The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Be careful what you wish for, all you anti-woke yahoos. A Utah library has taken the Good Book off its shelves after complaints that it is unfit for young readers. Pornographic and excessively violent, some concerned parents said and apparently the librarians agreed. These are tough times in partisan America so it should come as little surprise the ‘woke’ Bible-phobes are up in arms. Put another title on the banned list, probably just arouse the curiosity of those teenagers itching to get their hands on the burn list, see what the hub-bub is all about. What was Jezebel up to in Chapter 6?

Course, kids could just log on to their devices and google porn up while their parents are out lobbying their local libraries and PTA’s to keep undesirable books off the shelves. I’m sure these same parents insure their little precious doesn’t get his or her hands on violent video games or listen to music sung by people of uncertain sexual preferences. The world outside their insular home is a bit too dangerous these days when the latest surveys show 20% of teenagers checking the box regarding gender preference as Uncertain. Oh my….

Books and music and Hollywood, all that evil. Now the Bible. Where does a Mom turn? What can a Dad do? Well, for one, demand that their church quit teaching from pornographic and violent texts, that’s what. Keep those impressionable youths indoors, take away their devices, stop going to the library and definitely take them out of public schools and probably even private ones too if they’re affiliated with churches. Evil is everywhere now. Ignorance is not only bliss, it might be the only option.

So a duck walks into a drugstore, picks up a box of Trojans and walks to the counter with it under his wing. The pharmacist rings up his purchase and asks, ‘you want me to put this on your bill?’ The duck, aghast, quacks, ‘I’m not that kind of duck!!’

So I’m walking into my own local drugstore and this kid and his girlfriend are palavering in the aisle I’m walking by. She’s crowbarred into torn designer jeans that must cost a hundred bucks and he looks like he shops Goodwill. ‘How would I know where to find them?’ she asks the boy, ‘I don’t shop here.’ At which point I leave eavesdropping range, get what I came for and head back up to the checkout line. The girlfriend is waiting some ways away, but says, loud enough for everyone to hear, ‘I’m not going to stand there too. You can do it by yourself.’

I queue up with the lad who has a package of Trojan condoms in his mitt and we’re behind two elderly ladies who are waiting for their turn at the register. It becomes a long wait, but finally the two women move to their respective registers and finally I say to the kid, “ya know …

when I was about your age I went into a pharmacy to buy prophylactics for the first time. You had to ask the pharmacist for them back then, didn’t want to leave them out for the prurient public. I was a little nervous, being a kid, so I asked the druggist for Trojans, just like you got right there, and the guy asks, ‘what size?’ Geez, what size? Not something I counted on, I guess figuring one size fits all or something, but finally I mumble, ‘I don’t know, mediums, I guess.’ ‘Naw,’ he says, ‘what size box, a dozen or what?’

I’m sure the guy pulled that on every underage kid who bought his first condoms from that store, probably howled with his buddies every time too.” My kid gives out a nervous little chuckle, not quite sure what to make of this old geezer telling his story, but he’s saved when the counterguy says Next. On the way out of the store, reunited with his girlfriend, I’m wondering if he’ll maybe tell her he bought the condoms but forgot to check what size, see maybe if she’d fall for it. Naw, I think maybe he had other things on his mind….

My neighbors are up in arms. A year ago a cluster of alders blew down in a storm, crashing into the bulkhead below and opening a wide gash exposing the bank to the sea. Our trail down to the beach was threatened — and more importantly a few houses close to the bluff’s edge were threatened. The obvious solution, of course — no, not put those houses up for sale — was to repair the breach in that bulkhead.

So permits were applied for and meanwhile the homeowner’s association decided the old bulkhead, rotting pretty fast, might as well be replaced too. More permits, more delays, more time to gather estimates, hire experts, obtain bids, attend meetings and divide up sides. Take a million plus dollar estimate and divide by 25 or so properties, you’ve got a microcosmic snapshot of America, the Haves vs. the Have Nots, the folks on fixed incomes vs. the Boeing and Microsoft retirees. Annie, get yer gun, we’re going to war.!!

I’m not exactly an uninterested bystander in this shoot-out. We have beach rights and since the trail is a necessary component of those rights which the bulkhead protects, the argument has been made that we are equally responsible to pay for the repairs. This, you can infer, is why attorneys were invented. For the time being I’m biding my time.

The irony of this imbroglio, this War Between the Houses, is that we live across the highway where bluff erosion really won’t impact us and our buildings for a millennia or so, unlike the folks perched precariously a few scant feet from potential disaster. And … the path to the beach is steep which means only a few of us geezers ever venture down that trail, mostly me.

Meanwhile the permits languish, attorneys are hired, acrimony builds, guns are loaded, secession seems possible … but wait! The State has revised its rules on bulkheads in the meantime. Possibly, probably! the government won’t allow a replacement. Peace in the hood might be restored. Neighbors might once again speak to one another. Guns will return to their closets. Happy Days?

Not likely. Now they got the new lawsuits concerning a building application that would block the views of the Sound and the Olympics of two other neighbors. Don’t put those firearms away just yet! They just might still be needed.

Kind of makes your head spin, this 30 plus trillion dollar debt we have. I can remember back in the day when we had a debt. Took eleven years to pay off 24 grand for our shack’s mortgage but when we did, we vowed never to incur another one, not for a car, for credit cards, for a plasma TV, not for anything, just stop paying interest on money we didn’t have. Trust me, there were times the money ran out, like halfway through building our house, when a loan looked like the only recourse, but we just stopped buying lumber for awhile until we managed to get enough to continue. And yeah, I know, a lot of folks have to feed their kids, pay for college, all that stuff … so we count ourselves lucky more than smart.

This past month we’ve been enduring the continuous chatter about hitting the national debt ceiling, that point where the federal government cannot borrow another dime and sets off all kinds of mayhem. The GOP is suddenly alarmed by the 31 trillion we owe and want to cut back on spending for increasing the budget of the IRS or welfare programs. The Dems want to spend more on those but pay for it with rolling back the tax breaks the Republicans under Trump gave the rich and the corporations which of course added plenty to the national debt. Wasn’t troubling then but it is now with the Democrat Biden in office.

I’m all for a balanced budget, probably even for a reduction in the national debt. Most folks are. The issue really isn’t balancing or reducing, it’s how we get there. Neither party thinks we can cut anything from the military or Social Security. Medicare is pretty much off the table. So that leaves … not a whole lot of places they can cut. Welfare programs, school lunches, Medicaid, stuff that helps the poor, what we call a safety net. Of course we could raise taxes. I know, verboten! Especially raising taxes on the rich. You know, the folks we gave tax breaks to under the last regime. But we probably won’t and if you need proof, consider that part of the deal this week was to cut money from the IRS. Sure don’t want auditors probing the tax filings of the rich or the corporations. Sure don’t want to collect money from those folks even if it might help bring down the national debt.

Maybe the poor ought to call up their banks and their credit card companies, tell them No Way are they gonna pay one more red cent on their loans until the government does something about cutting down that national debt. And further, maybe they should demand that those same banks, those same credit card companies and all the corporations who are bilking the IRS because nobody’s checking the henhouse, only then will they pay one thin dime. I know, kind of a fantasy….

Over on the other side of the island I have a little 5 acre park I caretake, mostly mow the grass, weed eat the ditches, chainsaw up the trees that fall over the trails and pick up trash my visitors are kind enough to leave behind. It’s a thankless job but I figure it’s the only park on the South End, one that nobody else volunteers to help maintain, so somebody ought to step up and if that someone is me year after year, so be it.

The other day I was sprucing up the picnic grounds and found a little baggie of dogshit considerately left on the table for someone else to dispose of, but not the dog’s owner, apparently. Giving credit where credit is due, at least my visitor, no doubt ‘woke’ enough to scoop the poop and bag it, cleans up after her/his pup. But what I always wonder when I find the baggie tied and left behind is whether they/them/it understands the principle behind scooping. I’d prefer they/we/us just shoveled the crap into the woods where it could compost naturally somewhere no one would walk on it or smell it, but to encase it in a plastic bag and leave it on the picnic table, somehow that seems, oh, I don’t know, inconsiderate unless the leaver is mentally challenged by the concept of scooping and bagging.

I could leave an instructional sign up, I suppose, although I’m not wanting to man/womansplain to the folks who walk their dogs there how the process is supposed to work. Seems obvious to me. Too obvious to explain. But there are folks out there who definitely could use a manual. A few years back the South End String Band decided to set up an impromptu concert on one of the hills at Terry’s Corner, this being before Freedom Park was imagined. Fools on the Hill, we called it that day. Eventually a woman drove in and we thought, well, here’s the first of what would be a gathering audience.

She got out of her car, attached a leash to her german shepard and proceeded to walk the path up the hill to where we were playing Cripple Creek. About toward the finale she came up beside us and the mutt took his dump next to our bass player, then the woman turned and headed back to her car. A lesser band might have called out, hey, you forgot something, lady! But instead we shook our collective heads, finished the song and then laughed until we cried. Critics, I guess, come in all breeds. I wonder, though, if that same woman is the one who leaves the bagged poop for me/you/or them. Maybe doesn’t like the way we maintain her park…..

Maybe you saw where a gang of killer whales over in Europe launched coordinated attacks on sailboats, the speculation being that a dominant female orca had been injured by some encounter with a ship and was severely traumatized. Traumatized is a nice way of saying she was mightily pissed off. Out there in Mother Nature the birds are dropping rapidly in numbers, the insects are being reduced too and of course the amphibians are thinking about skipping metamorphosis and staying in the water. We humans haven’t been too kind to the creatures who share the planet. A little busy developing combustion engines, clearcutting the Amazon and working to develop artificial intelligence.

Course we homo sapiens aren’t too concerned, not yet anyway. Global warming? Climate change? What, me worry? We got our jet skis and our air conditioners, who cares about a few less mosquitoes, right? If we have to put up dams to keep the Atlantic from flooding Florida, well okay, we’ll put up sea walls and tide gates, not gonna stop burning coal just because a few environmentalists are whining, sure not gonna litter up Arizona with fields of solar arrays. The future will take care of itself, always has, always will. The birds, well, they’re on their own.

But … I just wonder if this gang of killer whales might be a harbinger of nature taking revenge. I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds as a kid, the world under siege by billions of feathered attackers, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. What if all the insects banded together in massive swarms? Or the frogs formed militias? And the snakes joined them? I know, it sounds paranoid, but dammit, what are those orcas up to? We even gave a few of them nice homes in the swimming pools of SeaWorld and fed them their favorite fish and all we asked was they do a few acrobatics for the paying customers. Geez, talk about ingrates.

I don’t know about you but I plan to keep an eye out down by the garden for any … well, unusual activities by the squirrels or the robins. Yesterday I watched two robins attacking a red squirrel, something I thought was probably normal. Today I’m not so sure.

As a home improvement specialist I had a set of toilet seat hardware break, no big deal, just buy the replacement parts and attach them back on the seat and top. Trouble was, when I did just that, the seat top had to be held so that it wouldn’t slam back down. The seat and top were custom fit by me about 30 years ago when I built the house, big thick curly maple and maybe the new hardware wasn’t spec’d out for twice that thickness. Although … it had worked well enough for 3 decades. Plumbing, as any of you know who have ventured into that matrix of horror, is as mysterious as it is implacable, a labyrinth of broken dreams and leaky futures a mere mortal might emerge from babbling and cursing. Me, I have been there many times and some might conclude that this is the reason for more than most of my, let’s call them ‘problems’.

Today I spent four hours assembling new hardware. Backwards, upside down, inside out, you name it, I screwed it in, I screwed it out and I screwed it up. Nothing I did seemed to work, most were just total lack of engineering brains, something I have none of apparently. I have the kind of brain that is spatially dyslexic, so I flip the hinge backwards, then realize my mistake. And then do it again. And possibly, later, one more time. Something in my synapses is short circuited, I don’t know what else to call it.

In the end I had a toilet seat whose lid had to be hand held to keep it up. I suspect some evil femme in a factory somewhere in Hunan modified the design to accommodate women’s pleas to us men to leave the damn lid down when we’re done peeing, but of course the problem is more likely in the design of my weak brain. Finally, out of frustration, I took an old wood toilet seat from the shack and replaced it with the Chinese revenge model, then hauled it up to the house here and installed it. Thirty years on that curly maple throne and now I’m stuck with a store-bought.

Nevertheless, all dark toilets have a silver lining, isn’t that what they say? And mine is to hurry down to the patent office to lock in my new specially designed SEAT DOWN commode for the women of the house whose husbands refuse to listen to their laments and protestations and leave the seat down when they’re done. I expect to make a fortune and trust me, I don’t care how many threatening messages I get from pissed off men who tried to fix that seat on their own so it would stay up. Of course I’ll pass some of the royalties on to that Chinese factory worker. If I can ever locate her….

I just read that 60% of wage earners in the Land of Opportunity are living paycheck to paycheck. Which means they don’t make enough to save anything for, oh, that next ER visit or the unexpected auto repair or the jump in their house or apartment rental. Sure, some folks just spend everything they make anyway, wouldn’t matter if they got a 50% raise in their hourly wage, they’d run out and buy more, probably put it on their credit card, pay the monthly minimum, ignore the huge interest accumulation and just sink deeper in debt. But … I suspect most of these 60%ers are struggling to feed their families, pay the mortgage or the rent, cough up the car payments and buy clothes for their kids. Their incomes are probably down in the minimum wage bottom area.

Nice to know, though, that the Fed keeps jacking the interest rates to try to keep inflation at bay. Or put another way, the Fed wants to see unemployment rates rise. And the last thing they want is for hourly wages to start rising too, just another form of inflation. The lower the unemployment numbers, the more employers will have to pay to entice workers to hire on to flip burgers, repair tires, serve café patrons, scan groceries or make beds at the motels. Yeah, it’s a vicious cycle, a downward spiral, at least for the poor.

Housing prices are going through the roof. Gas is high. Try to find an affordable used car or get in line to buy a new Honda. Supply chain issues, price gouging, too few rental apartments, remote working, you name it. Opioid addictions, homelessness, civil unrest, what’s not to like if you’re the Fed? Crank up those unemployment numbers, keep the wages low, spare the rich. This time around we have the debt ceiling crisis looming, a game of chicken where the right wingers in the GOP put a gun to everyone’s head and dare them to refuse more tax cuts for the wealthy and less benefits for the poor. You might think the richest country in the world might worry less about its billionaires and more for those 60% hanging by a thread. But you’d be wrong…. The rich, in case you hadn’t heard, just keep getting richer.

A couple of our friends’ daughters were dutifully dragged along to our dinner party awhile back. They’re in their late 30’s, working women, one divorced and the other dating, which means, I’m guessing, they’re both dating. I don’t ask, give me that much credit. Once we got past the health care issues of us Boomers, all those geezer geriatric complaints, we finally settled into politics. Trump, Biden, the smackdown rematch coming up in 2024.

“I can’t believe,” Katie, the daughter of our oldest friends, said, “the same two old white guys are going to run again.” Jenny, the divorced kid of our other two oldest friends, rolled her eyes and chugged the half finished glass of sauvignon, then filled it with a sloppy flourish. “No kidding,” she growled, shaking her head. Her latest paramour lightly touched her wrist, no doubt worried we geezers would take umbrage, but he was the new squeeze, he’d learn soon enough us old birds were hard to rile. If he lasted long enough ….

“There ought to be an age limit. Reagan went out with Alzheimers. Biden’s a hundred years old, give or take. Trump’s going through his 10th childhood, the spoiled old fart. It’s time to retire some of these white dudes, put em in a Home!” Wally, I think her beau’s name was, took his hand home, wrapped it around an empty beer bottle and probably felt like he’d walked into an assisted living facility by mistake.

I wandered over to the fridge, pulled a beer, opened it and handed it to Willy or Wally or whatever. “New blood,” I said lamely. “Gotta say, we old farts are leaving you with a helluva mess. We didn’t do doodly about climate change, left you with more guns out there than most armies have. We had our fun and you’ll get left with the bill. Seems only fair you might have Senators or Presidents who had some new ideas. We seem to have run out of them. Can’t even come up with new candidates. Gridlocked Congress is our answer. History’s gonna be a little harsh with us,” I said, “but give us this, we gave you rock and roll.”

So okay, not a great trade-off.