The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Barbarians at the Gate

So a week ago we put a little library in the phone booth that mysteriously appeared in the park I care-take here on the South End. I built a fancy bookcase in a tree configuration, painted it like a Jackson Pollock, installed it inside the booth and filled it with novels, how-to’s, kid’s books and CD’s. It lasted less than a week before some anti-literacy vandals decided that very nice wood bookcase would look nicer broken to pieces and thrown out on the lawn and the books would be better off left unread strewn around the Little Library in the rain. They burned a few of them, tore up others and spit loogies on the windows of the phone booth, then started to paint F… something on the sides. Which raises the question: if you didn’t want to read the books, why bust up the library? Just do like most folks in America, don’t go to the library. And don’t defile the temple, even if it is just a phone booth.

I’ve been mowing that park for a decade, a pretty thankless task, let me tell you. I mow the lawn, clear trails, chainsaw up deadfall, plant shrubs and flowers, put in sculpture and birdhouses and art. Three of our sculptures were stolen the first week. A grill was sawed off and taken the second week. If you were the ranger, I bet you’d be discouraged as much as me. I know I stopped trying to add more sculpture and art after awhile, too much a kick in my soft head.

Today I went over to clean up the mess and restock the books. A carload of women drove in while I was there, hoping to see the new little library. Cultural tourism after the Vandals have trashed Rome. They had seen the photo in the newspaper and driven southward to see for themselves the grassroots biblioteca. What they saw instead was the smoldering ruins of our answer to the Library of Alexandria.

These are tough times in post-Truth America, for sure. The ignorant are up on their hind legs braying like donkeys and the politicians are too timid to tell them they’re complete imbeciles, afraid of the angry backlash that might, god forbid, remove them from their coveted offices. The illiterate and the conspiracy promoters walk hand in hand now with monkey wrenches and pickaxes. Who needs government? they howl. Who needs facts? Who needs the truth if it goes against our beliefs. Burn the witches! Burn the books! And who needs a dopey little library right down the road?

Well … I think we know who does. Trouble is, they don’t and they won’t. Our little library is still open. We’ll see for how long.

Maybe you were busy yesterday with something else besides watching the Kavanaugh hearings all day. Lawn mowing or hair appointments, picking up the kids from school, going to work, raking leaves. Me, I watched the entire hearings and had trouble sleeping last night. So if my nerves seem frayed this morning, that’s my excuse. Today the Judicial Committee will weigh the testimonies of Ford and Kavanaugh and make a recommendation whether to move the confirmation of the Judge forward. Tomorrow, the entire Congress will vote on that motion. I may lose a lot of sleep this week.

It would take a heart as hard as Donald Trump’s not to believe Dr. Ford. It would take one harder than Lindsay Graham’s or Brett Kavanaugh, both red-faced and sputtering with fury in their monumental rage toward the Democrats, the Left, the conspirators of the Clinton cabal, the Unfair World . I know how they felt. They made me feel the same way toward them. Rachel Mitchell, the Maricopa prosecuting attorney for sex crimes, interrogated Ms. Ford, probing for inconsistencies and came up with nothing. When she tried the same for Judge Kavanaugh, the GOP Senators, sensing a debacle in their plans, pushed her to the side and mounted rabid broadsides. It was a spectacle. Little wonder they avoided questioning the accuser directly. Wouldn’t want another Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas mess in this current #MeTooMovement, apparently the only lesson these 11 male senators have learned from it.

Judge Kavanaugh berated and wept, cried foul and wept, wailed like Lear and wept some more. He did not have sex with that woman. He did not know her and he did not go to a party and shut the bedroom door with his buddy Mark Judge, no way, no how. Nobody asked him between sobs and spluttering how it was his accuser knew Mark Judge, how it might be possible the two teenagers were sloppy drunk, even too drunk to recall the attack next day. Judge Kavanaugh has suffered enough, he said repeatedly, his family has suffered enough he made angrily clear, and no way, no how was he interested in extending this circus to allow time to interview Mark Judge, the third person in the bedroom with these two witnesses. This from a man who would be Supreme Court Justice.

The FBI, he parroted the GOP senators time and time again, doesn’t decide guilt or innocence, an ingenuous ruse by all. No need to gather data or facts, they won’t give us a verdict. This from folks who are choosing a Supreme Court Justice and one who wants to be one. It’s just ‘he said, she said’, guess we have to assume innocence until proven guilty, what else can we do? Certainly not take more time to dig a bit deeper, we need to Get This Thing Done.

There is a certain demeanor I would expect from any judge and particularly a judge on the highest court and that is a measured impartiality, an equanimity of mind in considering the cases before him or her, an ability to weigh two sides equally before rendering decisions. What I watched yesterday was a petulant puffy-faced preppie who feels entitled to the job that was close to slipping away. He blamed everyone but himself, he cried and he whimpered and he beat his fist on the table. But he wanted nothing to do with clearing his ruined name by taking a lie detector test or having the FBI talk to his old pals or other potential witnesses. He’d suffered enough. Dr. Ford did her best to warn us about this man. She put herself through an Inquisition on national TV and had her life too turned upside down. She told her story quietly and convincingly. None of us should have slept well last night.

When Wally and Edna Burkholtzin first conceived the idea of a 50 cent store, they were convinced competition would make them, if not rich, at least profitable. Sure, they said, Dollar Tree was a national conglomerate, but hey, someone had to open that first store somewhere. Why not them, why not here?

Here, unfortunately, was near the long forgotten Happy Kennels, a dog and cat boarding house that lasted a shorter time than a Trump advisor and ended on a sour note when Marta’s husband Jerry left the pens open after feeding time (some say alcohol played a small role) and next day the place looked like a prison riot in Angola, victims dead or bleeding, beloved pets clawed, chewed and bitten. Thus are dreams deferred … and lawsuits submitted. Not so sanguine, Happy Kennels, now the stuff of South End lore.

The Burkholtzins shared Marta and Jeremy’s entrepreneurial zeal right down to their under-capitalization. Rent was low and goods sold under 50 cents obviously were dirt cheap and definitely low grade even by Chinese standards. “If a Dollar Store could make millions,” Wally loved to tell his many detractors and doubters, “ a fifty cent store could make six figures.” Good math, most of us thought, poor economics. At the Grand Opening we all wished Wally and Edna the best of luck, but we went home shaking our collective heads, probably the same for Jobs and Gates, Musk and Bezos, Zuckerberg and Joe Swisherman , the guy who invented and marketed X-ray glasses sold in the back of comic books to see through walls and women’s clothes. Millionaires don’t hear laughs, they hear cash registers.

When, after two months of pretty near zero sales, Wally grumbled to Edna, Location Location Location, he said they needed a new one. So they relocated lock stock and plastic cutlery to the office/store under Windy Rear Realty’s South End office, I guess figuring the potential buyers of high end properties might avail themselves of an opportunity to save nickels, even dimes. When they vacated the building three months hence, they took nothing but themselves. If they’ve found the Right Location, it’s nowhere near here, but their two bit legend definitely lives on.

A buddy of mine told me he was throwing out his beat up old fleece vest after a decade of usage and so, in a hasty buying decision, decided to go to REI for a new and improved version. He drove to the sporting goods outlet and tried on a few before sticker shock made him flee for the front door, back home and into the trash can where he’d tossed his tried and true, broken zippered vest. He googled up zipper repair, found a site that advised greasing the skids with olive oil and lo and behold, his old vest was functional once again, ready for another decade or two of daily wear.

But … this wasn’t the story he wanted to convey, as inspirational to us South End flea marketeers and thrift store addicts as it was. No, what he wanted to tell us was the part where he was googling up zipper you-tube repair strategies and noticed ads from REI for fleece vests EXACTLY LIKE THE ONES HE HAD BEEN TRYING ON earlier that day. Holy Capitalism, Batman, how the hell did they know he’d been in the store?? And what he tried on? And who he was???

I half expected malevolent, creepy, ominous music to exude out from under the couch in the room next to us when he told this story. Did you use your credit card to buy something? I asked, but he said no, he tried on a couple of vests and immediately left the store. Did they take down his license plate number? Have these outlets got surveillance cameras with facial recognition? Sporting goods detectives watching for hesitant buyers. Are we all in jeopardy from Big Brother, Inc.???

Or … could we just settle down a paranoid minute and accept welcome-armed the modern notion of advertising’s future? If you search for a product, a place, a person or whatever on the internet, you already get ads marginally related to that search appearing on your sidebar. Look up Hawaii, say, and check out the volcano. A nano second later you’ll have hotels in Hilo with prices and sales. Save you the trouble of searching, right? Airline fares to Honolulu, excursions to Maui, whale watching trips, yup, right there at your fingertips.

Maybe REI can read credit cards from that new chip they’ve installed for security concerns. Privacy, okay, not the priority in these social mediated times. And if they can get that, maybe they need to know your credit rating and minimum balance, no need to contact you if you’re too far in debt, right? Okay, let’s be honest, that’s exactly who they want to contact. Not their problem if you go broke. We all have Free Will. We don’t have to buy the damn vest. They’re just making sure you didn’t make a mistake when you left the store, maybe had to go to the restroom and got disoriented and left accidentally out a side exit. Come on back, we got a sale on!!

I haven’t seen my buddy since yesterday. I’m hoping REI hasn’t found his place of residence yet, but I’m betting next time he drops by he’ll sport a nice fleece vest and want me to go up for the sale he’s been asked to promote. If so, I can tell you this: resistance is futile.

Down here on the South End where unemployment figures fly in the face of national statistics showing the lowest percentages in decades for the rest of the country, we layabouts and welfare queens rely heavily on our one main crop. Nettles. Oh sure, there are other industries down this way, everything from dog grooming to … well, real estate sales, I guess. Let’s be honest here, most of us are either retired or on the dole. We’re not apologetic about either, but those real estate agents, maybe they should be.

So when this tariff war started up we didn’t think it would have much of an impact on us local yokels, not unless the cost of dog shampoo went through the ceiling. Like a lot of fact-averse Americans, we just figured we’d poke along, harvest our bounty of wild nettles for the Asian markets which revere the stuff as a supernatural aphrodisiac and an organic antidote for erectile dysfunction. If ignorance is bliss, we found out the hard way that maybe we got it backwards. And if the Asians looked at a map of the island, they’d realize it looks like a Before ad for Viagra.

The Chinese took umbrage to the billions of yuans in tariffs the Trump boyz piled on them and so, in a tit for tat, watch THIS gringo, socked us with import duties mostly on products from the red states to teach the Trump-tolerant a hard lesson in economics. As if they’d be likely to learn…. Soybeans, wheat, apples, ginseng, oh, and you betcha, nettles. We weren’t exactly making a killing on those nettle bales shipped by container ships bound for Ghuangzou, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Dongghaun, but we eked out a meager living now that marijuana was legalized here in La-La Land and ruined our underground economy.

So now our unemployment figures, already at record highs, are going to shoot up stratospherically. Great. Thanks a lot, Mr. Prezident! Don’t blame us when creeping socialism rears its ugly head. You’re the one who put us on welfare. And maybe, just maybe, you could offer us what you offered those soybean farmers, our own subsidy. Capitalism, right?

Pity the Republicans. Here they are hoping for a miracle on the scale of Moses parting the Red Sea as a blue tsunami approaches this fall in the midterms and their one possible redemption as lackeys to the Trump mashup is to park another rightwing justice on the Supreme Court. They’ve got the votes, they’ve got their man and so they scramble headlong to get this nomination done before the elections and yeah, it looks like a winning touchdown with only a minute on the game clock. Until, wait a second! … until this woman, this Christine Blasey Ford tackler emerges out of nowhere and stops the game, timeout, timeout!

She’s got a little story to tell about an attempted rape thirty odd years ago by a 17 year old kid named Kavanaugh. It’s really an incredibly credible story. Names, places, even got a second drunk attacker and she names him too, some blackout drunk who wrote a book called, appropriately, WASTED, chronicling his sorry exploits of those drunken revelries he and the judge shared with their fellow preppies. She’s taken a polygraph and passed. She has transcripts of her therapy sessions years ago where she’s trying to work through the trauma of that night. The judge testifies he doesn’t remember this attack, says he wasn’t even there, didn’t know this woman, maybe didn’t even live in the country back then, possibly wasn’t even born yet. The blackout boy, he of course doesn’t remember anything. Who ya gonna believe?

This is the #MeToo Moment for the current Republicans, a chance to get it right after that Anita Hill mess where they victimized the victim in a nasty public tribunal of old white guys displaying ugly brutal chauvinism. The trick now, of course, is to look as if they’re seriously considering Ms. Ford’s testimony, then announcing he said, she said, then throwing up their collective hands, what are you gonna do? And then confirming a guy who more than likely did attack that woman, who is lying about it now, who has never and will never apologize for what are probably drunk actions long long ago by an intoxicated kid of 17.

Good luck with that, guyz. I read a column this morning by a woman who argued like one of the GOP’s on the Judicial Committee that it was possible Ms. Ford was suffering from mistaken identity. Different guy on top of her, she just got confused. Happens all the time, she said. Probably the best explanation for two different accounts, she said. Ho ho. Ha ha. Let’s see if that flies with the women watching this kangaroo court played out day after day. No, we don’t want the FBI looking into this. No, we can’t delay the hearings any longer. No, we need to be fair to the ‘process’. Yup, we believe Judge Kavanaugh. He did not have attempted sex with that woman.

Trust me, boyz, you need to let go of this tar baby. But we know, don’t we, you won’t. Good luck selling that to the women voters in November, pals.

I know we’re in a hurry to confirm Kavanaugh as our next right wing Supreme Court Justice, damn the torpedoes, and I know you know that as a card carrying Trump denier I’d like to see the proceedings held up the way the McConnell crowd held up the Garland Merrick hearings until the next election nearly a year later and here we’re only talking a few weeks. Politics isn’t pretty, not for either side, and okay, it’s sausage making time again on the Hill. But c’mon, this isn’t the Clarence Thomas cover-up again, is it? Not after the #MeToo Movement.

I guess you think maybe this was old news, some attempted rape back in the ‘80’s, just a drunk rampage the Judge says he doesn’t remember and his accomplice doesn’t either. Boyz having some fun, underage drinking and a little non-consensual sex, what’s the harm? The female classmates of the victim — yes, let’s call her the victim — wrote a letter for the White House declaring Brett was a good kid. Crimes usually aren’t voted on in America except maybe for O.J. Simpson. Was the perpetrator liked on Facebook 65 times? Well, okay, one rape, 65 Likes, hmm, guess he’s good to go as Supreme Court Justice. Gimme a break. The woman took a lie detector test, for cripe sakes. And passed. She has medical records from years ago chronicling the trauma this event caused her. Thanks, all 65 of you who have no direct experience with this rape, for sticking up for the guy. And you wonder why women don’t come forward when this happens to them????

I can remember the Anita Hill circus trial. The old white guyz eviscerated her on national television. Some of those gentlemen still sit on the Judicial Committee. And Clarence Thomas is still sitting on the Court without ever asking a question. Clarence’s mizzus recently demanded an apology from Anita Hill. Before long we’ll have Kavanaugh’s wife asking the same from Christine Blasey Ford. This is the state of partisan politics in America today. Justice? Get a grip. Justice died the same sorry death Truth did in the Truth Justice and the American Way mantra. The American Way, sorry to say, is a mess.

When I was a kid down in the red clay district of Georgia, us little munchkins did what most brats did. We played tricks on each other. You know, when we weren’t busy frying ants with magnifying glasses that concentrated infrared rays or putting frogs on railroad tracks. I know, we were bad kids. And we will no doubt have to spend the rest of our sorry lives atoning for this kind of cruelty to animals and ants. Or, if you’re Hindu, we can expect to come back in the next Rotation on the Wheel as frogs. Serves us right, I guess.

We had a kid in the hood, little Jimmy Sutton, the cop’s son who was always following us older punks around, wanting in on our games of marbles or whiffle ball, generally making a nuisance of himself, not a bad kid really, but … you know, we needed somebody as our scapegoat. We weren’t all that mean to Jimmy … except maybe one time when we fed him ‘smart pills’ to make him as intelligent as, well, us. He was hesitant to take them but the urge to be as all-fired smart as the rest of us was too much to resist and finally he took the handful of rabbit turds we’d found earlier and munched them down. I still remember the look on Jimmy’s seven year old face before he spit those smart pills out. And yeah, there’s a special place in Hell for all of us for pulling a mean-ass stunt like that on a poor little kid.

My point here, before I forget completely in a wash of self-abasement and apologetics, is that folks are too damn gullible. They believe conspiracy theories of the most outlandish variety, they believe Donald Trump tells the truth most of the time, they think science is a bunch of bunk, they read the National Enquirer, they join the weirdest sects with the most insane leaders, they watch Fox News, they believe in UFO’s and Bigfoot and haunted houses even though they’ve never seen any ghosts or flying saucers or giant hairy creatures. And worse, they’re NOT seven years old. Short of offering up a handful of rabbit turds marketed on late night TV and sold with fancy packaging down at the Nutrition Outlet as Intelligence Enhancers, I don’t know what to advise these folks. I bet Jimmy Sutton doesn’t believe these hoaxes. And for that, I hope Jimmy is grateful to us little bullies who set him straight on the road to truth, justice and what used to be the American Way. If not, I hope he’s got a good job in the White House.

My shack’s sink has been plugged up for a couple of years and no amount of Draino or reaming with a snake or the power of prayer has opened up that damn drain. I checked the Building Codes for just running the grey water into a bucket beneath a pipe that exits the bathroom in the back and I didn’t see anything to preclude that option. Course, I didn’t look too hard. And here at the outskirts of Rome’s Reach, I figure that’s close enough.

A buddy visited recently and noticed our new kitchen sink up at the hacienda which, since he’d had a vicious encounter with the gods of plumbing, caused him to ask if I’d installed the thing myself. He obviously has forgotten he ever met me in an earlier life. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Only took two or three days, about par for me and my skill set. Why do you ask?’ Seems he’d had a leaky drain pipe under his sink and so, being a male of the species, decided to, you know, take a few minutes and fix that drip. Ho ho. Ha ha. Whee hoo, now here’s a fellow inmate who hasn’t really familiarized himself with the Laws of Plumbing. He thinks, innocently enough, naively enough, that plumbing must be fairly straightforward. Simple even. The Gods of Plumbing love us guys, so trusting, so completely unaware, such easy pickings. We are naught but toys in their cruel and capricious hands.

How did that drip repair turn out? I asked and waited for a long and terrible saga of busted pipes, spewing water, multiple trips to the hardware store or the emergency room or both. “Oh’, he said nonchalantly. ‘I tried straightening out the drain pipe where it was a bit crooked and before you know it, I broke the thing off in the wall where it was impossible to reach.’ So what did you do? I asked, still expecting a variation on my own typical plumbing horror story. ‘I ran into a plumber and I had him finish the job.’

This is probably the correct and proper ending for these stories. Hire a pro. Get a real job and pay the money. Forget your stupid pride, admit defeat and move on. This, I will tell you one more time, is NOT the South End Way. Certainly it is not MY way. I do not bow down to the sadism of plumbing deities. Sure, I bleed, I weep, I throw myself down on the sink floorboards and wail, I break tools, I break pipes, I break my back. Of course I want to quit. Of course it’s the only logical alternative. So what? If that were the Point, I’d move back to the city, buy a wardrobe and a tie to match, interview for real employment and join the mainstream.

I … am … not … going … back … to … that … America. Not even when Trump makes it great again. And no rusted pipe, corroded drain, busted waterline or anything else the Plumbing Gods can throw in my way will make me do it. No sir! Not even if I slowly have to devolve toward a shack with only cold water from a dripping faucet and a drainpipe into a hole in the ground. Not even if I end up back with my old outhouse behind the shop. There are things far worse than outdoor toilets, trust me.

Finally, scientists have solved the mystery of those odd symptoms exhibited by our Cuban ambassadorial team, the headaches and migraines, dizziness and inability to concentrate, that ringing in the ears and general discombobulation. Neuroweapons. You heard me. Some kind of microwave blaster or space raygun focused on the embassy and wreaking havoc with our state department personnel down there. Those whacky commies, always up to something! Revenge, no doubt, for trying to assassinate Fidel.

But you know … and I do too … this may explain more than just our Cuban victims’ symptoms. Yes, Virginia, I’m sure you can see the obvious conclusion of these scientists’ theory plain as the ringing in your ears, loud as the flashes behind your glasses. The White House is being bombarded by neuroweapons!! These invisible emanations are disorienting our leaders, causing them to turn on one another, leaving them nearly insane with withering headaches and burning brains. What other possible explanation is there?

Neuro skull scramblers. It all makes sense now, doesn’t it? Those endless tweets after a night of no sleep and a microwaved mind. You wouldn’t trust anyone either after months of migraines left you with only the ability to watch Fox and Friends because anything more complex than that would tax your jumbled cerebral cortex beyond its ability to comprehend. Try reading the entire text of that New York Times op-ed tell-all and if you thought yesterday’s migraine was nuclear, just wait til the second paragraph!

The arms race has definitely taken a dark turn when a microwave oven can be turned into a delivery system for the enemy. We tried our own brand of heinous inventions to destroy the minds of prisoners of war without violating the Geneva Convention. When the Panamanian leader Gen Noriega holed up in the Vatican Embassy, we blasted him with non-stop Guns N Roses, Elvis, Judas Priest, Twisted Sister and even, God forgive us, Kiss. Non- stop, high decibel, repetitive. And when that didn’t work, they resorted to … yes, Brittany Spears. Ears bled, amigo, and if this isn’t torture, what is???

Neuroweaponry, the next stage. We now have the sad debacle of a White House babbling like chickens in a shitstorm, unable even to comprehend the attack, much less surrender. No one steps up to take credit. No terrorist group admits to this sort of inhumanity. We may never know if the Russians were behind this or if some loser sitting in his folks’ basement took a measure of revenge for his lack of a decent job. We do know this: none of us are safe. And there is no refuge. No doubt the Defense Department is stockpiling Brittany Spears. Destroying our President’s brain must be met with fire and fury, shock and awe. And if necessary, Barry Manilow and Madonna. The price to be paid for reducing our fearless Leader to a babbling imbecile needs to be grave, collateral damage be damned!!