The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The guy who was once President of the greatest country on earth, you know who I mean, the self-confessed pussy grabber, is going to be indicted this week, at least according to his highness, and you, his loyal minions, should turn out en masse to protest m’lord’s unjust incarceration. Well, at least he says he’ll be locked up. Which, of course, is fairly improbable, but hey, the point is that he’s being scapegoated once again, another of the interminable witch hunts, endless investigations, non-stop attacks on a poor innocent president-in-exile.

Maybe it’s fitting that the first of those indictments is the one regarding the hush money to keep his short but spectacular affair with the porn star Stormy Daniels from sinking his political aspirations. It’s not a crime to pay off Ms. Daniels, but it may very well be if it was an unreported campaign contribution. Mr. Trump —‘Tiny’, if you care to use Stormy’s nickname — has been tweeting a usual storm about his paramour, the usual bullying stuff, but he’s met his match with the porn queen. So, Tiny it is. No doubt a reference to the man’s intellect.

Tiny wants us to hit the streets this week. Take back America. You know, the one he made great again, that one. But now the MAGA crowd wants you to stay home. It’s hard to know quite what to do in these complicated times. Their argument is that, apparently unbeknownst to Tiny, the Feds and the cops will imbed agitators in the crowds protesting Tiny’s arrest. Or more likely, his indictment. Either way, just like the January 6 protests where patriotic citizens were compromised by evil FBI agents who turned a peaceful gathering into a bloody and violent insurrection, a similar event is likely given the entrenched Deep State who hate Tiny and America. Obviously these people will stop at nothing to destroy our country.

I’m at an impasse here, I guess. To protest or not to protest, that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. To die—to sleep, no more; and by a sleep to say we end the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to: ’tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep; to sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub.

It’s an age old quandary. But I suspect we’ll get more than a few chances to decide whether to hit the streets to support Tiny or stay home to prevent the damn government from co-opting us. Either way, Tiny’s day in court is coming. Not just once, but plenty more where that came from.

The Storm is coming! Or so the Qanon predicts. Or maybe it’s Armageddon. At least that’s what the evangelicals think. After the apocalypse, everything should be much improved. A world without gays or uppity blacks, without the WOKE crowd or elitist college grads, immigrants, liberals, environmentalists or anyone else like me. Okay, a Paradise for Them, not necessarily for You. Probably something akin to present day Afghanistan after the return of the Taliban. Heaven in the eyes of the oppressor.

The January 6th insurrection — or protest if you were one of the folks merely wanting to make yourselves heard while on vacation — might give you an idea of what the Storm might bring to the table to make life new and improved. If you don’t get a seat next to Jesus, you might still get one near Steve Bannon. No, Donald Trump isn’t going to let you anywhere near, stop deluding yourselves.

So after a brief but vociferous Rebel Yell from the disaffected, the aggrieved, the racists and the folks who now think democracy might as well be junked if they can’t get their way and no longer want to wait patiently for Armageddon, how do we re-unite the late great USA? Compromise seems an archaic notion when bargaining with Satan, probably even an impossibility given the increasingly insular bubbles of social media. We live in separate fortresses of rigid belief, each side lobbing flaming oil across a vast chasm, a no man’s land of mines and memes littered with fallen heroes, debunked saviors, discredited Founders among the broken statues of Confederate generals.
As the great philosopher Pogo once said, we have met the enemy … and he is us.

Hard as it is to believe, inside the center of the earth there’s an iron and nickel ball of metal, hot as the surface of the sun, that rotates inside us.  It changes speeds, it even changes direction.  Sometimes it wobbles.  Scientists, if you still believe in anything they say, assure us there’s no reason for alarm.  Although, they really don’t understand exactly what’s going on down there beneath our surface.  Welcome to the club, boyz.

It’s comforting to know that we don’t even understand the dynamics of our little home here.  What, me worry?  Deep down below us there’s strange goings-on, a spinning orb of hot metals, changing polarities of the planet, time of day shorter sometimes, longer another.  Wobbly core, temperatures hotter than hell itself, time out of synch, what’s the alarm for?  The science guyz tell us that the ice ages didn’t roll in slowly, they came on in as short a time as a couple of  generations.  Asteroids occasionally whomp the earth, resulting in major die-offs, nuclear winter and planetary burial grounds for the dinosaurs.  Some folks, but not the science wizards, believe all this happened in the last 6 or 7000 years and that theories of evolution or much of anything else are phony baloney.  Probably even still people who think the earth is flat and there’s no core at all, just a magic hole where oil comes up if you drill to the other side.

This wobbly little metal core underneath us might explain those Jewish lasers in space.  Or that actually the earth is hollow.  Or the moon landing was more likely a subterranean mission, not one into outer space.  I don’t know how, but maybe, just maybe, this iron and nickel ball caused viruses to mutate into the coronavirus.  Actually, this core might be the hidden server for the Matrix and what we’re all living is nothing but a simulation created by Tech Masters.  The moon is a fake and so is the earth.  Nothing is as it seems and more worrisome, nothing is real.

So where does that leave us?  Qanon might be real.  Trump probably won the election.  JFK was never assassinated and he’s living with Adolph Hitler in a secret bunker in Antarctica.  Why not?  What you believe may be the only reality.  If so, I suggest you come up with better ideas.   Just saying….

I bought my first house in a government auction. I’d moved to Seattle and Gomorrah to reconnect with my wife at the time after a summer’s hiatus from each other who’d connected instead with a new boyfriend who she lived with while I lived with a houseful of University students who mostly majored in drugs. My wife and her beau were intent on making a fortune in real estate so they’d gotten licenses and were working as realtors. Don’t ask me why, but my missuz — let’s call her Alice — decided we should buy a house together, live in it long enough to defer capital gains, then sell it for the profit and repeat the above until we were rich.

My roommates were people who stole my food and beer, never washed a dish until there were none clean and then only the dish they would use. I was ready for a new place to live and a house of my own looked more than okay. Not having much money and virtually no sources of income, the pickings were poor. But Alice found a HUD house for sale down in the ghetto, a large two story house with no distinctive features other than a hardwood floor that had been ‘rehabbed’ top to bottom and was offered up for bid at a minimum price of $18,000. We bid $24,000 and won, according to our realtor who specialized in HUD houses, by a few bucks and change. A mortgage company his real estate office must’ve owned gave us a loan and we became homeowners for the first time.

Alice stayed with her boyfriend/business partner and I rented rooms to friends and weirdoes and psychopaths at $50 a month. It paid the mortgage of $180 a month and it kept life interesting at a time of my life that welcomed demented and derelict diversion beyond the dreary bottom feeding neighbors that surrounded me in my introduction to true urban depravity. Life, I thought, certainly can take some odd turns. I looked at myself as a character in the modern novel I planned to pen, no doubt a tragedy, but hey, an interesting one. The house, I gradually realized, tied me to my wrecked marriage, to a city on the skids, to my own broken dreams, to a real estate fantasy I wanted no part of and on and on through chapter after chapter.

I could see a bad ending coming. I could even see myself taking the ride down, accepting my Fate as some kind of Lord Jim contrition, blaming myself, becoming bitter and no wiser. It might be a good book, but hell, it didn’t look like a good life. Maybe the squalor and the crime and the low life neighbors were the rewards for a life of laziness and dreamy inattention. Maybe I was in some subliminal atonement for my own failings. Maybe this was Just Desserts.

But I’m not much for martyrdom. I’m not much for contrition either, it turns out. I guess, thinking myself a writer by inclination, I decided to write a happier ending even if it made for a second rate novel. I’ve heard it said that happiness is overvalued. But I’ve never heard it from those folks who are happy. And you won’t hear it from me. Life isn’t a novel and us would-be writers would be wise to remember that.

Love on the South End was never a bowl of cherries. You try to woo a prospective mate after she’s set eyes on 8 foot tall killer nettles menacing the front door, you’ll see what I mean. Course, the Rottweiler barking all night from its pen next to the neighbor’s travel trailer which no longer travels, the one Mr. Dog Lover lives in with the hound chained close by for affection or protection, that doesn’t endear new girlfriends to the neighborhood either.

Most of my single friends have about given up on the local scene. They’ve dated every yahoo, unemployed or otherwise, down at the Hotel Watering Hole and Dating Service, and those memories they’d like to forget. Or at least suppress. I know. I had to mail order my bride. She probably sensed the muted desperation in my throb-filled love letters, but she took pity, I guess, on an old hermit. I sure didn’t mention the banjos. Or the ivy holding up the shack walls. Or the well on its last legs with an ancient piston pump wheezing and gasping just to haul up a glass of water. Love, I knew, would overcome all those drawbacks.

Course we were younger then, still ‘marketable’. My friends, my single friends, have grown a bit longer in the tooth. Some are missing teeth. More than a few have turned to internet dating to meet future partners, figuring, I guess, the ‘pool’ around here has grown shallow with mostly only geezers fossilizing in the puddles. Now they got a pool of millions of prospective mates to choose from. Just sort through the criterion, run the data and preferences, make allowance for some creative exaggeration, then set up a date. “Non-smoker, loves to walk the beach at sunset, enjoys good literature, would rather snuggle than watch TV, loves puppies and quiet conversations.” True translation: psychopath, possible killer. “Fit, but could lose 5 pounds, enjoys an occasional glass of merlot, young at heart.” Translation: obese nursing home escapee.

Fat chance of finding an honest person in the era of Facebook selfies. The mizzus is counting her lucky stars, but our friends — Mr. Right is fudging the facts. He’s balding, morbidly obese, 15 years too old, drinks until he blacks out, watches any sporting even on TV day or night, eats exclusively Doritos and beer nuts and has the conversational equivalency of Cheetah the ape and a literary proficiency that stalled with Archie and Jughead. He wants mostly to get laid, then left in peace with his TV show. He is, if you haven’t guessed, 6 farts shy of being a heart throb.

Love is an elusive realm. It takes a lot of compromise to share a life, a whole entire life. With a person who has faults and idiosyncracies that have to mesh somehow with your own. And on top of that there’s the cultural overlay of physical beauty and … well, physical beauty mostly. And sex. Let’s not even go there, the rest is hard enough. Although for the guys, the rest is sort of superfluous.

I know this isn’t exactly an Advice Column and by now you know any advice I got is seriously suspect anyway, but … for those who still believe the AM radio bubble gum pop song notion of True Love, don’t give up. But DO keep in mind, bad love is worse than no love. I’ve had my vaccination of bad love. Loneliness usually won’t make you miserable. Or cynical. Or suicidal. But love gone south … love on the rocks … love turned sour and rancid and mean? Be choosy is all I’m saying….

I’ve heard it said that Camano Island is the fourth largest island in America. The continental America anyway. We’re on the biggest island in all of America this week, Hawaii. 13,800 foot volcano – above sea level – taller than Everest if you count the distance to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, the entire island black cinder spewed from the lava still forming the island. The volcanoes divide the island in half, one side dry, the other side with the rainiest city in the United States, Hilo. Right now we’re in Hilo. And yeah, it rains a bit.

If you think of Hawaii as a lush, tropical jungle of a place, you’d be right. But only half the time. Most of it so far is fairly barren, lava fields without much vegetation, volcanic mountains sides devoid of trees, long stretches of semi-arid countryside. Maybe what you’d expect from the top of a huge mountain building up from the ocean.

The Big Island, Hawaii, is the largest island in the chain, but the sense you have here is these islands are small outposts on the planet far far from anything else, pinpoints on a map smack dab in the middle of the Pacific. If you were the type who wanted to escape, this might look like a likely candidate.

Maybe I’ve lived too long on an island with an easy escape route, but living here with volcanoes still active nearby or right underneath, maybe it’s a little too primal, still unformed, altogether too close to the crater’s edge for my comfort level. Sort of like living in Pompeii far out in the Aegean Sea with nothing else close by. Pele looks like an angry god, not a kindly one, breathing all the time right down my neck.

The End of the Road Tavern isn’t actually where the road ends, but it’s close. A few Forest Service roads branch into the mountains and there are a few cabins up Rainbow Creek, but otherwise most traffic stops at the tavern. Donny Butler owns it, bartends, cooks and breaks up fights. He closes Monday and on Christmas, but otherwise Donny is always open. No one around UpCreek recalls him taking a vacation and if he’s ever been sick, it was on a Monday. His cabin is in the woods behind the bar, but none of us regulars have ever set foot inside. Most of us can’t imagine him in such a domestic setting and the others think the house is just his storage area.

You want to know what’s happening around UpCreek, the End of the Road is where you can find out. Who’s poaching what and where, who’s catching cutthroat and what size, whose wife is cheating with who and whose kid is going to prison for what crime. Two years ago Donny got a license to sell hard stuff, figuring to double his profits like a lot of the taverns downriver. Which he did. A lot of profit in a bottle of Jack, not so much in a keg of beer. Donny noticed even the women started coming around, ordered cocktails he had to learn how to make and these were very profitable, plus the ladies brought a fresh clientele and a new atmosphere. He put some checkered tablecloths on the stained tables, tidied up a bit and added salads to the menu. The End of the Road seemed like the Start of Something.

This hunting season a couple of Seattleites celebrated two buck kills a little too exuberantly. “Double Shots!!” they shouted deep into the night until Trapper Jim, also deep into his cups, took umbrage at the out-of-towners’ good luck and his own lack thereof. Later Donny admitted at the trial, he should have quit serving all three. Hindsight doesn’t need a high magnification scope. Jim was untying a 6 point from the hunters’ Range Rover roof when they stumbled into the parking lot. Words were exchanged, push came to shove and Jim pulled his 30-30 Winchester off his Chevy pickup’s rack and shot one of the men.

Who lived … fortunately. But that’s why the End of the Road no longer serves booze and why women drink downstream. Or quietly at home.

What I love about a Google search is the way they put the ads at the top of the ‘finds’. They already got a place heading for SHOPPING, but just in case you might’ve missed a hot deal, they’ll park some at the top of the list. Course, they’ll add some more throughout the search results too. Don’t ask me why, but I find this really annoying.

But then again, welcome to Capitalist America. Television has ads to interrupt shows, newspapers have ads, magazines too, highways have billboards, athletes wear endorsements, the internet tracks our every click and offers you a related product. Thanks guyz! Corporations buy elections, corporations are considered citizens by the Supreme Court, corporations run the world. They advertise, they lobby, they own your ass, period.

Now we got Facebook, Instagram, every social media platform, all monetized, all ethical considerations cast aside, well, what’s new? What? You want state sponsored search engines, commercial free? I wonder, do Russia or China have ads on Tik Tok or Google. Are they selling vacation trips to the Black Sea or Outer Mongolia? Black market movies?

It won’t be long and we’ll tattoo NIKE on our foreheads for a monthly stipend. Already you can find folks who ‘wrap’ their cars in logos of various companies for a price. I’ve even heard of corporations wanting to put stratospheric billboards in space. There just doesn’t seem to be anywhere you can go not to be assaulted by advertisements 24/7 your entire life cradle to grave. Although … last time I whistled past a cemetery the plots didn’t carry ads or logos. Rest in Peace … finally!

Imagine yourself thousands of miles from the next terra firma, on a small dot of land, warm breezes, almost a paradise. With active volcanoes towering above you from every point on the island. Welcome to Hawaii, the Big Island. Everywhere you go is evidence of the last eruptions, nothing but lava fields, some old, some new, some still venting sulfurous emissions, cars and houses incinerated, Danger Will Robinson, Danger!

Up above you the crater glows hellish orange after dark. Drive the highways and you’ll see mostly uninhabited lava beds. We’ve seen a couple of coffee tree groves and nut farms but not much agriculture. For that matter, outside tourism, not much business. I’m told 72% of the island’s employment works in government, schools, administration, fire, police, etc. I’m also told unemployment is rampant.

On top of that add the smoldering grievances of the native population, their land co-opted, their culture subverted, now relegated to essentially a service industry work force. Some of the high schools have a 30% graduation rate. Who needs an education when there aren’t many jobs that require one?

I know, I know, it’s just a vacation — I’m not searching for a place to live. But … I will say, the weather is perfect.

We’re camped in what most Americans would call the Life of Riley, a timeshare apartment in Kona, Hawaii. Swimming pools, movie stars, fancy eating table, clubhouse, golf courses galore, gated entries, high end shopping mall, spas — no need whatsoever to leave the elite compound of Hiltons and Marriots unless you’re crazy enough to venture out among the natives.

Sure, it’s wonderful to rub shoulders and elbows with the retired 1% and let the small army of service slaves trim the hibiscus, skim the pools, change the linens and attend to us and our three other friends’ every whim and need. After all, don’t we deserve pampering? We did, you know it, work those jobs that paid, oh, slightly more than menial labor. Hard jobs, stressful jobs. And do not give me that WOKE talk of white privilege!! You can’t guilt us anymore, especially not here in the land of the pampered few. Everybody had the same chance, says it right in the Constitution … or maybe the Declaration of Independence. What? You think Tom Jefferson or George Washington should’ve freed their help? C’mon, it’s a complicated world.

Right now we have housekeeping bringing in fresh towels and new sheets. Lap of Luxury, buddy. No way am I using my towel more than once or twice. Or a sheet that I slept in. Bring me a freshly laundered one. Is that too damn much to expect? The American Dream in a nutshell. Call me crazy but I’m bored out of my frigging mind. Should have learned to golf, I guess….