The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Yesterday we had a shootout at the freeway park and ride. Most of these are drive-by shootings, but this one, no siree, this one was a genuine wild wild west pull-your-six-shooters and blast away from close range in true vigilante justice, see who’s standing when the cylinders are empty. After this hail of bullets ended, one guy was shot four times and carried away to the nearest hospital where he’ll most likely live. The others, well, they had some serious explaining to do.

It seems one of these yahoos had his chainsaws stolen, so when he ran across an ad in Craigslist featuring the exact same saws, well, he decided to call the thief up and arrange a meeting to buy them. He got his son and a couple of buddies to come along to the meetup at the park and ride and then, just to be on the safe side, he called the sheriff’s department to meet them there too. So now we got the Earps, we got a posse, we got plenty of guns and we got a nice public spot.

The seller must not have suspected too much or else he never watched the Gunfight at the OK Corral, but he came alone, no gang, no family members, just him and a couple of chainsaws. When the Earps got tired of waiting for the Law, the buddies of the aggrieved theft victims decided to approached this guy’s truck, no doubt pretending to be the interested buyers of the saw, but in true comic fashion, they came with guns too. Drawn. And the seller, realizing something bad was afoot, produced his own weapon and commenced to firing. Chaos, of course, ensued.

These things get out of hand sometimes. Sure, they should’ve waited for the sheriff. Maybe they could’ve left the guns at home. All easy to imagine in hindsight. But a man’s chainsaw is his chainsaw and a rope is too good for the mangy dog that stole it. Or so it seemed. Until the purported thief, in interviews with the police, claimed he’d owned those saws for years and even identified marks and features that seemed to validate that claim. And the attackers did mention that they’d really only seen the photo in the ads and that, yeah, it might not have been their saws. Saws tend to look a lot alike since they do look a lot alike. And yeah, it might’ve been smart to wait for the sheriff.

No doubt there are some lessons to be learned here. But probably none gleaned by us South Enders. Me, I’ve started locking up my two chainsaws. I don’t want to have to duel it out for the time I have to get them back from a thief. Probably better just to bargain him down rather than shoot him. Especially if I found out later they weren’t my saws….

This past week I hauled up north to my dentist and had my teeth cleaned. For most of my life I’ve been told that flossing is next to godliness, that it’ll prevent plaque build-up and gum disease, that if I were to neglect it, I would probably be at risk for everything from halitosis to heart attacks. Today, the news told me and all my floss flagellating friends, this is scientifically unprovable. Flossing, according to the latest studies, makes no more difference to my dental health than if I gargled with holy water.

Great. A year or so ago I received the news that baby aspirin, forever touted as a hedge against plaque build-up in arteries and therefore heart attacks, was probably not much help. Might even be offset by increased incidents of stroke. So much for the wonder drug of aspirin. So much for listening to the advice of health professionals. You wonder why folks go down to the supplement store and spend fortunes on snake oil, maybe this is why. You might as well believe what you want, the so-called experts are just as phony.

One year whole milk is a killer, better drink skim, this year a study claims we need that kind of fat. Butter, might as well eat DDT, now it’s margarine that’s demonized. Sugar, holy moley, white sugar will eat you alive. Now the diet stuff, worse yet. What’s a poor boy to do???? I don’t know about you, but I like to believe — and science may contradict me tomorrow, then support me the next week, etc. — that we are creatures of the planet Earth, most of us, and we evolved with a diet of natural stuff. All those foods we made easier to cook or made from chemistry labs, well, I’m not saying they’ll give you cancer and make your hair fall out or your teeth rot, I’m just saying we didn’t really get exposed to those things in our climb from the ooze to the treetops.

Folks think science will bring them closer to immortality, and don’t get me wrong, I believe in science, but we’re really looking for magic bullets, pharmaceutical panaceas, artificial remedies, all those medical cures advertised to us old farts on TV every damn night. Just ignore the cautionary list of adverse effects, then go bug your doctor for a cure-all anyway.

I don’t know if I’ll keep on flossing or not now. I probably won’t lose sleep over it, but if I do, I’ll check with my pharmacist and take what he recommends. Just so long as one of the side effects isn’t gum rot.

We’re less than a month into the Second Coming of the Trump Administration and already the temperature down at the Pilot Lounge is hotter than a New Delhi tenement in the last summer’s global warming. Jolene’s Beauty Salon, thanks to Ronald’s constant up-to-the -minute hair on fire news commentary, has resulted in the loss of three of Jolene’s most reliable clientele, a fact which she has tried to impress on her gay beautician without much success. A couple more and Ronald will be going with them, she thinks. Although, truth be told in these post-fact times, Rebecca Arnold pretty much instigated the argument when she announced to the entire salon that she was happy the Man in the High Tower had declared that only two sexes were admissible in the new definition of gender. No trans and, according to her, maybe no gays either. Red flag to Ronald’s bull.

The Diner, as always, is a hotbed of insurrectionist talk, liberal outrage, militia supporters and even a few customers who seem only interested in breakfasts and lunches. Even the Flatheads left off the usual arguments of stock vs. after market carburetor replacements, 6 to 12 volt upgrades, the only topics across their DMZ concerned now with geopolitics. Did Trump really mean he’d bulldoze Gaza and make a Riviera on the sea? Was Greenland worth a war with the Danes? Should we take back the Panama Canal? Fuggetabout carb overhauls and white wall tires, the vintage car guyz were weighing in on the Ukraine War, the China/Taiwan threat, the NATO debates. Don’t even get them started after two refills of Brenda’s high octane caffeine on the purges going on with the Musketeer crews or the confirmation battles split evenly down Party lines!!

The only thing that united these patriotic diners, the only thing, was their unanimous outrage when Anita inked in on every spattered and battered menu: “Due to the spike in egg prices all egg items will be $2 extra.” The great wailing and the drumbeat pounding of chests that emanated from the formica tables could have been heard clear to Stanwoodopolis. As Two Toke intoned once the hubbub had died down a few decibels, “It’s the eggonomy, stupid!” And for possibly the first time in months, we all laughed.

There’s an old fable about a snake that asks a man to carry it across the river, promising not to bite. Before they reach the other side the snake sinks its fangs into the man. “You promised not to bite me!” the man cried out. To which the snake replied, “But I’m a snake. What did you expect?”

In Michigan the Moslem minorities are complaining bitterly about the man they trusted to bring the Gaza genocide to an end now floating the grand notion of evacuating the survivors to neighboring countries so that the United States can clear the rubble and rebuild on the ruins a fabulous waterfront mecca, a Riviera on the Dead Sea, pardon the irony. Mar-a-Gaza, owned and controlled by the United States and no doubt built and operated by Trump Global Enterprises.

Agreed that no one probably could have imagined this ‘solution’ to the Palestinian problem in any form or fashion, but c’mon, the same folks bitterly denouncing the scheme voted for the man or abstained from voting at all. They trusted the snake not to bite but of course the snake was true to its nature. The same is true for the rural red states, of course, who voted to drain the swamp, cut spending, slash departments and root out the cursed bureaucrats who are stealing their hard earned tax dollars. All that infrastructure money has been terminated, most of it going to those same states. Health care funding has been slashed and it won’t be long before rural hospitals begin to fail. Tariffs promised should soon jack up inflation, hurting the poorest the most.

There will come a wailing and pounding of fists from the heartland before very long. They will say they were betrayed, that all politicians are liars, that no one is to be trusted. I’m sorry, but you brought the snake on board. He did what he has always done. Sure, he said he wouldn’t harm you. What did you expect?

I always wondered which American era the MAGA folks wanted to return to, maybe McCarthy and the communist witch hunts, maybe the slave era, maybe before women’s suffrage was passed. But this first couple of weeks of the new regime made me realize they want to go back to 1984, the book. Thought Crimes. Political purges. Weaponized government. Computer surveillance to weed out wrong thinking, contrary viewpoints and incorrect political beliefs. Fire the enemies then prosecute them. How many fingers am I holding? Big Brother asks Winston after secret surveillance revealed his doubts about the government. Who won the election in 2020? Who were the heroes of the Civil War? What is a female? Who started Covid? What did they put in the vaccines?

It’s not a far reach to go from firing anyone in any department who might have been involved in the DEI programs, the folks who mistakenly thought diversity and inclusion and equity were positive values, not crimes against the state. The history books will be purged of references to anything that does not ennoble the country. Racism will be erased from the textbooks, slavery was nowhere as bad as some suggest, the Civil War was a fight to protect states’ rights, the indigenous population was given generous reservation lands. Anything other than the official line will be considered a Thought Crime.

Our former enemies will now be our allies. North Korea, Russia, previously stigmatized, are now friends of the regime. Canada and Mexico suddenly are demonized, tariffs placed on them, little more than drug smugglers. Any suggestion of past alliances to the contrary will be erased from the data banks. “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

“What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?” Big Brother owns the media, Big Brother controls the executive, the legislative and the judicial. Big Brother Is Watching! We are all immigrants to him. We are all guilty of Thought Crimes. 1984 has finally arrived. Forty years late.

My sense of humor went on strike yesterday. Nothing I could say or do, not even a considerable bump in the minimum wage I pay her, would convince her to come back, not even for a trial run. ‘Where you gonna go?’ I asked in a painfully pleading voice. ‘None of your business,’ she called out over her shoulder. I offered early retirement, vacation time, full health care, but nothing doing. I said at least leave me a phone number where you can be reached. ‘I need you more than ever,’ I admitted. ‘These are terrible times. If a man can’t laugh occasionally, he’ll go insane.’

‘Welcome to the club,’ my sense of humor growled just before slamming the door on the way out. I confess, I haven’t been attentive to my S.O. H.’s needs of late, but I didn’t think things had gotten so far beyond remedy. Sure, I read the papers, newsfeeds, blogs, all things political and yeah, it makes me eternally pissed off seeing my country run by punks and thugs as if they were operating a crime syndicate in a third world country. I mean, I did notice that my chuckles were few and far between, my drinking had picked up a notch, my messages to friends were growing darker, my response to phone solicitors was no longer amused, but I didn’t realize I had slipped into a steady dripping funk. Sinister thoughts were entering my fevered head, fantasies of terrible accidents befalling our dear Leader, subpoenas and impeachment wishes, presidential untreatable syphilis and worse, much much worse.

No wonder my S.O.H. took a hike! What’s funny about wishing harm to someone? Even if you hate the sonofabitch? But of course the corrosive part of hating this guy was that eventually I started hating the people that voted him in. And the politicians who make excuses for him. And the Party that enables this totally undemocratic dickhead. My S.O.H. doesn’t handle that kind of toxin, nothing humorous about it, no great punchline here. The trouble with hatred is it has no room for my S.O.H., none whatsoever, and couples counseling isn’t going to help, no way. We might have stayed together for the children, but … we don’t have kids. So I can’t blame my sense of humor for this. She knew it was time to go. Well before me, I see now. Maybe we can work things out eventually, I’m hoping but not real optimistic. Meanwhile, I’ll just stew in my own bile and trust in the power of a vestigial funny bone. You never know, sometimes life can turn funny again….

Down by our Garbage Free end of the island we got about 16 trucks a week from Waste Management plying our neighborhood. Big green plastic bins get rolled out to the end of the driveway and the big green trucks stop, drop their metal arms, lift the bin up and into the maw of the trucks’ rear ends then move on to the next. The mizzus asked if maybe we shouldn’t sign up for curbside pickup, save me that awful trip to the dump.

The trip I make about every 3 months. When I arrived at the primitive South End, the dump was actually that, a dump. Roll up, toss our garbage into a pit. Frank ran the dump back then and about half what we tossed he took home. Old TV’s, busted toasters, dead lawnmowers, Frank figured they were worth keeping. Sort of recycling before recycling was cool.

Admittedly there weren’t many of us living on the island back then, but when the population grew, the county installed coin-op dumpsters. For 50 cents we could load the bin and a compactor crushed it all down. A decade later they added barrels for glass and plastics and paper. We had to sort the glass — clear, green and brown — and most weeks the barrels were full so folks dropped the stuff on the ground. The dump was a dump once again.

Now we toss all the recyclables into one place. Easy. Real easy. I don’t know why either folks still use the highway to toss their bottles and cans, maybe just the irrepressible urge to dump as soon as the container is empty. But a lot of us evidently think the roadside is their personal dump. If I thought too long about it, I’d become more cynical than I already am and none of us needs that. Litter’s bad enough.

So when folks drop their garbage in the middle of the parking lot at the park I maintain, I’ve stopped sorting through it to find a letter with their address or a magazine with their name on the label. I have to live near these folks, but I sure don’t want to get to know them. I got enough enemies as it is … so I’m real glad most of the newcomers can afford curbside pickup.

The South End Advisory Committee met last night in emergency session. The last time they convened a similar gathering was back in 2001 following the Trade Tower attacks when an alarmed citizenry demanded they beef up our shoreline defenses to counter what, at the time, seemed like imminent terrorist incursions. Since then the South End has pretty much kept its head in the sand, so to speak, ignoring the Great Recession (which seemed to most of us just a continuation of our unemployment woes), the Iraq War (we’re pretty much all too old to enlist) and the rise of ISIS (it’s hard to behead those with theirs buried in the beach). But sometimes events arise that demand attention, demand action, demand a committee meeting.

And certainly this was one of those times. Now that the Trump Tweet presidency has left the station, small groups around the country have declared themselves Sanctuary Zones. Sanctuary cities, sanctuary universities, sanctuary Starbucks, sanctuary nursing homes, sanctuary daycare centers. The question on last night’s table: should we declare ourselves a sanctuary too? Ethel Birmbach, current President of the Council, called the meeting to order. “Deportation is not an option,” she declared almost immediately. “These are our neighbors and friends, not our enemies.”

Randy Primplucker, a realtor for WindyRear Realty and the only member on the council actually born on the South End, argued for a quick vote “to protect our neighbors”, but Betsy Birdcall took him to task. “We don’t really know who some of these people are, Randy. Sure, you might have sold them their property, but beyond a credit check, how do you know what their backgrounds are? I’m not arguing for detention camps or even forced deportation, I’m just saying we shouldn’t assume there’s nothing nefarious going on in our community. The government won’t be looking out for us, that’s for sure.”

“These people already have detention camps,” Ralph Van Vleet practically shouted. “They put up their own gates! What are they hiding behind those gated walls? Why are they so nervous? Who are they trying to protect? Who do they think they’re fooling?”

“For godsake, Ralph,” Patty Plankton replied. “These people pay the lion’s share of our property taxes. Let’s don’t charge in half-cocked.”
Ethel pounded her hard rubber mallet on the desk that served as podium. “Calm down, everybody,” she commanded. “Randy, we all know you have financial ties to these folks. Maybe you should recuse yourself on this issue. This is way too important to have monetary issues clouding our judgement.” Randy protested meekly, but finally acquiesced.

In the end the Council voted 5 to 3 to declare the South End a Sanctuary. Up in the gated communities the 1% breathed a collective sigh of relief that, for the time being at least, their taxes would not go any higher. At least not until after the Trump presidency or a turnover in the South End Council. Down here we protect our own.

The other day I went looking for my sense of humor. I searched everywhere I could think of. I looked in all the closets, checked under the laundry, dug through cabinets and behind the sink, under the beds, in drawers I hadn’t opened in years. Nothing. It had to be here somewhere, it couldn’t have wandered off on its own. I’m sure I just put it down absent mindedly and walked off so if I retraced my steps, maybe I would run into it.

It’s been a few days and I’ve been to the studio, the shop, the woodsheds, back on the trails, down to the beach. Nothing. Not a trace, not even the shadow of a smile. It’s been raining nearly constantly lately and I’m worried I left it outside where it’s shrunk down to something small enough for the slugs to slime over, something I might not even want to find much less use again, just some icky sog of a remnant nobody would recognize.

The shortest day of the year is coming up and I really need to find that funny bone. The sun comes up about noon and starts sinking immediately, the rain drips off our clogged gutters, the storms keep blowing down trees in the back 40 and the news is too bleak to listen to anymore … at least without that lost sense of humor. I checked on E-bay to see if maybe someone had stolen mine and now was selling it, used, slight wear, free shipping. Not only didn’t I find mine, I didn’t find anyone offering a reasonable replacement.

Although, someone from Wisconsin had one for sale. “Funny bone, never used, won’t be needing it. Voted Trump. Best offer.” Bidding started at $25 with a $250 shipping charge. I noticed it had yet to get a single bid even though it had been listed since the election. The idea of an unused, nearly new sense of humor was seriously tempting. And at this point of desperation the exorbitant price was almost acceptable. But I’m going to hold out for one that’s more tried and true. That one from Wisconsin, I bet it’s dark and mean spirited. You know, if it even works. I worry that its idea of funny is to belittle and bully, then laugh out loud at the victim’s misery. Just make fun of others who are different, whose religion isn’t the same, who have a disability. I’m not sure how much I’d be willing to pay for that. At least not yet.

Meanwhile, I’m going to keep looking for mine. It’s got to be here somewhere. I just worry if I don’t locate it soon, if I find it after prolonged inactivity, it’ll be like my flashlight batteries, pretty much dead. Inauguration Day is coming right up. I’m going to need to find it before then. That, or buy the one on E-bay and take my chances.

My calendar is going backwards. So are my clocks. Every hour, every day now, the past is coming up fast. The future I had been counting on optimistically is now in the rearview, objects not closer than they appear, fading into the distance. Can this be possible? Have we stumbled into some kind of wormhole? Some alternate reality? Am I living my life in reverse?

Today, for instance, it was decreed by executive order that there are only two sexes, male and female. A few days ago we had a moving scale of gender identity. You could even change sex if you wanted to. But not today. Today was a few years ago. Women could serve in the military, even ( lucky them), go into combat. But the clock ticked backwards overnight. Another few days and women will be back in the kitchen, cooking dinner for us men. I can’t explain it, I just wake up every day farther in the past.

While I was sleeping, apparently the old President became the new President. Maybe he ordered the clocks turned back, hell if I know. Yesterday we thought gays and trans should be given the same rights as everyone else. We thought immigration was what made this country great, cheap labor if nothing else, a melting pot with minimum wage as the fire boiling the pot beneath it. Now we’re rounding up the foreigners, setting up internment camps, loading detainees on trains. Is it still 2025 or have we slipped into the World War 2 calendar?

I’m at a loss to explain it. And now I’m afraid to go to sleep, fearing what a backwards Ichabod Crane will find. Maybe I’ve been wrong all these years. Maybe sex is binary and the Bible is right. Maybe minorities should stay in their place, at the bottom. Maybe slavery was okay and the South understood American capitalism better than me. Maybe we Americans have nothing to learn from the past, certainly nothing to be embarrassed by. I sure hope so because we’re going back there. They say those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. I’m starting to think we didn’t forget it, we were just afraid of the future.