The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

For the past 25 years or so the mizzus and me throw a big New Year’s Party here on the South End, partly so we don’t get to know the sheriff’s deputies any better than we do now, which is what we tell the neighbors, but the real reason is a bit more shrouded in the mists of lost memories. I got a call today from Brent, an old friend now in Alaska, and it triggered a couple of neurons into firing spasmodically once more and voila, I was back in, oh, 1985 down at the shack with just a few of us struggling mightily to make it to midnight so we could toast the new year and pass out in our bunks.

My brother was here with his wife and we had Brent and Liz visiting from Portland. My brother is what you’d call a spark plug for party stuff. Meaning, when conversations lag, he springs into instant action. ‘Let’s go around the room,’ he says, ‘and tell what the best day of the year was for each of us.’ So Brent goes first and he relates a warm summer day when he and his collie were at the park and the sun was shining and the Frisbees were sailing and it was just a golden day, a boy and his pooch, fetching the Frisbee. Not maybe what my brother had in mind, I bet, but just a hippie dippy zen day that stood out for Brent more than some birthday or Christmas or the day he got a raise or the usual dopey stuff we trot out when you play Name Your Best Day.

I don’t remember what my favorite day was. I don’t remember Karen’s or my brother’s or my brother’s wife’s favorite day. But I remember Liz’s turn, Brent’s girlfriend who I’d know a long time. A real long time. A way too long a time. And as the clock ticked glacially toward 1986, gears needing oil, glasses waiting for that toast and then goodnight everybody, my brother sez, ‘Okay, Liz, what was your favorite day?’ And to this day I can remember Liz turning to Brent who was rubbing his collie’s head, probably still warm in his remembrance of a summer day in the park, and the clock’s hands stopping forever, the wood stove throwing a heat nothing like what she was focusing on poor Brent with a laser look that would burn through titanium like it was cheap plastic, and our glasses with champagne broke in the sudden stillness before she said, ‘My favorite day …. (and the ‘my’ was a small caliber bullet) My favorite day was the day we got back together, Brent.’

Maybe you’ve had a New Year’s ‘Party’ like that. The room emptying of air and sound and mirth, as if a stopper had been pulled from the tub of our happiness and no matter how hard you try, and Brent desperately tried, that stopper won’t go back in and all the merriment drains out by your feet and deep down in your cold curling guts you know, you know absolutely this is not the way you wanted to ring in the next year. You know what they mean by ill-omened now and all the months to come you will dread the next New Years’ Eve the way you would dread death itself. And of course Liz and Brent broke up and Brent moved to the furthest corner of the earth and my brother admitted maybe that wasn’t the best holiday icebreaker of all time and we decided either to forsake New Year’s altogether or bring so many people in we couldn’t possibly go around the room and play parlor games like Stab Your Lover.

And that is how the South End got its gala New Year’s Extravaganza Potluck and BYOB Party. And of course, you’re invited! Unless you got some serious issues with your girlfriend or boyfriend, lover or husband, wife or mistress. Then I think you got a new parlor game for you and a few select friends. Happy New Year anyway.

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 decade 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.

I heard a guy on the radio, some Hot Talk jock, who said he was against not only minimum wage increases, he was against minimum wage completely. He argued that the largest growth spurt in U.S. history was when the corporations took off with little tax and with no regulations to prevent them from setting wages as low as the market would bear. Capitalism at its cut-throat best, unfettered, unregulated and unapologetic. The Roaring 20’s. I guess he didn’t read the next chapter in his 8th grade history book, the one titled The Great Depression.

Down here in the laissez faire South End, a lot of us don’t have minimum wage jobs cause we don’t even have jobs. The ones who do have minimum wage jobs don’t make enough to afford health insurance or to make the monthly nut on that double-wide they’ll never own outright. To make ends meet they’ll apply for food stamps or other supplemental programs. These are the folks my Hot Talk jock calls ‘Takers’. Or sometimes ‘Whiners’. And occasionally, when he’s feeling frisky, ‘Leeches’. And when he hears some candidate advocating for tax reform or health care or income equity, he screams ‘Class Warfare’.

The South end Food Bank barely keeps up these days. Moms with kids, fathers without jobs, folks who are disabled, people down on their luck. The Little Church in the Ravine helps the poor, I’ll give em that. Pastor Bob preaches the parable of the loaves and the fish, feeding the masses. I saw a bumper sticker on a BMW going into town: WINNING DOESN’T MEAN SOMEONE HAS TO LOSE. Or so he’d like to think….

Charity begins in the home, I’ll grant you, but sometimes we need to think of America as our home. Maybe you never needed a helping hand, but I suspect most of us got one except maybe that BMW driver. You maybe can’t legislate compassion, but you can sure legislate for fair play. You think folks living on the street or applying for food stamps or welfare are all Takers, turn off your radio and stand by the Food Bank half a day. It might just soften your heart.

We’re about to head out before Christmas hits its Big Finale, Santa sets his GPS and leaves all his elves waiting for that fat bonus which is as likely as a Peking Pension Plan.  Just shut the door behind us, leave the island and motor past the malls jammed with desperate folks on their last frenzied Push, credit cards and stress maxed, feeling like Jimmy Steward when the bank run ends.  Only without the Norman Rockwell town to back him up with community support….

I remember the Old Christmas.  The one where we were poor as churchmice and all those gifts to friends and family felt like one more weight on the anchor dragging us below the surface.  The folks who make minimum wage or who are unemployed or who pick our crops for next to nothing — Christmas isn’t A Wonderful Life, let me tell ya.

I know, we say the same thing every year.  Christmas.  Too commercial.  Too materialistic.  Too phony baloney.  A month or two of seriously clichéd songs, TV specials, movie reruns.   Scrooge, the Grinch, Tiny Tim, Christmas Future, Miracle on 34^th St., all to sell cars, perfume, watches, toys, baubles and bullshit.  I’m as sentimental as the next he-man, but C’MON!!  It’s a tad excessive.  It’s pretty close to obscene.  I’m sorry, Virginia, but Santa is an executive at Wal-Mart, hate to be the one to break it to you.

I could tell you we go away to some dark hollow to escape all this … but the truth is, we leave so we don’t dampen the neighbors’ spirits here on the cynical South End.  No need to thank us.  It’s our gift.  And as always, it’s really the thought that used to count.

The final hearing of the January 6^th Select Committee is scheduled for today, the last installment of the series before turning it over to the next Select Committee, probably Jim Jordan’s unbiased handpicked kangaroo court, this one to investigate the investigators who will announce the winners of their choice for criminal charges.  I think (spoiler alert!) we can expect Donald to be their first pick.  So much winning for the guy he’s probably sick of winning.

Whether the Department of Justice prosecutes based on this recommendation remains to be seen.  But irate MAGA Congressmen are already making it clear to the Department that a Select Committee will be formed to investigate Merrick Garland and his G-men.  Clear your calendar, Mr. Garland, the wannabe Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy made clear, same guy that pointed the finger at Trump after the insurrection that scared him but who went to Mar-a-Lago shortly after to beg forgiveness from the soon-to-be-impeached President-in-Exile.  The hunger for power can make a man grovel.  Lord only knows what else Kevin would do for the scepter. So much for profiles in courage in this era.

Who needs Netflix serials when you got this kind of tragi-comic material on everything from the New York Times to Twitter? Not great for managing a country, maybe, but hey, It’s Entertainment and after all, we voted for a reality TV show huckster so let’s play this out, see who’s Fired! Course, we need to update the Select Committee panel shows, don’tcha think?  Something a bit fresher, something to appeal to the Gen X’ers, maybe think out of the box.  Or the Congress.  Take it to the street, why not?  Studio audiences in Poughkeepsie and Mankato, load up the Truth Bus and journey to the hinterlands.  Between witnesses, let’s have some song and dance, something lively, patriotic of course, move those booties!  To the right, hopefully.

C’mon, you Trump Haters, you gotta give the man his props.  Here he is, under siege from all quarters, depositions bombarding him constantly, lawsuits aplenty, rape charges in the works, the Trump Organization under assault, the classified documents still turning up in their hiding places, his approval ratings tanking, even his fellow MAGA mouths suddenly quiet … and yet, AND YET!, the man has time to create his own NFT trading cards.  You and I, we’d be stressed beyond imagining, locked in with a team of high powered attorneys 24/7, no time to slurp diet cokes or scarf down burgers, just non-stop injunctions to stall the proceedings, court filings to install Special Masters, telephone calls to shaky allies not to cooperate with the hounds the Feds are sending in packs.  Give him credit, money speaks to him much louder than the possibility of lengthy jail time.  Money, after all, is his air.

Us mere mortals would take cover, maybe use acid to remove our fingerprints, undergo plastic surgery to change our faces, grow a beard, shave our heads, whatever it took to escape the constant pounding of the press, the Democrats, the Twitter Trolls and the Department of Justice.  Slip off to some isolated island no one has heard of, live off coconuts and whatever other food source washes onto the beach.  Throw away our cellphones, delete our social media accounts, issue false death certificates.  Or worst case, ask Putin for permanent residency no extradition could touch.

But we’re ordinary citizens.  This man is anything but.  Acknowledge that!  If there is one man who deserves his own super-hero trading cards, that man is Donald J. Trump.  No kryptonite can touch him, no subpoena can scare him, no legion of women claiming sexual harassment can detract him.  Teflon tough?  No, sir, this is the Man of Stainless Steel.  Fires surrounding him, he shrugs off the mortal danger and issues his trading cards.  Mock him if you will, but give him his money.  That’s all he wants.  Your esteem, certainly.  But mostly, the money.  Give it to him.  You owe him that much.

I know as well as you do that being the richest man on Planet Earth gives a person certain rights that others may not enjoy.  Plus, being the brains behind space exploration, self-driving cars, battery technology and all the rest surely qualifies a man as smart, possibly even a genius.  But pardon me, when that same person rolls out with an unqualified opinion, definitely political in nature, on one of the largest social media platforms he now happens to own, all I can say is please be quiet, Elon, sit down and shut up for awhile.  Nobody really needs an egotistic conspiracy theorist, we got plenty. With more on the way.

Lately the boy genius has been spreading rumors that Pelosi’s husband’s attack might have been, not a brutal assault, but a romantic assignation gone wrong.  You know, just a guess but why not put it out there?  Today he tweets that we need to prosecute Doc Fauci.  Not that he needs any proof of wrongdoing, mind you, just wants the man jailed.  For crimes imagined and otherwise, apparently.

I might expect this from my MAGA-mad uncle Ralph in Biloxi who just sits all day feeding himself macro-doses of Breitbart and Fox, fills his brain with jumble-de-gook and wants the culprits in whatever suspense thriller kooky conspiracy he’s absorbed with today brought to justice.  Justice being, more than likely, straight out of Dirty Harry.

Musk has shown himself for what he really is, a genius moron.  A guy with a lot of brains who evidently doesn’t use them part of the time, just another Tech Giant whose ego lets him think whatever he believes must be true, facts aside.  A spoiled boy who has more money than God and now can play God.  He’s my idea of why we should not have billionaires in this country.  Nobody needs billions of dollars.  And for my money, squat as it is, nobody needs Elon Musk’s opinion either.

Maybe somebody’s trying to tell me something but lately I’ve been invited to a couple of what I thought were merely get-togethers at local watering holes, a few friends, some new, some old, that turned into preliminary meetings for possible men’s groups.  We could meet monthly, share our latest medical insults, discuss erectile dysfunction remedies, ponder strategies for dealing with the Big D.  All items I might consider useful … just before the nurse yanks the IV’s out and disconnects the ventilator.  The thought of a drum circle of old farts mulling over geriatric distresses, reading treatises on the Final Stage, swapping surgical intrusions and offering comradely commiserations, trust me, if I want to feel old I can do it on my own just fine, thanks.  Insofar as prescriptions for how to cope with geezerhood, I got my own ideas that don’t need to be passed around the tavern table.

Maybe the boyz are going through some ‘stage’ of life, no doubt Chapter 8 in the Aged Man’s Guide to Peace of Mind.  Me, not so much.  Course that might change when I’m diagnosed with (Chapter 2 — Pathologies of the Mature Male), but for now I’m fine with the aches and pains, the soft tissue injuries that take four times longer than when I was young, the memory loss and …, well, no need to write my own book here, there are plenty of tomes to choose from.  And yeah, the Plague Years were a treat.  Lost about 20 friends and neighbors in a little over a year, (Chapter 6 of Grief and Loss for Seniors) what might for some of us lead to troubled inquiries into the tenuousness of our brief existence on this planet, but I’m a yahoo who thinks life is probably long enough, no point reaching for the Methuselah cure and an old age of dementia and parts replacement.  (Chapter 2 —Forget You Have Alzheimers and Enjoy Television).

The boyz are a good crew, plenty enjoyable to quaff a pint or two with, crack wise, compare the latest anecdotes of lives that are more interesting than most, one-up each other since half of us are amateur comics, musicians, filmmakers, writers and fellow artists, what, in a different time and place, might come to be referred to, like the Hudson School or the Paris Group, the Vienna Café or Greenwich Village, as the Camano School.  But that isn’t going to happen either, not if I can help it.  Art, like aging, is not a team sport.  We worked alone all our lives, struggling with our demons and with our muses, by our lonesome.  Too late now to call the hotline for assistance.  Why on earth would anyone think we moved to the South End if we were searching for counseling or consolation or support?  We wanted that, we’d have moved to Stanwoodopolis and whiled away the hours at the Duck Inn with the farmers and the fishermen.  Too late now, boyz.  Too late now.

I just came from a would-be shopping trip to my usual grocery store, the big box one in downtown Stanwoodopolis (name withheld by advise from my attorney).  With my cart only a quarter full I rounded the final corner in the last lap to the checkout stand, hoping for one that might have one or two carts, a short wait, but no, the three lanes were backed up into the aisles, the self-check back to the rear of the store, so with my usual penchant for patience I settled in and waited my turn behind a couple of carts crammed with enough groceries to weather a winter, plus two or three small carts with about the amount I had.  I figured five minutes, I’d be at the conveyor.

Five minutes nothing had moved.  It was like a Twilight Zone episode, the one where the shoppers never move an inch.  Fifteen minutes and everyone is looking around, wondering same as me, what the ?%$#.  Since I couldn’t see my checker, I assumed we had a new hire, some poor victim stressed beyond anything manageable and who had suffered either a stroke or had simply gone catatonic, frozen over the barcode scanner.  The guy in front of me gave me a quizzical look of frustration so I asked what day he’d gotten here.  Comedy, you might not need to be told, isn’t much appreciated when you’ve become trapped in long lines that do not move.  Down at the other checkouts some progress seemed to be made, not much, but some and by now it was too late to lane change.

Twenty minutes and a couple of pass-bys from the Manager, a mackerel faced administrative type unbothered by the fact that ten minutes ago he had tried not to make eye contact with me and yet here I was again, rooted to the same spot.  I asked if they would be bringing porta-potties soon for the folks with incontinent problems.  Again, humor is not what was needed here.  Maybe a couple more of those unopened self-check lines might be, but no, I guess not.

Twenty five minutes later I’m expecting Rod Serling to wander out of the produce section, maybe offer a short summation of this day’s episode.  ‘The townsfolk may have asked themselves if this was nothing more than an alien experiment to determine if grocery line gridlock might lead to civil unrest.  Some may still be there with their thawed pizzas and their melted ice cream.  But rest assured, they’ll always be checking out … in the Twilight Zone.’

Thirty minutes later and another pass-by from the unharried Manager, I noticed a cart peeking out from Aisle 6, queued up for the checkout stand half a dozen of us had been waiting for in Aisle 5.  It didn’t take Rod Serling to script the moment when the two lines converged, each confident that we were next.  My cart would be the one to meet Aisle 6’s cart  and obviously the lady who never quite figured out where the end of our line had been would think, well, you know damn well what she’d think and then ….

I gave up rather than lock carts with another frustrated customer and pushed my way through a forest of stalled grocery wagons to the self-check, figuring anything was better than another half hour even if I bullied my way in front of the lady in the wrong line.  Course when I reached the self-check at the other end of the store, that line stretched to the end of the aisle, possibly out the storage area and into the loading area.  A guy at the head of the conga line jabbed an angry thumb at me in case I tried to jump the line, pointing off into an infinity of basket carriers and shopping cart victims.

I don’t know how many shoppers succumbed to dehydration or heart failure.  I don’t know if the Red Cross set up shelters by the dairy department to tend to the fallen.  I do know I was the only one to abandon his cart and stumble to the front door.  When they count the fatalities, I hope my cart doesn’t send the authorities looking for its owner, some poor schmuck frozen back in the freezers when confusion sent him reeling, another casualty of the grocery industry prior to its proposed merger of the two national supermarkets.  The merger that should, little doubt in this former shopper’s mind, solve most of their checkout problems.

Right.

I got plenty of friends who are looking for a love interest after pretty much giving up finding a compatible life partner down at the Stanwoodopolis Hotel or the Boxcar Tavern, don’t ask me why but apparently the pickings have been picked over.  They’ve tried joining a few groups, everything from pilate to art guilds, but the dating pool is small and most aren’t single anyway.  An affair isn’t really what they’re looking for.  Or at least that’s what they tell me.

So with options shrinking faster than glaciers in Africa they’ve turned to the 21^st equivalent of matchmaking, joining an online dating site, posting their photos and interests, editing their lives down to a paragraph that hopefully will make them attractive to potential buyers.  Meaning, they probably lie about their age, their weight, photoshop their pictures, exaggerate their interests, mention that they love walks on the beach and cuddling on the couch, adore cute puppies, never smoke or drink or do drugs … or at least only in moderation.

Now most of my loveless pals are no longer youngsters, oddly enough.  In fact, we’re, if we’re honest with ourselves (something unsuitable for Tinder or other dating sites), actually Geezers.  An age bracket that you might think would be notable for its honest acceptance of who we are in this latter stage of life.  Dater, know thyself!  But of course this is the internet … where truth goes to die.  And in this new Darwinian universe of mate selection, advertisement is everything.  Consequently, those first dates make fine grist for late night commiserations over a few adult beverages when they regale me with love gone wrong stories.

One of my pals puts on his resume that he would rather drink horse piss than date a MAGA maiden … or something to that effect, maybe more subtle, but his message is clear.  You voted for the Trumpster, don’t answer this ad.  Better to sleep alone, apparently.  And yet.  And yet!!  Invariably he gets to that first luncheon date with a potential Miss Right only to discover fairly soon that Miss Right is really Miss Rightwing, she just didn’t think it would be all that important when it came to lifelong spousal choices.

And so it goes, love on the digital highway.  After a few bad connections, dates that were easier back in high school and long lulls in conversation, I can see why a lot of my cronies eventually give up, realizing that a few decades of living alone have ossified into an inability to compromise much at, oh, 65 or older.  Explains, I guess partly, why they’ve finally decided they’re happily unmarried.  If nothing else, us geezers have accrued no little wisdom in our advanced years.  It just takes a few times in the dating rodeo to figure that out.