The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

A man died today in a pancake eating contest. In his zeal to excel he clogged his food chute with the tasty but expansive buttermilk cakes and expired before any Heimlich maneuver could expel the carbojam from his alimentary. These things happen, of course. No one said fame would be easy. Sad to say, same day, another contestant died eating in a donut gobbling race. In the dog eat dog world of gourmet eatery contests, these two are now heroes even if their names are already forgotten.

Maybe they should’ve dedicated themselves to the hot dog eating competitions. Less bun, more meat, but who knows if this would have saved their lives or not. The quest for a Guinness world record leads many of us down a treacherous trail, but usually not an early demise. Nevertheless, the sacrifice, however steep, makes the effort that much more poignant.

I myself am not much of a pancake or a donut enthusiast, I don’t care how much maple syrup lubricant you add to the coagulated glutinous mess or how many sprinkles to the deep fried batter. And the thought of cramming these things into my pie hole at breakneck speed, well, even a hot dog competition looks good. And I can’t recall when the last contestant in a wiener race died at the plate.

Still, we are a society with an appetite for momentary fame. American Idol, the Apprentice, Dancing with the Stars, Pancake Gobbling King, President of the United States. Give us our 15 minutes, that’s all we ask. Something to engrave on the granite headstone when we’re gone, something our progeny can read with no little pride. Here Lies Grampaw: He Died Doing What He Loved Most.

For you grampaws out there slowly rocking into the shadows watching Wheel of Fortune, lift a fork to the Pancake King.

A study cited in the morning’s lying press showed statistics that kids were less likely to do drugs these days. The thesis these researchers had come up with was they were doping themselves on social media, a steady drip of dopamine pleasure, nearly constant in their waking, if somnambulistic, hours. Social media as narcotic….

You live down at the tail end of an island far from the tentacles of Facebook, you forget sometimes you’ve set yourself adrift from the continental shores of 21st century modernity, but as the riptides sweep you away and the land lines tear loose from the walls, those messages from the Mainland become fader and more indistinct, Morse code from telegraph poles rotting in the relentless rains.

For a confirmed xenophobe, this desire to stay in constant contact with strangers and family and friends is bemusing, like stuffing messages in bottles all day long and setting them loose on the tides. I had a buddy back in high school who was a ham radio operator tapping out code to other hamsters overseas and across the globe, who stayed up late in his room on the chance that meteorological conditions were ripe for some far away contact. “I talked to a guy in England,” he would tell me the following morning.

“Whadja talk about?” I’d ask. Invariably, nothing much, just name, serial numbers and rank. Where they lived. Age, maybe. I guess we just have this desire to make contact, to let someone know we’re out there, that we’re not alone. Same reason we send radio signals into space. Same reason we write blogs. Ironically, my buddy the ham radio operator slowly became afraid of human interaction of all kinds, what the shrinks call agoraphobic. I tried getting in touch with him some years after the last time I saw him, but he’d lost his job, moved away from his house in Missoula and now even Google can’t locate him. I imagine him holed up in some desolate place, tapping Morse code late into the comforting night, listening for an answer from folks he’ll never have to meet, all his bottles crashing onto lonesome beaches in places he’ll never see.

Jeez, no sooner than the British start the process to exit the EU, those sneaky Spaniards make a claim for getting back Gibraltar. Brexit is a more slippery slope than the Brits thought, but if Spain thinks it’s going to annex the Big Rock without a fight, they’ve forgotten the Falklands. And the Falklands, with their herds of sheep thousands of miles from the English shore, well, they’re not the Rock of Gibraltar, trust me.

Here on the breakaway nation of the once 13 colonies, we’re starting our own withdrawal from globalism. Maybe we should worry a little about Hawaii and Alaska. The Russians feel pretty gypped by Seward’s little folly back 150 years ago and Pele, the volcano god, might feel the same. And let’s not even mention Puerto Rico and Guantanamo.

But that brings us to Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, all those territories we took after John Wayne lost the Alamo. Mexico would be crazy not to make a grab; after all, they’ve been slowly invading for decades, pretending to work low paying jobs without even getting social security, just biding their time until the day America, trying to be great again, shrinks its borders. With a president who understands the art of the deal, maybe the time is ripe for a fast negotiation, see what we can get for the Lone Star state since they want to secede anyway. Maybe trade for Cancun with Baja thrown in for good measure. We could easily toss in Arizona for good measure, let Sheriff Joe fight the cartels on their own turf, see how tough he really is.

Down here on the South End I’m licking my chops. Might be the exact right time to make a play for the northern section of the island, save us going the Kim Jong-un route and developing nuclear stockpiles. A peaceful resolution seems a lot more likely now that American expansionism has come to a crashing end judging by the Trump Doctrine: Talk loud and carry a small stick. Maybe my neighbors to the north will see the logic and economics finally in reunification. If not, well, let’s not start saber rattling just yet. Down here we still believe in peaceful negotiation.

This morning in the mainstream lying press, I read about a UW professor who was tracking blogsites and twitter feeds to see if she could get a handle on where folks are getting their information these days. InfoWars. She was astounded that most people are reading – and probably believing— the alt-right and far left sites that appeal to their biases, not their reason. I listened this morning on the radio to an interview with a right wing talk show host who accused his interviewer and NPR of bashing all things Trump, just another example of the lying media.

Trump and his mentor Bannon of Breitbart have studiously planted the seeds of public doubt about the veracity of the Washington Post and New York Times. We are entering a techno-fueled Dark Age. I talked with a woman last week who said she couldn’t bear to read anything but the sites that bashed Trump. The entire nation seems to be pulling the covers over our heads and listening only to voices that agree with us. This tribalism bodes ill for Reason.

If I can summarize, the way to determine if something is faux news or factual news is this: it’s all phony. Everyone is lying. Truth is relative. Truth is what I believe, period. Walter Cronkite was a big fat liar, we just didn’t know it yet. Rush Limbaugh is God and he’s laughing at us. He killed the truth by telling people what they wanted to hear.

I don’t have the optimism I once had about the fate of a nation that loves its own ignorance. Like my old neighbor loved to intone: no brains, no headaches. Course, he went bankrupt three times, lost his wife and kids and his farm. My bet is he didn’t learn a single lesson from that. It isn’t that we no longer learn from history, we don’t even believe in history.

Every year in the Pulitzer Prize nominated Crab Cracker, our local bastion of honest news reportage, we look forward to the one day when we can test our readers’ knowledge of alternate facts and verify vestigial funny bones. In the past we have run cutting edge, fast breaking stories about everything from whale sightings in the Stilly River to alpaca hunting season openings, from renaming the Mark Clark Bridge the Colton Harris Moore Causeway to the proposed 40 acre landfill on Camano’s South End.

Admittedly many loyal readers felt duped and some even canceled subscriptions … at least until they learned there were no subscriptions. It’s a free press in more ways than one, we informed our outraged gullible readers. But for the most part folks were mostly amused at our once a year antics. Those days, sad to say, are now gone. The Trump Administration yesterday issued an executive order via Tweet that henceforth, April Fool’s Day would no longer be recognized as a national holiday.

Reporters from the lying NY Times and Washington Post clamored for clarification, but White House spokesman Sean Spicer refused to accept questions from their faux news services. Fox News asked if rumors were true that the entire month of April would be designated Fool’s Month, but Mr. Spicer refused to validate those claims, saying the President and his staff would issue further information in good time.

“Isn’t it true, sir,” our reporter from the Cracker queried, “that Saturday Night Live is saying the entire year can now be declared April Fool’s Day?” which brought the press conference to a sudden conclusion when Spicer blamed the media and Hollywood for a profusion of phony stories like those. “You people twist everything!” he shouted before abruptly throwing down his microphone and walking to the door.

The Crab Cracker, no longer invited to further press conferences, if indeed there are more press conferences, was unable to verify rumors of a month-long holiday from truthful news, much less reports of a yearlong celebration of Alternate Facts. But … our investigation did reveal that Congress will soon introduce a bill in the Senate declaring May 1st National Truth Day. Watch for an update here in these pages.

I live in the only industrialized country in the entire world that doesn’t have universal health care. Instead, we have privatized health care, the kind that’s supposed to bring the full firepower of capitalism’s vaunted competition to bear on prices, meaning, we, the citizens, are shoppers in the medical market. It’s like buying a couch or a car … except far far more complicated. I also live in the only advanced nation in the civilized world that rejects the science behind global warming. Not only rejects it, but now thumbs its nose at the rest of the world.

Today our president started the process of rescinding EPA restrictions on American power plants. With a stroke of his mighty pen, he proclaimed a New Day for coal powered plants and for coal mining jobs. He’s making America great again. If only he realized how complicated this will be!! If only he’d checked to see what natural gas plants cost now to run. Or how many jobs are in the alternative energy field compared to coal mining and gas and oil extraction. But no, he’s bringing back coal, making America, if not great again, what it was 50 or 100 years ago.

What’s next, you ask? Cotton farming and slavery? Kodak and the print film camera? The slide rule? We going to raise buffalo to hunt, old growth cedar to log, 80 pound salmon to fish?

I wish the world was the Way it Was when I was a kid, a white middle class kid anyway. I wish technology wasn’t moving so fast most of us feel shocked and stupid and scared. I wish the world would get small again, about the size of the South End and its environs. I wish I wasn’t bombarded with the news, faux and real, 24/7, maybe give me time to read a book or listen to music. I wish there was a job for everyone that paid well, except maybe the Irish/Jewish/Eastern European/ Hispanic immigrants who’d work for cheap all those jobs we need but don’t want to do ourselves.

I wish America was the fantasy on Roy Rogers and Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver. I wish Ike was still president. But you know what, it wasn’t all that great for a lot of us and it won’t be like that again, I don’t care if the buffalo roam the plains by the millions. We hunted them to death, we killed the Indians that needed those bison to live and I can tell you with no little certainty, those coal jobs aren’t coming back either. Who’s kidding who here?

Back when I first came to Seattle and Gomorrah, I had a buddy who lived in a dive apartment that was going to be sold and remodeled. They were tossing the old 1940’s era refrigerators the junkies and alcoholics had used for decades and my pal asked me if I wanted to go in with him on the capitalist venture of hauling, cleaning and selling these vintage frigidaires for fun and profit. Not being employed and in full possession of a half ton Chevy pickup, I said sure. And by that afternoon we owned 60 reefers of various stages of mold and decomposition.

I had access to a garage none of my six roommates used, so we stored them there after a couple days lugging them down 2 or 3 flights of stairs near downtown, then hauling them up to the university district where I rented a room in a house full of students. Each one got cleaned, disinfected and plugged in to see if it still worked. They all did. Tough units, those old Kelvinators and Frigidaires. Not particularly efficient, but they’d run until the next century if you asked them to. All we asked them to was run for the 30 days we offered as a ‘quality assurance guarantee’. If we’d been savvier biznessmen, we would’ve offered a 2 year service plan like Sears. Course, Sears is in about the same shape today as some of those refrigerators were back then.

Our ‘advertising’ campaign was simple in those pre-Craigslist times — we put flyers on telephone poles.
$30 30 DAY GUARANTEE FREE DELIVERY CALL THIS #
The Freon filled appliances sold like hotcakes, mostly to little bistros and coffee shops and student renters and our friends. I kept one for my room after my roommates started stealing my beer and food from the communal fridge. Then I locked my room. I guess they were young communists, share and share alike, mine is theirs. They weren’t bad people, but I learned why communism doesn’t work unless the others do and you don’t.

By the end of a month we’d sold every last unit. We made about $800 dollars each, more than I made the entire previous year, maybe two. My buddy said maybe we should’ve grabbed the stoves too, but by then it was too late and our experimental entrepreneurism came to an abrupt end when demand outstripped product. Probably lucky for both us Appliance Kings.

It’s been raining here in the land of rain, the Pacific Northwest. Even here on the banana belt of the South End, the rains are biblical. Water is coming off the hillsides, down driveways, off the bluffs, over our clogged gutters. The gutters, well, they’re not really unusual since I’m a little slothful when it comes to keeping them clean. The bonsai trees seem to thrive up there, if nothing else. But the bluffs, not ready for this kind of constant deluge, they’re slip-sliding away.

I just put the finishing touches on the new oars I built for a rowboat I found escaped from its moorage in one of last winter’s storms. It had a 1979 Arizona registration number so we could, if we wanted, surmise it had journeyed through deserts and over mountains, blown by sandstorms and avalanches, all the way to Puget Sound where I found it washed up a mile north of my beach. It kind of looked like it had had a rough voyage, but hey, any boat in a storm, I say, so I hauled it back to our bulkhead, patched it up and used it for crabbing last summer.

My new oars needed one final fitting before I attached the oarlocks so I was taking them down to the beach for a tryout … only to discover a landslide of trees, blackberries and a million years of sediment layers had sloughed off and buried the bulkhead stairs and smashed my twelve foot dinghy into a four foot crumpled tin can. So much for fitting oars for that compacted aluminum scow. Easy come, easy go, as the philosophers say.

I stood there awhile in stupefied wonder, staring at my wrecked rowboat and at the naked bluff where water was still seeping along a clay layer, threatening further mayhem, maybe even treating me like it did my boat. A watersogged peninsula of sand hovered precariously 50 feet above me, ready to let loose any minute, so I decided to abandon my nautical dreams and just get myself and my oars out of harm’s way.

The weather folks are predicting rain for the rest of the week. I’m predicting landslides. The neighbors on the bluff are suddenly alarmed, I guess just now noticing that the banks aren’t stable. My second prediction is that by next week we’ll see a new crop of FOR SALE signs across the road. That, or maybe I’ll have beachfront property soon if the monsoons don’t stop.

So little by little, tweet by tweet, you’ve come to grips with the sad reality that Donald J. the Trump is king of America. Hard, isn’t it? Sleepless nights, muffled sobs of despair, an inchoate but ever present anxiety, a mounting anger and a refusal to fully accept this harsh new reality. You thought, with Obama winning the second term, we’d turned a corner in this country. Oh, racism had reared its ugly head again, but … we were a pluralistic liberal society after all, we’d solve these vexing problems.

Just like you, I didn’t see this coming. Sure, I’d listened to Hot Talk Radio and those rating-hungry demagogues. I predicted Trump beating the Rhinos, but I sure didn’t see him winning the Whole Enchilada. I couldn’t imagine it. But … no need to tell you, unless you’ve been self-medicating too hard, he did. I’m not going to reiterate the man’s foibles, you can read it in the lying press every damn day. What we’ve all got to face, what we all need to understand, is we’re in a culture war and we’re losing. The kids aren’t buying into Trump and so if you’re willing to wait a decade or two, well, the tide will turn once again.

But me, I waited through the anti-war Civil Rights 60’s, the Nixon 70’s, the Reagan 80’s, got hopeful in the Clinton 90’s, lost faith again in Bush’s war years, then grew optimistic with Obama. Now we get the backlash. Easy to say it’s just the old white guyz, those Fox News addicts who think their Anglo country is being over-run by immigrants and welfare queens, transsexuals and women in the military, who call themselves the real patriots because they think this is a Christian nation and by God they’re Christians even if they never go to church on Sunday and they’ve made Hate a breakfast cereal to wake up to every day of their unhappy lives.

You don’t win the culture war by staying in the closet. Ask your gay friends. Black Lives Matter has it right. The Occupy Movement had it right. Folks don’t like uppity blacks? Tough. They think men shouldn’t sleep with men? Tough. They think Hollywood is a bunch of neo-commies? Fine. They think immigration is a doorway for terrorists? Wake up. They want to make America great again? Welcome to the future. We won’t be going back to Ozzie and Harriet, Ike and Tricky Dick. The America that’s great is the one that honors innovation, fresh ideas, new blood. It’s the America that’s inclusive, welcoming, democratic and optimistic. And yeah, it’s the America that’s willing to fight back against the bigots, the small minded, the xenophobic and the misogynistic, the America that has nothing to fear but the fearmongers themselves. I say sharpen your pitchforks, we’re in this fight for real now and I for one don’t plan to lose.

Down here on the South End most of us get our ‘news’ the old fashioned way: gossip. Meaning, South Enders, like the rest of the connected world, listen to their cohorts on social media. Their friends don’t lie, or so goes the assumption. A few of us still subscribe to the local lying mainstream media, the Everett Herald, a newspaper like all the others in this digital post-Gutenberg world that struggles to stay afloat. Recently, in a cost cutting measure of last resort, they downsized their comic section.

The real comics, I’m talking about, not the AP or UPI feeds. The funnies. In a matter of nano-seconds the backlash from informed readers was second only to the tsunami in Fukushima. Readers fired off angry letters to the editor, readers canceled their subscriptions, readers wanted to vote which comics were discontinued, readers fumed that their children would never grow up to read newspapers if they couldn’t read Beetle Bailey every morning. Readers were broken hearted.

I suppose if the Herald had discontinued the crossword puzzle and sudoku, they might just as well have shut down their presses, the self inflicted wound would prove too grave to survive. I don’t know what Beetle Bailey or Blondie costs in syndication to print in a daily paper, but I suspect whatever it is, it’s too much judging by the last time I peeked at those zombie funnies which were never funny in 1950 and certainly aren’t now. I wanted to write a letter and say thank you, they needed killing. Course, long ago the paper had dropped my own favorites, funny only to cynical yahoos like myself. And yes, I read the comic section. Or did before it became the Syria of humor, a wasteland of irreparable disaster….

Some days, maybe most, the entire paper seems like a comic section. Presidential tweets attacking Saturday Night Live, presidential advisors pretzelizing the English language to defend their boss’s latest gaffe, the upcoming heavyweight title fight between Kim Jong-Il and Donald J., the Sean Spicer comedy hour, the Paul Ryan budget, on and on, day after day. Who really needs the funnies when politics are so hilarious?