The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Breakfast of Champions

My friend’s thirty-something daughter called today to ask her what was this Brexit thing anyway, some kind of new breakfast? I guess my friend and I assume kids, grownup kids anyway, keep abreast of things like international affairs and presidential elections. At least she didn’t ask her who this Donald Gump was. And I’m pretty sure she knew Brexit was the most important meal of the day.

The Donald was in Scotland today congratulating the kilted ones for voting to leave the E.U. while he was promoting his golf courses and hotels. Trouble was, the Scots didn’t vote to leave the E.U., they voted overwhelmingly to stay. Facts can be such damn nuisances. No wonder we’ve decided to go with our gut hunches on everything from politics to science. Easier. Less messy. Ends most arguments. Less filling and tastes great. Kind of like breakfast cereal. Kind of like chocolate covered Brexit. Since the currency there had devalued, our presidential candidate was happy the British pound had gone to its lowest level in three decades so foreign tourists would find it more inviting to golf at his new course. He was, as he said, a winner. The American stock market and folks with 401-K’s, not so much.

I can’t go to the grocery store now without scanning my fellow shoppers, 50% who say they will be voting for a reality TV show host who has attributes most folks once thought of as reprehensible, but now, through the miracle of erasing ‘political correctness’, they think of as okay. Racism, misogyny, bigotry, bullying, arrogance, ignorance and … well, the list goes on and on … it’s okay once again to say what they think. I don’t really mind them saying what’s on their mind, I just worry about what is on their mind.

I listen to a lot of Hot Talk radio. It drives me crazy, but it’s obviously driven a lot of folks crazier than me. They believe this stuff I find maddening. They feed on the venom and the anger. They think Obama is a secret Muslim and believe me, they hate all Muslims. They love America, but they hate the government, the president, the Congress, everything but the military. They love the Constitution but they want Muslims banned from this country, they want gays put back in their closet, they want profiling, they want God, the Christian God, put back in their classrooms. Their parents or grandparents or great grandparents came from somewhere else, but they want immigration ended. They want government off their back but they want government to stop abortions, to stop homosexuals, to stop atheists. They want to make America great again.

These folks want to lay off the Brexit and go back to Wheaties, Breakfast of Champions. You know, the one with Bruce Jenner on the box back when she was a he. Back when America was Numero Uno and men were men and women did what they were told, no backtalk. Back to the Good Old Boy Days.

I don’t want to suggest that a person who listens to Rush Limbaugh and is voting for Donald Trump is ignorant. That might fall under lack of political correctness.

Just when all those kooks who call in to late night radio talk shows about alien invasions and spacemen abductions were feeling maybe they should see a psychiatrist for their ‘condition’ in the face of a paucity of proofs for their unorthodox beliefs, along comes the latest revelation from the Egyptologists noodling endlessly with Tut, the boy king, and all the toys his minion priests buried with him. Today it was revealed that his dagger — a basic iron knife, not gold, not silver, iron! — was made from a meteorite. I suppose you and I and the scientists might conclude this dagger was made from a meteor that landed near Cairo. But I can assure you the late night alien hunters won’t.

No, they’ll know with a certainty as large as Bigfoot’s Butt this dagger came from outer space. Hell, they may even figure Tut himself came from the same place as the dagger, why not? Probably explain how the Egyptians were able to move hundred ton stones into pyramids, just hit them with the anti-gravity beam and drop them lightly into place, couldn’t be easier … if you’re an advanced alien culture. If you’re maybe troubled by the timeline here, don’t be. They got time travel down too.

We live in a world where fantasy and fiction are more than slightly blurred, maybe even sleeping together. I guess we could blame the internet or Rush Limbaugh or bad TV, but it’s probably not going to help. We’ve been disappointed in facts, bored with the real world and skeptical of science so now we’ve turned to snake oils, diet supplements and late night advertising deals. Call now and you’ll receive another Donald Trump, just pay shipping and handling. If you’re not satisfied, just send them back and we’ll refund your money. What we do about your gullibility, well, wait until tomorrow night. Yours, for only 19.95, the fabulous meteorite knife!! Slices dices and never dulls. Chops vegetables, saws lumber, moves slabs of stone. But wait! If you order now we’ll send you not one, not two, but three Tut daggers for the unbelievable price of 19.95. Just pay shipping and handling from our warehouse in the Milky Way.

The political season is in its final innings here on the South End. Down at the Diner the debates continue unabated, but practically everywhere else, we’re wore down, depleted, dejected and pretty much exhausted with the whole damn thing. Even the Pilot House, once Hotbed Central for lively late night alcohol fueled discussions, even the Pilot House has turned its short span of attention to the basketball tournaments and the baseball scores.

The tulips are coming in early up north in the fields of La Conner. I was thinking maybe going there instead of the caucus this Saturday. Last time I went to a caucus it was Carter running against Reagan. All the local politicos were in attendance. And me and the mizzus. We never really understood the process and we never went back. I like voting in private, to tell you the truth, not in small groups of people I don’t really know. The tulips, I get tulips. They come in early some years and some years late and rarely, but it happens, they bloom on time. This year they’re way early and the Festival, that two week traffic jam miles and miles long, well, it’s going to be pretty much after the harvest.

I spoze the folks stuck in the colorful backup out in the flats can while away the hours arguing whether global warming is to blame or if the low price of gas is a blessing or not. The big tour buses can haul up the city folks for a slow creep through the countryside and hope for a few fields of blazing candy color seen vaguely through the rain. Us locals pretty much avoid the whole show now. You’ve seen one tulip field, you’ve kind of got the idea.

I wish I could say the same about elections. I’ve seen a few, but … this one is very very strange. Maybe even troubling. Says a little too much about my neighbors, for sure, but hey, that’s the price of democracy. You admire a trash talking billionaire who thinks political correctness is just some liberals’ way to keep racism from rearing its ugly head, well, you got a new hero. You think all Moslems are terrorists and all Hispanics are on welfare, you got your candidate. You looking for a bully for the presidential bully pulpit, he’s got your back. They say we get the leader we deserve. This year we’ll find out if a rich reality show money grubbing pitchman is that person. If he is, I’m gonna lose a lot of my faith in this democracy. And in my neighbors.

The Snow Goose Bookstore is closing its cover this month after nearly three decades of serving the literati of Stanwoodopolis. The two sets of owners were the monks keeping the guttering flame of Uff-da civilization from going completely dark for the past 30 years. They were the Book Bambis vs. Amazon’s Godzilla where we all expected they would be Bezo toejam in a year, no more, but they held on despite terrible odds, through the Great Recession, despite Google, despite Kindle, despite a world whose attention spans are too short for a novel or a work of non-fiction or a poem by e.e. cummings.

Oh, I know, most of you will say ‘the world has changed, Skeeter, even if you haven’t, Gutenberg is dead, send him some flowers for his grave, move into the 21st Century, embrace the tweet, stick with haiku.’

First it’ll be the bookstores, then the libraries and finally books themselves. Who has time to read them anyway if e-mails are nudged aside by text messaging? U no, wen speling and puncs have dyed. My old pal Prof. Ralph visited from the hinterlands of Minnesota last week. He was, like myself, an English major back in our college years. I asked him what he was reading these days and Ralph just shrugged and said ‘not much’. Not much what? I asked and he said not much of anything. If us English majors have given up on the great American novel, maybe there really is no hope.

Prof. Ralph is writing, he said, probably a bit defensive about abandoning Hemingway and Updike. ‘A novel?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘philosophical musings.’ Great, a solipsistic diarist, completely uncontaminated by outside ideas, especially one who no longer reads anything, just what we need instead of the Snow Goose Bookstore. Close the door, shut the gates, the barbarians are definitely on their way.

Well, Buckaroos, Skeeter’s going into the hills once more on the annual Beer Hunt, must be about the 30th anniversary. A lot of trophy bottles mounted at the hunting shack up by Rosyln, Washington. The herds aren’t as big now, of course and the backlash from Orlando may actually put a crimp on our quest for new military style weaponry. In fact, I may suggest to my fellow beer hunters we just catch and release this year. Maybe photograph the elusive prey and mount blowups on the cabin walls.

Then again, these are hardened hunters and my wussie suggestion may get outvoted as a little too politically correct. We boyz are democratic, if nothing else. Last year we crossed the Cle Elum Lake dam where, since 9-1-1, the federal property has surveillance cameras and multiple No Trespassing signs. In those years just after the Towers came down, the Dam Keeper would come out and threaten us with arrest. We explained we were patriotic United States citizens, but dammit (no pun intended) we were walking across that dam. The other direction home was 15 miles in the dark.

We never learned if he reported us to the FBI. We never saw mention of terrorist infiltrators storming the dam in the Cle Elum Gazette. Apparently our numbers and our hostile demeanor were enough to convince the Dam Keeper not to mess with our semi-invasion. The Keeper is gone now, no doubt budget cuts in these fiscally fraught times, but the cameras and the No Trespass warnings remain. Last year a police cruiser passed us on the road to the dam, turned and passed us again. We apparently aren’t on their Watch List.

At any rate let’s hope we aren’t this year either. Until my return or extradition, feel free to peruse some old entries here. I don’t remember writing most of them, you probably won’t remember reading them either. On the South End, every day is brand new.

I was having coffee at an old friend’s house yesterday. Doreen and I go back to when we both drove school buses on the island some 35 years ago. Doreen’s husband and she divorced years ago so it’s okay to visit now that the paranoid yahoo’s out of the picture, good riddance, we both agreed over our mugs. Doreen had the TV on when I arrived and left it on while we sat at the kitchen counter, some morning talk show with folks I didn’t know interviewing folks I didn’t know about personal subjects it was impossible to imagine anyone caring two cents about.

Doreen had aged since our Bluebird bus days. Not that I look like a high school yearbook photo, but she looked particularly haggard. Too many years of two pack a day cigarettes, hard liquor and hard living. Life on the South End isn’t a bed of lilacs for all of us, hate to be the one to crack the idyllic image. “So how’s things?” I asked anyway, wishing I’d declined her invitation at the grocery parking lot, old friends or not.

Doreen’s house leans back into the woods of the island’s interior, skirting gone green with gutter-splash mold, curtains drawn in the daytime, and it gave me a whiff of depression before I rang the doorbell. “Making do, Skeeter,” she answered. “Just hanging on day to day.” Lives of quiet desperation, I guess. We clinked cups. The coffee was bitter but drinkable.

Out in the livingroom the TV was laughing, things were good, folks were happy. Not a single painting hung on Doreen’s walls, just empty drywall, a dull pallor in lamplight. Her bookshelf was nearly empty, just a couple of paperbacks standing sentinel, a Library for the Uninterested. The sink was full of yesterday’s dishes, pots and pans crusted, glasses unemptied. An ashtray sat on the counter, full of butts. She dumped it in the garbage when she got our second cup. By then we’d exhausted our shared memories, the colleagues who had died, some still around but lost to us now after three and a half decades.

“Good to see you again, Doreen,” I said. “Anytime, Skeeter,” she answered. Both of us knew we’d settle for parking lot hellos here on out, but I was probably the only one who felt bad about it.

If there was a place worse than homelessness itself, the While-a-While was it. Ancient RV’s, rusted out Winnebagos, Airstreams down on their axles — they all came to die, slowly sinking into the wetlands, grass up to their pitted aluminum windows that seldom opened anymore, a muddy trail leading to the communal restrooms and showers which occasionally all functioned but not usually.

In the summer the While-a-While offered tourists and fishermen some spaces, most without power, for $25 a night. Half the permanent residents had come and for reasons best left for late night binge talk, they ended up trapped there. Milt came 20 years ago in his reconditioned Cortez, a heavy 20 foot industrial RV built when gas was 24 cents a gallon but was now too much for Social Security retirement if he wanted to actually drive it somewhere else. And now it was a rusted relic, flat tires, busted front axle, long dead battery. Milt lived there with his menagerie of cats, half of them feral, all of them breeding like rabbits. Residents who’d ventured inside claimed the place smelled like one giant litter box over a gas burner.

Most inmates of the While-a-While gave Milt a wide berth. If familiarity bred contempt, with Milt it bred outright hostility. He was a hermit now among enemies, most of whom he’d alienated over slights so small they never really understood they were slights and so they concluded the man was a total asshole, a near universal assessment at the trailer park. If you were a dog owner, too bad if they growled or chased Milt’s feline herd. If your politics were left of Genghis Khan, too bad, you were a hopeless radical. If you drank or used drugs, he wrote you off. So what if he’d done more of those than half the park in a quarter of the time — he’d reformed, rehabbed and now was righteous as a born-again preacher.

Maybe we all end up where we deserve at the end of our ropes. If so, the poor souls consigned to the While-a-While probably wished they could have a do-over. But they were there, not to while awhile, they were doomed to quite awhile. With Milt as a neighbor.

I saved a life today. I usually like to think these blogs save lives every day, but let’s be honest here and assume I’m not running for president. Truth is, well, the truth is…. At least I’m not taking lives with these blogs. I don’t think.

But today I was down by the toolshed turning off the water to the garden. I’d turned and headed back to the glass factory when a funny noise caught my ear, a strange sound but not the usual menagerie of cacophony in the orchard, something that made me stop and listen harder. Sure enough it was odd and it seemed to be coming from near the spigot. Then I heard splashing and that same squeaking sound, weirdly troubling.

I got to the spigot and then I noticed the large tub we use to catch water off the toolshed roof was where the disturbance was emanating and when I looked inside, there was a small beaver swimming circles in there, treading water, half drowned. We don’t have a lot of beavers that do the dog paddle so I recalculated and realized it was our little red squirrel, the guy who sits in the plum tree and chatters at us while we putter around. He seems to be a talkative little rodent, maybe a little too chatty, but we talk back and he listens. Not that we’re learning each other’s lingo, but sometimes it’s important to attempt communication. Like I say, I’m not running for president.

The language he was using in the tub wasn’t hard to understand. He was down to the last breath, exhausted and cold and probably thinking it would be okay to just let go, sink into the water and drown. There was no way he could scrabble up the plastic sides of the tub and who knows how long he’d been swimming for his life in there, maybe a helluva lot longer than I would’ve and I have to say, I was impressed at his will to live.

I pulled him out and laid him in the sun where he looked for all the world like a drowned rat, fur matted to his convulsing body, tail flattened, eyes rolled back barely noticing me. I didn’t really know if he’d spent himself or taken water into his lungs or what … and I don’t know squirrel CPR. But I stayed with him and moved him once in awhile to a warmer spot and after half an hour of shivering and hopefully resting, he wobbled up, ran between my legs and hightailed it for the woods.

I drained all our buckets and tubs. I hope both of us learned a couple lessons here. And I hope next time he’s parked on his favorite limb of the plum tree, he doesn’t cuss me out for leaving that tub there. But I wouldn’t blame him.

In the digital world where no kindness goes uncriticized and no act goes unjudged, it’s maybe not surprising to you that the mom of that kid who managed to slip into the gorilla’s cage last week is under more crossfire than a Marine in Afghanistan. The zoo shot the gorilla in a scene right out of King Kong and the Twitter Universe unleased its full and unadulterated outrage. At the mom.

Now I love gorillas as much as the next South Ender. Supposedly they’re endangered elsewhere, but not so much here. We got plenty down this end of the island, mostly guys who beat their wives and spend far too much time watching ESPN on the cable TV they really can’t afford. But then, they don’t snap up wayward kids who wander into their unmowed junk strewn yards. If they did, we’d bring in the SWAT boyz and the TV crews and the internet trolls looking for fresh targets to vent their pent-up rage on. Pity the moms. Pity the gorilla. Pity the poor schnook at the zoo who had to make the decision to shoot Kong.

But pity is a hard commodity to locate these days, especially if you’ve been following presidential election politics this hunting season where pity is deemed fit only for losers. We’re growing sharper claws and longer teeth. We’re molting our old skin and growing a tougher hide. Pity? Forgiveness? I don’t think those words live in the new vocabulary of grunts and shrieks. When the weak stumble, they become prey.

I guess it’s the anonymity of the internet. Used to be you could flip off a fellow motorist from the safety of your one ton automobile or your two ton Hummer fighting machine, pretty much drive off feeling smug and righteous, but now, behind the screen of a laptop, you can lob missiles with no fear of retribution. Nice to think the worst in us comes rising up, the toxins we held in check out of politeness or fear or peer group pressure, what we once thought of as civilized societal norms. You know, before the internet jungle hid us in its strangler vines.

I’m going to miss that gorilla I never even met. I like to think he was protecting the little toddler, maybe even planned in a simian sort of way to raise him up in gorilla values. I’m real glad he didn’t hurt that kid who I hope will grow up to be kind to animals, even the human ones. He’d be almost a hero if he did, just not in the Twitterverse.

Scientists this past week declared that a bacteria was found in this country totally resistant to antibiotics. Great news if you’re an e-coli bacteria, not so good if you’re a human being. For decades we’ve treated chickens and pigs and turkeys and hypochondriac homo sapiens with antibiotics, giving out tetracycline and every other antibiotic like candy, never figuring the little bugs would adapt to this, despite the fact that they breed like … well, bacteria. In 1928 when Alexander Fleming accidentally discovered penicillin would kill the little buggers, it heralded in a new age of medicine.

Ninety years later, well, we got a brand new age of medicine. For almost a century we could control everything from staph to tuberculosis. Not bad for us humanoids. But the microscopic monsters were slowly working out defenses to our gigantic big brained discoveries. And now they’ve beaten us. We got a little complacent this time, and instead of using this miracle drug to cure diseases for us humans, we found we could make chickens grow big, salmon grow bigger and pigs grow to the size of tractor trailers. We could give patients the stuff when the doctors knew it wouldn’t do anything more than shut them up, a pill or two as placebo, maybe it would keep them from coming back when the viral infection ran its natural course. The pharmaceutical conglomerates sure didn’t mind.

We all grew up, I guess, thinking there was a pill for pretty much everything that ails us. We might’ve been alarmed when something like a flesh eating bacteria or HIV rolled in, some bug that we’d never imagined, something that would kill us for sure, our very own Black Plague. Course, we could always find a cure we figured. We could make a vaccine or discover a new antibiotic. Science, it’s on our side.

Now it looks like all bets are off. Unless you’re betting on the bugs. Or you were investing in Big Pharma stocks. Might be a good time to double down on health care stocks instead, not that being rich is gonna do us much good when the epidemics come….