The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The pundits and political scientists, the sociologists and the couch philosophers, plus half us yahoos will parse this last election til the cows come back to the barn that’s leaning into yesteryear. We’ll find bigotry, blame the Latino turnout, fault the woman candidate’s presumed expectation of presumptive victory, dig into Alt-Right and Fox News and Breitbart. We’ll find plenty of fodder to explain a Trump victory.

Jobs are going away, the middle class is shrinking, the gap between rich and poor — once a leapable ditch — is now a Grand Canyon. The white majority is gone and the immigrants are coming! The immigrants are coming! Terrorism rocks the Middle East and Europe and now here. A college education costs six figures and may not translate to anything but a lifetime of tuition debt. And to top off everything, monthly cable costs for a citizenry desperate for digital opioids, keeps going through the roof. What’s a poor white boy to do? Well, vote for the carnival barker selling snake oil, a panacea for all our ills, that’s what.

I know this, if nothing else: there’s a Disquiet on the land, an Unease out there in the Starbucked suburbs, a Dread covering the wired cities. Change is coming, scary as a Terminator who keeps getting up after being killed time and time again. The Terminator, of course, is the computer we brought into the livingroom, carry on our belt or in our purse, wired our house to, runs our car, plays our music, knows our habits and buying preferences, watches us constantly.

Future Shock. It’s here. It’s been here a few decades now, accelerating like a car we’ve lost the steering on. Half of us can’t program a Blu-Ray much less comprehend Implications. We just see the landscape blurring at breakneck speed. The Industrial Age isn’t closer than it appears in the rearview, it’s gone, nothing now but nostalgic longing for a past that ain’t comin back.

The social fabric is being torn apart. We are Borg now, getting our news exclusively from Facebook. Only 15 percent of the Facebook news feed folks look somewhere else. You read it on Facebook, it’s got to be True. So what if it’s just pablum and paid pandering? It’s all we need, right? We are morphing into the Hive and we know the relationships aren’t quite … what? Real? Deep? Meaningful? We don’t know, we can’t predict, we’re afraid of what’s coming next. Wait?! What’s that signpost up ahead? Naw, it’s not Rod Serling. It’s Mark Zuckerberg. It’s Big Brother.

We’re at the bottom of Puget Sound this weekend, the mizzus and me, encamped in a milkhouse we rented next to an old barn not too far from Olympia. Just up the road is the old railroad bed that ran to a jetty five miles north out into Woodard Bay to haul out logs, load them on train cars and pull them to the Weyerhauser Mill in Everett. The barn, the railroad tracks, the wharf, the mill in Everett are all part of history now. So is this milkhouse, presently a cottage on AirBnB.

The farms out here have been parceled to five acre farmettes, mostly horse pastures, a few nurseries, some small gardens, a couple of McMansions and plenty of double wides and modest homes. The agrarian landscape has definitely been downsized, if not lost completely. Our milkhouse now sports Wi-fi and Blu-Ray.

We breakfasted in Olympia at a café I’d eaten at a quarter century ago, half restaurant, half tavern with a cigar bar at the entrance back then. The McMenamin chain has bought it now, refurbished it, prettied it up and charges outrageous prices for eggs and coffee. The hostess who found us waiting at the Please Wait To Be Seated sign five minutes after we arrived informed us we’d be seated in twenty minutes. I guess nostalgia won over impatience so we waited. The food was okay, the coffee was weaker than a 7/11 dispenser in a truck stop franchise. You can profit on history, restorations, reproductions, all that yearning for what has been lost to strip mall America, but it’s a thin veneer, slightly flimsy. Just costs a little more.

I hear tell there’s a hunger in the land to Make America Great Again. Maybe you know what that means but I haven’t got a clue. Bring back the timber? Bring back the salmon runs? Bring back those coal mining jobs, the textile mills, the steel factories? Bring back the family farm and the industrial age? They’re gone, I hate to tell the folks who pine for a new Gilded Age. Go ahead and drive a restored Packard but don’t think Detroit is going to tool up to assembly line them again, I don’t care how much Kool-Aid Trump doles out to the yearning masses.

We’re packing up to leave in an hour. Going back to our old 1915 shack and our hand built twenty-five year old house. Going back to re-imagine our own piece of America. You ask me what made America great once — and I know you didn’t — it was our imagination. It was our optimism that the future could be shaped by that faith in ourselves to transform the world in our image, to create new art, new literature, new music, new dance, new architecture, new businesses, new inventions, new visions. To go boldly forth where none have gone before, to trek the stars. You want the old America, go to a museum. You want America to be great again, stop looking backwards. Turn off the TV, start using your imagination. And for godsake, everybody, stop the whining, stop blaming the other party, stop pointing fingers. Believe in yourself. Think bigger, dream larger, be your own hero and start painting your own life. It may not make this country great again, but it’s a good start.

Here’s my To-Do List for today:

Zip, Nada, Zilch, Nothing

The mizzus and me are going to idle awhile, then we’re going to follow our noses down a few primrose paths, see what the day brings. Yesterday we found a trail down to near where the Sound ends at Budd Inlet and Boston Bay and watched the sun disappear and the moon come up. Herds of ducks were taking flight at dark, headed to some marsh maybe, no longer home.

Most of the world is migratory. The creatures of this earth travel sea to sea, continent to continent, in search of food, of nesting grounds, all following some primal urge to move, to Go, to follow some celestial command to change location. We may not move to the Bering Straits or Tierra del Fuego, but I suspect we’ll shuffle around some. You know, after a few cups of coffee I’m brewing right now, after a little reading, maybe a after a few songs on the guitar I brought along.

We’re not sure when we’ll go home. Maybe tomorrow, maybe not, but when we do I suspect it’ll be ever so slightly different, hopefully a lot different, more like when we came to the shack almost 40 years ago, nervous but adventurous, naïve but ready for something new, more exiles than pioneers, strangers in a strange land, in love with the island, in love with owning our 7 acres of nettles and woods, in love with going back to the land, in love with the beach, in love mostly with each other. The world wasn’t our oyster, it was ours to create. I think, post election, it’s time to do that again.

No, we didn’t create America. And we didn’t elect the first woman president. But I’m not going to plant bitter seeds in our garden, either. Not sure yet exactly what we want to grow next, but we’ll rejoice that we can, that we will, that we’ll harvest a bounty of, if nothing else, love. Don’t ever think that’s the least a person can do.

I’m down in the South Puget Sound taking a little breather from the post-election introspection. Took a walk this morning in the fog-shrouded Mima Mounds. The Mounds are these strange mysterious giant gopher hills nobody really understands how they came into existence. Sure, you could see them as a metaphor about a bigot’s victory, strange upcroppings in the Body Politic, but … let’s not. Let’s just take a walk.

I’m in here by myself, just me and a couple of raptors hovering over their prey in the mist. Sure, another metaphor but for me it’s just a hawk and a some poor rodent who didn’t pay enough attention. When I finally finish off a few miles through the mounds, a sheriff’s cruiser sits parked near my rig, engine running, the deputy sitting with his window down. Just me and the Law now. Sure … but let’s don’t.

Like a lot of you, I may need a 12 step program, but first I’m going to try a 10,000 step one out here on the trails. When a hawk is just a hawk and a mouse is just an unlucky snack, I’ll know I’m on the road to political recovery. Okay … apolitical recovery. What do the AA folks recite? God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

I graduated college with a degree in sociology in 1972 so it’s hard for me to let it go. A friend sent me the lyrics to a John Prine song after the election. “Blow up your TV throw away your paper. Go to the country, build you a home.” He and I once left civilization behind and moved awhile to the country together. Didn’t build a house but we hobbled together an outhouse. I think back and realize we maybe were leaving Nixonian America behind then too. Neither of us really went back … but, we aren’t living in Timbuktu either. Still, there’s another song I remember from back then, Joni Mitchell’s ‘Woodstock’.

Well I came upon a child of God, he was walking along the road
And I asked him tell me where are you going, this he told me:
Said, I’m going down to Yasgur’s farm, going to join in a rock and roll band.
Got to get back to the land, and set my soul free.

It’s a hard road to travel, I do believe, but a good destination. I’m going to try to get myself back on that road. This election, it’s just a bump in the path.

You’ve probably seen them too by now, eyes rolled back, heads lolling, hands at their sides fingers twitching, wandering aimlessly with no destination, no obvious direction. Their lips are moving but the only sounds aren’t speech, just incomprehensible mutterings, muted sighs, vague exhalations, an occasional stifled sob. Ashen faced, they seem stunned, shocked, survivors of some unseen catastrophe.

You think Zombies. But you know you’ve seen too much bad TV, too many derivative movies about the Undead. No, these are living people, people you know. If there are any people you know anymore.

These are the catatonics from last night’s horrorshow election, the folks who never dreamed their neighbors, their friends, their family members even would vote in … that man. That crass creepy cretin of a human being, the very incarnation of kitsch and excess, a braggart billionaire so lacking in noblesse oblige they can’t wrap their confused heads around the reality. Around ALL reality.

Who knows how long it will take to come down off those evil hallucinogens someone slipped in their Chablis while they were settling in for an enjoyable evening of election returns, canapes balanced on their napkined laps? Who knows when the earth will tilt back onto its proper axis? At the moment there are no more predictions. The unthinkable … yes, the unthinkable. And the impossibility of even trying.

Maybe tomorrow. Maybe in a week. Maybe, if they could only get a flimsy handle on this, maybe … well, maybe never. The country they lived in is gone now. They will wander its barren landscape knowing they were always strangers in a strange land, a land inhabited by faces seemingly familiar, but only masks. Their homes are gone. Someone has changed the locks. The squatters. The new owners. For the unknowable future, they’re the new refugees, lost in America. Whatever you do, no matter how much you’d like to help, give them a wide berth. They’re beyond all that now.

My fellow Americans, the day of reckoning is finally here! Today is Election Day in the Land of the Free, the Home of the Brave. With the rest of the world watching, we proudly put our form of democracy on display as an example to follow. We show those totalitarians, those monarchies, those kleptocrats and commies how our model form of government could be theirs as well. How we have winnowed from 350 million citizens the two who can lead the Free World as president of the most powerful country in the history of mankind.

And tonight, the envelope please….

I know, you’ve had a belly full this past year. It’s been a long national nightmare that we never believed was possible, we never dreamed it could go this far, we can’t quite pinch ourselves to full wakefulness. President Donald Trump. I know, you can’t quite say it. You think: the man is a pig. The man is a bully, a womanizer, a philanderer, an ignorant arrogant egomaniac who campaigned only with his wife and kids and no political backers, a huckster whose claim to business savvy and deal making is a façade that covers multiple million dollar bankruptcies that he used to avoid, legally, paying taxes. He’s a racist, a xenophobe, a misogynist, a fraud and a cheat. He’s a liar who doesn’t appear to believe he’s lying. When confronted with the facts he simply repeats the lie. He claims he will throw his opponent in jail if elected. He wants to cancel Saturday Night Live for skewering him. He bans reporters from his rallies if they work for a paper he considers unfair. Like the New York Times. He encourages violence at those same rallies, ridicules the handicapped, finds it disgusting if a Miss Universe contestant gains a few pounds, tells us he’ll sue the pants off the dozen or more women who accuse him of sexual harassment.

This is the man who will Make America Great Again. Who will ban Muslims from entering the country, who will build a Wall, who will renegotiate trade deals, cancel the Iranian nuclear pact, get tough with China. Who admires Putin and declares him a much better leader than Obama. And no, Russia has never — will never — invade Ukraine.

Tonight, my anxious Americans, we will put on display an America we never really acknowledged, the one we kept hidden in the closet. The dark room where we keep our Confederate flags, the KKK, hate crimes, lynchings, sexual abuse, police racism, corporate tax dodges, a widening divide between the rich and poor, minimum wage stagnation, immigration problems, all those embarrassing traits we lock behind that door. The America half of us want to make great again is the America of angry white folks, folks who fear a polyglot melting pot nation of different nationalities and color and religion, all united, all Americans, all hoping to have an equal opportunity in the land of the so-called free, the land of the scared.

I’d like to tell you our long national nightmare will finally be over tonight. That the healing can begin. But you know and I know too, the skeletons in the closet are out now. It’s not just Election Night. It’s Halloween. The spooks and the goblins and the demons are out in the open, during the daytime, in the light of scrutiny. If you think they’re going back into the shadows, think again. No matter who loses tonight … they’re the real winners.

My parents, when us little sprouts were growing up, never made much of a fuss over us. If we got good grades, they nodded approvingly. And if we didn’t, they told us to buckle down and smarten up, school wasn’t some game. They never came to our sports events to watch their star kids play and we were glad they didn’t because, well, to be honest, we weren’t stars. We were just your basic kids, vanilla, ordinary, okay.

When they became grandparents, however, things changed. Their grandkids, my god, they were Einsteins, they were football stars, they were just all around Wows. My friends who have grandkids have those same kids, all of them the smartest, best looking, most talented brats you ever had the privilege to hear bragged about. I don’t know, maybe if I had kids, they’d be superheroes too. But I didn’t and I bet they wouldn’t be if I did.

When I look back at my childhood (okay, the early years, not the present years), I drifted through sandlot baseball games, marbles, some fights, some homemade soap box derby races, all the stuff we hoodlums did back in the halcyon days of Eisenhower’s America. I didn’t think I had to be a genius. Or a basketball star. Or a movie actor. My folks didn’t push us munchkins out into a competitive universe with a prescription for failure by convincing us we were God’s gift to the free world. We were encouraged to try stuff, everything from track and field to chess to debate clubs, but they didn’t come down and play soccer mom and get into fights with the coach or the parents of our opponents. They’d ask how it went and if we got our butts kicked, they said better luck next time. These weren’t life and death competitions.

I worry that we’re trying too hard now. Sure, we’d all like to think that the fruit that fell near the tree is special, the sweetest, the tastiest, the fastest growing, the most flowers. But I suspect we just set the kids up for disappointment. Ballet. Dropped out. Lacrosse. Never really liked it. Cheerleader. Couldn’t do a head stand. Choir. Had a tin ear. Academics. Got a C+. Life. Just normal.

My folks accepted normal. So did we. What they wanted for us was happiness. It’s not a bad wish. In their own hands-off way, they taught us how to get there.

When the Flatheads got to the door of the South End Diner this morning, they were greeted by Anita’s handwritten placard:
No More Political Arguments
Until After the Election
No Exceptions!!

The vintage car guyz were flabbergasted. What’s it mean? they wanted to know. What about Freedom of Speech? Walter particularly wanted to know. Brenda was pouring the first rounds of coffee to about ten perplexed Flatheads. “We’re sick of it, all of us,” she explained. “Anita’s had a dose. She’s ready to close the diner until after next Tuesday if she has to.”

“Who does she think she is?” Walter demanded, waving his porcelain clay mug in a moving target for Brenda who finally grabbed his hand to hold the cup still. “She’s the owner, Walt, that’s who. No shoes, no shirt no service. You want breakfast, no more of your Trump talk.”

Jerry clapped his hands. “Okay with me, Walt. Maybe my appetite will come back.”

“What’ll we talk about instead,” Charlie moaned, only half serious. “How about cars?” Brenda suggested, starting now to take orders. “You’re a car club, not a political action committee.”

“Anita gonna ban that next?” Walter shouted, which brought Anita herself out from behind her register. Walter had his back to her and never saw the menu before it slapped across the back of his head, knocking his Make America Great Again ballcap onto the formica tabletop. “What the …?” he sputtered and turned to find Anita rearing back for another swat.

“Holy cripes, Anita,” he stuttered. “I’m just kidding.”

Anita whacked him anyway. “Jeez, Anita ….”

The rest of breakfast the boyz spent discussing the virtues of dual exhausts, twin carbs and rebored cylinders. Next week they’ll probably argue who stole the election. Or try, anyway ….

Down at the salon the only talk under the dryers was the election. Oh, the storm of the decade got a little play, but like the wind itself, it came and went with barely a whimper. The election, though, swirled like a tornado, styling chair to styling chair, fueled further by every new appointment.

“I’ll just be glad when the whole thing is over,” Kate, the newest stylist at the Cut’nClip, sighed after Abby Jorgenson had stepped out the front door, saying as she left her dollar tip that she just didn’t know who she would vote for.

“Oh sweetie,” Ronald had said down by the sink as he washed Myrtle Martin’s graying hair, “you mean it’s a hard choice? Between the first woman president and a serial womanizer?”

“Take it easy, Ronald,” Myrtle cried, “you’re digging holes in my scalp.” “Sorry,” Ronald apologized, “but good Lord, I can’t imagine voting for a man with that HAIR! It’s so not natural.”

“You judge a man by his hair?” Marie on Chair #2 asked. “Oh sweetheart,” Ronald sniffed, toweling off Myrtle’s newly shampooed locks, “the boy is 100% phony. His hair, my god, it’s golden and the man is 70 years old. Like a Greek god.”

“Grecian Formula, maybe,” Sally said from Chair #1 and Ronald snorted. Becky Myers laughed as Sally hit her with a hot blast from her blow dryer. “Ronald, you’re a crackup,” she said. “What about Hillary? She changes hairstyles more than she changes pantsuits.”

“Omigod, isn’t that the truth,” Ronald squealed happily. “I’d be rich if she were my client, that’s the holy gospel. Think of the jobs that woman will create. Ten stylists standing by at the White House.”

“Five more on Air Force One,” Sally tossed in.

And so it goes at the Cut’nClip. After the election, maybe they can return to the usual gossip. We’ll all be thankful is all I can say.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but this election is going to teach me a few lessons in civics. Mostly, you’d have to be out of your mind to communicate by e-mail. At least if you’re a politician. Time has come, I think, to at least write in some kind of unbreakable code. The Russians are hacking the Democratic Party, the FBI is poring over messages from that pathetic wiener Weiner, Wiki-Leaky is publishing all its hacked e-mails whether or not they’re really true or whether they’ve been altered, who could know and in this political climate, who cares anymore? Snowden should’ve proved that nothing is private.

I guess Hillary wasn’t paying attention. She just figured she would keep her stuff on a private server. Ho ho. Private? I mean, I can’t blame her. She’s only been investigated by her political enemies since forever, why would she feel the need to insulate herself from the right wing conspiracy? I, for one, sure don’t think she’s paranoid, just a little naïve.

Boys like Snowden and Zuckerberg and Assange, they think the world should be totally transparent. Whaddaya got to hide? Or what do you Dare hide? It’s a messianic vision. Evil will be rooted out so you will stop doing evil things. Tell that to Anthony Weiner and the underage kid he’s sexting. Every day you read about another bust of some child porno ring and I wonder, don’t these deviants read the paper, don’t they know they’re likely under surveillance, can’t they guess the little girl they’re meeting at the Greyhound bus station is FBI?

We’re all being outed now. We’re all under surveillance. If you’re on Facebook, you probably won’t understand what I’m talking about since you gladly strip yourself bare, sometimes literally. Privacy lacks primacy these days. Even the banal seems worthy of posting.

We say it’s only for my friends or it’s only a way to keep in touch with my kids now that they’ve grown. Sorry, we’re all on a party line once again, the way it was when I first came to the South End and a private telephone line cost a fortune. We were pretty circumspect on our conversations back then. Now we got cellphones, internet, e-mails, twitter and text messaging. We got the party line with everybody listening in … and the best part? It costs a fortune and I’m not talking about money. Go ask Hillary. Or Donald, when he’s ten tweet tall.