The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Trump Trump Trump. It’s a constant frontal lobe migraine drip, never ending, never letting up, never pausing for a breath. Trump Trump Trump, another blockbuster story followed by another and another, you hate to peek at a newspaper in the morning or turn on the radio or watch the television or scroll down the internet headlines. Trump Trump Trump. The man is a P.R. Machine, doesn’t matter if the publicity is good or bad so long as it grabs you by the lapels and gives you a good hard shake.

Prostitutes pissing on the bed the Clintons slept in in Moscow? Affairs with Playboy models while he was married to … one or the other of his wives? Deals with shady Russian businessmen? Meetings in his country clubs with foreign dignitaries? Selling Trump products while he’s President of the United States? Trump Trump Trump. Firing the head of the FBI? Filling his cabinet with totally unqualified lackeys or lobbyists bent on gutting their own agencies? Hiring his kids, qualified or not? Undermining the intelligence community? Trump Trump Trump. Denigrating his enemies? Bullying those who accuse him of wrongdoing? Petulance and pissyfits? Trump Trump Trump.

If entertainment is what you want from the White House, you got it, binge-worthy, eye-rolling, stomach-churning cliff hangers day after day. Trump Trump Trump, the air in the room is sucked out until nothing is left but Trump Trump Trump. White is black, night is day, truth is faux news, faux news is truth. You can scarcely believe this is happening, but wait, the next episode is already rolling. Indictments are rolling in, heads are rolling out, the Secretary of Something was fired yesterday and the new one is sworn in. More lies! More bullying! More threats! More firings! The cast of characters changes weekly and Trump Trump Trump claims he thrives on chaos, loves it, wouldn’t have it any other way.

The screws are tightening, the Mueller investigation is closing in, the associates and colleagues are singing like canaries to escape long prison terms, lawsuits are being filed to shut up the porn stars, how do you top yesterday’s episode??? Who is writing these scripts? Trump Trump Trump. What will we do when his show is canceled? What on earth will we do??? What stupid reality show can possibly take its place???

Stormy Daniels is a Russian spy mistress intent on destroying the United States of America. If you don’t believe it, ask yourself this: why did Trump fire the Secretary of State on the morning when Stormy Natasha Fatale’s ultimatum to the President that he accept the $130,000 hush money or Else ??? She and her attorney Boris Badanov aka Michael Avenatti have vowed to speak publicly on her yearlong affair with the Donald unless he takes back the slush money paid out by Trump’s own attorney, purportedly without his knowledge, who was merely trying to protect his friend from further shame and castigation shortly after the then candidate’s admission of groping women. To prevent that deadline from becoming the day’s headline, the President diverted the mainstream press’s attention by firing Rex Tillerson via Tweet. Mr. Tillerson had made the mistake a few months ago of calling the President a ‘fucking moron’, definitely fake news to serious journalists on Fox and Friends. Additionally Tillerson had agreed with the prime minister of England that Russia was behind the poisonings of a double agent and his daughter. Adios, Rex!

Obviously Stormy Daniels is a Russian operative, bent on destroying the good name of Donald Trump by disclosing what may seem obvious to the New York Times and the alphabet media, but has been denied repeatedly by the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, even if she did let slip that this affair had been litigated previously in the President’s favor. Stormy and her friend (and probable spy) Playboy model Karen McDougal, each claim to have had sexual affairs with the Commander-in-Chief, even suggesting he invited them to participate in a menage-a-trois. What this hints at is that the two women may also be engaged in a double operation with a definite French connection. Quelle Tristesse! So sad!!

Today the President himself filed a lawsuit against Ms. Daniels for $20 million for violating the non-disclosure contract for the affair he claims he never had with Stormy D. I-never-had-sex-with-that-woman —– sounds vaguely familiar. Nearly half of Republicans polled this week believe the President has been faithful to his wives. 2% of Democrats believed he was faithful. This may tell us more about the GOP’s notion of ‘faithful’ than it does about the Donald’s illicit affairs. Apparently a non-disclosure contract with hush money negates an actual sexual act by a married man. Read the small print, I guess. Yesterday Stormy opened a crowd-funding site to help her with the $130,000 she’ll lose if she tells all to the press. She hit that mark in less than 24 hours. You know, and I know, the Russians donated the money. Quelle Tristesse!! Let’s see if they’ll pony up the 20 million. Or was that the gold bullion shipment that fell off the plane in Yakutsk yesterday? Coincidence? You be the judge.

In a hastily called news conference in the White House briefing room a visibly flustered Sarah Huckabee Sanders denied claims that the Administration had been infiltrated by beings from another galaxy. When questioned repeatedly concerning reports that the President had been abducted and replaced by shape-shifting aliens from beyond our solar system, she answered unequivocally ‘Fake News’.

Reports from the CIA and FBI, as well as from the NSA, would seem to contradict Ms. Sanders’ denials. In a much watched interview on 60 Minutes, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was unable to answer even the simplest questions, raising concerns in the press that her intergalactic captor had replaced her brain with its own but had not downloaded terrestrial data before the show. Sudden policy reversals by the President himself would indicate extremely aberrant behavior explained in part by cerebral hijacking by body snatching invaders. Further, the rash of cabinet members and staff suddenly and impulsively fired lends credence to the conspiracy theorists’ belief that the White House is being replaced one by one by creatures whose intention is still unknown to us.

Jake Tapping, of CNN, asked when the White House was made aware that the Russian leadership had been similarly replaced, from Vladimir Putin on down, and wasn’t this why the Administration refused to criticize Russian efforts to delegitimize American elections? Ms. Sanders declined to answer and moments later the press corps was horrified when Mr. Tapping was reduced to smoking ash shortly after a crackling blue light blinded the room. Sanders suggested Mr. Tapping had needed to use the restroom when his absence was noted by fellow journalists. She reminded the assembled news people that smoking in the briefing room was, under no circumstances, allowed. “Please don’t let that happen in the future if you know what’s best for you,” she warned with her trademark crooked smile.

Meanwhile a wary nation waits for some Announcement from the President. Or his children. Strange beams of light have been seen emanating from the Washington Monument and tours there have been canceled indefinitely. An unidentified porn star stepped forward this week to suggest the creature masquerading as Donald Trump has genitalia not of this earth, but when interviewed yesterday she refused to make further comment, citing a no-speech contract for $250,000. A worried population waits for further developments and analysis from Fox and Friends. Stay tuned.

Poor Melania. Another revelation of her husband’s phake news philandering. More stories of her embarrassment. Slinking back to Trump Tower to avoid the questions from the press. Talk of divorce, estrangement, disgust. Gimme a break.

I’m betting she signed a contract along with those wedding vows to keep quiet. Everyone else did. National Enquirer ponied up the money, killed the stories and keeps churning out those headlines about Hillary a year after the election was supposedly won by their favorite son. Maybe you don’t check out their covers in the checkout line, but trust me, they don’t pick on Trump or the First Lady. This is what Tabloid Propaganda looks like. Forget about the lamestream media. Fox and the Enquirer have a copyright on that.

And now the FBI has indicted those Russian trollers and hackers with who knows how many Americans coming next. Fake news!! Always fake news. You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!!! I bet Melania can handle it. If anyone knows the dark heart of Donald, she and Stormy do. He’s a serial womanizer. Hell, he admitted it, what more do you want! These new revelations, let’s just call it icing on the cake. The one the naked lady will burst out of. A good percentage of the ‘base’ wishes they had his lifestyle, his money, his gold toilet, his women. The American Dream, they think. Win the Lottery, live like Donald. Be a TV star, be the President of the United States.

No, save your tears for someone other than Melania. She bought the store hook line and slinker. They say she cried when her man won the election. Well, join the club, sweetheart.

For various reasons I’ve been flying the not-so-friendly skies lately. Costa Rica, Utah, Wisconsin with plenty more on the way. Burning a lot of my carbon credits, for sure, if you’re the type who pays attention to such things. Okay, if you’re a ‘liberal’, the people who believe we’re spewing CO2 into the atmosphere at a rate that’s warming the world, melting glaciers, imperiling the polar bears and creating beachfronts where skyscrapers once stood. I guess I plead guilty to being one of those.

Lately I’ve been reading how jets are pretty huge culprits toward contributing to Global Warming, what we’ve rebranded as Climate Change. I haven’t done the math comparing airline travel vs. automobile or even trips by donkey, but I suspect jets use an inordinate amount of fuel and spew a lot of greenhouse gas and now I feel guilty every time I take a trip … even as folks like Elon Musk race toward space tourism. Pony up a quarter million dollars, in a year or two you’ll blast into earth orbit, leaving behind a carbon footprint the size of a brontosaurus herd. Meanwhile cruise boats are navigating the icepack for the well-heeled to venture down to Antarctica, helping to melt the place.

Course, half the folks who don’t believe in man-caused climate change do believe in chem-trails, the crackpot theory that the government is unloading poisons on us via commercial jets. Don’t ask me what the poisons are or what their nefarious intent is. And certainly don’t ask me why these conspiracy theorists don’t equate chem trails with Global Warming. If I could see into their minds, I would be hopelessly ensnared in a tightening morass of insanity and paranoia, no doubt leading to my vote in 2020 to re-elect Donald Trump as Pharaoh of the Planets.

What’s a concerned citizen to do? Walk to work? My work today is in Utah, 1350 miles from home. I could get a horse but equine flatulence has its own deleterious climate effect. I gotta tell you, living in a country that doesn’t even believe in Climate Change, it’s hard to know what the Responsible Course of Action is short of not having babies. There’s just a whole lot of us humans and most of us can’t afford to leave for the moon. The moon, of course, could use a little warming. Maybe instead of Antarctica, us liberals should plan now for our lunar vacations. Not much air but way less chem trails. At least for now.

My Pop, bless his 95 year old heart, keeps sending me political e-mails. I guess he just wants his firstborn to be kept informed of the events of the world. So today I got one that was titled ‘Mystery of the Century’. It chronicles more than just one mystery, it had plenty more than just the usual Obama birth certificate. These folks go on as if no Hawaiian birth certificate had ever been produced so obviously evidence to the contrary of their conspiracy theory doesn’t really pass muster. Additionally, they wanted to see the Obama kids’ birth certificates, something real fishy there, someone hiding something, but I never could figure what the something was. And oh, how about the ‘fact’ that no one seems to remember Barack in the colleges he pretends to have gone to? Or the law degrees for himself and Michele that were voided, how about that?????

There were more, of course, maybe too many to fact check for my old man or the folks who send these e-mails from the rocks they live under, but when I talked to him he chuckled and said, well, they’re interesting, don’tcha think? So one by one I had to send him the fact check FALSE results of my painstaking research. And of course, I got no response. And won’t.

Maybe the Russians are behind this, maybe the alt-right, maybe the Trump machine (if I thought they were that capable), maybe it’s just the times we live in where the most outrageous lies are propagated for god only knows what reason other than to piss off people like me. All’s fair, I guess, in love and politics for some folks. Deep down I think folks are making money somehow. Monetizing their ranting and raving, boosting their ‘hits’ and capitalizing on the gullible.

… Course, on the upside, I been noticing this blogsite that usually gets less hits than a bottom dwelling baseball team has suddenly been raising its batting average, oh, by ten times the last couple of days and no doubt whatsoever in my pencil-shaved mind, the Russian trolls have found me and are using my innocuous words to their evil intent. I know I should complain to the FBI or the President or someone in charge of keeping the flames of liberty from flickering out completely, but … well, I thought I’d wait a day or three, maybe a month or more, years if necessary, to see what advertisers might flock to my clickbait. I mean, I’m all for freedom and democracy and all that fluffy stuff. But we’re talking capitalism here, in its rawest truest form. And if that doesn’t trump liberty and justice, well, I might as well move to Russia. Actually, I suspect the Russians are already here so why bother moving there? And Vlad, if you’re listening in, my agents are standing by for any lucrative offers….

I like to think I am a student of history, a person who would rather not repeat the past because I was too lazy to remember it. You know, unless it’s to make America great again. What I’m learning this past year is that it is important, very important, to lie. Not just lie, but lie bigly. Bigly beautiful lies. The wilder the whopper the better. Folks love it, they really do. Don’t ask me why, I’m a student of history, not the professor.

Maybe it’s just this era we live in, the one where folks are feeling a little insecure about their jobs and their future. Anxious about where the country is headed. Or the world. We want to bury our heads in some nice warm sandbox and build a tall wall to keep the rapists and killers on the other side of our borders. And I’m not just talking about those Canucks, believe me. Trust me on this, we got grievances. Lots of them and we want somebody to smack down the people and smite the countries who grieve us the most. Take that 9-11 attack. Okay, we didn’t really know who was behind it, but like some of the boys down at the Pilot Lounge said the following day, Somebody’s got to pay for this and they didn’t care who. Well, sir, we bombed the bejabbers out of Iraq and no, Iraq wasn’t really to blame, it turned out, but godalmighty, the boys felt one helluva lot better. Poke the bear at your peril, Little Jimmy hollered the day they caught Saddam Hussein in a hidey-hole.

Course, the whole Middle East is a mess now. Never did find those weapons of mass destruction. Now we’re a lot poorer, all those years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. But … damn! For awhile there we showed those Arabs who was boss, we surely did. They respect strength, isn’t that so? Forget negotiations, try a little of our special of the day: cruise missiles! Collateral damage, hey, that’s just the mainstream media, pretty good liars themselves.
A lot of folks bought the malarkey our current Leader puts out every day. He had the answers, all simplified and pre-packaged, and we the people bought it hook line and sinker. Not because we really believed the guy, c’mon, he’s the P.T. Barnum of the 21st Century. We just happened to like the lies. You want to believe the world is so complicated, so complex, there’s no hope in trying to figure out stuff. Skip the nuance. We want a tough guy, a guy who would run into that high school bare handed and take down a shooter with an AR-15. Dirty Harry without the 44 Magnum, that’s what we want, and yeah, you know he wouldn’t any more charge into that building unarmed except with a running semi-automatic Mouth, but dammit, somebody’s got to pay for this mayhem and it sure as heck isn’t going to be the NRA.

And anyway, like his soon-to-be-departed long term Communications Director, Hope Hicks said in sworn testimony, they’re just little white lies. The big ones, she refused to answer.

If you walk straight back into our woods, you will eventually walk out into the orchard behind us where the owners rarely come up. A driveway continues up the hill and ends at the outdoor wood-fired oven of the woman there who’s a bread baker. Her place adjoins 10 mostly wooded acres where, a dozen years ago a tree fell on a 5th wheel trailer, crushing it and its renter to the ground. The victim’s legs were pinned beneath the maple and the temperature was below freezing, but after who knows how many hours of agony, he managed to reach the revolver he kept in the nightstand beside his deathbed and shot himself in the head.

This is not the horror story I’m going to relate, but it is the same property. Two days ago some neighbors were taking a stroll on this 10 acres, one of them being Bob who had put $15,000 down on a potential purchase, meaning to add to his own 5. Another trailer was now on the property, rented to an itinerant truck driver, and they had ventured in to have a look, figuring when he didn’t respond to a knock on the door, that he was on the road and wouldn’t mind. So they walked past the trailer and into the woods. (Cue the creepy soundtrack.)

Just beyond the trailer they stepped over a cedar nurse log and noticed wire screen covering a hole in the ground, which, it turned out, was the hatch cover to an underground bunker that apparently went for some distance out of their sight. Odd, they thought, but having no flashlight, they resisted the urge to go down into the darkness. (In the movie, of course, they would go anyway.) They dropped the camouflaged screen back into place and planned to resume their investigation of the property, (music crescendo, rustling leaves, barking dogs in the distance) and see in the shrubs nearby a sleeping bag.

If you’ve seen any horror movies at all, you know NOT to walk over to that sleeping bag which looks like it has a sleeping tenant inside, albeit the end is duct-taped up and the bag looks pitched haphazardly into the bushes. Bob and the boys, apparently do not watch that genre of movies. They walked over and proceeded to undo the duct tape. (The music is a shrill near- scream with a bass heartbeat beating faster and faster, closer and closer.)

And then … they open the sleeping bag. Inside there’s blood everywhere and of course, a human body, a woman judging by the leopard bra. With her head decapitated. In the woods they hear motion and think they hear someone running off. Someone who had been watching them the entire time!

So … we have a monster in the woods now. No police have contacted us, no notices have given us warning. We heard from a friend on the sheriff’s call and from the baker who was at a dinner with us last night on whose property a high heeled woman’s shoe was found. State patrol, Island County sheriffs, a task force parked in her driveway. They were looking for more bodies and they were going to go down in that underground bunker. The island is narrow down here on the South End, about a mile across and few houses on the interior all the way down to the Head. It’s tough going in there but an easy exit onto the highway or up to a vacant house or one of ours.

Whatever is going on, it isn’t over. We have our doors locked and plan to keep them locked until someone finds the murderer. You think it can’t happen in the bucolic country, think again. We certainly are.

I don’t want to appear misogynistic. Of course a runway model can be intelligent or possess extraordinary attributes that would give Customs Folks reason to allow her into the United States of America on an Einstein Visa! Nobody is insinuating that the Donald pulled strings to have the immigration folks slip her through their incredibly complex security measures just because she was his squeeze. Certainly America doesn’t work that way. We’re the land of equal opportunity. You can be ugly even and be allowed in. I think. Well, maybe not if you’re getting the Einstein option. Then you need to be glamorous, beautiful, a model. With, of course, a very high IQ. Or specialized skills, like, oh, hugging a plastic blow-up whale in a Sports Illustrated swimsuit layout.

Not! that I’m saying you couldn’t have an affair with Donald and still have a high IQ. Certainly you could. It’s just, well, it’s sort of highly unlikely is all I’m saying. No offense, Melania. You seem like a perfectly nice person. The kind who would, if she ever got to be First Lady and had to pick a Cause, might pick Cyber-Bullying. It’s a great cause, really, but geez, wouldn’t Einstein have cautioned picking one that pretty much sums up yer Old Man?? I think he would have.

No, I’m not the kind of guy who would begrudge a person the right to come into our country with fantastic modeling skills. I just find it troubling that she’s married to an anti-immigration blowhard who games the system to his own advantage while at the same time denigrating those rapists and killers coming across our borders, those terrorists sneaking in on Lottery Visas, all those family members getting in via Chain Immigration where moms and dads and kids can join the newly assimilated émigré here in the Land of the Free. Melania’s folks came in that way recently, but … well, no buts, just another exception that proves Trumps rules. Consistency, after all, is the hobgoblin of little minds. The Trumps obviously do not have little minds.

I do think, however, we need to reword the inscription at the base of the Statue of Liberty, a little update for these hobgoblin times we live in, something along the lines of ‘Give me your runway models, your photogenic, your privileged masses yearning to be TV reality show stars, Send these, the swim-suited, tempest free, to me, I lift my camera beside the gold coin door.’ The rest of you, get a tummy tuck or stay home.

While I was queued up at the long lines of the South End International Airport two days ago pushing my duffle bag by footkick the two miles to the patdowns and X-rays, a nice TSA lady asked us if we had any pets. “Dogs, birds, snakes … peacocks? Yes,” she laughed, we’ve had peacocks.” I was seriously glad I’d left my chickens home to roost. No telling what the airlines demand for pet fees if they get $25 per piece of luggage one way.

Maybe it’s less for chickens or turtles or small reptiles, I wouldn’t know. I’ve ridden with small dogs in carrying cases their owners stuffed under their seats. No charge back then in the Friendly Skies, but I’m betting now there’s a price plus proof of rabies shots. The overhead bins are totally crammed so good luck stuffing little Woofsie up there. A snake, sure, always room for a coiled serpent. They can curl right up and snooze for hours, but they’re probably surly when they get disturbed. I’m sure, though, they’re defanged.

‘Comfort pets’, I guess we call these critters, what used to be ‘service animals.’ If you were blind, you had a trained dog to safeguard you crossing streets. I don’t know if a parrot is really trainable for that. Just does the talking, maybe, for the mute. Or a boa constrictor. Comfort? Well, that’s a tougher call. I had peacocks way back. No way were they a comfort, not with that scream of theirs like a kid being hit with a red hot branding iron. Pretty though. Be quite a show to spread a six foot iridescent fan and shake it in the aisles. But not comforting, sorry, not at 35,000 feet.

Who knows where this all ends? Noah’s Ark Airlines, maybe a niche in the industry where, for a small fee, they provide a flying kennel. Leash free areas even. Just one huge comfort zone. At least til the terrorists start using Cockapoodles to attack the flight crew. Then those pet fees are going through the roof….