The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Some people are born to be businessmen. They know how to promote themselves, they understand negotiation, they embody what Donald Trump calls the Art of the Deal. I wish I had a couple of strands of those genes in my DNA. My kin, my ancestors, my genepool — all I can say is they climbed down out of the trees, but they never figured out they could sell the timber or develop the real estate. Plus we never remembered how to climb back up so now folks want to sell US the damn trees.

I actually have a business. I know, hard to believe. My right-leaning Republican relatives and in-laws shake their heads sadly to think I’m the only one in the two families who represents their bedrock GOP values of entrepreneurial get-up-and-go, job creation, small business struggles, all those virtues they hold dear. I sell goods. I buy materials, fashion them into art and then I have to sell the product. American? Well, it sticks in their throats, but yeah, as apple pie. Mom and country. Bootstrap success story. You might suppose, after 35 years, I’d be pretty good at it. I just made a stained glass entryway window for some new arrivals on the South End. Even though I’m cheaper than any glass shop in the Pacific Northwest … and even though my stuff is original artwork … I ended up giving them a discount. And they’re rich. You tell me what’s wrong with that picture.

I bought a new truck a few years ago when my old one almost caused me to miss a huge commission for a public art project down in Portland. You think I negotiated a lower price or argued for some ‘extras’? If you thought that, you don’t know me. All I asked my salesman was sell me the damn truck sitting out there in the lot, the one without any bells or whistles, and don’t screw around, I want to leave here ASAP, I don’t want to play the game, I don’t want the sales manager showing me an invoice proving you aren’t making any money on the deal, I don’t want to hear that bullshit. Yes, I’ll pay full price. No, I don’t want to take it for a test drive. Yes, I’m a complete idiot.

But …. I’m an idiot who would rather pay the full monte than get down in the pit and wrassle for a few dollars. I’m not going to lie and say money is beneath me. I’m frugal to a fault. I’m my Depression-era parents’ kid. I shop mostly at Goodwills, I buy Chinese, I’m so stingey I squeak. Money comes hard and it leaves hard too.

Sales is a tough job, at least for the likes of me. Buyer beware? I don’t think so. For me, it’s seller beware.

It used to be that Flag Day fell on June 14th every year. Now it seems like it’s Flag Day most all of the time. The Colorado GOP just called for burning all gay pride flags. Justice Alito flies his American flag upside down and An Appeal to Heaven flag rightside up. You can find blue striped American flags, Pride flags and Don’t Tread on Me flags. Every day is flag day in these divided states of America. Upside down, inside out, backwards, sideways, all signifying something.

Just flying Old Glory itself, what used to be a fairly universal act of patriotism, now is more a rightwing ad co-opted by the Republican Party. Jam a couple in the tailgate of a jacked up 4×4 Dodge Ram and run them until they’re nothing but tatters, what better way to announce your love of country? Or run one up the flagpole upside down, let everyone know you think the country has gone to hell in a handbasket. Back in my day, the wild and wooly ‘60’s, we burned flags. Laws were passed by outraged Republicans banning those incendiary expressions of free speech. Now those same folks want to burn Pride flags. At least in Colorado.

Justice Alito claims his wife loves flags, him, not so much. He’s not really certain what his wife’s flags even mean. Probably the only guy in the country who isn’t which only proves, at least to him, how impartial he will be and why he shouldn’t recuse himself on cases related to, oh, say January 6th when those flags were used as battering rams at the Capitol.

When we built the Camano Island Visitor Center, we erected an historic flagpole from the Stanwood American Legion who apparently didn’t want it on their property. Invariably we would have outraged Viet Nam vets demanding that it be properly lighted, even before we could get around to it. Maybe you’d like to help, I’d ask. Not much volunteering other than their negative opinion of what we were trying to do. But I can attest that flags definitely get peoples’ attention, good and bad. Maybe we should just ban all flags and end all this acrimony. And while we’re at it, let’s ban Flag Day too. Run that up the pole and see who salutes….

I drove my jalopy down to Bellevue and Babylon this week. They got a new Pay-as-you-Drive lane system now, fast lanes for the folks willing to pay up to $10 for a commute to Microsoft and the high tech cubicles, more if you’re like me, the occasional traveler without a transponder and a special bank account. I thought I’d already paid my gas tax and license fees, maybe now I could drive the same roads as the rich, especially since percentage-wise, I was paying even more than them.

I figured wrong. As usual. I’m used to sitting in the back seats of planes jammed in like a chick in the crate going to the slaughterhouse. I’m growing accustomed to feeling second class. Nobody said life was fair, even in a democracy. You pay to play. College. Jewelry shops. Opera. State parks. National parks too. High speed internet. Politics. You maybe thought your taxes give you a free pass to Yellowstone or equal opportunity at the ballot box, think again. It costs $10 to drive into the State Park and I not only throw more optional money at them on my driver’s license fees, I maintain a county park us Friends of Camano Island Parks maintain so the county can use the saved dollars to enforce boat launch fees when I haul my sailboat down.

Maybe the rich do deserve their own lane for commuting. Maybe they deserve every break we can give them. When the King’s carriage rolled through on the highway to the castle, you better believe us peasants pulled over, doffed our caps and bowed ceremoniously to M’Lord. Call me cantankerous and slap me with a macaroni, but I don’t like it.

Probably won’t be too long, though, the gated communities down here will demand their own lane over the bridge onto the island. That, or they’ll go whole hog and insist the state retrofit a drawbridge, just for them, the rest of us, buy a boat. It is, after all, an island. If the riffraff can’t swim, all the better. A few less of us and the property values will go up. The free ride is over. For now, the boat ride’s fairly cheap.

I guess I live in a country of Whiners. Crybaby pissed off yahoos who think the world or the government or their parents owes them an apology for the injustices done to them daily. Take a few hours to listen to hot talk radio, you know, if you can tear yourself away from the trolls on social media. Angry angry people, raging against … well, near as I can tell, just about anything and everything. These aren’t the folks living in their cars, the ones working minimum wage, the people without health care … naw, they’re doing fine. Just not fine enough! They got axes to grind, they have beefs with the System, they’re unhappy and someone else is to blame. That someone needs to be punished.

Gas costs too much … even though they drive SUV’s that get piss poor mileage. They want a house bigger than their parents’. They want cheaper groceries but not the stuff they’d have to prepare themselves. They think people on welfare are stealing their taxes. They think the cities are cesspools of crime and corruption. They think minorities and folks with different definitions of sex are morally bankrupt. Immigrants are taking their jobs, immigrants are getting free health care and food stamps. Immigrants are replacing them!

The libraries are filled with pornography. Drag queens are corrupting their kids. Transgender predators are stalking the women’s bathrooms. Drug addicts are pampered and criminals are let loose. Moslems want sharia law in their state, elections are being stolen, the country’s gone to hell. Even our ex-President complains constantly how poorly he’s been treated, the worst in the history of the world. This from a guy who claims to be one of the richest smartest most successful people on the planet! If he has gripes, how pitiful yours are.

He promises to be your Warrior, your Avenger, your Salvation. He feels your pain. More than you do by a factor of a thousand. Pain? You couldn’t handle his pain!

So much for self-reliance. So much for that much touted Can-Do gumption. So much for the myth of the tough guy American. Naw, we’re pathetic victims now, mewling whiners, aggrieved citizens. Look at what they’ve done to us, the bad mean people. Better to hide in our houses and listen to the other whiners. Nothing we can do. Other than gripe and complain.

Capitalism succeeds because it combines two primary drives in the human brain: greed and the urge NOT to work for someone else. On the South End most of us tried our hands at employment but came up a little short. Short of a work ethic, short of money, short of tolerance for a Boss. So we did what most desperate, unemployed people do. We started our own business.

Any good STARTING YOUR OWN CORPORATION FOR THE COMPLETE IDIOT book will tell you under-capitalization is the main harbinger of Failure in 90% of startups. Obviously none of us down here bought the book, probably couldn’t afford it. “It takes money to make money.” Page 2, Chapter 1. Folks just figure, I guess, they’ll buy a couple of yaks, breed em, then sell the little yaksters to a clamoring public. They don’t really factor in the yak feed, the vet bills, the yak barn and the yak fences. And they NEVER factor in the publicity campaign to create a viral fever for WANTING or NEEDING a yak. Maybe many yaks.

The other thing they don’t calculate in is how much work self-employment entails. Without overtime. Without benefits. You’re supposed to trade off working for Cap’n. Bligh in return for slaving 80 hours a week for Mr. Wonderful, yourself. Course Mr. Wonderful isn’t issuing paychecks at the beginning. He has yak bills to pay before he pays himself and the debts are growing deeper than yak droppings out in the barnyard.

So it’s little wonder us entrepreneur types, us Job Creators, us Captains of Industry, end up broke, disillusioned and depressed, our dreams shattered, our shacks mortgaged, our divorce rates sky high.

But! By god, we’re South Enders and South Enders don’t quit! Well, okay, we gave up on our capitalist fantasies of entrepreneurial riches. But we stayed true to our vow never to work for the Man again, never to be a cog in the well-greased machinery of some #@*&!!^# company, no sir! If we have to live poor, so be it. If we have to live by our wits, even if that’s a SERIOUS disadvantage, okay. And if anyone out there is looking for a very nice herd of cute yaks, I think we can help you with YOUR dream.

Before Anita got fed up with their hours-long studies at the Diner, the Bible Boyz would argue scripture over their one coffee and multiple refills, taking up table space for paying customers and driving away others like myself who wearied of parsing psalms and bickering over prophesies. When she finally cast them out into the wilderness, they called her Jezebel and probably much worse out of earshot, but I thanked her when I heard the café had been returned to its pre-righteous clientele of park tourists, vintage car guyz and the rest of us heathens searching for a fairly quiet ‘hair of the dog’ morning.

“What was the straw that broke the Bible’s back?” I asked late in a slow morning and she’d joined me with a cup of coffee of her own. She blew a strand of lightly greying hair out of her eyes, looking around for eavesdroppers first, then leaned in closer. “I kinda lost it when Pastor Paul asked for his 50th refill. He says to me, get this!, he says I really had no business as a woman — as a woman!” Her voice was way beyond its original whisper. “ I had no business, as a woman, running a business. I should be having kids, staying at home, taking care of a husband and family. You believe this man?”

“Um,” I said, looking around at a few customers now myself. “Sounds about par from these folks.”

“About par?” she practically hollered. “About par?? That’s the whole point, Skeeter, they’re always right. They got the news. They got God on their side! But you know what kills me, they would sit here for hours arguing this, arguing that, what this meant, what that might mean, god almighty, and they think they know what’s what?”

“But what got me, Skeeter, was when that pompous pastor suggested I come to his Sunday service, maybe find a husband there, you never know, make an honest woman of me. An honest woman. That just frosted my ass.”

She sat back, took a long slow sip of coffee, then smiled beatifically. “That’s when I banished them, the whole self-righteous flock. No shoes, no soul, no service. Out! Get out!”

I laughed and Anita did too. I guess Pastor Paul hadn’t gotten the news that Anita was gay. If he had, maybe they’d never have used the Diner for their Biblical studies in the first place. Or they’d have come with pitchforks to replace the cutlery….

Barely out of the courtroom that found our Prez–in –Exile guilty of 34 felonies, the man hauled himself over to an Ultimate Fighting Championship in Joisey, what the New York Times called a hypermasculine appeal to the fans there. They went wild, they cheered, they pumped their fists, they obviously sensed (or smelled) the Huuge testosterone fog of our former Commander-in-Chief wafting across the sweat-filled arena. Sure, he’s beyond fighting weight now, hair pretty much gone, small hands soft as a baby’s, never worked a physical day in his life, never went to a gym to exercise, couldn’t lift anything heavier than a Diet Pepsi if his life depended on it. But hey, here he was in all his fat ass hypermasculine glory, reveling in the adulation of fight fans who could care less if he was a convicted felon. In fact, maybe a year or two in a federal pen might amp up his cred with these folks, hard time, no problem for the Donald. He’s their warrior, their Avenger, the guy who put it to Stormy Daniels and that other porn star, what’s her name?

Oh yeah, here’s the poster boy for Machismo. A guy who cheats at the only sport he knows, golf. Okay, marriage too. Not sure what his handicap is there but I’m betting Huuge, isn’t everything in his braggart telling? A real man’s man. A role model for the fight crowd. A tough talking, take no prisoners, call it like it is, kiss my ass street thug. Maybe our next President. Again. What’s not to love? Compares himself now to Al Capone. And why not? He’s a cheap crook, a con from the get-go, a real killer or maybe he will be if he wins in November.

So what’s with all the crybaby whining? Waaah, waaah, the government is picking on me, the nasty people in the Justice Department are out to get me, that Georgia prosecutor hates me, Judge Merchan treated me so very very badly, my beautiful wife won’t sleep with me anymore, I’m a victim, I’m a martyr, I’m suffering for your sins. Vote for me or they’ll be coming for you next. Send money to me or the bad mean people will take it from you when I don’t win. Send more money, all you can, I’m just a poor billionaire. Buy more of my crappy merch, buy another MAGA hat, buy those tennis shoes, they’re the greatest, like me! Waaah.

The South End Suds and Duds, our local laundromat and gossip center, advertises as OPEN 24/7, but for us Maytagless residents, we know it’s open maybe only 5 or 6 days, the other two they’re closed for repairs and plumbing catastrophes now that Wanda , the current owner, lost her husband/repair guy to Cindy, one of the regulars, at least until she ran off for a new life in Phoenix. Wanda took Fred’s betrayal hard, especially considering Cindy was young enough to be their daughter. If she was a bitter chainsmoking woman before, she doubled down after. And consequently lost interest in the Suds and Duds.

I happened to be washing a week’s worth of dirty clothes and sheets when our washer refused to drain. Wanda was interviewing Tommy Wilson for the position of Head Roto-Rooter. Tommy barely knows which end is the working end of a toilet plunger, but Wanda obviously was short on applicants. “I got a guy yesterday,” she said through a haze of Pall Mall smoke, “probably illegal. I said I’d need to see a green card. He could barely speak English. Said he had a family to feed. I told him I was hiring him, not his whole damn family.”

Tommy swore. “Takin our jobs. They’ll own America before long.” Tommy’s jobs disappeared a long time ago. If Wanda hired him, it would break a streak of decades. “We need to deport these people,” he growled darkly. “Just leeches on the rest of us.” Wanda shot him a long exclamation point of smoke. For once I kept my mouth shut. It’s hellish enough doing the laundry here without debating the owners and clientele. I vowed to get my washer fixed ASAP or die trying.

Tommy lasted about half a week, near as I could tell, probably until the first breakdown. Wanda hired an hombre named Carlos to replace him. They say he can fix about anything. Except maybe Wanda’s broke heart and bitter life. I bought a used washer at the 2nd hand appliance place up north. A very polite Hispanic kid helped me load it into my truck. I noticed he spoke perfect English.

Well sure, the guy had an affair with a couple of porn stars, nothing most healthy all American males wouldn’t do if they had the opportunity, right? Course I’m right. Even if they’d had a wife who’d just given birth. And if they happened to be running for President in a close race, they’d want to keep this under wraps. Buy off the women if they had the money and Donald certainly had the money. Especially if that embarrassing segment of grabbing genitals had just hit the airwaves…. Not that for most voters, even the evangelicals, this would matter. The rich are kind of immune from the morality of the rest of us. Right?

Okay, let’s admit there’s a law against hiding that payoff. Why you had Cohen make the payments, your bag man, your enforcer. Turns out he was ripping you off while he was at it and then when you threw him under the bus and he spends time in jail, he turns star witness on you. Great TV, but embarrassing. Stormy was even more embarrassing. Probably a mistake hauling her onto the witness stand when the affair wasn’t the real issue, try to make her look like a liar so it wouldn’t appear he’d had sex with her, something everyone knew he had and most would have liked to have had too. But never back down, just double down, isn’t that the Roy Cohn motto. Hit back and hit harder. Never admit guilt.

And now 12 jurors have found him guilty. On all 34 felony counts. You didn’t expect remorse, now did you? Course not, all a witch hunt. Political payback. The right wing talk shows and the Republican sycophants are screaming bloody murder. How dare they bring an ex-President up on charges? Same as those impeachments, both of them. Nothing to see here, nothing wrong. Nothing you or I wouldn’t have done in his place.

Up next, the sentencing. No way could Judge Merchan put him behind bars, no way, no how. But … here’s a defendant convicted on all 34 counts, fined repeatedly for violating the Judge’s gag order, who ranted daily about a travesty of the law and a corrupt court, who obviously has no remorse, none whatsoever, who quite possibly changed the 2016 election in his favor by his actions, who will not and cannot be disciplined. No way he’s going to be incarcerated or ordered to home detention. Right? Right????

So our President-in-Exile had his day in court. Weeks, really, and today the judge gave the jury their instructions, then sequestered them. Even took away their cellphones and wi-fi, which, if I’m guessing correctly, should induce a hasty verdict due to social media withdrawal, tempers on edge, plenty of shouting and wailing in the jury room, ‘for godsake, everybody, I need my phone!”

Mister Trump, despite declaring he would most certainly testify in his own behalf, declined to take the stand. Or the oath to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. His accuser, Michael Cohen, was a serial liar, a point reiterated countless times by the defense attorneys. As for their client, well, you be the judge.

This, ladies and gentlemen of the blog jury, is the America this defendant made great again. Divided and angry. A corrupt Supreme Court that takes bribes and flies an upside down flag supporting insurrection without shame or recusals. A do-nothing Congress. Red states vs. Blue. If anyone thinks this narcissistic phoney baloney business man, a serial liar and a rapist, a man completely devoid of morality, is the answer and not the problem, I got a bridge I’d love to sell you. To Reality.

Of course if the jury finds our Savior guilty, it will be like the last election, rigged. You can’t trust the courts … or the police … or the government. The states, the Feds, the Democrats, Joe Biden — all out to get him, to bring him down, to prevent him from saving America. Never show remorse, never apologize, never compromise, never be a loser, never stop blaming others.

12 people are sitting in judgement right now while the world is watching. Maybe, just maybe, they’ll decide if America is great again. Meanwhile, it’s a real cliffhanger of a story.