The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The recent news that the Whidbey Naval Air Station was applying for permits to convert Camano’s north end air strip for its Growler fleet to practice ‘touch and go’ came as a complete surprise at the last Commissioner hearing this week. At that meeting a Col. Thackeray stressed the importance of alternative practice strips necessary to assure flight readiness. His announcement that federal permits had already been approved, a matter the Colonel insisted was fast tracked as a national priority, caused considerable commotion. County permits and EPA certification were the final steps prior to initiating improvements to runways and tarmac as well as construction of a small control tower and the upgrade of current facilities.

Island County commissioners, blindsided by the news, asked why they had been kept out of the process until now, but were told the plans were on a need-to-know basis. National security, the Colonel said, was paramount and a speedy resolution of the permits would insure NAS Whidbey would have the additional training the Growler force required in these perilous times of international instability.

One commissioner voiced concerns over jet noise, a subject of recent controversy on Whidbey. Col. Thackeray assured them the jets would not fly between midnight and 6 a.m. unless of course a national emergency dictated additional flight times, but hours of operation weren’t completely finalized yet although they would be soon. “Trust your government,” the Colonel declared at the conclusion of the meeting. “We fully understand Camano Island’s concerns and we’ll do our best to be a good neighbor while also maintaining military readiness.”

Down here on the patriotic South End, the Sound of Freedom will no doubt prove too far north to be heard. The old sign on Whidbey, PARDON OUR NOISE, IT’S THE SOUND OF FREEDOM, got replaced years ago by one that omitted the apology. All I can say is freedom is pretty loud but hopefully the North End residents’ patriotism will be a bulwark against the decibels of slow moving reconnaissance jets dropping their property values down to sea level. Me, I’m just glad nobody put an airstrip south of Elger Bay. Yet….

Give the guy some credit, he never quits. He’s the proverbial bad penny, the Grinch who stole America. And if he wasn’t totally pissed off before, he is now. He feels your pain and shares your grievance. Oh boy, he’s going to be the warrior king who seeks revenge on the woke crowd the right wing blame for their grudges and resentments. He’ll be their bully, the righteous dude who kicks sand in the faces of the wimps. He’s their outlaw ruler, the bad boy who beats up on the minorities they hate too. And yesterday he was indicted, first President in our history to receive the honor. You better believe he’s spitting nails down there in Muddy Lago.

You might be wondering if you’re one of the wimps, one of the woke, one of those retribution will be meted out on. Good chance you are. Hitler had a few favorite targets. Jews, gypsies, homosexuals. If you’re going to be the champion of the aggrieved, best to find a scapegoat. Or two. Maybe a lot more. Trans, gays, the press, Hollywood, the educated elite, the coastal folks, blacks, most everyone not white, immigrants, college professors, Democrats, liberals — it’s a wide net. Chances are pretty good you’re on the hit list of those who need swift retaliation and harsh vengeance. Lock em up! Lock em up! He means You, buddy.

Course, if you attack too many groups, you run the risk of losing their support. Sure, we might want revenge on, oh, drag queens, but call for the castigation of dozens of enemy lists, what’s left are the Fox News addicts and I seriously doubt they make up a majority of Americans. Maybe in the South, probably in Idaho, but it’s a big country and most of us wimps aren’t too worried that Hollywood is undermining the nation’s morality. Or what shoes M&M cartoon ads are wearing. Last survey I saw asking if ‘woke’ was derogatory or not, most folks thought it was a positive thing. Most of us would like to believe we’re not dozing off at the wheel, much less aim the car at those who actually are awake. And more to the point, most of us don’t want Donald driving anything more lethal than his golf cart. Anybody in his foursome maybe ought to be careful.

Maybe you’re not like me — and geez, I hope you’re not — but I’m at that juncture in life where reminiscing is a better pastime than daydreaming about the future. I know, I know, Be Here Now, practice Mindfulness, yeah, yeah, but I’m 72 years old and there’s a lot more in the rearview than what’s up ahead and okay, I realize I need to keep my eye on the road for what’s coming up. Nevertheless…

Jimmy Buffet has a nice song called A Pirate Looks Back at 40. Talk to him about Mindfulness, I’m nearly twice that age. Let me drag up memories and regrets, wins and losses, successes and defeats, mistakes and triumphs, I think I earned the right.
My old man is 99. In a month or so he’ll break the century mark. I haven’t got a clue what he thinks about all day long in his small room in the assisted living joint we put him in. I talk to him every day and for the past couple of years his dementia has gotten worse to the point he doesn’t know what day of the week or sometimes what hour of the day. Gotta admit, sometimes I don’t either. Neither of us really cares.

I remember when my boxer, Dr. Gonzo, reached the age where she mostly slept next to the woodstove, maybe dreaming her old dog dreams, maybe not, seemingly content to stay warm, eat, hang around us all day. I suspect it’s us humans who think too much, worry too much, maybe lose sight of the small comforts old age affords us. We can just slow down, sleep a little more, fall into a more natural rhythm finally, one we fought tooth and nail against as obsessive ambitious human beings.

Me, I’m content lately to reminisce.

In the wake of the Stanwoodopolis Chamber of Commerce’s spectacular crash and burn, numerous groups have jumped in to fill the vacuum left by the now defunct Chamber. Over the years the Camano Chamber attempted to join forces with the city’s group without much success. Given that the island entrepreneurs vacated their own Visitor Center years ago, big surprise neither managed to create a larger vision. Stanwoodopolis, of course, suffered from the ‘twin city syndrome’, the toxic vestiges of east vs west that dates back to the pioneer days. Separate cities with their own city halls, schools, fire departments, all within a rock’s throw from each other, prevented mutual trust. Put a weekend art show on the east side, the west side felt slighted. History, for those who ignore it, has a way of getting the last laugh.

But … where there’s a vacuum, fools rush in. Jimmy Slattery, owner of the now defunct Rock and Gem Shoppe, stated recently that he is looking into a new group that would take the place of the old Chamber. “We’re going to call it the League of Capitalism,” Jimmy told the Cracker in an exclusive interview. “Fresh start, new blood, lower dues. We have some pretty adventurous ideas for reinvigorating the downtown flood zones. Nothing solid just yet, but you wait and see. I think the citizens of this town will be excited by what we’ll have to offer.”

Me, I’m not holding my breath. I’ve lived in a lot of places, some small, some as large as Stanwoodopolis, a town metastisizing fast as new suburbs can be built, roads paved and the slap-boxes annexed, but none with a Chamber of Commerce run completely into the swamp. In its dying breath this Chamber needed to keep its final summer music venue in order to fulfill its fiscal obligations. Maybe they just needed a name change, something other than commerce in the title. At any rate, probably a merciful death. Out here in the hinterlands the Island Chamber plugs along, offering the Stanwoodopolis chamberites a membership if they want to join up with the realtors. Business as usual, boyz, business as usual. And Jimmy, best of luck.

Maybe I’ve neglected to mention that before I graduated from the Univ. of Wisconsin with two useless majors in Sociology and English, I panicked and took some courses senior year in Education. If nothing else, I could at least teach youngsters grammar, punctuation, syntax, political science, demographics and the like. Not as if I had a passion for teaching kids stuff they couldn’t use either — at least for jobs and careers — but we humanities majors are a bit more ‘high-minded’, meaning, we weren’t in it for the bucks.

Today I drove past my old school, Cherokee Middle School in Madison, Wisconsin, still standing albeit a lot more shabby than the shabby it was when I taught there in 1972. I taught 8th grade English and no, not sociology, history, a subject I had never seriously studied, one my principal decided I could study a night or two prior to each class. Which begs the question, why the hell did I need a college degree?

My last professor in Education, the aging hag who made my last semester miserable, called me in for a conference to offer me her nomination to Phi Beta Kappa in exchange for my commitment to teach secondary rather than pursue a masters or doctorate. Since none of the above mattered one whit to me, I said, yah shure, u betcha. Some bargain. But I took a job teaching. A deal’s a deal.

This, like I said, was 1972, hot on the heels of the campus riots, student strikes, ROTC bombings, radical outrage. You think I was going to be an orthodox teacher? C’mon, we were tearing down walls. My kids got the full-bore, no grades, no seating chart, no authoritarian prison guard teacher expecting to revolutionize his classroom with guerilla tactics. We read outside with kids in the trees, made movies of zombies who were the kids in other classrooms, created our own syllabus, butted heads with fellow teachers and the administration and even some conservative parents. Oddly enough.

The kids were confused, the staff was confounded, the administration was concerned and I was pretty sure my career was kaput. We were all correct. C’est la vie, I guess. And so, ironically enough, the rest of my life my college degree wouldn’t be guaranteeing me employment. Lucky break for me.

In the tidal wash of the Silicon Valley Bank debacle, concerned citizens are making a run at our local banks, fearing that the dominoes are falling fast now. Right wing commentators are blaming the woke culture of the SVB, don’t ask me how that might be the underlying cause of a bank’s default when they’re actually due to large investments in long term federal bonds locked in at interest rates pretty low when inflation is driving those rates steadily upward, an awkward moment when investors started pulling out and the bank was forced to sell at losses in the bazillions. Maybe the woke CFO was cow-towing to the Tech Boyz’ interest in promoting trans agendas, but … somehow I doubt it. Personally, and in full disclosure, I didn’t graduate from Wharton with a bizness degree, but I think maybe the Trump administration’s easing of banking guardrails might have been more of a reason than woke cultural concerns. Just saying….

Time maybe to haul down to our own local fiduciaries and relive the runs of the Depression Era, line up at dawn and hope to pull our life savings out before the bank goes into default. No doubt their own woke agenda makes them vulnerable to blatant mismanagement. Not sure what exactly but if you can’t trust the True Conservatives, who can you trust? George Soros? Just because he’s a billionaire? Savvy investors probably should know that their individual accounts are guaranteed by the government up to a quarter of a million bucks, an amount maybe 1% of local depositors have socked away in the Bank of Stanwoodopolis. I guess folks never watched Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life tossing out his own money to nervous citizens to save the bank and of course the town. Where’s Jimmy when we need him?

Jimmy, needless to point out, is a Hollywood creation. Part of the woke culture. Trans, Black Lives Matter, critical race theory, litter boxes in schools. That Hollywood. Time, maybe, to pull your money out of the bank. Before it’s too late. Which is why, in this time of existential fiscal peril, we at the South End Fiduciary Strategies are here to serve a nervous public with creative options for that cash you’ve had the wisdom to withdraw from your local woke banks. No need to bury it in the back yard behind that dead 1967 Chevy van you intend to restore some day or gamble it on cryptocurrencies. At Fiduciary Strategies our team of investment counselors will assist you in low risk, high return monetary tactics guaranteed to weather the turbulent waters of today’s uncertain bank viability and the unsettled equities markets. Stop in today and put your hard earned dollars to work for you, not your woke banker. We might not be Jimmy Stewart but we aren’t Hollywood either. South End Fiduciary Strategies. We’re the team you can trust.

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.