The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I probably already mentioned how it doesn’t bother me much the football players who protest racial injustice by not standing for the National Anthem. I understand there’s going to be folks who say it’s the wrong place, the wrong time, let’s not politicize the sacred game of football, kind of like cussing in church. But these guys have a national stage and some serious grievances and they probably figure, if not now, when? If not here, where?

Football fans, unless I miss my guess, are patriotic, don’t tread on me folks who mostly hated Kaepernick when he took a knee on the Anthem. WTF? The man is colored and rich and he STILL can’t keep his uppity mouth shut? Course now he can’t find a team that’ll take him. The fans would go batshit crazy, bringing that commie protestor into their hallowed stadium!

So now we got the Trumpster, the man who equates white supremacist Nazis with the Black Lives Matter protestors, calling out ‘the sons-of-bitches’ who kneel during the Star Spangled Banner, asking the NFL owners to fire them, fire them now! Today was Football Sunday. If you expected mass layoffs, you were sorely disappointed. If you thought teams would stand at attention, hats off, hands over their hearts, you probably needed an extra IV of Bud Light to get you to half time. The Coach-in-chief maybe misjudged on this one. Then again, maybe not.

I’m no huge sports fan and I’m not much of a betting man either. But my money’s on the Knee-Takers. And if the Trumpster doubles down, I bet most of these teams will skip the Anthem, okay by me. If folks thought racism had ended, if they thought the Civil War had put slavery’s sad history to rest, if they thought Confederate statues were simply honoring the Good Soldier, if they think it’s a question of supporting the cops vs. supporting an end to cop killings, if they think standing up for a crummy song is the Test of Patriotism, well, I got some bleak news for them — the Civil War ain’t over, Bubba, it’s only just begun.

Every day we get out of our bunks and before the coffee has time to percolate or our brains haul into full consciousness, some new Tweet or soundbite ruins the morning. I’m living as part of a live audience for the Donald Trump Show, a reality nightmare that considers itself bingeworthy despite the sinking polls.

The plot — if you’d pitched it to HBO execs a couple years ago — would’ve gotten you laughed out of Tinsel Town. Some reality show huckster, see, a phony self-promoting real estate developer with ties to the mob and an empire fueled by banks too nervous to let his Jersey casinos fold and drag them down too, decides to run for office. Not just any office, mind you, the Highest Office. And to keep his name in the tabloids he starts the rumor the current president wasn’t born in the United States.

You still with me? So this bombastic know-nothing knows this: how to keep the press interested in every outrageous pronouncement he makes. He tweets constantly. Angry accusations. Outright lies. Mostly hysterical nonsense, but the media eats it with a silver spoon. And then the guy starts winning primaries. He attacks his own party and the voters go wild for it. TV ratings go through the roof. Then he wins the nomination and you guessed it, he wins the election too, all the marbles.

You turned off the TV yet? No? Well, okay, now the mutt is president. What’s he going to do now? Well, he doesn’t have an agenda really, so why not keep on doing what’s always worked for him. Angry tweets, personal attacks, more lies. The citizens can’t get enough. They’re part of the show now. We’re part of the show now, an interactive plotline.

At the United Nations he stepped onto the world stage, top hat and cane, perpetual sneer, and threatened to destroy North Korea and little Rocket Man. You expected Diplomacy, you haven’t been watching the entire first season. And today Rocket Man called him, get this, a dotard. No, it’s not a Korean slurword, it’s English. It means, if you’re like me and didn’t know, an old guy, probably sick and feeble. Oh … and he said he would shoot an ICBM into the Pacific and detonate a hydrogen bomb.

I know, you can’t wait for the next episode. I’m just hoping this wasn’t the Season Finale and we have to wait for Season 2. But what a cliff hanger! Great for the ratings!

Awhile back I took my little six string guitar into the shop up north to have some work done on it. My guitbox looks like it was on the losing side of the last War, missing perfling, broken neck up at the top fixed not by a luthier but by a medic with epoxy, odd bridge, ragged scar on the spruce top, break in the tuning head. When I came back a week later to pick her up, the entire backroom of repair luthiers came out with her. “What’s the story with the guitar,” they asked, not quite in unison.

As always, there’s a story….

I had an irascible buddy whose girlfriend had bought a few stained glass pieces from me and would ‘pay me later’. When I brought it up to them a year later, Bill went ballistic, called me a greedhead and drove away after Marge told him I was correct, they did owe me for those windows.

A few years later she came down with terminal cancer so I ended up on hospice duty. Which meant a small rapprochment with Bill. A couple months after Marge died, he stopped by my shack and handed me a moth eaten Persian rug and a guitar. “What’s this?” I asked and he told me it was payment for the glass. Not feeling like another knock-down drag-out fight, I simply accepted the ruined rug and the broken guitar. “What’s the story on the guitar?” I asked.

Turns out some guy had it up at the Pilchuck School of Glass, our little world-reknowned glass blowing headquarters just off island. They’re fairly infamous for their parties, wild bacchanalias of international instructors and rich kid students, and somehow this guitar had been leaning up against a wall, got knocked over by some drunken reveler who managed to step on its neck before falling directly on it, crushing the soundbox flat and breaking the neck in three places. Its owner next day brought it down to Bill to fix. Bill’s no luthier, but on the other hand, Bill was the kind of guy who could fix anything made of wood.

The owner, probably figuring no one could put that shattered jigsaw instrument back together, never came back. And since Bill didn’t play guitar, it sat in his shop for a decade or so. Until it got handed over to me. Inside its soundhole you can barely see the maker’s label, but when you do, it says Martin Guitar, Nazareth, PA. For you non-guitarists, Martin is the gold standard of early guitars in America. Mine, it turned out, was built in 1963 which means it was constructed of Brazilian rosewood before it got banned from import into this country. Brazilian rosewood is THE tonewood of tonewoods. And I have one of the last guitars made with Brazilian rosewood.

If you are of a certain age, you might remember a band from the 60’s called The Association. They wrote Along Comes Mary, Cherish, Windy, all kinds of hits back then. And when they recorded these or played them live, my little guitar was on stage or on the album. It says a great deal about Bill’s woodworking skills that this double ought-21 still plays, much less that it sounds beautiful, perfectly balanced from high string to low. You know, if someone other than me plays it, someone who knows his way around a guitar.

I think the boyz in the music shop knew that too. Too bad, they probably thought, that a certified luthier hadn’t done the repairs because now the little Martin might be worth a small fortune. Maybe so, but I’m not selling instruments and if I were, this would be the one I’d keep. Or like the song Cherish sez: I could say I need you but then you’d realize/ That I want you just like a thousand other guys.

Talk about heartwarming stories! This kid, see, a white American boy, writes a letter to the White House how he mows lawns around his neighborhood and boy,howdy, would he ever love to mow the President’s grass. So the president’s staff seizes right on this as a photo op bonanza and invites the lad to come to D.C. and use the official pushmower while Donald walks alongside the 11 year old exclaiming how the entrepreneurial go-getter is the Future of America.

I listened yesterday to the Future of America explain how he was happy his letter would no doubt open up doors for his burgeoning enterprise. The future Warren Buffet wanted to charge his usual $8 but his folks talked him into doing it for free, no doubt a tax write-off. Call me cynical, I guess, because somehow I didn’t care for the idea of turning this into a publicity stunt. Give me a paper boy maybe delivering the dailies door to door. Give me a Kool-Aid stand on the sidewalk of my old neighborhood. But don’t tell me this kid is what I want for the Future of America, some pre-adolescent hustler who probably will, by the time he’s 14, be hiring illegal immigrants for his chain of landscaping services.

Don’t get me wrong. I give the kid some credit for mowing lawns at 11. I do wonder about his folks letting some tyke loose in the hood with a machine capable of chewing through his hundred dollar Nikes right into his barely formed feet. My dad wouldn’t let me near a mower until I was nearly out of high school. Said it was too dangerous for kids. I guess I think he had a point.

Donald, well, I doubt he cares about some kid’s toes. If I were a petty person, I’d ask if the White House filled out a W-2 for the kid, maybe a 1099. But I’m sure the Future of America probably works under the table.

I don’t know about you, but I was sure glad that new Apple Phone finally hit the market and the hype can settle back down to normal settings. The CEO, Tim Cook, flattered himself that this was the Biggest Thing Since the Last Biggest Thing, a world changer, a revolutionary leap for mankind, a huge step toward personal insolvency for man. $1000 starting price. Well, actually, $999.99, keep a penny for a rainy day.

Tim sez the screen is border to border. Big! A game-changer. You plan to watch Gone with the Wind on it, Clark Gable will be about one inch tall. The Civil War will shrink to something slightly this side of monumental. Atlanta burning will look like a marshmallow roast for a couple of Girl Scouts. Tim mentioned how it will have facial recognition. Sweet! That’s gotta be worth a few hundred to feel like an actor in Star Trek. And apps, hoo-boy, it’s got room for some apps and plenty to spare.

I get that we’re a mobile society now. I watch folks in the grocery store checking their phone. I see people standing at the bus stop scrolling their e-mail. I hear guys in the stall next to me talking to clients who never imagine their caller is sitting pants down doing you know what. I know the kids would rather go naked into school than go without their smarty-phones. And I know I’m the last Luddite hold-out for not carrying a cellphone with me everywhere I go.

I gotta admit, when I buried my truck in the sand two days ago launching my rowboat down at the beach and began the long trek home, it would’ve been nice to just call up a neighbor to come and pick me up. But the walk did me good and believe me, the next day when I launched my boat I was a wee more cautious about driving onto the beach, learning — as usual — from the School of Hard Knocks. And yeah, I understand totally that the world wants to be hardwired together now , social media rules, privacy is dead, the virtual world is dominant and nobody gives a damn about some curmudgeon who walks the beach with his trousers rolled up and doesn’t carry a phone.

But Tim, ask yourself if this brave new phone, the revolutionary thousand buck computer-on-a-string, is going to make life better for us mere mortals. Or is it just another bump on your stock market valuation? And yeah, Tim, I know, you can’t call me to tell me which it is. My bad….

Well, okay, about a third of us in this country have been hacked. Social Security numbers, driver’s license, date of birth, all the necessary ingredients some crimninal in Belarus can sell to identity fraud specialists. I didn’t realize there were 3 or 4 companies that kept credit databases, much less 3 or 4 companies who were wide open to hackers. Silly me.

And here I was worried about Big Brother. The Damn Government, I mean, not Mark Zuckerberg. Turns out all of us are just one big happy data family, smooshed together in some internet Cloud that knows everything important about us. Now we’re sharing that information with hacker hoodlums. Swell. Just swell.

Back in the dark days of the 1970’s I lived with a bunch of freewheeling yahoos in Seattle and Gomorrah who majored in various studies at the University of Washington, but spent most of their time experimenting with drug abuse of various sorts ranging from hash oil production to laughing gas theft. They grew pot and they raised psilocybin mushrooms. They scored opiated hashish and they drank legal whisky. The place we lived in was a veritable criminal operation. ‘Honest, Officer, I only rent a room here.’

On our bulletin board we had a Social Security card pinned up. Ralph Speidel. The kidz had gone down to the local cemetery and searched for a deceased child, then gotten a card in Ralph’s name, they told me when I asked who Ralph Speidel was. ‘Just in case,’ they said. Just in case of what, I asked. ‘You never know,’ they replied. ‘We might need to go underground. Set up a new identity.’

Jeez, I thought at the time, these are drug addled paranoiacs. But they were playing with fire, stealing canisters of nitrous oxide from hospitals, selling various illegal drugs. Nixon was gone by then, the VietNam War was lost and the draft was over. These weren’t SDS roommates or Weathermen, they were college students doing a little research, nothing the FBI would find particularly interesting. Yet.

When I moved out a few months later to my ghetto home and some fresh roommates, I considered taking Ralph’s card with me but I left it on the bulletin board, just glad to be shed of these goofballs finally. Now, of course, in light of current events, I wish I’d snatched it. You just never know when a new identity might come in handy.

I keep hearing how what us South Enders want fom our health care is more choices. Me and the mizzus, both past Medicare age now, started shopping for supplemental insurance. If we wanted choices, whoo-ee, we got em!! Well , not so much in different companies offering competitive prices so much as the two companies offering plans with plenty of their choices.

Maybe you want Plan X, pays 80% of Medicare A’s deductible, 100% of Med B’s. For $50 more a month you can get 100% pay on A & B. Want to save $$$’s, go for Plan D, you pay $3200 out of pocket before D kicks in, maxes out at $50K or Death, why they call it Plan D, you will opt for death before bankruptcy. Plan Z you can get some nursing home care, but not on Plan Y. Out of country coverage? Some yes, some no. Want co-pay or Medicare D, check out plan C? Need dental or glasses, Plans X and G and maybe N, but see if it covers contacts, bifocals or Lasix.

The list goes on. And on. And on some more. If you got a month or so, download the prosepectus of 43 pages or so per plan. Price per month is pretty prominent, you won’t need bifocals, but try to compare those prices with the juggling options, you’ll need something for your vertigo, check if it’s covered on your Medicare D, the pharmaceutical part. And if you’re not like ma and me, you’re searching for the equivalent of Medicares A and B in those health plans, god help you.

Call me cynical but if I didn’t know better with all this accumulated Wisdom old age is supposed to accrue along with arthritis and prostate problems, I’d say the health care industry makes this purposely obfuscated, a labyrinth of impossible to calculate connections between the fees and options, throw the dice, pay the price, take two aspirin, hope you make it til morning….

So … do I want more options? I don’t know. It seems like that stupid beer ad for the most popular beer in America: More Taste, Less Filling. It doesn’t have any taste whatsoever and it’s less filling because it’s mostly water. Still costs plenty, that’s for sure. Health care: more options, less expensive? We’re all being sold a bottle of snake oil, just 25 different labels on the same bottle. Glad we got those choices, though! Well, maybe if you’re wealthy….

By now you’ve heard the news: Amazon has announced plans to create a second headquarters outside Seattle and Gomorrah’s gridlocked environs. Needless to say this has set off a bidding frenzy for who can offer the most tax reductions, the best qualified personnel and the most advantageous living conditions for Amazon’s elite management team bent on taking over the entire world.

And what major metropolitan city in this country or somewhere else wouldn’t want to claim that citadel of power as their own economic engine? Who wouldn’t want property values to shoot through the roof in the first year, doubling or even tripling the price of a modest home and swelling the tax base? Who wouldn’t want rental prices doing the same, forcing the undesirable poor to move somewhere far outside their upscale neighborhoods? And who wouldn’t want to jumpstart their transportation system by injecting thousands upon thousands of Amazonians bent on reaching headquarters by train, by bus, by self-driving automobiles? No, the bids and the proposals are already pouring in the very first week of the retailing Godzilla’s announcement.

Here on the South End we have our own pitch, one we think may just carry the day. Admittedly we don’t have much transportation infrastructure, just a two lane blacktop that loops around the end of the island. And housing opportunities are, well, a bit Spartan and okay, mostly non-existent. Plus, qualified personnel and high tech training programs are what we could charitably call nascent, but actually are fairly non-existent, although Stanwood is building a fine new high school . I guess we could offer tax incentives. No B&O taxes, possibly forever. And gifts for the executives. You know, free crab. All the crab they can eat. Anytime they want it. We’ll even crack it for them.

What we really have to offer — and we think they’ll see the wisdom in this — is the chance to start at Ground Level, no impediments, no necessity to sweep aside the existing infrastructures, just a Fresh Clean Start. Sounds good to us too! Rome wasn’t built in a day, but Amazonia? We think you could do it here on the blank slate of the South End. Think about it, but not too long. Tyee Store may be expanding soon, pretty tough competition down here, and they may not roll over the way Whole Foods did, Mr. Bezos.

If you’re like me (I know, you hope you’re NOT!), you’ve been diverted lately from the usual political comedies by the tragedies in Houston and now Florida which is in the crosshairs of Hurricane Irma. Irma? Who comes up with these names, some bored yahoo in the basement of the National Storm Appelation Department? And if you’re like me, you feel lucky to be torn away from the 24/7 drumbeat of Trump Tweets and maybe you even feel a little guilty considering the suffering of folks down there in the Bible Belt whose God has apparently forsaken them.

But now along comes that bombastic bomb thrower Rush Limbaugh to suggest the hurricanes are nothing more than liberal conspiracies to alarm the masses and thereby open the door for legislation on Global Warming, as big a hoax to the Rushter as the notion that Obama was born in the same country as him. Lies, all lies! A conspiracy of the left! An evil plot to destroy America! But he can stop them, maybe only he can stop them, by broadcasting the truth from his beacon of Brietbart babble.

Thank God for the Rushman! Faux hurricanes! Who’d have thought the Left could stoop so low. Bogeyman meteorology!! What’s next? Glaciers supposedly melting? Polar bear uprisings? Icebergs plowing into San Francisco? Is there nothing too low for these liberals to stoop to?

Apparently not, according to Herr Limbaugh. But … today he has decided to, well, let’s just say he’s decided to play it safe. He’s evacuating himself from the phoney baloney hurricane that’s nothing but liberal hot air. Not, I’m sure, to protect himself. No, the man is far too courageous for that. Truth, he would tell you himself, is all the defense he needs. The mouth is mightier than the sword. Or the whirlwind. Or whatever …. No, I’m sure he’s taking a small break from the routine of Savior, maybe indulging in a much needed vacation. Either way, I’m sure we could use a much needed vacation from Rush. And if that hurricane should actually make landfall with 150 mile sustained winds, don’t think it’s proof the libs were right. Probably brought on by the sudden vacuum of the Rushster gone silent.

The Little Church of the Ravine has a huge flock down here on the sin-saturated South End. The new pastor, Rev. Jeffrey, recently removed from his post in Eastern Washington, preaches on the side of punishment over redemption. His new parishioners figure those wheat farmers must have responded better to prods than to penance. The rest of us know Jeffrey has a rough row to hoe if he thinks South Enders are going to respond to Fear. If abject poverty hasn’t scared us yet, the good Reverend is tilling soil dryer than Eastern Washington’s.

Faith takes a lot of forms down here and the Little Church of the Ravine is only one of many. We got spiritualists and Ouija Boarders, Tea Leaf Readers and Palmists, Y Ching Tossers and the just plain superstitious. You name it, we probably got one or two back up the holler. Most of em don’t mind admitting to some faith based mysticism, they just want to believe in Something. Mostly we accept each other’s cosmology — even if Rev. Jeff makes it plain where he thinks that leads.

Jerry the Card Counter lives a half mile up the road and throws in with us boys occasionally at our weekly poker game. Jerry plays the odds mathematically, analyzing probabilities in his engineer’s head. Don’t even ask if he buys lottery tickets. Jerry usually goes home a winner. Partly because he never plays a hunch and partly because he drinks less than the rest of us, a good combination for profit, but not for fun.

Jerry is a believer in science. Which is fine. But he doesn’t like it when I say, peering over my 4 sequential cards and going for an improbable inside straight, that science itself is unprovable and so it too is essentially faith based. Jerry, nearly apoplectic at such heresy, forgets the odds of his own hand to unleash a spirited defense of Empirical Inquiry, then meets my raise by raising me back. The boyz all fold at the high cost of calling bluffs and embroiling themselves in epistemological exercises. “You can’t prove anything, Jerry,” I say calmly, looking at the last card Fearless Fred dishes me. I bet 3 bucks, the limit for our games.

Jerry can’t help himself, meeting my 3 and raising 3 more. “Science is fact-based, Skeeter!” he yells, thumping down a puny 2 pair when I throw my money in the pot, aces over eights, all black, ‘the dead man’s hand’, what Wild Bill Hickok held when he was shot down.

“Not true, Jerry. The Uncertainty Principle. The experimenter affects the results on the quantum level. It’s a strange world down there, Buddy. Believe what you want — it might make it come true.”

Jerry’s watching as I lay down a ten, then the jack and the queen, both lining up with the king next and I hold the final card until he can’t stand it any longer.

“Dammit!” he explodes when I lay down the Ace of Hearts with a gentle slap and big smirk. “What a lucky bastard!”

I smile as I rake in the big fat pot. “Sometimes, Jerry, you got to bet the hunch and hope the quarks line up. It’s all about believing. Next game is 7 card stud, gentlemen. Jokers wild. My deal.”