The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The Prez has just nominated the guy who worked with Ken Starr’s investigation of Clinton’s Whitewater accusations to be the next Supreme Court justice. No, they couldn’t find any evidence of that, but they did find the stain on the blue dress and the House impeached him for lying about it. High crimes and treason back then.

Not so much now. The Cohen tapes are coming out now, conversations about hush money for a year-long affair with a Playboy model right after Donald’s wife gave birth to their son. The evangelicals apparently don’t mind this kind of infidelity and the Congress doesn’t mind the lies or the breaking of campaign finance laws. What was good for the Clinton goose doesn’t cut it with the Trump gander. What matters is preserving the Party. Respect for the law, respect for Biblical tenets? Just lip service. If you find fault with the Donald, his true believers will make you pay at the polls next time around. This is the quandary the Grand Old Party finds itself in for electing a boy-man without ethics or common sense. For a time, we might have gloated, but now he’s the madman in the middle of the room and the majority in Congress are frightened to death.

We should all be.

A buddy yesterday, a veteran no less, asked me, “Nixon looking pretty good to you these days?” And I had to admit, yeah, better every day. Give me Tricky Dick or LBJ over this creepy clown. I never liked these guys but I never thought they were unpatriotic, just working off a different set of values which weren’t mine. This new guy, c’mon, he’s beyond the pale. He’s not working for the America you and me live in. He’s not bringing back coal mining jobs and factories. He doesn’t care about anything but the Trump brand. Who knows what the Russians have on him, but he’s willing to throw the intelligence agencies under the bus to protect his self or his interests, whatever they are. He’ll be willing to do the same with the nation as he did with Melania right after giving birth to their son.

The terrible thing to watch, more frightening than the President’s actions themselves, is the apologists and sycophants who make this guy possible. Blame it on the Russian bots if you want, blame it on Fox fake news (and I do), blame it on a disgruntlement with Hillary and the Democratic Party, but the dirty truth is there are a lot of folks out there willing to turn a blind eye to a very scary demagogue in our midst. This autumn we are going to learn something about ourselves and it may very well be that this nation is not what we thought. It may be that we have elected the man we deserve.

I guess I’ve lived on the South End long enough to see many changes in Crabbing Techniques. Down by us we still walk for the dangerous beasts, armed with only a potato rake and our wits. Obviously the crabs have a definite advantage…. If, as sometimes happens, the wily Dungeness gets the potato rake, well, the poor South Ender is rendered nearly helpless and few, if any, hear those anguished screams.

Some of my newcomer neighbors can afford traps and boats. Boats with motors even. They launch at high tide and bait the traps with caviar and special crackers from Trader Joe’s. They say they catch crab, but I suspect they eat the bait themselves later with lobster flown in from Maine.

In the olden days, when crabbing was a mainstay of South End maritime economics, we drove the great Dungeness herds north every spring to the stockyards of Utsalady and Stanwoodopolis. These were difficult and dangerous drives for the crab cowboys — and many a young wrangler never made it up the coast. Crab stampedes were a constant source of concern. Knee deep in the eelgrass with 10,000 head of the crustaceans clacking claws, the smallest motion would set em to running. Old drovers still tell the story of Mabana Mike, caught in the stampede of ’09 with a herd of barnacle crusted monsters whittling him down like a chainsaw speed carving contest. Old Stumpy, they called him after that at the Tyee Retirement Villa. Never the same. The sound of a denture clacking would set him off for days, the nurses said.

But when the crabs were delivered and the happy Crabpokes had money in their waders, you better believe Stanwoodopolis and Utsalady resounded to the whoops and cries of drunken drovers celebrating another successful drive to market. You see an occasional crabber in the Hotel now, a small reminder of those South End glory days when Crab was King and Crabboys were too. So when you’re eating high on the shell this year, remember you’re partaking in a bit of history. And be careful. Don’t want to hurt yourselves with those nutcrackers and picks…

This past winter we holed up one night in San Jose, Costa Rica on the way back home. Miles of razor wire, concrete walls, security gates, metal fences. Not a place where you’d take a stroll after dark, maybe not even in the daylight. The motel we’re at here in Oakland reminds me of the barrio down south, ramshackle houses, razor wire, homeless encampments, a third world nation invisible to most of the 1%’ers who would gladly take welfare away from these poor and add it to their portfolios. It’s a land of equal opportunity, they like to argue, and these people squandered it out of laziness or because of drug dependency.

The America of gated communities, razor wired walls and security patrols is fast coming, a nation that blames the victims and champions a bully President and his toady minions. We will have walls within walls, walls at the borders, walls in the cities and walls in the prisons and detention centers.

In the land of really not very equal opportunity, the Ladder to Success is missing a few rungs for, say, someone of color, or a woman, or an immigrant than, oh, the son of an Ivy Leaguer. If you start at the bottom, you might hit a home run, but not one 1/100th as likely as the guy born on third base whose dad owns the stadium.

There will always be inequality in a democracy but let’s not call the attempts to minimize it ‘socialism’. Trying to shift the wealth to correct those income gaps only seems unfair to those at the top who don’t find a problem with lowering corporate taxes or skyrocketing CEO pay, or taxing stock portfolios as capital gains, not income. They know perfectly well how to redistribute wealth; after all, they write the laws. And from the looks of things here at street level, they want more and maybe they want it all. We’ll see how that works when they’re afraid to leave their walled kingdom without bodyguards they trust.

Maybe you wake up in the middle of the night, cold sweats and a fevered brain, unable to sleep, impossible to think clearly. You feel an anxiety, you have labored breathing, you feel mood swings from rage to despair. You’ve talked to your doctor and he suggests you try an extra adult beverage in the evening before he prescribes lithium. He tells you you’re not alone, that half his patients lately seem to be suffering similar symptoms. Mass hysteria, he mumbles to himself, and you go home thinking you should seek a second opinion. Or a third. Or double down on those adult beverages.

You decide to quit watching the news, stop reading the papers, forego the radio. It doesn’t help, not a bit. Menopause? you wonder, or in half the cases, male menopause. Hot flashes, mood swings, depression. You discover half the neighborhood is suffering the same malady. Something in the water? Something in the air? A terrorist nerve toxin, maybe?

And then, out of the blue, right after the President sides with Putin over his own intelligence agencies and even some of his Fox Friends wonder what in the world?, Rand Paul, of all people, comes out and says this hysteria is nothing more than intense hatred that blinds you to … well, maybe not facts exactly, but Trump’s latest diplomatic move. He even gives it a name; after all, he is a doctor. Okay, an ophthalmologist. And you are having trouble seeing straight. He calls it Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Meaning, you hate the guy so much you can’t see what he is doing is smart, strategic and possibly even visionary. You can’t see it because you’re blinded by hatred. If he calls the EU our foe, if he believes Putin when he tells him he didn’t tamper with the elections, if he tells you he’s saved you from nuclear war with N. Korea, if he lambasts our NATO allies and goes straight to Helsinki to meet amiably with the Russian leader, well, you only see red. You’re locked and loaded with piss and vingear. You have TDS, my friend. You’ve doubled down on the double negatives.

And from here on out, you will hear that diagnosis again and again. Think Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi, Lock her Up, Lock her Up, Lock her up! There’s no cure and I suspect no one is looking for one. So today, when the Trumpster reverses once more on whether the Russians meddled with our election, jumping back to his original position, which, if you remember, was before he explained the double negative he actually meant to say, well, you probably gnashed your teeth and beat your fists and screamed into the storm. Because you hate the guy so much, you are blinded to the genius of his strategy. You probably even think, like me, that Trump Derangement Syndrome isn’t a description of us, it’s a perfect description of him. Quite a disease….

When I was a grade school kid in Georgia some 60 years ago, my teacher, Miss Betty Lou Parker had all of us little crackers give Valentine’s Day cards to each and every fellow student in the class, male, female, didn’t matter. Be My Valentine. We each got about 30 of those, the one day of the year we were encouraged to offer — and accept — a simple gesture of love.
What innocent creatures we were! What a long time it would take to arrive here today. If you had told me — even 5 years ago — gay marriage would be legal, much less that I would be officiating one, well, times DO change.
They say Love Conquers All. That may or may not be true if you ask this cynical old fool … but I will tell you, it beats the alternatives. Be MY Valentine. Be My Friend. Be My Partner. Be the Love of my Life.
We’re here today … to celebrate a love that did conquer all. .. and we’re here today to celebrate Amy and Laura’s love for one another and our love for them.
So without further ramblings on my part, let’s marry these two lovebirds before they change their minds … or Congress changes the laws of the land … or the Supreme Court rules Valentine’s Day unconstitutional.
[Later] So, by the power invested in internet ordinations and this consecrated cowboy hat, I pronounce you married in the state of California and in the hearts of all of us present today. Go ahead and make out a little, it’s legal.

We left home to drive down to the Bay Area last week and immediately ran into an 8 mile backup in Seattle, a dark omen, when the police closed the freeway for a pedestrian fatality, some guy trying to cross 8 lanes of rush hour traffic, a human possum, victim of Darwinian laws. Two days later we reached the outskirts of Oakland after a straight shot down the western side of America, no turns, just vacationers and trucks mainlining an artery toward the porous borders … when the mizzus’ cellphone ran out of juice.

In the digital world we now find ourselves in, losing that cell’s GPS was equivalent to Lewis and Clark losing Sacajawea. Winter would find us months later, emaciated and stark raving mad up some dead end box canyon above the hills of Oakland, another tourist cautionary tragic tale hyped to sell GPS apps and enhanced cellphones. Don’t let THIS happen to YOU!! If they’d only carried the Apple 10,000 fully loaded with locator apps, distress signals and emergency instructions. Don’t leave home without it!

The urban jungle, in case you are like us and travel primarily, if at all, on two lane backroads, is a blackberry thicket of 70 mph fast lane changes, intersecting bridges, sudden tunnels and too many highways, all in all a spider’s web for the unwary or the GPS-less. Not wanting to meet the spider, I stopped to ask directions at a mall that appeared at the first exit we took off interstate something or other. A half hour to find parking and finally we entered the three level grandeur of a suburban Macy’s. Salvation in the Consumer Cathedral!!

And sure enough, like St. Pete at the pearly gates of a Sunday School heaven, a customer service gentleman smiled as I approached. “Can I help you?” he asked. “Indeed,” I replied, “I need to get directions to Oakland from your grand cathedral.

He smiled beneficently, glad to assist a confused customer. “You need to get yourself a GPS.” I thanked him, of course, a Neanderthal lost in the rearview. And that, right there, is why men do not stop and ask directions.

Welcome back, intrepid readers! I know a few of you are wondering if Skeeter managed to marry those two women down in California and set them on a path to either happiness or divorce … so let me assure those who were left back in Episode 9 with this cliffhanger, yup, I shepherded them through the legalities, waxed a little philosophic (I was, after all, the clergy) and signed the binding contracts for the State of California.

Okay, so I got to the wedding half an hour late when traffic on the Bay Bridge crawled to a stop, but hell, Putin made Trump wait an hour. Folks had to wait — after all the Reverend wasn’t there yet. And if the brides weren’t nervous before, trust me, they were by the time I waltzed into an auditorium with 150 people fidgeting in their uncomfortable folding chairs, most of them a bit perplexed by the composting cowboy hat and Carhartt denims, open shirt and dirty shoes, all set off nicely by a silk scarf of stained glass design needlework and fabric made by one of the brides-to-be.

And yeah, all right, I screwed up the beginning of the processional, then had to start all over. They cut off my microphone mid homily and sure, things looked grim, but we settled in and I only goofed up 3 or 4 more times before I announced them woman and wife, or … well, … you and the 150 others, we all know what I meant.

So … maybe we can resume our lives now, get back to the Donald Trump Reality Show and try to avoid further tangentials. Like love. Or marriage. Or all those so-much-less-important things than politics. Unfortunately for me — and for you readers — I have friends coming to go crabbing, I’m heading to the Mississippi River for a Huck Finn excursion with my brother and 95 year old dad, then I have to curate a fine art craft show. All this will distract me from the Trumpster at least a month. There’s always MSNBC and Fox if you need a vein pumped full of venom, but I’ll need methadone to ward off withdrawal.

Nevertheless, it’s good to be home, back, it looks like, in the USSR.

Okay, buckaroos, Skeeter is on the Move, headed to Sodom and Gomorrah to marry a couple of women before the Supreme Court nominee is inducted and that kind of love is banned for the indeterminate future. Thankfully my matrimonial participants aren’t pregnant, another issue we’ll be losing soon to the Crackers and Alt-Right and the Right to Lifers who don’t mind death penalties. These are strange and troubling times, as you know, but persist we must. The mizzus and me will be crossing the fires of the Siskyous and past the last sighting of the guy who beheaded our neighbor. I drove by a display on the island today, two big American flags and a small billboard that said TRUTH, JUSTICE AND THE AMERICAN WAY. Oh right, and let me guess, the yahoo voted for a president who is incapable of truth, who just pardoned some arsonist insurrectionists and who has no freaking clue what America stands for as he flies over to Europe to piss on the legs of former NATO allies, then meet with Vladimer for some heart to heart, thug to thug.

Road trip! You all are on your own for a time. Nothing I can say will add anything to the current political conversation. But … when I come back, two young ladies will be married, love will conquer and maybe, just maybe, we can hang our hopes on that star. Cross yer fingers.

This coming week I’m taking to the highway, heading down to Trump’s favorite state, California, to perform a wedding that his next pick for Supreme Court will probably de-legalize in no time flat. Who knows, maybe this matrimony will be the last legal gay marriage in America. If his lapdog Pence has his way, it probably will be.

But … we Sodomites and Democrats, Liberals and Anarchists need to proceed with some modicum of optimism in these new Dark Ages and so I’m driving for a few days toward San Francisco, an ordained minister carrying the message of truth and even love in the era of bellicosity and lies. Diogenes of the Digital Age. Two days ago I was visiting an old friend who had had a detached retina while in Florida, spent six weeks recuperating and was now back home, apparently healed and 20/20 with corrective lenses. We were both very glad and sat for a time with a beer catching up since our last visit before his eye went haywire.

He asked what I was up to these days and since I don’t have a helluva lot going on, I mentioned how I was circuit riding down to Frisko to marry a couple. He chuckled and asked if I’d been ordained and I said you bet, even got an official certification right off the internet. Dick is ordained too, has been since about 50 years ago, a protestant minister of the old school variety, now retired. When I mentioned this wedding was for two women, he nodded and laughed. “I married two girls this summer myself,” he said. “Met them at a get-together and when they found out I was a minister, they asked if I would consider marrying them? I said I would. And then they asked what I might charge for my services.”

He told them he would do it for gratis, seeing as how they were poor and in love. Dick is a softie, why I love the guy. I bet he was a great pastor. “So when I married them out in their orchard beside their little farm, I said I hate to be rude but I have to leave right away, have to be someplace in an hour, and they handed me a dozen eggs and twenty dollars.”

Ah, I said, the barter system. And Dick said, you bet, the barter system. So like I say, I’m heading down to California. Who knows, maybe I’ll get a dozen eggs and a chicken. Guess I’ll bring a cooler….

Ralph’s Old Time Tonsorial Emporium

Every blue moon or so a new entrepreneurial startup appears in the sleepy hollows of the South End. A computer repair shop stuck out a shingle ten years ago, some techie kid who figured the retirees would need his skills first time their desktop Dell froze up — and he was right. Trouble was, there aren’t enough of us old timers. There was that dog groomer place, the Pampered Pooch, who specialized in poodle pompadours but quit shortly after Jenny Winesack’s fox terrier took issue with the jetted bubble bath and bit her on the face, nearly taking out an eye. The neighbors claimed the terrier was vicious even without the water torture treatment and advised her to sue Jenny, but she said no, she guessed she just wasn’t the Dog Whisperer she’d thought she was.

So when I saw the wooden sign down past Tyee Store nearly to the Head where the road hairpins back north toward our place, I shook my head, figuring Ralph’s Old Time Tonsorial Emporium would last a month or two. I also figured I ought to get myself a trim before the place closed its doors forever and so I rode my bike in one sunny day down the long overgrown driveway into the nettle festooned interior, surprised to discover Ralph had added a room off the old Stuart place where he’d installed an old time hydraulic barber chair, a double basin porcelain sink and even a vintage barber pole spinning red white and blue on its axis by the door.

Little Jimmy was in the chair and Fairlane Fred was sitting his turn. “Take a seat, won’t be long, I cut faster’n a logger on meth,” Ralph, I presumed, said in greeting. I took off my hat and joined the crowd. The conversation was lively, political and heated enough for my liking. The cut was fair and the price too. “Come back,” he said, sweeping my locks into a metal dustpan, shaking the apron for Big Walter who’d come in behind me. “I will,” I said, and I have. And damn if Ralph’s Old Time Tonsorial Emporium didn’t make a go of it, despite all odds.