Facebook. You three or four readers of this un-viral blog will be part of an elite coterie of eagle voyeurs. PBS, eat yer heart out….

The mizzus and me went out to investigate rumors that an old log cabin on the island was about to go up for sale, presumably one of the oldest ones still standing. The current owner and his siblings were interested to know if the Historical Society might be interested in buying it, maybe save them the hassle of a real estate deal, agents, subdivisions, onerous contracts and even more onerous commissions to be doled out. Since the place was a bit out of the bounds of the genteel gated communities, I went along as shotgun. You never know what sort of varmint are laying in wait back in the nettle swamps.

Turns out half the family was up there in the hollows, drinking whisky and sitting around a campfire, tossing flies on a fishing pole to the trout they’d stocked in a fair sized pond. Looked all the world like a scene from Deliverance without the kid with the banjo sitting on the porch. And sure enough, the old log cabin was standing after a century or more, parked on log rounds instead of footings, weathered as boom pilings and festooned with antlers and antiques hung from every nook and cranny in that dark little home. Judging by the antlers, they must’ve cleared out the deer population in that neck of the woods no time flat. The boyz liked their venison and their trout. And they liked to bullshit, which is why we came.

They regaled us with ragged memories, sometimes sharp, sometimes a little rounded from too many retellings. Jim, the Homer of the group, grew up in that cabin. Plenty of siblings, all crammed into about 4 or 500 square feet, one bedroom, different times for sure. Heated the place with a big camp cookstove, three times larger than the one there now. He told us about the military plane that crashed in the woods behind them, two airmen dead, debris scattered for the scroungers after the government carted most all of it off. Talked about their jobs at the Weyerhauser Mill, poker games in the cabin, keggers, the usual good ol boy tales.

We asked why they were selling. Well, they replied, here’s the deal: we decide to keep the place in the family, all the kids, the new generation, they don’t give a damn about this place, they don’t care about the history, they’d just end up fighting about the upkeep, who owes what, who did what, then finally sell the homestead and divvy it up, use it to go traveling instead of working or whatever the kids these days do. Naw, we’re gonna sell it ourselves, take the money, use it how we want.

I get it. Take a couple dozen kids, grandkids, wives and husbands, see how they like sharing the chores, the repairs, the utility bills, the taxes, the lawnmowing tree trimming brush cutting endless joint responsibilities and add them up until you get a splintered family tree. Interestingly enough the boyz figured the kids and grandkids would have little to no interest in the family homestead, just sell it and use it instead of working or’ whatever the stuff they do is called’, probably doing them a favor by not offering it up as a family inheritance.

And so another legacy bites the dust. Or sinks into the swamp. Or just gets lost to the entropy of rot and rust and ruin. A lot of history is like that here on the South End, nothing we don’t see all the time. Too many for the Historical Society to buy and maintain, for sure. But we took a few pictures, heard a little of the family sagas, wished em luck selling the place and hope the new owners will value the log cabin enough to keep it standing, not just bulldoze it under. Chances are they’ll bulldoze it under. In the future, no doubt in my mind at all the historians will mark this the Era of the Gated Communities.

Maybe by now you’ve canceled your subscription to the lying New York Times, turned off the radio that has NPR, switched from PBS to Comedy Central and erected a chain link fence around your property and put security locks on all your doors. If so, stop reading right now, no need to disturb your attempted disengagement from all things Trump.

Today the man demanded the NY Times apologize profusely to him for allowing Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman to call him the enemy of the people. He’s incensed, he’s steaming mad, he’s outraged. After all, he calls the NY Times the enemy of the people. You get too many enemies of the people and the message gets diluted down to truck stop coffee strength, no caffeine, just the urge to pee. When attacked, strike back twice as hard. File lawsuits, tweet in capitals, revert to name-calling but don’t just sit there waiting for the next shoe to drop. Escalate! Roy Cohn Principal #1.

Get ready for some serious tweeting this next year. Committee after committee will demand tax records, testimony from his staff, subpoenas for his bank records, a constant dribble of illegalities, fraud, criminality, emoluments, nepotism, back-channel communications with Russians, real estate shenanigans, a very long list of what it takes for a president to become the enemy of the people. Impeachment? They don’t need no stinking impeachment with all the investigations they’ll be holding. And if you think Mr. T is outraged now, hold on to your britches. What’s coming will be red hot.

His personal attorney Cohen warned us about this guy. He won’t go gentle into that dark night. He’s not Nixon. He’s not going to see the merit in accepting what will be an avalanche of incriminating details and step off before the poop hits the fan, not Trump, not his way.

And if you stop and think about it, what has he got to gain? Soon as he leaves office, the wolves will have legal access. Maybe you can’t indict a sitting president, but you can sure indict an ex-president. Roy Cohn’s advice isn’t going to help our boy once he’s lost the bully pulpit and there’s no ignoring the subpoenas anymore. The real question is Cohen’s question: will he leave office willingly? Or is something ugly waiting down the road?

A month or so ago I tried to burn down my old house, accidental arson, but to no avail, just scorched some walls and fried the panel box and its antique breaker switches. So now I’ve torn off the interior walls, dismantled the old breaker box and installed a modern one, then reconnected wires and jettisoned even more I don’t need. Just for fun I replaced the old barnwood walls I tore off with a crowbar and replaced them with new cedar and tongue and groove maple flooring.

Now I have to call in a state inspector to certify it was all done according to code. Needless to say, I’m nervous. Not so much about the panel box replacement as the half mile of wires running throughout the shack, up the walls, exposed, illegal, definitely not code. I’m hoping I’m only being inspected on the box, not the entire house. Because of those fears a year ago I decided not to replace the panel. If I had been shut down, we’d lose the power to run the well. It’s one thing to live without electricity in the shop, quite another without water up at the house. This time we ran wire down from the main house to run the well house … so if we’re red-tagged by the inspector we can flush toilets and still make coffee. Small blessings!

I’ve been thinking how much of a miracle it must’ve been when that old shack got its first electricity. Water could be pumped from the 1930’s piston-driven Mayers pump one hundred feet deep directly into the house. There’s an addition on concrete, the only part of the house not on post and beam, that was the indoor bathroom. No more outhouse! They could power a refrigerator like the coil top GE electric one I still have in the freezer room. They could read at night by incandescent bulbs, run a sewing machine, listen to a radio! It must have seemed like a miracle all these things we moderns take for granted, a defining moment, a cause for celebration. I think maybe I’ll know exactly how they felt. If I pass that inspection….