The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

All you tech-savvy readers out there probably are way ahead of me on this, but I just read than now clothes are being digitized. Sports bras with heart rate monitors, Levi jackets with connectivity to music devices, yoga pants with tingle activators to correct posture. The entire fashion industry may soon be wired. This is great news for androids maybe … and those of us who apparently (apparelly?) want to emulate replicants.

Not that there aren’t obvious benefits to us homo sapiens. Underwear that delivers electric shocks after not being changed regularly. Pants that can zip themselves up. Or lock down in sexual harassment office situations and if need be deliver additional electric shocks. Self-cleaning handkerchiefs! Programmable shirts that change color with your mood. (Remember those mood rings — way ahead of their time!)

Pardon me if I don’t share the same level of excitement as my Zumba-spandexed wired-in-the-crotch fellow South Enders following the fashion trends of Silicone Valley. Although, I remember when Wisconsin deer hunters and Green Bay Packer fans delighted to battery warmed socks. No doubt the circuitry of today’s woolen hosiery would make those early prototypes look clunky and quaint. And who knows how many lives were lost to electrocution than toes to frostbite.

Personally I don’t want my clothes to be too smart. Almost everything around me now is ‘smart’, wirelessly scanning the internet for further updates, leaving me so far behind I probably show as a ghost on GPS. The last thing I need in this digitized interconnected society is my hat telling me what to do, where to go, how to better accessorize. A hat, I hope, is just a hat. And if, as some say, it makes the man, let’s leave it at that. I sure don’t want it giving me instructions, shocks or directions, just keep the rain off my empty head.

I’ve always wondered how the evangelical voters could ever support a guy like Donald J. who admitted, on camera no less, to groping women. Does the whole Man is the Head of the Household thing work to justify whatever us guys want to do with our women? Never mind that there are laws against this sort of sexual assault. Never mind that we’re watching a herd of harassers dragged into the police line-ups for all of us to identify. I might understand if they confessed and asked for some Christian forgiveness. But not too many do and most just point an accusatory finger at their own accusers, calling them liars and political operatives.

Judge Roy Moore definitely is my poster boy for this sort of malfeasance. He’s an avowed firebrand of a Christian, a family values sort of guy, impeccable evangelical credentials, a man who fought the Hard Fight against the secular legal establishment to bring the 10 Commandments into the Alabama State Courthouse. Now, of course, he has half a dozen women, once teenagers he hit on when he was in his 30’s and feeling more than his oats, coming forward to tell their sordid stories. The Judge avows how this is nothing more than a political hatchet job. Why didn’t they press charges back when?

Times change, Judge. Ask Anita Hill. She brought her case to the white men on the Judiciary Committee about to rule on Clarence Thomas’ fitness for the Supreme Court. And she got browbeaten on a national stage pretty handily. You want to take a turn in the docket next? Not me. And not most women who could easily imagine their careers ruined, their co-workers turned hostile, their notoriety smeared with mud and blood.

Well, times do change. The Judge declared that these spurious accusations were nothing less than an attack on his character. No kidding? I guess that’s why they made you a judge. But Roy, this isn’t the 20th Century anymore, or in your case, the 19th. No, little buddy, this is Now and your Day is over. Even if the fine folks of ‘Bama vote you in as Senator, you’re a Pariah. Look it up, Judge, it’s a biblical expression. And that excuse from some of the evangelicals down there that Joseph and Mary were consenting statutory rapists by today’s standards, see if that holds up in court as a defense.

The President took the opportunity in Viet Nam to ask Putin once again if he’d hacked into our elections a year ago. And once again, Putin told him no, he had not. In fact, he was, according to D.J., pretty miffed that he had to answer that question another time. How many times does he have to tell Trump NO? Geez, whaddaya want, an affidavit?

Stop the Mueller investigation! Why waste more time and money on a wild goose chase now that the President has asked Vlad if he and his fellow Russians played any part in the 2016 elections? Putin says he didn’t and that’s plenty good enough for Donald and me. After all, why would the man lie?

It’s not like he was Papadoupolis or those women who accused Trump of groping them. They certainly can’t be believed. Or FBI Director Comey whose motives are certainly suspect. Or Mueller himself who apparently is on a vendetta of some kind against the entire Trump family and their circle of friends. Okay, their circle of business acquaintances. I mean, if you can’t trust the veracity of a strongman like Putin, who can you trust?

Well, you can’t trust CNN. Or the failing New York Times. Or the Washington Post. PBS is out. So are the rest of those sorry alphabet television news sources. And forget about the lamestream, drive-by media. Other than Breitbart and Fox, they’re all prevaricators and purveyors of attack innuendo. Can’t be trusted, certainly can’t be believed. Faux news. All of it.

If Vlad says they weren’t involved in disseminating negative stories about Clinton, that’s good enough for me. So what if the entire point of the Mueller investigation is to get to the truth? The intelligence community, the FBI, the CIA, all a pack of liars. If they truly wanted to find out the truth, all they had to do was ask Putin. Yes or no, Vlad? Yes or no.

Well, the answer, earth to Bob Mueller!, is no. Simple as that. Shut down the investigation and let’s move on to something more substantial. You know, like bringing back those coal jobs. Getting some tax breaks for the Job Creators and real estate developers. And getting that Trump Tower built in downtown Moscow.

Pity the poor men! Every day some sad schnook who was riding high on ego and money and power, gets dragged down into the mob of angry women ready to have at his sorry manhood with sharp tongues and sharper fingernails. One day it’s that creepy monster Weinstein or Winestain or whoever, the prototypical casting couch perv who not only seduces young wannabee actresses but threatens the established ones with smear campaigns that undoubtedly would ruin careers. Hugh Hefner died last month and boy howdy, that signaled the end of an era of boys having their way with girls.

Hef surrounded himself with a bevy of young talent, lounged lasciviously in his black satin pajamas and thought he’d discovered a New World of permissive sex and exploitation. Guess he missed the Roman Empire. Power brings many rewards, but as the boys at the Pilot Lounge like to say, money talks and bullshit walks. For all our lives the frat boys and the fat cats have had their way with their female counterparts. Women’s Lib opened some doors, but behind a lot of them, they still encountered the predatory male, the guy who can’t translate NO and doesn’t expect rejection, not from some pretty little underling.

Every day now another rogue molester finds his accusers shaking fists and talking to the press. Movie actors, congressmen, judges, professors, you name it, the spotlight is veering this way and that. Poor Judge Roy Moore, newly off his campaign win for GOP Senatorial nominee of the great state of Alabama, is being accused of groping a 14 year old girl. Even in Alabama this is considered beyond the usual pale, they don’t care if he WAS the chief justice of the state Supreme Court and fought valiantly for bringing the 10 Commandments into the courthouse. (Well, 9 Commandments if you throw in the prohibition against sex with someone other than your wife.)

Even Jesus’ old man Joseph was called out by the Alabama state auditor, purportedly in defense of Judge Moore, for being an adult dating Mary, an underage teen at the time. The auditor, apparently felt that what was okay for the parents of the Son of God was certainly good enough for the beleaguered Judge. My own take is that they should be glad the statute of limitations is a couple thousand years past due date. But not for the Judge.

#MeToo is a train that’s barely left the station and already the bodies are piling up under the cowcatcher. The chatter at the morning breakfasts in the South End Diner is way less vociferous, almost whispers now. It’s as if we can nearly hear the testosterone drying fast in the hot winds of this new climate. Who knows who’ll be missing next week? Who among the assembled caffeinated is without sin? Who can say where the next finger points.

Danny the Dagger, our geriatric playboy of days long past, maybe summed it up best. “If those people thought they were safe after Trump admitted groping women then got elected anyway, they better hope they own a few very tall Towers and half a dozen golf courses too. My money’s on the women now. Trump better climb to the top of his own damn Tower and bolt the doors, they’ll be coming for him too. God help us all.”

Ya know, like a lot of Americans slowly slipping out of the so-called middle class into Hard Times, I too feel a patriotic duty to shore up the wealthier citizens’ place in our society. Not just the individual taxpayer, but the corporate entities the Supreme Court has declared as persons with the same rights as you and me. So when I see the tax plan rolling out that will drop their bracket from 35 to 20%, I feel confident these proud Americans will pour those increased profits back to the working sector and I’m more than happy to wait for the trickle down.

My Republican legislators, working hard for their constituencies in the red states, assure us the economy will ratchet up with these corporate tax breaks. Sure, there’ll be major deficits, but trust them, the zooming economy will take care of those. Better corporate rates will bring companies back to the Land of the Free, you wait and see.

The Paradise Papers are out now, a blow-up snapshot of how the beleaguered corporate taxpayer has been forced to seek shelter in off-shore accounts. Apple dumped billions into the tiny island of Jersey. Jersey doesn’t tax them at all, but I’m sure the GOP will offer further incentives to bring that money back to our disappearing shores. 15% seems good on its face, but maybe that’s still 20% more than Jersey. If we have to compete, well, I think the rest of us taxpayers who will benefit from a roaring economy will have to sacrifice short term to achieve gains long term. Corporate Patriotism is going to be the New Patriotism, I get that.

And I’m okay with cutting into Medicaid and welfare. You won’t need those anyway in a booming economy driven by Amazon and Google and Microsoft and Exxon and Apple. Sure, we could have cut out some deductions for them and not us, but, well, you see the point. Don’t handcuff the job creators, you’re only hurting yourselves.

And yeah, I know you’re going to say these fat cats have been avoiding taxes all along. 35%? Ha, they haven’t paid 35% at all, you’re thinking, and you’d be 100% right. But you’re missing the Big Profit. Big Picture, I mean. Same difference. If our corporations, our semi-U.S. corporations are allowed to compete completely unfettered by undue regulations and burdensome taxes, they’ll hire more of us, get it? And if we have to keep our wages slightly low, maybe even lower the minimum wage if necessary, that’s how you compete with Malaysia, Mexico and Slumbekistan. Is this hard to understand???

We should be grateful is all I’m saying. Pretty soon Amazon and their brethren will be moving into 21st Century automation. Robots don’t get paid and they sure don’t pay taxes. Throw the dice and put some trust into our Ayn Randian future. Spare the rich and the life you save might just be your own.

I lived a fairly large chunk of my formative years in the dairy state of Wisconsin so naturally I follow their politics which is everything important to the Dairylanders outside of the Green Bay Packers, fishing and hunting. In recent years the good folks of Wisconsin have gerrymandered their districts to such an algorithmically fine degree that now the GOP has gained full control of the legislature, the governor’s office and the judiciary, the whole shitaree. The pigs are definitely at the trough, to use an agrarian phrase … which may be why some lawmakers are hoping to change the license plate logo that now reads AMERICA’S DAIRYLAND. I’m not sure what they have in mind for a replacement, maybe something along the lines of LET THE RICH RULE.

Every week or so I come across some article in the newspaper concerning my old homeland. This week a buddy who is also an ex-pat escapee sent me one concerning legislation to allow children of all ages to hunt deer. You know, if they had an adult monitor of course. Maybe you never hunted with a kid in tow, some feisty fellow with a .30-.30 he can barely lift up to his bony little shoulder, safety probably OFF and excited as hell for the first opportunity to kill something bigger than himself. I have. Trust me, it’s a horrifyingly frightening experience. So frightening, in fact, that I quit hunting in the woods of Northern Wisconsin right then and there. I’d rather hunt Siberian tigers with a Bowie knife than hunt near a kid with an itchy trigger finger and no sense of firearm safety, I don’t care if he has 15 adult monitors in the brush with him all sporting NRA logos tattooed on their asses. He’s going to shoot at anything that moves more than likely.

I’ve known people, adult people, who have inadvertently shot and killed their hunting partners. One shot his father. Another shot a brother. The NRA will tell you guns don’t kill people. And they’re half right. But totally wrong. What is true is how it changed some lives forever. The father killer went crazy. The one who shot his brother couldn’t live with the guilt and eventually killed himself. I’m not sure how many stupid deaths will result from grade school hunters. But if you think Wisconsin’s GOP legislators aren’t on top of this, consider the bill this weekend that seeks to ban abortions because abortions would reduce the future workforce of the state. You have to admire the problem-solving tenacity of these lawmakers.

Given that admirable ability, allow me to offer a new license plate option to my favorite Red State legislators: KILL A FEW SAVE A FEW. Compassionate conservatism still lives in Wisconsin.

Maybe you can remember when we used to make fun of George Bush’s mangled speech. Ho ho, hilarious stuff, but probably not the makings of a coffee table book on the wit and wisdom of the 43rd president. We don’t really expect high minded elocution from our elected leaders so much anymore. Kennedy was eminently quotable and Obama, but most of our Top Guns, they’re not so much Cicero, maybe plenty of Clint Eastwood.

But the present occupier of the White House, well, it’s hard to imagine anyone less eloquent or serious of mind. Anyone older than eleven or twelve years old anyway. What do you reply to someone who tells an interviewer with millions of viewers he has a good brain he’s said a lot of things. If the interviewer is a Fox News commentator, you fawningly nod your head and agree whole-heartedly. In a fair and balanced sort of way. It would be impolite to roll your eyes or laugh out loud, I know, but c’mon. I’ve got a good brain and I’ve said a lot of things??? The one contradicts the other. At least when logic made sense and the world seemed rational. Which, lately, you have to admit, they don’t anymore.

There are those who suggest Mr. Trump has suffered brain damage in the past decade or two. Syphilis perhaps or mini-strokes. They point to earlier syntax that seemed less confused and posit that the man in the White House is damaged mentally. A lot of us would agree, of course, but we’re virulent liberal snowflakes and nothing Trump says would make us nod our heads fawningly in agreement. And anyone who would probably would nod again when he changes his viewpoint next day 180 degrees. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson said, consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

Hobgoblin of little minds. Nice line. Ralph never met anyone like Donald apparently. If he had, I bet he would have changed that quote. Me, I prefer a certain degree of consistency, hobgoblin or not, and it’s disconcerting to have a Leader who brags that he has said a lot of things. I’m with the folks who think something has happened to the man that has slowly dissolved cognitive function. The question we citizens should ask is: Igor, where did you find that very good brain?

The Southendomish live in government housing in the fishing grounds they once had a name for but don’t anymore. All of us on the South End would live there if we could imagine a reservation or remember our elders or if television wasn’t invented because we’re all part of the same tribe, we just don’t know it. Charlie Johnson, who owns the South End Trading Post, who sells us our cigarettes and canned meat and our 24 ounce high alcohol beer, he knows we’re all kin whether we’re great grandsons of immigrant loggers or the grandparents of native babies left in our care by drug addict parents. We all would dream the Ghost Dance but the ghosts are all us now and the drums long ago stopped beating. Charlie, just like the rest of us, stopped Spirit Chasing and went after the money.

There’s a playground in the center of the dilapidated government houses, mostly rusty chainswings and a slide that’s tilted toward Saratoga Passage where the concrete beneath it heaved over and cracked. Walking by the other evening, I watched Jimmy Walks-the-Talk sitting on the rotted seat of one of the swings, head bent forward, pushing himself slowly back and forth in the fading winter light which looked to him like his future. Laughter left this playground a long time ago and took its friend Hope with it.

Maybe if the reservation had been nearer the freeway, we could’ve built a casino, sold cheap gas and untaxed cigarettes. But we’re a world away from an interstate teeming with gamblers and chainsmokers. No one would come to our Las Vegas. But those are the dreams we dream now, not the ones we’ve forgotten. The kids have computers now and their own cellphones. They live where the river has dried up and the mountains have crumbled and the skies are grey with microwave grids. So do we. The real world is dissolving into the past. We don’t see it yet, but so are we.

Jimmy, I know without seeing him now, is swinging in the dark, eyes closed, sightless as the windows across the unmowed football field with no curtains and the flickering blue electronic lights. He should go home. I should go home too. We’ve just forgotten where it is, is all.

Open Mic (I have to host a new Open Mic tonight at the Family Resource Center in Stanwoodopolis so let me practice on you folks first)

Well, I want to thank all of you for letting this old geezer be the first yahoo to introduce the Open Mic Program. When I was a pup we didn’t have anyplace like the Center here, a place for kids to go to after school. A place to meet up with friends, maybe learn how to play a guitar, listen to music, all that stuff you folks do. Naw, my backwash town had a pool hall, that was about it.

Big Fred ran the place. He didn’t allow fighting — you had to go out back. He didn’t allow smoking or drinking — you had to go out back. Gambling was okay. I mean, it WAS a pool hall, not a knitting circle. Big Fred was like a father to some of us juvenile delinquents. Not a good father, don’t get me wrong. Kinda like the Dad from hell, now that I think about it.

A lot of the kids that hung out in the pool hall, well, I’d say it changed their lives. Not really for the better now that I think about it. Kind of a school for criminality. Me, I did learn to shoot pool without going to jail. Some of my buddies, they didn’t learn pool and they still ended up behind the 8 ball. And prison bars.

I’ve never played before at an Open Mic. Too shy, maybe. Too scared, probably. I got a little band, the South End String Band, used to have eleven of us, now we downsized to 5. Easier for me to hide in the back. Still scary, though.

Our first public appearance we set up in the Tyee Store parking lot. You never been to the Tyee Store parking lot, it’s not much bigger than this room. Half the customers left their rigs running so we’d play to empty cars pumping exhaust fumes on us. Next gig we set up at Elger Bay Store’s picnic table, just OFF the parking lot, saved us carbon monoxide poisoning and the crowd sometimes swelled to 3 or 4 curious shoppers.

We thought we’d made the Big Time when we hit Haggen’s at Christmas. Big box grocery. Indoors even!! Course, they stuck us next to the ATM machine and folks wanting to get cash for the big tips they were probably planning to leave us had to wade through eleven yahoos. And a partridge in a pear tree….

We played for some fundraisers on Camano and then we played a benefit to Save the Grange in 2004. 700 people came to help us. $5 spaghetti dinner and music by us. We raised enough to keep them afloat and the rest is history. Well, okay, not much history but hey, we’re still here. And so is the Grange.

What I’m trying to say is this: if you never put yourself on the line, never get up and play your song, that’s okay. What matters is you play it for yourself. But … if you want to share it, this might be a good start. And who knows, someday you might get that life-changing audition for the South End String Band. Anyway, lI’m going to give it a try. If I seem nervous, it’s because I am….

Back in 1977 I bought a HUD repo house in the ghetto of Seattle. First house I ever owned and so, being a neophyte, I thought maybe I should go whole hog and get a dog too, a companion, a man’s best friend. I always had a fondness for boxers so I looked in the paper, found someone selling pedigree boxer pups and went over to take a peek at the litter. One of the little guys was far and away the most active so unfortunately I picked that one. I named her T’Ashi, which I was told by a Sioux Indian I shared a Greyhound bus and a bottle with a few months earlier, meant ‘friend’.

T’Ashi made the Energizer Bunny look like a rabbit on tranquilizers. She was a bundle of mindless energy with legs like pogo sticks and a brain the size of a pea. A dumber dog I never saw before or since. If I threw a ball out into the Sound, she would go under to find it and if she didn’t find it, would stay down until I rescued her. Not many animals lack even the minor brain activity required for self survival.

Couple all that energy with a love of chewing, you got a recipe for mayhem whenever I left her alone in the house. She chewed through drywall, she chewed through closet doors, she pretty much chewed through a post in the basement that held up the two stories above. I drove nails into that post when I discovered it eaten a quarter way through and T’Ashi chewed through those. In despair I took her to a dog training class where the woman with the German accent told me, when I mentioned I didn’t think T’Ashi was trainable, that all dogs were trainable by her.

Great, I thought. Maybe she can save my house from being nibbled to death. Four weeks later she told me not to come to classes anymore. My beloved brainless dog was incapable of learning. In defense, I had tried to tell her. But now I was tethered to the monster I had brought into my new home.

Some months later I threw in the towel. It was the dog or the house. I put an ad in the Seattle Times: Pedigree boxer free to good home. I got plenty of calls, but when I asked if they planned on leaving the dog alone in their house, I patiently explained that that would not be a good home for T’Ashi. Not for long, anyway. People tried to argue with me, but I was firm, I was stubborn even, I was trying to protect them from themselves. A week of declined offers to take my dog for free left me thinking suicidal thoughts. And then Linda Rae Starr called.

“Would you be leaving the pooch home when you go to work?” I asked and was surprised and ecstatic when she said she wanted a dog that would NEVER LEAVE HER SIDE. “Come on over,” I said. “T’Ashi is yours. You got the perfect home.” I told her why that was, told her she was eating my own home down stud by stud, nail by nail, every time I left the house. “I’d never leave her,” Linda Rae Starr told me sweetly. “I’ll take her everywhere with me.”

Linda Rae came right over to what was left of my ghetto house. I gave her dog food and dog toys and dog dishes and dog leashes, everything she needed. “Just one thing,” she said right at the end and I felt my heart crash into my guts, figuring she was backing out at the last minute. “What?” I whispered.

“I’d like to change her name, if that’s okay.” My heart soared, my mind spun dizzy little circles of joy. I told her she could name T’Ashi anything she wanted and she clapped her hands, put T’Ashi in her beat up car and the last I saw of the two of them was when they drove away. I did call Linda Rae up a week or two later, just to be sure, just to relieve my guilt at inflicting a hound of hell on her. “Oh no,” she said in response to my concern, all was well in the Starr House. “Cleopatra and I go everywhere together. I thought maybe you wanted to take her back.”

I assured her that was not my intent. “Cleopatra is yours, Linda, forever and ever.” Linda Rae thanked me again and again. And I thanked her. Again and again. And still do…..