The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

We take so much for granted, us Moderns. Oh, I don’t mean you, of course. Me, maybe. But the truth is we live in a predictable world, electricity always on, water in the taps, thermostat at our fingertips. Get our food when we’re hungry, get our entertainment at the touch of a button or a mouse. Life’s easy for us Americans. Complacency is our middle name.

So why is it we whine so much?? Are we spoiled brats in the Garden of Eden, always wanting more, never satisfied with what we have? Have we become soft and lazy sitting at our computers, goofing with our ‘devices’? Two Toke Tom thinks it’s something else the night we’re parked on his rickety porch waiting for the full moon to rise out across Port Susan about where Mt. Pilchuck has turned the last of its snow golden as if God Herself had poured butterscotch topping on its ice cream peak.

“You and me, Skeeter, we’re the last of our kind.” Tom had been living up to his nick name while I’d been working on a beer or three. “We’re outliers.”

“Outlaws, you mean?” I asked, not sure what he was driving at.

“We’re outside looking in. We want heat, we cut wood. We want water, it comes from our well. Food’s out in the garden, down at the beach. We’d rather build something than buy something. You built a house and I did too. You build boats, I build furniture.”

“What’s your point, Tom?” I cut in, knowing he could go on past midnight with this. We’d done it many a moon, full or not.

“I mean, we live in the world.” When he didn’t elaborate, I said, “We all live in the world,” but he shook his head. “Naw, not the natural world. They live in offices, they live in fluorescent light, they live inside their entertainment center, they think nature is the weeds out by their sidewalk. They’ve gotten themselves stranded, man, and they don’t get what they’re missing anymore. They got their social media bullshit and that’s their reality, talking to people they don’t know or can’t see or who the hell cares? It’s all two dimensional. It’s all disconnected from this.” He swept his arm out into some galaxy he was apparently Seeing. “People have lost touch, that’s what I’m saying. They’d rather live in the Digital World. Pretty soon they’ll have little automatons living with them. Bots, man, doing their bidding. And when the robots decide to take over, people won’t even notice. Because they’ll be robots too, man.”

“Cut back on the weed, Tom,” I said, popping my next beer. “We got our own issues.”

Fortunately the moon began to show over by Three Finger Jack, just a glow at first, then quicker than you might think, a fat pumpkin of a moon orbiting the globe while we sat lost in our own thoughts on a porch on an island where the world kept spinning whether we noticed or not.

“Just like in the movies,” I said.

“Pretty as a hologram,” Tom cracked back.

One of the hazards of scribbling nonsense in these 21st Century blog sites along with about one billion other yahoos is that there are folks out there who really – and I don’t mean maybe – REALLY don’t like what they read in Skeeter’s pantheon of purpled prose.  Maybe some search engine sends em by mistake, hooks on a key word, next thing you know, instead of a self-help forum, they got some chucklenut waxing profane about a subject they couldn’t care less about.  And now, instead of Helpful Tips from Tom on how to turn their unhappy life into something swallowable, they got precious time wasted scrolling down South End Babble and boy howdy, somebody needs to reimburse them!

So they write to me in the anonymity of the internet.  Which is the digital highway equivalent of road rage on the interstate.  Flip me off, swerve into my lane,  jam the brakes.  They’ll show me who’s who and what’s what.  And the best part: they’re untrackable, anonymous as drive-by shooters.  Splatter my windshield with shotgun pellets and don’t look back, just speed away to the next unlucky target.

These are some very Very ANGRY! people out there with us.  More than you think.  Way more.  I suppose we’re lucky they shoot from the lip, not the hip, but if you ever made the mistake of commenting on a forum or some issue that meant enough to you that you weighed in, then you probably learned firsthand what I’m talking about.  Civility is most definitely not a valued trait in Cyberville.

I’d like to see the volume and vitriol dialed back a bit.  I know, probably won’t happen, probably get ratcheted UP even more if anything,  But personally, I’m weary of the ranting, the hysteria, the apoplexy.  And hey, you, the guy who sells antiques and read the blog by mistake on cleaning out my storage shacks, maybe hoping for bargains:  I’m sorry you thought this offered no insights for living your life.  And I’m doubly sorry if you thought I was so self- centered I used the blog to make myself look attractive.  I guess we won’t be dating.

I don’t have anything to sell, pal.  Not the junk I cleaned out, not the ideas in my head.  And .. .sadly…. it sounds like we’re all a little late to offer you tips on living.  Let’s both just figure it out on our own.

You got a reality TV president, cabinets full of Fox News talking heads, talk show hosts as advisors, why not go whole hog and solve a few of the thorniest problems with reality show solutions? The latest entry from the clown power brokers is for a contest to pit immigrants against one another, the winner receiving U.S. citizenship. Dancing with the Stars meets Queen for a Day, what’s not to love? The losers, presumably, get deported back to the hellhole they tried to escape. Although, from my twisted perspective, the show might very well be the hellhole they needed to escape.

Maybe you’re too young to remember Queen for a Day. The premise was fairly simple. The women candidates were trotted out to the audience and asked to offer up their collective tragedies, everything from crippling diseases to dying children, all heart-wrenching personal misfortunes now displayed for the consumption of a national television audience. The winner, the most tragic of the bunch, would win prizes like washing machines and color TV’s, merchandise that would assuage the mishaps of a life gone terribly wrong. A life that every one in the audience might imagine could happen to them.

Maybe the Citizen for a Day show would offer up similar tragedies, tales of gang killings in El Salvador or rapes by banditos on the long hike through the entirety of Mexico. Murders, mayhem, poverty and atrocity. We could vote on who would be most worthy of American sympathy. The other contestants? Well we don’t have all the room in the world for refugees and we certainly don’t have room in our collective hearts.

The danger, of course, would be humanizing these desperate immigrants, showing how returning them to their countries of origin might actually be a death sentence for them. It’s one thing to deport supposed gang members without legal redress but it might be a bridge too far to send a mother and kids back to the town where the real gangs threatened to kill them, why they left in the first place. Like a lot of plans proposed by the government lately, I suspect this one is dead on arrival. At least I hope so.

It used to be whispered in the locker rooms of an America once great that homophobes and their ilk were actually insecure about their own masculinity. They hated homosexuals because they, deep down, feared for their own sexuality, probably even hated themselves for the same reason. Maybe why closet gay politicians were some of the most virulent when it came to anti-gay legislation. Tough guy bullies like J. Edgar Hoover were rumored to prance around in women’s clothes after a hard day at the office. All things effeminate were considered a threat to us he-men. Drag queens, especially, were a red flag to us bulls. Might just be a sublimated dream of Dionysian dancing to our hidden drummers.

Or … it might be as simple as folks fearing what they don’t understand. Someone of a different race, a different nationality, strange customs, a divergent sexuality. We live in a herd mentality. Outsiders, well, better to distrust them, possibly even shun them, ostracize them, deport them, worst case, kill them.

But I’m no psychiatrist and really no sociologist either, just a guy grown old who moved a lot as a kid, went to new schools and communities in various states, perennially the Outsider. So maybe I just tend to side with them, the banned, the different, the potential threat, possibly the enemy. We give lip service to the idea of a melting pot in this country, that our strength is our diversity, but the truth is, we’re divided into our various tribes, religions and sexual preferences. Add to the soup a little anxiety about the future, season with economic distress, pretty soon you look for someone to blame. The government, the other political party, the immigrants, the trans or the homosexuals, doesn’t much matter. Albinos, the left-handed, hermaphrodites, Muslims, Jews, gypsies and the autistic. Choose your scapegoat. Sharpen your knives.

Age old stuff. Gang allegiances, monkey warfare, clubs and guns, teeth and fangs. Close the borders, wage economic warfare on the rest of the nations, celebrate the ‘American Identity’, the whitewashed version, rated G, airbrushed and highly edited. Forget the melting pot, stop yammering about inclusion. The City on the Hill, that beacon of fair-mindedness, democracy, foreign aid and all the rest, that’s over, Bro! We’re building a Castle and surrounding it with a moat, filling it with crocodiles. Those huddled masses, yearning to breathe free? They’re trapped inside now. At least until we can deport them. The rich boys in the country club locker room, they’re in charge. And they’ve only just begun.

When I first came of voting age — we’re talking 1968 —the Viet Nam War was raging, the draft was mandatory, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King had been assassinated, the country was definitely polarized. At the time I thought the government needed overthrowing. The CIA was involved in coup plots worldwide, the FBI was keeping ‘enemy’ files, ‘tin soldiers and Nixon coming’, the country was on fire, cities were burning, campuses were rioting. Me and my armchair revolutionaries wanted change and we wanted it Now.

Fast forward more than a half century. Maybe not wiser, but I’m a lot older than I was then. The new mantra of move fast and break things, advocated by the Tech Boyz, doesn’t ring true to me anymore. It’s not like the USA is a broken despotic nation in need of radical rebooting. More to my liking these days is a policy of meddling at the margins, fixing those things that are in need of repair, leaving what does work the hell alone.

But that’s not what we’re seeing in the first 100 days of the new regime. Tinkering is out, chainsawing is the tool of the new architects. Behind some of their onslaught you can barely make out a strategy, something on the line of unfettered capitalism and the destruction of global interdependence. Get rid of burdensome regulations and pesky law firms, give corporations free rein and things will be better. If you have to circumvent Constitutional norms, so be it. If it takes an authoritarian leader to institute those changes, fine. These new radicals won’t say it out loud, but they definitely believe it: democracy doesn’t work.

So maybe the chickens have come home to roost for us 60’s activists. The government of MAGA and MUSK is the manifestation of our own paranoia long ago. Like the rich and privileged character in the Big Lebowski said to the Dude, “Your revolution is over, Mr. Lebowski. Condolences. The bums lost. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?”

I hear these folks loud and clear….

Luck’s a funny thing.  Some folks don’t much believe in it – or don’t want to – since they think they’re the Captains of their own Destiny.  Me, I’m easily seasick on the storm tossed waters of my life … so I put more faith in luck than my own crummy navigational skills.  I guess living on the South End had a lot to do with it.  You find yourself on an island on the edge of a continent, you think it’s a short walk before the next move is a wet one.  

I came when no one had heard of Camano, few people lived here and most of the cheap land was far down at the south end where I stumbled in one dark and stormy night.  Luck had pretty much run out, jobs were scarce and a bad marriage had foundered on the rocks thanks to the aforementioned maritime skills.
I bought a shack and 7 acres for the princely sum of $25,000, everything I had down, $225 a month for the next 15 years.  Sound cheap?  Well, I had a hard time meeting that mortgage the first few years.  But a funny thing happened on the way to the poorhouse.  Corny as an A.M. radio pop song, I fell in love, got married to my old sweetheart and fell in love too with my place, the South End and my life.  Lucky?  You bet!!

We take forks in the road all the time.  I know buddies who always wonder where the other road would’ve take them.  I don’t look back.  I don’t use the rearview mirror because it takes all my attention to drive the road I took, the one with the NEXT fork and the unexpected curve.  You ask me — and I know you didn’t —luck is part being ready for it.  It’s not a lottery ticket, it’s that small opening, that slim opportunity, that sudden chance that may not come twice, the one that veers up out of the headlights and offers, for those who are ready for it, a new game, a fresh start,  a brand new road.  Luck, I’ll admit this: it does take some skill.

You know, I grew up hearing it repeated as Gospel that government was way less efficient than the private sector.  I guess that’s why we’re hiring private contractors to fight our wars.  Why we want to pay corporations to run our schools, run our jails, maybe even  ramrod our fire and police departments.  They’ll naturally do a better job for way less money.
I’m no economist, but I need more than mantras to make me want to dismantle half of society by gutting and cutting government like it was a sacrificial cow on the altar of unbridled capitalism.  Wasn’t it GM and Ford and Chrysler, bastions, capitol B, of capitalism that just got bailed out by the federal government?  Not just bailed out, propped up, given CPR, put on life support,  brought back to life ….Oh, and brought back to profitability.

And maybe my memory is slipping, but wasn’t it the banks, the mortgage companies, the credit firms who drove this country into the worst recession in more than half a century?  Maybe they were what?  Too efficient?  Too something, that’s for sure.

We complain about government but I don’t see the heads of  government agencies or departments pulling down multi-million dollar salaries with huge mega-bonuses and sweetdeal stock options.  I guess if we ran them like businesses, we’d inflate that executive pay by, oh, a hundred times or so.  See how that helps efficiency.  Sort of like paying military contractors way more than our military men and women — maybe why we take 10 years to lose wars now.

So before I wrapped myself in the American flag and started dismantling all our government departments and offer them up like railroad right of ways to the corporations, I’d follow the money a ways and see who exactly is going to profit from that supposed increased performance.  Call me cynical and paint a bullseye on my be-hind, but I suspect it’s some of the fellows in corner suites at the top of Wall Street skyscrapers.  Even if profits don’t  go up, they’ll get a nice bloated package, you bet.  Efficiently wrapped.

The Grinch That Stole America

The Orange Scrooge sitting in the White House recently acknowledged that the holidays this year would see some empty shelves due to his tariff plans. So what? he mused, the kids would only get 2 dolls, not the usual 30. If you can’t make sense of what he’s talking about, welcome to my world. Hang your stockings with care, there’s plenty of coal this coming Christmas. Looks like we’re all going to get the Naughty tag, those who haven’t been already been deported, sued or laid off. And if you’re expecting a miracle on 34th Street or Pennsylvania Avenue, get realistic. There’s a War on Christmas, all right, but not the one advertised for years by the right wing anti-woke crowd.

The Two Barbie President claims the weakness in the stock market since he announced world wide tariffs was actually the result of Biden’s policies. When the Market was going sky high under Sleepy Joe’s regime, he claimed it was due to his policies four years earlier. Cause and effect, like much of rational thinking, science or the obvious, really doesn’t crowd out much of Trump’s non-logical thinking. Happily, he has advisors who were chosen, not for expertise, but for flattery. Eight years ago we were introduced to Alternative Facts. Welcome to the Alternative Universe we now call America.

Russia was attacked by Ukraine. Palestinian protests against the slaughter in Gaza are anti-Semitic. Vaccines cause autism. Tariffs are good for the economy. NATO allies have been bleeding us dry. Immigrants are gang members, rapists and killers. Government is mostly a bunch of slackers, thieves and incompetents. Social Security is riddled with fraud and corruption. America is a bleak and broken country with only one man who can save it.

The Ghost of Christmas Future sits in his high tower. This is no happy family made-for-TV feel-good holiday movie. Scrooge learns no lessons in humility or charity. The Grinch is happy being the Grinch. Merry Christmas, One and All!

Wasn’t it Ralph Waldo Emerson who wrote admiringly about self-reliance?  About two hundred years ago?  Well, I got some news for Ralph.  The world changed.  It got real small, Ralph, about the size of an I-phone, and nowadays you rely on IT, not on yourself.  I got friends who go to the grocery store to buy a couple of last minute items and they no more than get to Aisle #1 than they need to call the missus and see if she’d prefer the large size or the organic kind or a plastic jar not the glass one or exactly what kind of mustard?

I really don’t know what to make of this.  Do my buddies call across the house every morning to see what color socks they ought to wear today?  I mean, damn!  Make the decision!!  All by yourself.  Be brave.  Be bold.  Get the mustard YOU want.  Then live with the consequences!!!

We got GPS to help us NOT get lost.  We got Google to find us a quick answer to about anything.  We got Facebook to keep us abreast of our pals’ last 6 hours of late breaking activity.  We got internet shopping and Netflix movies and satellite TV.  We got e-mail and cellphone and twitter and text messaging.  We haven’t got one iota of time to make even a simple decision, you get right down to it.

Poor sorry Ralph Waldo.  He might’ve been stuck sorting it out solo, but we’re linked up, digitally connected, nano seconds from somebody else’s answer to any question we got.  And we got plenty of questions.  Just none we’re willing to answer by ourselves.  We need confirmation, we need a social network, we want to know if our friends will approve, if they bought that product, if they liked that movie, if they’re going to that restaurant.

Ralph probably ate his hot dogs without mustard, is my guess.  Too much trouble deciding.  Besides, if you google it up, the supermarket hadn’t been invented…..  Don’t believe me, cellphone a buddy and ask them.