The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

NEVER GIVE AN INCH, you might as well declare as the motto for this current administration. Kellyanne Conway, on the heels of Spicer’s departure and the arrival of the hedge fund manager now Communications Director, Scaramucci, evidently decided six months after her Alternative Facts fiasco to just go ahead and explain herself. And the Trump Team. And how more has been done in this Presidency than we give them credit for. More jobs. Record stock market. Peace on Earth. Intergalactic reputations. All that stuff you maybe missed paying too much attention to possible Obstruction of Justice, Collusion with a Foreign Government or Lying Under Oath and/or Tweet. Partly sunny, see, partly cloudy. Variable. Neither here, but not actually there. Not really one, but not the other….

I see partly cloudy with a hint of thunderstorms and raining of frogs. But, of course, I’m listening to the lying media. Time, maybe, to tune into Breitbark and Fox. Sunnier weather, no doubt. See which way the wind blows. Right to left or left to right. Kinda both, see, partly cloudy, a little sunny. Alternative facts, who can really say? You muddy the water, spin the data, shake and stir, well, sir, you got something nobody can say for sure, take your pick, roll the dice, flip a card, check with yer astrologer, it’s too close to call….

Me, I appreciate clarification like this. For awhile I thought the Trump administration was trying to justify lying to me, thought maybe I was dumb as a box of ballots, figured they could sell me some snake oil or nutritional supplements and I wouldn’t know the difference. But partly cloudy, sometimes sunny, well … I can sure see which is which, facts are facts and bullshit is bullshit. I think so anyway. Or perhaps partly factual, partly b.s. Hard to say, except for the administration’s communication people. Anyway, thanks, Kellyanne, for clarifying that. Maybe thanks, maybe bite me. You know what I mean.

It’s only been six years since Inauguration Day. Oh, wait, six months. That feel like six years. And already the Comb-over-in-chief is examining whether or not he can pardon his family and friends and possibly himself for the inevitable verdicts that are coming down the pike faster than jobs are leaving the country. You have to keep pinching yourself to see if this is all some weird dream, something you’ll wake up from and find Hillary Clinton in the White House. Benghazi Benghazi, the war chant of the same folks who can’t find it in their conscience to demand much of anything when it comes to Trump’s malfeasance. Lock her up! Lock her up!

Keep pinching yourself, it isn’t Hillary who’s headed for prison. And yeah, the guy who will be is already looking for his escape route. You can lie all you want selling real estate and name brand to the money boyz in New York and Moscow, but lying under oath, especially to the FBI and the Special Prosecutor, good luck with that. Ask Bill Clinton. Sexual dalliance is one thing, but lying won’t cut it. Give him credit, though, he never planned to pardon himself. That tactic is reserved for the doomed and Bill was never one to see himself as the victim. Donald, oh yeah, he sees himself as something he never dreamed, the recipient from a thousand bullies’ attacks. So unfair! Bad!

The noose is tightening every day and you can hear the screams of anguish from the White House at 4 a.m. every morning clear out here on the Left Coast. The legal beagles he’s hired evidently didn’t counsel him to stay quiet on the subject of executive pardons. He might as well stop tweeting now and plead the fifth, ditch the attorneys and save some time and money. Nobody who is innocent would be considering pardoning himself, let’s quit fooling ourselves. A written confession might be slightly more damning, but in the absence of that or Mueller’s future indictments, I think a jury of his peers will need pardoning too, but for the jury of us citizens, the only question now is the sentencing.

Personally, I’d be okay with a pardon. Just leave office in Abject Shame, the Trump brand forever synonymous with Lying Loser. Send him back to his gold palace and ban him from public appearances for the rest of his self-absorbed days. Put an asterisk in the history book in the blank space for 43rd President of the United States. * Unindicted Co-conspirator. Pardoned by Himself. No Memorable Legislation.

Thank God for O.J. Simpson! For six sick months we’ve wallowed in story after story of our President’s, let’s be kind here, missteps. Day after day of wretched lies, fumbled opportunities, tweeted outrages, bullying accusations, the continuous and endless tantrum of a six year old spoiled brat in the body of a Michelin Man doughboy, but now, my fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. O.J. is dominating the news!!

Okay, so maybe the national nightmare isn’t actually over, but … for a while, brief or not, we can turn our short little attention spans to pulp fiction, not political fiction. O.J., he of the small glove, will certainly supplant Donald, he of the small hands. And can’t we all, Republicans and Democrats, Libertarians and KKK, can’t we all agree on this: O.J. is back and bigger than ever!! He’s getting out of prison after 9 long years in exile. And boy, do we need the Juice in these difficult times.

Here comes the man we’ve learned to love to hate, a tabloid villain, a rags to riches to jailcell story not only made for TV but made for day in and day out viewing. Remember the freeway caravan down through Los Angeles, dozens of squad cars following respectfully as the big man wove through linebackers and tacklers and SUV’s and rush hour traffic. You don’t? Never mind, we’ll be rewinding that game footage for you and everyone else. Johnny Cochran? Judge Ito? That little stoner what’s his name, Kinky or Kreepy, the Southern California surfer dude without a board? Get ready, he’s back, they’re all back. F. Lee Bailey, hey, bet you forgot F. Lee. He’s back too, the whole gang is back.

I don’t know how long the networks can run reruns on this, dissect the parole hearings, interview the victim’s parents one more time, recap the crime, analyze the trial, review his last crime trying to recover his trophies or whatever he was trying to recover. Fox News should be able to take it down the field for very long yardage and CNN can run exclusive coverage for a week at least. Unless N. Korea nukes us and they’re forced to interrupt with breaking news. Donald J. who? Duck? Health care repeal and replace? Ho ho. What we need to know is where was that knife hidden, O.J., and how does it feel to be a free man again and what will you be doing now that you’re with us once again? America turns its needy eyes to you, buddy, and hey, thanks, glad you’re back!!

Sarah and I were down at the Suds and Duds laundromat doing what our own machines wouldn’t do last week. Mine was leaking water from somewhere in its enameled casing and Sarah’s just wouldn’t turn on anymore. While we were idling over the noise of washers and dryers, we got to complaining about life in the 21st Century, a favorite pastime for us South Enders. Sarah had a bottle of wine discreetly hidden in a paper bag and I was working through a six pack of beer I’d picked up on the way to the Suds and Duds at Tyee Store. We made quite the pair.

“So I bought one of those gizmos,” she was telling me, “you know, the little canister that has a brain. Alexa.” I shook my head, no, not sure what she was referring to. “It’s a device, Skeeter, to hook up all your other gizmos. Answers questions, puts on songs you request, orders stuff online. Seriously, you never heard of this?” she asks and pours herself another glass of merlot from the paper bag. I assured her I had not. “Some people put one of those in half the rooms in their house.”

“So it’s like a TV remote?” I asked, quite the Neanderthal. And popped my third bottle. I could see my sheets spinning in the big Maytag, round and round, only another quarter hour or so, then I could go home to my broken washer and my deviceless home.

“No, it’s not like a TV remote,” she said in a voice a mom would use on an exasperatingly stupid kid. “It’s like a computer that listens and learns. It figures out your likes and dislikes. Plus it answers all the questions you can throw at it. Like a talking encyclopedia. But here’s the thing,” she whispers, lowering her head close to mine, as if we weren’t the only two people in the place. “It listens to you all the time.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean it hears what you’re saying. The other day I was talking to a neighbor over coffee and I mentioned the washer was busted. An hour later my computer started getting ads for appliances. Washers on sale.” She said it was no coincidence. It had started happening all the time. “Now,” she told me, “I’m afraid to turn it on. I unplugged it. And I’m still not sure it isn’t listening.”

“So it’s sending all this back to Headquarters?” I asked, not sure where headquarters might actually be. Sarah nodded, took a long hard pull on the wine, looked nervously around the laundromat, the poster child for Artificial Intelligence Paranoia. “They’re listening, Skeeter. They’re keeping tabs on us. Right now they just want to sell me a washer dryer combo, but I don’t know what else they’re thinking about.”

A truck pulled up to the front door. Sarah pulled away from me like she’d been hit with the voltage from a cattle prodder, like this Alexis thing had commandeered a vehicle and come to check on her. Maybe ask if she needed another bottle of merlot ordered and then delivered by drone. By the looks of her, she could use two. I figured I had time for maybe one more beer.

There’s a lot of chatter lately about removing the Mad King from office. Insanity, they say, is grounds for dismissal. The Democrats mostly want the Presidency restored to its former glory, made great again, the Republicans are afraid the Trumpster’s constituency will come after them with pitchforks and Confederate flags. I hate to admit it, but the GOP have a well-grounded fear of reprisal. We all should.

Half this Land of the Free Home of the Brave voted for this guy, not because they didn’t understand the crudity of the real estate developer, not because they thought he would be high minded, not because they couldn’t see he was a pussy grabbing dog whistler. He told you so himself. He went before the Christian Right and professed his sins, not confessed them. They went right ahead and voted for the sinner. Anyone who thought he would change his ways once he was elected probably had bought a bridge from him in New Jersey. The rest of us knew what we were getting.

So now we got what we were getting. Hell no, I don’t like it. Hell yes, I’d like to jerk the jerk right out of the White House, haul him up on any and all charges Mueller can make stick and hope Mike Pence doesn’t offer clemency under the bogus defense that it would irrevocably cripple the nation. Mike Pence doesn’t give a fig in Hades about what would hurt the nation. He’s a lap dog with ambitions to be the lap. Personally, I’ll take the Mad King.

But here’s the deal, artless or no: the citizens of this experimental democracy voted in a vicious little nutcase. They listen to hot talk radio and read faux news that says the real news is phony. They believe what they want to believe and how do you convince them otherwise? It isn’t quite the definition of crazy, but it’s close enough for me. We elected the Man of Our Times. Crass, sexist, narcissistic, oh cripes, why list them again, the huckster is known to all of us. He’s the sinister little voice in the back of our heads that whispers go ahead, do what you want, anything goes, there’s no punishment, just reward. Lash out, you’ll feel better. Knock the old lady to the sidewalk, she’s been asking for it. Never ever pull your punches, that’s for losers. It’s dog eat dog, baby, and you better sharpen the canines.

The 25th Amendment as a remedy for this? C’mon, you’ll need an amendment to stop the ignorant from voting. Welcome to democracy circa 2017. Welcome to the New America. You huddled masses, if you’re tired or poor, it’s your own fault, go home or shut up.

Let Them Eat Cake … or Twinkies

“We built a program to solve the problem of malnutrition in America, and now we have a problem of obesity,” Rep. (R) Steve King said recently, referring to Michele Obama’s nutrition in schools program.

What Mr. King is suggesting is that we build the border wall using the money from food stamps as well as the defunding of Planned Parenthood. King wants that wall built and he’s happy to use EBT card money to get the job done. After all, he says, the nutrition program of Michele Obama’s school program worked so well that now the poorest citizens are overweight. Thanks a lot, Michelle! You’re probably responsible for the diabetes epidemic in America too. Why aren’t we investigating your role in the murder of innocent people across this once great nation? And why isn’t Trump tweeting on this?

We elect these folks. My fellow Americans elect these people. Yours too, by the way. These are the people who want to end Medicaid and substitute health care you can choose, not something dictated to you by the damn government. Of course it will cost more, a lot more, but when you reach the point you can’t afford to buy it, that’s your decision, see? That, claims Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House, is freedom. Freedom to choose.

It’s like those school lunch programs Michele inflicted on our kids. Maybe they wanted desserts and pizzas washed down with Coke, not vegetables and fruit washed down with milk. Freedom of choice, freedom to eat what they want. Fast food vs. nutritious fare. Let the little tykes pick what tastes good to them. That’s the American Way. Not government intervention. Not a nanny state. Maybe offer them cigarettes too and a couple of shots of Jack Daniels. More options, good. Less options, bad. Land of the Free, see?

Same thing with science. Why shove evolution down our kids’ throats? Why not let them choose to study Creationism? Or witchcraft? Why limit their educational options? Why make those miners’ children in Kentucky study Global Warming when all those faux scientists’ claims will kill their daddies’ jobs? Doesn’t seem fair, doesn’t seem right.

Pity the fat kids Michele’s nutrition program created. We can’t help them now, but maybe we can help the next generation of children. Let’s take away their food stamps and cut out the Medicaid. They’ll thank us for creating new choices for them. Tough love, I know, but compassionate conservatism has to be.

Fresh off his victorious mistrial for sexual assault using quaaludes to drug his victims, Bill Cosby’s crack publicity team announced the National Funny Man would go on the road to conduct town hall meetings to educate us men on how to avoid being falsely accused of sexual misconduct. Presumably he would inform us how to court and spark with pharmaceuticals and not be convicted. At least not convicted on the first trial with a hung jury. If the second goes badly, Fat Albert may want to change the focus to something more attuned to his prison audience’s needs.

I guess Cosby has been watching politics lately judging by this chutzpah. If you’re caught in a lie, call your accuser the liar. If they tweet back, threaten them with lawsuits. If that doesn’t work, ramp up the lie. No doubt in my mind the President will offer courses at Trump University to help student/citizens avoid lawsuits on real estate deals that were fraudulent, on impeachments that were trumped up, on collusions that were really more egregiously done by others. Deny deny deny, but then go on the offensive. Blame the press, blame the jury, blame the crybaby liberals, blame those mean Democrats and those bitchy women. If you can’t rape em yourself, well, maybe there’s benefit in showing others how to do it. For fun and profit.

Cosby won’t pull this off, of course. Trump probably will. Donald has honed these skills from childhood and he has plenty of help now from the courageous profiles of his Republican shills. Plus, he’s already set up Trump U. The man is so far ahead of Cosby’s game, he makes Fat Albert look like a grossly obese donut addict starting his first marathon. The public has already judged Fat Albert, a ruined icon of American comedy, once a role model, now his own joke.

Trump, so far nobody’s laughing. But when we realize we’ve been fed date rape drugs and violated, when the drugs wear off, all the courses in his little faux University won’t help him either. Probably still make Time magazine’s Man of the Year and he’ll call it a Huge Success.

I guess I’ve been working in art for about 35 years. Some of it I’ve been doing okay at, even made a so-called Living at, and most of it, well, I’m not the poster child for Starving Artist, but maybe Anorexic Artist. We artists have a tough row to hoe in corporate America, that’s the truth, and so we try all sorts of strategies ranging from art fair booths to just giving up and getting a job, a real job. But probably too late for one that pays well or offers benefits and pensions. The money belongs to the Job Creators. Us creators, well, good luck.

I went up into the mountains this past weekend with a box of the Skeeter Daddle Blues, hoping to do a book reading and maybe sell a few copies. Ever since my old outlets for book sales dried up, I’ve been headscratching how to market these babies, get them out of my basement and into the hands of folks hungry for great literature. Tyee Store closed up and so did the Copy This Mail That office supply store that sold the first book Skeeter Daddle Diaries so well I ordered a second printing. The South End String Band CD’s sold like hotcakes too at those places, but when they closed shop, the only show in town was the Snow Goose Bookstore. And now they’ve shuttered their doors too. We probably sold two to three thousand CD’s before that. I sold maybe 1000 books. Not bad for a backwash.

This past year I haven’t sold more than ten books and the band is giving CD’s away at concerts for ‘the price we finally figured they were worth’. For free. One concert alone we handed out 150 CD’s.

A high tech, fast charging friend convinced me to try Amazon. Against my better judgement I signed on, figuring I’d be sending them a box of hot sellers they could pass out faster than candy on Halloween. But no, they wanted me to send one book at a time, priority mail, to their warehouse in Maryland or someplace far far away. I spent about $5 per book for mailing envelope and postage, losing a couple of bucks on each one. This went on for a couple of months, never enough sales apparently, to justify shipping them a full box. I might have continued this brilliant sales strategy right into bankruptcy but one day I noticed Amazon, love these guyz, had used copies of the Skeeter Diaries listed at 1.99 plus shipping. This was great. Me competing against me and the only winner was Amazon. It took me awhile to get out of this crummy cycle, the company not really responsive to any inquiries. In fact, they had no way to make inquiries.

I finally just kept sending them messages on the sales requests that the book was Out of Print. Which, finally, it was. Sadly, I buy my own book back from them occasionally just to have a few copies around. Cheaper than reprints by far. Bookstores competing against Bezos, like I mentioned at the last Snow Goose reading before they closed shop, are like Godzilla vs Bambi, it won’t be long before they’re toejam. Now I see where they’d like to be my printer too, print on demand. Probably ship them to me, then have me ship them back each sale. Lose even more money on every point of sale.

So I wish I had a tried and true strategy for you prospective artists out there looking for ways to sell your wares, I really do. It was always dog eat dog, but now we got Godzilla too. My only advice is to be like the little furry creatures during the Dinosaur Era, stay low, keep a close eye out, maybe move at night. I know, not much help, but the trick is to survive.

Yesterday I drove 60 miles up the Stillaguamish River valley, past the Oso Slide that killed about 70 folks a couple of years ago and into the tarheel town of Darrington for, ironically enough, a book reading given by me, Skeeter Daddle. This gig was sponsored by the local library, a branch of the regional library the mizzus used to work at, the big one that puts on Ted Talks and concerts and such, all those extracurricular to entice the citizenry to view libraries not as museums for Gutenberg, but vibrant places where discourse is aplenty and kids are welcome.

I admit, I had a bad feeling about this, even told the mizzus to stay home and save herself five or six hours of wasted time when the weather was sunny and warm, when we should’ve been picnicking with our fresh caught crab and our newly dug potatoes for potato salad, enjoying a cold adult beverage or six, basking in the lazy hazy halcyon days that are upon us. As I drove up the valley, past the jagged peaks of Whitehorse Mountain and streams filled with glacial melt gurgling into the Stilly, I wondered why the hell I was doing this. There was no remuneration and the possibility of selling a book or two wasn’t going to pay for the gas my truck was using to get there, about ten or twelve bucks, I calculated.

Darrington, even at the height of summer weather, was pretty much a ghost town. I never did see the library that sponsored this gala event, but I did finally find the bookstore and coffee shop where the reading was being held. When I got there the joint was closed, lights off, nobody home. I drove around town some more, made note of the redneck bars I might make use of if this reading had been called off, maybe read to the tarheel transplants some of my little stories about folks quite a bit, possibly too much, like them. I was imagining a story, the last story, with the working title: The Death of Skeeter Daddle.

My reading was at 6. At ten to the owner of the store showed up and we talked while we waited for the crowd. At ten after Larry showed up, ordered an ice tea and we all talked while we waited for the rest of the mob. At about twenty after the librarian who’d arranged this with me showed up and we all three chatted amiably about the state of running bookstores and libraries and such while we waited for the stragglers to show up. At 6:30 we decided this was pretty much the Whole Show.

I guess if you want seconds of Humble Pie, this is how you do it. We all exchanged information about our lives, the kids, jobs, how we got to the place we live, all that stuff strangers introduce themselves with. An hour later the librarian left and Tony was closing shop. I gave him a pile of books and said see if anyone wants to buy them, they’re yours. I handed Larry one too. The box I’d brought just in case the reading public of Darrington was smitten with my excerpts, well, they rode home with me. I stopped along the route home and bought some cold ones. I gotta admit, it was a lonely picnic.

I had a friend call me up the other day. An intruder – ‘a trespasser’, she called him – had wandered onto her property via bicycle. Armed, she said, with a clipper. Her neighbor had confronted him lopping English Ivy off her fir trees and asked him who he was, did he have authorization for this horticultural blitzkrieg, where was he from and why the Anglophobic hostilities??

My friend was sure if anyone had a hand on the pulse of the South End, if anyone was wired into the grapevine without the use of any social media of any sort, old Skeeter would know who this interloper was.

Indeed. I told her his name, gave her his address, website and phone number and approximate height and weight. More than that, I volunteered his M.O., his modus operandi. “He has a jag about ivy strangling the flora,” I informed her. “Harmless, really, old Clipper Carl. Rides his bike around the South End, usually asks the owner first, but I guess time is running out or the obsession has tightened around his trunk. It’s some kind of botanical fixation. Let’s not call it pathological, just a bit more like a religious calling. NOT that I’m saying Carl hears voices in the night “OUT OUT DAMNED IVY!!” Or that he might mistake a fellow South Ender for a strangler vine. We all have our hobbies. And sometimes we lose ourselves in pursuit of them.

The odd thing is, Carl is very well off, a wealthy retired professional and a big philanthropist. Sure, he could’ve chosen to eliminate poverty or disease on the South End …. but … he chose to eradicate ivy. Not maybe what Bill Gates would’ve chosen, but even Bill gets criticized for not choosing causes WE want most. You can’t really win with a lot of folks.

I was riding my bike by Carl’s property today, the ten acre parcel he bought down the road from his bluff house, the one he has the security camera aimed at the gate he keeps locked, and I noticed all the NO TRESPASSING signs he’d posted for a quarter of a mile on the perimeter. Right where I used to pick cherries and apples before he bought the acreage and warned us off. He doesn’t eat the fruit, I notice, but we can’t either now. I’ve been looking for a new hobby myself in my advancing old age and Carl’s given me something of an idea. Good sharp hatchet, hop on my bike and mosey down to those NO TRESPASSING signs I don’t much care for, I bet they’d come down faster than clipped off ivy vines. Free up those fruit trees to us neighbors.

If anyone would understand, I’m certain Carl would…..