The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Give the MAGA intelligentsia some credit. They have uncovered the conspiracy of the century. Joe Biden is dead and was replaced by a robotic clone. Hard to believe? you ask. Check out the post in the President’s Truth Social. The man who ran the country for four years was actually a cyborg.

All I can say is whoever created that clone could have done a better job, probably some voucher school science class project lacking adequate AI, not some lab funded by Project 2025. After all, funding for science is being axed in hopes the tech sector will pick up the slack. Musk was busy with DOGE and rockets that keep exploding. Building a Biden was probably not high on the To-Do list, not with Tesla stocks plummeting.

You gotta give the clone creators a little credit, though. Nice ruse to have the cyborg come down with prostate cancer. Some kind of self-destruct mechanism maybe. And give them a lot of credit for constructing a clone that even his wife doesn’t suspect is a replicant. That is no little feat. Try that yourself if you don’t think so. I can’t even keep my lawnmower running much less teach it to talk, even badly.

Sure, there will be those skeptics who will want to see the death certificate. Probably as likely as the Obama birth certificate. But for the True Believers, the Q-Anon faithful and the Newsmax loyalists, proof is for the weak minded. The President’s tweet is plenty of proof, all anyone should need. And if you need more proof, consider this: the artificial Joe Biden hasn’t denied the report. I think that speaks volumes. Even if he doesn’t.

I guess if you were the first felon elected to the highest office in the land and then given pardon privileges, you might, if you were a person without morals or guilt, decide to pardon all those fellow felons who were unjustly convicted of crimes by the government you swore to uphold and defend. Or maybe not.

You might even understand a pardon for those who contributed massive amounts of donations, sort of a Get Out of Jail Free card for the MAGA loyalists. I mean, money talks and felons walk, maybe a new motto on our legal tender, drop the In God We Trust. But c’mon, pardons for the rioters on January 6th? It was basically an admission that these were his loyal troops, his vanguard of a violent overthrow in order to keep him in office. And the senators and reps who ran for their lives down hallways or crouched in fear with gas masks when these so-called innocent tourists breached the Capitol, did they raise their voices in protest or just lay down and go along with the ruse? If they’d had the chance when those good citizens were touring the building, probably could have signed autographs while some were calling for the hanging of Pence and Pelosi.

Loyalty to the chief, tribute paid — all you need for crimes to be forgiven. Meanwhile anyone who criticized gets the weaponized Justice Department. The same senators and representatives who cowered in the Capitol and refused to impeach the perpetrator, now investigate at length, endlessly, the purported crimes of Hunter Biden for using the influence of his father’s office. Forget about the transparent and willful use of that same office to garner billions on $trump coins, Trump Towers around the globe, jetliner gifts and on and on, obvious emoluments banned by the Constitution, not a peep from the peanut gallery, whether from fear or agreement, who knows?

The inmates in the asylum are being set free. Insanity is being redefined and you tell me if this is what democracy looks like. Most of us can’t tell anymore.

What we used to call flip-flopping, we now call the art of the deal. I know, it seems cruel to pepper the Prez with questions about Trump Always Chickens Out, nasty questions he points out, when all he’s doing is ‘negotiating’. The stock market roller coaster follows every reversal judiciously, one day up when the tariff threat is lifted, next day down when the tariff is back on, all head-spinning stuff but probably exciting for you day-traders. Small businesses, not so much. Anyone who has their retirement funds tied to the Market, kind of a scary ride these days.

Consistency, Emerson told is, is the hobgoblin of little minds, but I’m not sure Ralph Waldo would assume inconsistency is the paragon or parakeet of big minds. Sometimes it looks more like just a confused state of mind, possibly the result of wee morning tweeting and social media overdose. Nevertheless, rest assured these aren’t daily reversals, they’re negotiating tactics, not TACOs. Course, if it looks like a chicken, squawks like a chicken and poops chicken shit endlessly, it might really be a chicken.

Half the news that floods through my newspapers and internet feeds is a reversal of yesterday’s reportage. TACO is angry with Putin one day, going to be dire consequences, next day there’s rumors of a breakthrough and possible peace meeting, followed of course by the news that Putin has scaled up the assaults, and you know tomorrow’s flip-flop. Deja-vu all over again. And again. And again.

I’m taking care of the neighbor’s chickens while they’re vacationing in Europe. Actually, I’m taking care of their hens while their usual chicken babysitters are vacationing in Oregon. The chicken coop, a veritable Trump Tower of a coop/aviary, sits right beside our joint property line so it’s no big deal to wander over and check the water, toss some chicken feed, gather up the eggs and cross back into my woods. The boys who usually handle this asked if I would check the house too, see if burglars had been prowling or were living in the mansion.

Some years back, shortly after the house was finished, the new owner was sunbathing in the privacy of her back yard and someone caught her sans swimsuit out on the lawn. That trespasser, she figured, being an amateur Sherlock Holmes, must be me since I live right next door. This created a bad start for our neighborliness as you might suspect. Nobody really wants to be accused of being a peeping Tom, but my neighbor kept asking friends of mine if they thought I was capable of this. Hell if I know what my friends probably told her, maybe worse than that. But she wouldn’t let it go and that dark cloud hangs over our mutual backyards like a constant threat of rain.

So I said no, I wouldn’t be caught dead or on video surveillance camera snooping around their house, just wasn’t worth the potential trouble to play security guard for them while they were vacationing on the Oregon coast. Michael mentioned that the owner had recently asked about me, whether I was a liberal or a redneck, a libertarian or a banjo whacker, a …. whatever? ‘What did you tell her?’ I asked. I’ve only lived next door to them for, oh, 15 years or so, how would they know what I was like, right? Admittedly they’re absentee chicken ranchers mostly, come up on holidays or a few special occasions, probably check on the trophy house, see if my buddies mowed and trimmed and pruned their fruit trees correctly. Rich folks. The kind of neighbors I love the most, especially the absentee part.

‘I told her you were a story teller,’ Michael said. We were next to the coop, chickens hopping up and down the escalator to the pen from the motel room style appointed laying bins. They were doing their cackle thing. A story teller, I repeated. What the hell does that tell her? A story teller is like, for her probably, a congenital liar, faux facts, Trump supporter, who knows what would run through her suspicious head?

I don’t know either what that means. A story teller? Well, okay, let’s roll with it. Stay tuned, is all I can suggest. If my chicken ranching neighbors have video cameras tuned to that chicken coop and find me prowling around their pen, I suspect we’ll have a sequel to this little story. If not, I get some free eggs and chicken shit on my boots. Life on the South End in these modern times … it’s never what I expect.

Most, if not all, Presidents use national holidays to celebrate their country, to remind us we are One People, all of us pulling together to make this nation what it is and what it has potential to be. Not the current one, of course, who sent out an all caps message to us that read: “Happy Memorial Day to all, including the scum that spent the last four years trying to destroy our country.” Nice sentiment from the Commander-in-Chief, the guy who called prisoners of war ‘losers’ and the troops who died fighting for their country suckers. Thanks, General.

Always in search of a scapegoat the guy can’t help himself denigrating any and all who he can’t see in the mirror. Losers, scum, suckers, deadbeats, gang members — I think he means you and me. But … help is on the way for this once great nation of ours that has lost its way. And that solution is him. Why he’s throwing himself a military parade on his birthday. Not sure why he didn’t get the job done the first term of office but let’s not go there. He gets a mulligan. In his world he always gets a mulligan and he always wins every tournament.

Most, if not all, Presidents aim for uniting the country they’re in charge of, not calling us scum and communists, not investigating anyone who has ever slighted them. Every good autocrat and every dutiful dictator looks for a scapegoat, Jews, Muslims, immigrants, pick one or two and blame the ills of the nation on them. This president has an enemy list longer than his inventory of merchandise he sells. Elite colleges, all Democrats, all immigrants who aren’t white, Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift, Joe Biden and Joe Biden and forever Joe Biden. He has skin so thin nearly everyone is a potential loser scumbag if they forget to kiss the ring frequently. And if the scapegoats aren’t enough here, he’s got our allies overseas to criticize and threaten. Some he hauls into the Oval Office and gives them the World Wide Wrestling Smackdown treatment, great TV he says, figuring, apparently, everyone loves a bully so long as he’s a winner.

So it’s Memorial Day here in America. Losers Day to him, all those gravestones in Arlington National Cemetery. To the rest of us, just another sad day in a long line of his Presidency.

This past fall my 74 year old body let me down, succumbed to the entropy of old age and geezer mechanics, went beyond the usual aches and pains and finally threw in the white flag of surrender. My left knee, the one I’d injured as a 16 year old kid falling on skis the only time he ever went skiing and the boot didn’t release so that the knee bent to the point of breaking. But not quite. Hello future arthritis.

When, after jerking a recalcitrant outboard motor trying to make it start for nearly an hour, that old knee flared its outrage and walking was suddenly a challenge, I reluctantly went to the clinic for an evaluation where the x-rays and subsequent scans came back with multiple issues, ranging from spurs to chips to misaligned meniscus to bone on bone and even sprained ACL’s. The prognosis for an active old age had greatly diminished in no time flat.

I had a fairly straight forward choice. I could gimp around the rest of my days, two stepping up stairs, hobbling in pain, accepting my fate. Or … I could opt for a new bionic knee. After which I could leap tall buildings in a single bound, no doubt with the assistance of a chip implanted in my brain to control the new titanium gizmo. Part man, part machine, everything I’ve feared most of my adult life. Why wait for the Artificial Intelligence Apocalypse? If you can’t beat em, join em. Resistance, needless to say, is futile.

Three weeks ago I had the surgery performed by a robot bone-cutter programmed for exact slicing and dicing. Post-op, I had a semi-human leg the size of a small elephant’s and an incision running from above the titanium knee to below, a throbbing gash that has kept me from full sleep all this time. I had sincerely hoped the controlling chip implant would also handle the pain as well as the bionic instructions but no, the android apparently hasn’t concerned itself with pain management, not feeling any itself.

Suffice it to say, I’m not leaping even small sheds, much less tall buildings. Folks tell me it’s going to take more time than my overly and unrealistic optimism had led me to believe. Soon, I hope, the pathetically weak human component of me will yield to the inevitable union with the machine masters. Meanwhile, I still have to oil the damn joint.

We take so much for granted, us Moderns. Oh, I don’t mean you, of course. Me, maybe. But the truth is we live in a predictable world, electricity always on, water in the taps, thermostat at our fingertips. Get our food when we’re hungry, get our entertainment at the touch of a button or a mouse. Life’s easy for us Americans. Complacency is our middle name.

So why is it we whine so much?? Are we spoiled brats in the Garden of Eden, always wanting more, never satisfied with what we have? Have we become soft and lazy sitting at our computers, goofing with our ‘devices’? Two Toke Tom thinks it’s something else the night we’re parked on his rickety porch waiting for the full moon to rise out across Port Susan about where Mt. Pilchuck has turned the last of its snow golden as if God Herself had poured butterscotch topping on its ice cream peak.

“You and me, Skeeter, we’re the last of our kind.” Tom had been living up to his nick name while I’d been working on a beer or three. “We’re outliers.”

“Outlaws, you mean?” I asked, not sure what he was driving at.

“We’re outside looking in. We want heat, we cut wood. We want water, it comes from our well. Food’s out in the garden, down at the beach. We’d rather build something than buy something. You built a house and I did too. You build boats, I build furniture.”

“What’s your point, Tom?” I cut in, knowing he could go on past midnight with this. We’d done it many a moon, full or not.

“I mean, we live in the world.” When he didn’t elaborate, I said, “We all live in the world,” but he shook his head. “Naw, not the natural world. They live in offices, they live in fluorescent light, they live inside their entertainment center, they think nature is the weeds out by their sidewalk. They’ve gotten themselves stranded, man, and they don’t get what they’re missing anymore. They got their social media bullshit and that’s their reality, talking to people they don’t know or can’t see or who the hell cares? It’s all two dimensional. It’s all disconnected from this.” He swept his arm out into some galaxy he was apparently Seeing. “People have lost touch, that’s what I’m saying. They’d rather live in the Digital World. Pretty soon they’ll have little automatons living with them. Bots, man, doing their bidding. And when the robots decide to take over, people won’t even notice. Because they’ll be robots too, man.”

“Cut back on the weed, Tom,” I said, popping my next beer. “We got our own issues.”

Fortunately the moon began to show over by Three Finger Jack, just a glow at first, then quicker than you might think, a fat pumpkin of a moon orbiting the globe while we sat lost in our own thoughts on a porch on an island where the world kept spinning whether we noticed or not.

“Just like in the movies,” I said.

“Pretty as a hologram,” Tom cracked back.

One of the hazards of scribbling nonsense in these 21st Century blog sites along with about one billion other yahoos is that there are folks out there who really – and I don’t mean maybe – REALLY don’t like what they read in Skeeter’s pantheon of purpled prose.  Maybe some search engine sends em by mistake, hooks on a key word, next thing you know, instead of a self-help forum, they got some chucklenut waxing profane about a subject they couldn’t care less about.  And now, instead of Helpful Tips from Tom on how to turn their unhappy life into something swallowable, they got precious time wasted scrolling down South End Babble and boy howdy, somebody needs to reimburse them!

So they write to me in the anonymity of the internet.  Which is the digital highway equivalent of road rage on the interstate.  Flip me off, swerve into my lane,  jam the brakes.  They’ll show me who’s who and what’s what.  And the best part: they’re untrackable, anonymous as drive-by shooters.  Splatter my windshield with shotgun pellets and don’t look back, just speed away to the next unlucky target.

These are some very Very ANGRY! people out there with us.  More than you think.  Way more.  I suppose we’re lucky they shoot from the lip, not the hip, but if you ever made the mistake of commenting on a forum or some issue that meant enough to you that you weighed in, then you probably learned firsthand what I’m talking about.  Civility is most definitely not a valued trait in Cyberville.

I’d like to see the volume and vitriol dialed back a bit.  I know, probably won’t happen, probably get ratcheted UP even more if anything,  But personally, I’m weary of the ranting, the hysteria, the apoplexy.  And hey, you, the guy who sells antiques and read the blog by mistake on cleaning out my storage shacks, maybe hoping for bargains:  I’m sorry you thought this offered no insights for living your life.  And I’m doubly sorry if you thought I was so self- centered I used the blog to make myself look attractive.  I guess we won’t be dating.

I don’t have anything to sell, pal.  Not the junk I cleaned out, not the ideas in my head.  And .. .sadly…. it sounds like we’re all a little late to offer you tips on living.  Let’s both just figure it out on our own.

You got a reality TV president, cabinets full of Fox News talking heads, talk show hosts as advisors, why not go whole hog and solve a few of the thorniest problems with reality show solutions? The latest entry from the clown power brokers is for a contest to pit immigrants against one another, the winner receiving U.S. citizenship. Dancing with the Stars meets Queen for a Day, what’s not to love? The losers, presumably, get deported back to the hellhole they tried to escape. Although, from my twisted perspective, the show might very well be the hellhole they needed to escape.

Maybe you’re too young to remember Queen for a Day. The premise was fairly simple. The women candidates were trotted out to the audience and asked to offer up their collective tragedies, everything from crippling diseases to dying children, all heart-wrenching personal misfortunes now displayed for the consumption of a national television audience. The winner, the most tragic of the bunch, would win prizes like washing machines and color TV’s, merchandise that would assuage the mishaps of a life gone terribly wrong. A life that every one in the audience might imagine could happen to them.

Maybe the Citizen for a Day show would offer up similar tragedies, tales of gang killings in El Salvador or rapes by banditos on the long hike through the entirety of Mexico. Murders, mayhem, poverty and atrocity. We could vote on who would be most worthy of American sympathy. The other contestants? Well we don’t have all the room in the world for refugees and we certainly don’t have room in our collective hearts.

The danger, of course, would be humanizing these desperate immigrants, showing how returning them to their countries of origin might actually be a death sentence for them. It’s one thing to deport supposed gang members without legal redress but it might be a bridge too far to send a mother and kids back to the town where the real gangs threatened to kill them, why they left in the first place. Like a lot of plans proposed by the government lately, I suspect this one is dead on arrival. At least I hope so.

It used to be whispered in the locker rooms of an America once great that homophobes and their ilk were actually insecure about their own masculinity. They hated homosexuals because they, deep down, feared for their own sexuality, probably even hated themselves for the same reason. Maybe why closet gay politicians were some of the most virulent when it came to anti-gay legislation. Tough guy bullies like J. Edgar Hoover were rumored to prance around in women’s clothes after a hard day at the office. All things effeminate were considered a threat to us he-men. Drag queens, especially, were a red flag to us bulls. Might just be a sublimated dream of Dionysian dancing to our hidden drummers.

Or … it might be as simple as folks fearing what they don’t understand. Someone of a different race, a different nationality, strange customs, a divergent sexuality. We live in a herd mentality. Outsiders, well, better to distrust them, possibly even shun them, ostracize them, deport them, worst case, kill them.

But I’m no psychiatrist and really no sociologist either, just a guy grown old who moved a lot as a kid, went to new schools and communities in various states, perennially the Outsider. So maybe I just tend to side with them, the banned, the different, the potential threat, possibly the enemy. We give lip service to the idea of a melting pot in this country, that our strength is our diversity, but the truth is, we’re divided into our various tribes, religions and sexual preferences. Add to the soup a little anxiety about the future, season with economic distress, pretty soon you look for someone to blame. The government, the other political party, the immigrants, the trans or the homosexuals, doesn’t much matter. Albinos, the left-handed, hermaphrodites, Muslims, Jews, gypsies and the autistic. Choose your scapegoat. Sharpen your knives.

Age old stuff. Gang allegiances, monkey warfare, clubs and guns, teeth and fangs. Close the borders, wage economic warfare on the rest of the nations, celebrate the ‘American Identity’, the whitewashed version, rated G, airbrushed and highly edited. Forget the melting pot, stop yammering about inclusion. The City on the Hill, that beacon of fair-mindedness, democracy, foreign aid and all the rest, that’s over, Bro! We’re building a Castle and surrounding it with a moat, filling it with crocodiles. Those huddled masses, yearning to breathe free? They’re trapped inside now. At least until we can deport them. The rich boys in the country club locker room, they’re in charge. And they’ve only just begun.