The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I can’t remember the last time I woke up to howler monkeys howling. After one red-eye to Atlanta, a long layover, another long flight to San Jose, a 3 hour immigration queue that looked like an NFL bathroom line with only one bathroom (this one had none), then a ride in a single propeller puddle jumper, followed by a 4 wheel drive straight up a one lane rutted mountain road with vertical drops of hundreds of feet both sides, we made it to Costa Rica Larry’s hacienda, an aerie overlooking the Bay of Tambor and the Pacific Ocean. With only a couple of airline hours of sleep, we slept the sleep of the muerto. Until dawn and the howlers ….

If you thought, from my exaggerated and hyperbolic descriptions of the South End, that we lived on the edge of some wild frontier, trust me when I say we’re not in Kansas here. Two miles up this mountain and civilization drops away like an Alzheimer memory. There are a couple of houses up here and one that is actually inhabited more than a couple of weeks of the year. At night we can see the lights from the fishing marina ten miles away and a few from Tambor Tropicale, a small resort with an outdoor bar that is Larry’s second home. Probably will be ours too. But up here on the aerie’s nest, isolation is the operative word.

Except, of course, for our fellow denizens, boa constrictors, vultures, wild pigs, birds beyond counting, insects and alien plant life. We’re anything but alone. The place is what you’d call fecund with a bio-diversity that is astounding. And we’ve been here all of one day. Plenty of folks come down to Costa Rica to visit, but not too many escape completely the way Larry has. We’ll go home too in a week. But I bet we’ll be sorry to leave. And that wild South End, it will look about two years from its first strip mall.

It’s been chilly here in Paradise the past few weeks. Burning wood the way a train fireman shovels coal, trying to keep warm. Back east the Bomb Cyclone has descended and friends and relatives send desperate missives concerning frostbite and frozen pipes. I’d like to help, but as you know, the Lord helps those who help themselves. I guess we have to assume the Lord is a Republican.

No, we’re going to venture out of our comfortable little cocoon here on the South End and head down to Central America. We got a buddy who works with the turtles there and he plans to rub our noses in how slow we’ve been to come on down where he has a hacienda on the Pacific slope of a mountain overlooking Tambor, then he’s going to vacation with us around his Costa Rica.

We’ve never been very south of the U.S./Mexican border. Oh, a couple of times we slipped across. Once we had a carload of empty cerveza bottles lying around the floor of a ’62 Chevy Impala we’d driven across the desert before accidentally, in our inebriation, found ourselves in four lanes of traffic, apparently crossing back into the Yew Ess Aye, not a ‘welcome back’ for four gringos trying to explain those empty beer bottles to the nice Mr. Customs Man. Once we’d ascertained the immediacy of our Situation, we acted swiftly and jettisoned that evidence. Sadly, we probably created flat tires and heartache for our fellow returnees. C’est la vie, as we say in Tijuana.

Another time I ventured down Baja when the State Department had issued warnings for us Americanos to leave, much less arrive, while the getting was good. That time I had a ’64 Chevy Belair, bald tires, pretty much on its last legs, and I had planned to donate it to the Mexican Department of Transportation when the machine gave up its ghost. It didn’t, I returned stateside, only to have it die in front of my ghetto estate in Seattle. I haven’t been back to Mexico since. Or anyplace further on….

So it’s off to the jungles for a couple of weeks. If I come across a howler monkey with a laptop, I’ll post a blog or two. But I don’t really expect the little primates to loan theirs out to a chimp like myself. Which means, once again, you get a reprieve from these trenchant malcontented observations intruding on your pastoral computer surfings. Now you’ll find out what you’ve been missing. No need to thank me. Thank the howlers instead.

Bomb Cyclone. I guess we got a new name to replace some of the tired old ones. I thought it was the description of the Bannon kiss-and-tell book, all those gossipy tidbits that must have the Liar-in-Chief tearing his orange hair out, which, if we’re to believe the book, is dyed but turns orangutan coloration because the boy has the patience of a two year old and doesn’t leave the dye on long enough to give it a natural color. Apparently he has a bald pate and grows what’s left into the comb-over of comb-overs, but … well, wait, bomb cyclone isn’t that at all, fuggedaboutit. It’s meteorological, apparently.

Who says you don’t need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows? My god, the weather these days demands an entirely revamped vocabulary. Polar Vortex, move over, let Beethoven bring you the news! Global warming? Naw, we’re calling it Climate Change. Snowmageddon, cute. Wind shear hurricane, okay. Haboobs, no, it’s not the U.S. Cabinet, it’s a sand storm. (I know, maybe we should switch the names.)

Bomb Cyclone. Where’s TSA when we need them? Weather terrorism. Who’d a thunk it? The meteorologists needed to explain the damn thing, something to do with barometric dives of x mm’s per hour or minute or, geez, if it’s that technical, maybe a better name. Low pressure cannonball in a hurricane. Course, polar vortex? Never much liked that one either. Faux science? I don’t like it at all, but hey, us plain folk at least get it.

Maybe I’ll go back to watching politics and skip the new lexicon of weather related events that always, and I mean always, lead some to question whether this was climate change or just the usual bomb cyclone. Who can say? Me, I blame it on the haboobs. They seem to be everywhere these days.

Jeez, it’s only three days into 2018, three crummy days of religiously trying to ignore the news cycle and the tweets and the incessant rants about whose nuclear buttons are bigger … and I’d been doing pretty good, ya know, not lurching for the nitro to keep my heart from racing toward aortic Armaggedon, when Steve Bannon comes out with his little tell-all. How do you avert your eyes and ears? The knives are out now for real and the clowns are making chopping sounds with their fat white lips. D.C. is a comedy show! No it’s a tragedy! No, wait, it’s a soap opera! Hold on, it’s all fake! Naw, it’s a cartoon show!

Sadly, it’s the United States of Amerriment, a slapstick Punch and Judy that barely stops long enough to give its corporate sponsors time to pass a tax reform bill that gives them millions in breaks. While you were laughing and howling at the latest gaffe, they were fleecing you like the snake oil salesmen they are. But isn’t it worth the Ride?? My god, Bannon’s gems are hilarious. The President goes to bed with a cheeseburger every night at 6:30 with his phone and three TV’s. Melania cried when the Donald won the Presidency. Ivanka is dumber than a brick. But she had a deal to be the first female President. The POTUS attention span is short. How short? He won’t read a one page brief. His handlers tried to tutor him on the Constitution — he made it to the 4th Amendment then left the room. Melania and Trump don’t sleep together! He eats fast food because he’s afraid someone will poison his meals, but not McDonalds’ pre-prepared burgers and fries. Don’t touch his dirty clothes on the White House floor! Don’t change his sheets! Germs, germs, everywhere!!

Congressmen met with psychiatrists to ascertain what level of craziness they had on their hands. Bannon gave it 33% he would be removed via the 25th Amendment for incompetence, about 19 amendments past Donald’s attention span.

Donald, of course, is firing back. Bannon not only was fired, he lost his mind! Says he wasn’t involved in the campaign win, now he will learn how hard winning is without the Trumpster. The President and his lawyers are screaming bloody murder, fake stories, libelous lies!! The liar-in-chief hollering in pain about his treacherous advisors lying! You can’t make this up. You live by the lie, you die by the lie.

And I’m supposed to keep my stupid New Year’s Resolution while this vaudeville show is playing night and day?? Easier to give up smoking. Way easier. And yeah, I know it’s a terrible addiction, these tweets. But if I turn away, I’ll maybe miss the next episode, the one that will make all the others seem banal. All I know, just like the rest of an insomniac audience, it just gets better and better. Drain the swamp? Why, when it’s so darn entertaining?

I got a knee that’s been bothering me. For about three years. I finally figured it wasn’t going to heal up so I went to my local clinic, got a checkup and was sent into town for some X-rays, then back to the original doc who took ten minutes before we both came to the same diagnosis: I was NOT Fred with the bad wrist. When we finally got Skeeter’s medical file, he told me he didn’t see anything particularly wrong, no doubt scribbling in my chart after I left — HYPOCHONDRIA.

A year later and no improvement in that knee, I switched clinics and tried again, this time asking the attending physician for an MRI, which he scheduled along with more X-rays. The MRI, I was certain, would show him the cause of my knee pain, hopefully something easily repaired. When I scheduled my consultation after the MRI came back and my answering machine mentioned ‘torn cruciate ligament’ I was confident we were going to get to the root of my chronic problem. At last!

My next doc mentioned he hadn’t had time to read my MRI’s yet, but he took a moment to have a look. “I see some arthritis in that left knee,” he told me and I told him my problem was in the right knee. “Not much arthritis there,” he said after studying the photos, “but that must be it.” (I’m sure he underlined the aforementioned HYPOCHONDRIAC in red ink.)

“I know I’m shy a few credits on my medical degree,” I protested, “but it sure feels like something’s wrong in there. A tear maybe?”

He patiently explained he was an osteo-surgeon and if I wanted a knee replacement, he was my man. “Whoa,” I said, “I’m not shopping knees today, I just want to figure out what this problem is.”

Disappointed, I went home, back to Plan A — see if it would heal itself. A month later my brother asked how the MRI’s turned out. When I told him, he said let’s look at your charts (his wife is an RN) and when I told him I hadn’t seen them, he explained it was almost two decades into the 21st Century, they would be available On-line, let’s have a look, so we did and right there in black and white on the MRI report were my two ligament tears, anterior cruciate and posterior too.

That was three months ago. I know I should go back, get a 3rd opinion, see if this knee can be repaired. My trouble is, I figure 50/50 they’ll amputate the leg. Probably the left one. So for the time being, I’m sticking with Plan A. Seems a helluva lot safer bet.

By now you’ve probably concluded that the Alt-Right Apocalypse half of us predicted for 2017 didn’t materialize. Yah, shure, the boy-king hasn’t been impeached and he hasn’t shown us his taxes and he won’t distance himself from the Trump businesses and those tweets of his keep us in a constant state of near hysteria. That’s Entertainment!

I got home from most of a tweetless week without opening a newspaper or listening to the news on radio or TV. Didn’t peek at a computer once for the latest news feed. But now we’re back from the Wilderness and the daily papers arrive at our mailbox and I’ve turned the computer back on. Lots of shrieking and tearing of hair over Melania’s Santa outfit or Ivanka’s photo with a Confederate flag somewhere far behind her, statistics on the total days Donald has gone golfing after he used to criticize Obama for picking up a putter, stuff like that. If I were Trump’s publicist, I’d put out incendiary stories exactly like those, endless petty fluff to distract all us enraged snowflakes from the clause in the tax reform bill to open up the Arctic to drilling or to kill the Obamacare mandate that requires folks to buy insurance.

NOT that every perceived insult by the Trump family’s Christmas cards isn’t earth shattering and probably contributes to Global Warming, it’s just that if EVERYTHING the Trumps do is outrageous, then the really outrageous becomes trivialized. I mean, I don’t care what Melania wore yesterday. I don’t worry about a photo with a rebel flag flying from some redneck’s shanty in the distance. Call me overly insensitive, but I don’t give a good goddamn. I do care about the Russians hacking our elections. I do care about those business deals Donald may have had with Putin. I do care that half his advisors and cabinet members are incompetent or liars or both. I do care the EPA is dismantling plenty of protective regulations. I even care that all those right wing judges are being approved. And I can go half crazy thinking about these Republicans who don’t seem to mind working hand in glove with a man who systematically attacks the intelligence community, the press and the Constitution all in the course of a few tweets, daily and with impunity.

So here is my own New Year’s Resolution, a few days early. I plan to keep an ear to the ground, certainly, but I’m going to quit searching the clouds for every little chunk of cumulus that might be cracking loose. I expect soon enough the jolly rich giant will come crashing to earth and that blot overhead will disappear and the sun will shine through once more. The sky will still be intact and I bet it’ll be blue once again.

Holy Mackerel, another New Year already! Every year we throw a party, usually with about 60 to 70 yahoos looking for a shindig close by so the sheriffs don’t need to be too concerned about their wobbly drive home. We get mostly neighbors and old friends, plus the usual stragglers who feel guilty they might be crashing the party … until we explain it’s basically open to all comers. So far we haven’t had to toss anyone out and no lives have been lost.

Although … there was that year when Steve came running toward the fire pit and never saw the bricks piled up next to the driveway. I saw him go down from my vantage coming up the hill. It was ugly. He never got a hand out, just went down like a Doug Fir cut by a 30 inch chainsaw. No one yelled Timber! They didn’t have to. I turned and went back down the hill to the shack figuring the revelers by the fire could call 9-1-1 or administer CPR if necessary. Too many docs spoil the triage, I think the expression goes. Steve, it turned out, was fully medicated and the faceplant caused bruising and bleeding, but pain was factored out. He was up in no time, fresh painkiller in hand.

We did have the year when the Belgian girl took her dance ensemble onto the main stairs up to the second floor, shaking their booties to some throbbing techno music they’d brought to dance to, high as Katmandu kites, when the staircase gave way. Turns out I’d attached it at the top when I built the house with only a couple of deck screws rather than lag bolts or something a bit more substantial. These things happen, I guess, and once I’d done a cursory investigation of the problem, I suggested they dance upstairs on the more solid living room floor.

There was the year the sheriff sat out in front of the driveway busting someone we hoped was not one of ours. Took forever and no one dared leave the party until those blue lights turned off and our scouts declared the coast clear. Those strobing blue lights merged with the strobe I had in the window of the shack just above, plus the megawatt floodlight that illuminated the fir tops, plus the disco colored balls that rotated out through the back room’s windows. All in all, pretty impressive light show!

We used to grab a crew and dig clams after midnight some years, but not so much anymore. One New Years Day we found Mike sleeping in the rain out on the lawn, not really too much worse for wear even though he had no blanket or tent. And there was the time Tom left his wedding ring on the bathroom sink in what turned out to be a Freudian slip that led to divorce soon after. And no, most of the neighbors across the street won’t come anymore, not since Bear hollered obscenities from the deck at our new house at them, something about ‘go back to the &%$@@# city, you pukes!!’ I explained later the sentiments weren’t universally shared, but, well, you know how people’s feelings get hurt.

So in a day or so we’ll have at it again. Am I nervous? Oh, not very. I usually just stand back and watch from the sidelines. I kind of think of it as their party, not mine. The days when we went until 4 or 5 o’clock are pretty much a thing of the past. Some New Years Days I feel okay, not like the time we closed up at 5 then had stragglers come a couple of hours later to spend the Day with us. You try sleeping two hours, then entertain hung over. No, New Years is a mellower affair these days. At least I hope so. Wish us luck. Or come on down, see what the shouting’s all about….

So okay, it’s been a long strange trip, this year of our Lord 2017, almost dream-like … and now you’re wondering if you’ll wake up to find the world hadn’t really changed after all, that Faux News was actually factual, that the world was round once again, that the Wizard of Odd was just a fat guy with too much money and yes, you can have a brain. And a heart. And you can go home to Kansas or Kamano or really, wherever you want.

Well, you Kan!! But the Port of Entry isn’t so much a place as it is a point in the Time/Space continuum right down here New Year’s Eve at Prasse’s Portal of Renewed Possibilities. Bring a dish, bring a friend, bring some magic potion (adult beverages work nicely), bring whatever optimism you can scrounge in the lint filter or under the couch cushions. We’re ringing in 2018 and you KNOW it’s only going to get BETTER!!!

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” George Orwell

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
― George Orwell, 1984

Words do matter. We so-called writers, addicted purveyors of the language, kind of know that, even if we have our doubts in these polarized times. So when the government bans words like ‘substance abuse disorder’ (it implies drug addiction is a disease) or ‘science-based’ (better to use something like ‘science in consideration of community wishes’) or ‘fetus’ (maybe use something like ‘little people who can’t speak for themselves and can’t vote but who don’t want to be killed by liberals who don’t read the Bible), they’re hoping to skew the meaning in their direction.
Nothing new here. You don’t believe in Global Warming, hey, ban the use of the words. Call it the Will of God or Faux Science. Course, if you ditch the words, then you can ask the question, why fund research into non-existent phenomenon? If you refer to fetuses as unborn humans, then you can write them into laws like one where a minus two month old kid can apply for a hunting permit. Validates the idea of life beginning at conception and goes for the twofer of applying the Second Amendment nine months earlier than before. The NRA is happy, the Right to Lifers are tickled, what’s not to like? ‘Right to Lifer’, there’s another nifty use of words.

My favorite this year, of course, was ‘Alternative Facts.’ Kind of sums up the entire Administration’s approach to, well, pretty near everything. Lies? Naw, just Alternative Facts. The News? No, dummy, not alternative facts, they’re Faux News, what we now call Lies. I know, it’s slippery at first, but after a year, we’re all getting used to it. In the Orwellian dystopia, Big Brother had to set up entire agencies to revise the history their Alternative Facts kept creating. In this new paradigm, not so much. Quote Trump from a year ago contradicting the current opinion, no problem!! The news media is biased. Faux!! They are, by definition, Liars. No need to bother about revisionism, it’s built right in. You just have to redefine Truth. Or ban its usage in the Newspeak altogether. Big Brother is smiling these days. And George Carlin is laughing his ass off.

Well, it’s that time of year again when old Skeeter and the mizzus and a few friends pony up the sleigh and head out to the boondocks where Christmas is barely on the radar. Where the stockings hung with care are full of holes and nobody expects a miracle anytime soon from Santa or the Easter Bunny or Donald Trump. Mostly just another day in a long succession of rainy ones. Okay by us.

You get my usual Christmas gift: a reprieve from these endless droning observations on the South End. A chance to clear your heads. Maybe even turn off the TV and the news and shut down the computer. We’re definitely going to. Sounds real good to me. Real good. I hear about one more analysis of that tax bill most of the people who passed it don’t know either what all’s in it, I’ll eat my hat and the mistletoe hanging above it.

So before we go, Merry Christmas to all of you and Tiny Tim too. And Santa, if you’re listening, I’ve been only marginally naughty so maybe you could grant me one measly present. How about bringing me a new America. One that isn’t so greedy. One that isn’t so militaristic. One that cares about the poor and the infirm. One that values compassion over swagger, truth over braggadocio, science over corporate consultants. You know, the America we used to believe in even if it probably never existed. Just asking…

And if you’re too busy, I’d take a cup of kindness. Short supply, these days, I know.