The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

If you’re tired of waking up every damn morning to a new conspiracy theory, you’re in good company.  For awhile these things amused me, but after a few years and a thousand bogus theories, the joke is stale even if the theories are new.  Take the latest: egg prices are the result of a collaboration between the chicken feed companies and the chicken farmers.  I suspect Doc Fauci has something to do with it and possibly the Chinese which might explain the egg shaped ‘observation’ balloon that more than likely was spewing chem-trails that sterilized hens below.  Or at least aborted the eggs.  Or … well, add your own and post it on whatever social media platform you’ve dedicated yourself to.

People must be bored to death, all I can figure, to sit around dreaming up this stuff out of thin air.  The folks who re-post and re-tweet, I guess it’s like gossip, who cares if it’s true, better to spread the rumor that Ginny Randolph’s kid impregnated the Simpson girl.  There’s a meanness to these conspiracies, a willingness to think the absolute worst about one another.  Well, everyone else anyway.  And a deep seated paranoia that someone or some company or some politician or some government is pulling all the strings that make life miserable for the rest of us.  The Wizard of Oz is behind the curtain, chuckling maniacally as he pulls the wool over our incredibly gullible eyes.  And … he’s a mean sonofabitch!

It may well be that somewhere in a bunker beneath Belarus or up in an attic over in Hoboken, some yahoo spews this stuff out 24/7 for his or her own amusement, drops it on the internet as clickbait and waits to see what goes viral or not.  They may even be making money off this, advertisers always happy to help if it will sell their products.  I suspect the chicken feed company might be writing these tweets themselves, pumping up their feed price.  Chicken feed, chicken shit, it’s all the same now….

On my afternoon walk yesterday around the Head I ran into a couple doing the same thing, something you might consider ordinary except for the fact that nobody walks the Head.  In all my years on the South End I’ve rarely run into anyone down that southernmost stretch of beach.  From Wilkes-Garry on the western side to Tyee Beach on the eastern, there’s an uninhabited section of Camano that runs about 5 or 6 miles without a house or a shack or even an artist studio.  Pristine.  With views of the Olympics, Hat Island, Mt. Rainier, the south end of Whidbey, the Cascades and finally Mt. Baker.  All to yourself.  It is a place so remote the carcasses of dead whales stinking up the waterfront of Everett are towed here, presumably where the stench of rotting blubber won’t bother anyone.

But yesterday I run into two folks.  Nice couple, live in a house in Wilkes-Garry I passed on my way beyond civilization so naturally we made a little conversation, moved beyond the weather, talked about this and that, but finally got to some palaver about exercise, diet, clean living, good health.  My newfound buddy told me he was 69, probably, he said, a little older than me, but hey, he didn’t drink or smoke, he ate a healthy diet and look, he was the picture of health.  I mumbled something or other about how a regimen like that probably helped keep him the Adonis he was and his wife smiled beatifically.

Course, that just opened the door to some health remedy he was promoting, hell if I listened close, but something to do with a miracle artery roto-rooting without medical procedures, clean out your arteries and plenty of other corollary benefits, mostly inducing me to consider escape options.  When he got to the part about how he kept himself in shape with clean living, which he defined now as a life without sin, sin being a disease and a sickness unto itself, I had trouble resisting the urge to mention that my own recipe for a long and prosperous life kind of included drinking and drugs and probably sin too, a prescription that obviously worked slightly better than his judging by my advanced years and the fact that he’d asked how far it was to Tyee, meaning he’d never walked that far, just a Stroller, apparently, whereas I obviously walked that far.  And oh, by the way, I said,  I’m a few years older than you, just look a lot younger….

I finally tore myself away from any further potential panaceas, bid them a good day and a good walk in the sun, then sauntered on home.  I guess we’re all looking for cures and remedies.  I mean, I guess if you think you found the news you must want to share it.  So to that end, any of you reading this and feeling a little under the weather, maybe dial back on your sinning a bit.  You’ll feel better in no time….

When I finally reached the ripe old age of 65, my nanny state sent me a notice that I could sign up for national health care, what some might call socialist medicine.  Not me, I call it health care, paid for through my taxes over the years along with Social Security, what some would call a socialist give-away, but once again, not me.  I call it my retirement fund.  My nest egg for old age.  But to tell you the absolute truth, call it whatever you want.  And if you hate socialist programs, by all means, turn the money down and buy your own damn health care insurance.

For awhile I thought I understood finally what the Golden Years meant.  Freedom from going bankrupt from the next health care crisis, if nothing else.  That, of course, was before the phone started ringing.  I have a landline, the precursor to a flip phone and the subsequent generations of cellular gizmos.  My landline doesn’t have caller ID, something so far I refuse to pay for since I’m willing to answer my phone and be surprised who might be calling.  At any hour of the day or night.  I remember when we were on a party line here on the South End.  Cost an additional buck a mile from the phone headquarters up in Mt. Vernon to get a private line.  Per month.  We endured the teenage girl and her mom for about a year before taking our grocery money to pay for a phone we could actually use occasionally.  And that may be the case with caller ID eventually.

We get calls starting early in the morning and into the evening.  They’re 90% from ‘Medicare Providers’.  And they’re 90% non-human.  They might ask how we are and if you answer, their programmed machine intelligence launches into their pitch.  I used to keep answering the robot until a human was connected in order to finalize whatever transaction they had for me, then I would request they take me off their list.  The next day, same time, the Hi, I’m Amy message would come on, repeated later in the day, repeated until you have lost your mind and found yourself talking ugly to the robot.  The robot, thinking you just answered its last query, moves on to the next part of the sequence.

This is not what I had in mind for my Golden Years.  What this is is the capitalist health care system piggybacking my Medicare.  They’ll send me some box of health care stuff free of charge, so they say, and I assume the government will reimburse them.  Maybe folks are happy to get free medical stuff.  Right now I have all the medical stuff I want.  Band aids mostly and a bottle of expired aspirin, but all I need. If I thought ditching Medicare would stop these incessant phone calls from Amy the Android, I might vote to repeal Obamacare and go back to the wild west of the American healthcare system, but somehow I suspect Amy and her legions of robot telemarketers would fill the void until having a phone with or without caller ID would be senseless.

Course, the peace and quiet might be worth it.

As you infrequent readers well know, I’m not the kind of person who complains or whines or throws himself on the ground in fits of rage over some insignificant slight.  Okay, sometimes I do.  And all right, maybe that’s basically my M.O.  Take this latest outrage and you tell me if I’m overwrought to what essentially is another of those small indignities that make everyday life a smidgeon smaller and a tad harder to take.

I’m talking about my two daily newspapers, morning papers, the ones I read quietly guzzling coffee before undertaking chores and work and the daily grind — those papers, delivered by 6:15 a.m. by some poor schmuck paid by the mile and by the paper, using his or her own car, the one with the failing muffler and the terrible mpg’s, but usually on time.  But gee, the publishers of those two papers evidently can’t round up delivery folks to get up at 3 a.m., hit the distribution sites, then motor down to this end of the island at the end of the world, so their solution: mail the day’s edition, already old news in a digital age of instantaneous information, via the U.S. Postal Service, the one the last Administration made far less efficient, hoping to undercut our faith in a system going back to old Ben Franklin.

So that now we get our morning paper late afternoon.  You tell me what universe, economic or journalistic, this makes sense in?  It is, after all, called a NEWspaper, not a history essay.  And yeah, I KNOW I can substitute the New York Times online or I can listen to NPR mornings, repeated every two hours, or I can watch daytime TV and catch the headlines on local news channels … but dammit, I’m an old codger and I want my, not MTV, my newspaper to read quietly in the morning WITH coffee.

Needless to say, sorry to whine, but now I read Yesterday’s news in the morning.  I know it’s pathetic and possibly intolerable over the long run.  But for now that’s my solution and I’m not happy about it.  Just thought you needed to know.

When I was a pimply teenage pup, I had a fantasy of living on an island.  Just me and my baby.  Robinson Crusoe and his sweetheart.  Like most fantasies, it skipped a lot of important details.  Like making a living.  Or needing a few skills.  You know, how to build a shack or repair a roof or pluck a chicken or grow a garden or fix a well pump.  Basic stuff like that.  I guess I believed the A.M. radio bubblegum songs:  Love will find a way.  Or all you really need is love.  Or love is the answer.  Love love love.  Oh baby oh baby oh baby.

Oh brother.  I’ll be the first to admit I daydreamed my way through school.  Stared out the window all day and missed, apparently, the crucial message education had for me.  Which was learn some skills, get a good paying job, conform and be happy.

You can learn life’s lessons the easy way or you can learn em the hard way.  Oh baby oh baby oh baby.  Abject poverty never intruded on my boyhood fantasies.  But it sure did on my adulthood dreams.  Or nightmares, really.  Still, I was knock-headed persistent.  Bought my shack and 7 acres on the South End and proceeded to the task at hand:  Hand to Mouth Survival.  Karen, my wife now of four decades, left a world of security for a vow of poverty.

The years passed and we tended our homestead, built a house, grew vegetable gardens and flower gardens galore, planted orchards and arbors, and like most folks in the Land of Plenty, we managed to survive.  I suspect each of us down here has an island dream, a fantasy that filled the sails of our imaginations,  that took us on a unique journey to this exotic archipelago in our minds.

We each learned how to live our lives here on the islands, even though we each could tell a different story…with an ending not yet written.  I think, though, and this is the hopeless romantic still staring out the schoolroom window – I think we all know it’s really, on some level, still a love story.

Francine rolled into the County Administration offices looking like the dog had dragged her to work.  “These three day holiday weekends are going to be the death of me,” she muttered to Harvey, the county’s health officer.  Harvey looked up from his list of septic tank inspections for the week and said, “What?  You don’t like football playoffs all day long, all weekend long?”

Francine tossed her purse behind the counter and made a bee-line to the coffee urn in the back corner.  She was still growling by the time she returned with her quart mug Big Gulp steaming with fresh joe.  “One ballgame is one too many, Harve, but honest to god, there must have been a dozen.  Wally had a friend or ten over, beer cans everywhere and crummy leftover pizzas far as the eye could see.”

Wally was her 26 year old son, laid off from the lumber mill in Sedro Wooley three years ago, unemployment exhausted and now a refugee in Francine and her husband Trey’s basement which they’d finished off into living quarters.  If you called a room with no windows, a small bed, apartment sized fridge and a makeshift toilet and sink ‘living’.  He had a small TV in there but mostly Wally watched ESPN on the 48 inch drive-in theater screen in Trey and Francine’s living room.  Meaning, his real living was upstairs.

“How long are kids supposed to stay in the nest, Harve?  Riddle me that!”

“I read the other day that nearly half of children from 18 to 30 were living with their folks.  You’re in good company, Frannie.  Just takes longer these days for kids to grow up, I guess.”

“When I was 18, I couldn’t wait to get out of my parents’ house.  Got an apartment with a couple of girlfriends in Seattle, found a job and got out.  What’s so hard about that?”

Harvey put his appointment list down.  “Remember what you paid for the apartment, Fran?  My first one was 75 bucks, some sad little second story one bedroom over the TV repair shop down in Ballard.  75 bucks a month.  What do you suppose that would go for now?  I bet you couldn’t find anything cheaper than a thousand.  On top of that, figure how much some minimum wage job would pay.  Might tell you why kids are living at home.”

Francine took a slow hit off her Big Gulp cup.  “You think we should charge Wally rent?”  The idea seemed to grow immediately in her imagination.  She was looking at Harvey and already nodding her head.  Why not? she was saying more to herself than him.  Room and board too!  Yes, why not?  “Harvey,” she finally said out loud, “you’re a genius.”

Harvey shrugged.  Tomorrow Franny would be muttering about the same thing.  The kid couldn’t afford rents in the area, he sure couldn’t afford Francine’s.  “Or,” he said, shuffling papers, “you could move away.  That’s what we did.  Jim, our son, didn’t want to leave his friends.  I hear Phoenix is nice.  At least winters….”

If you’re like the rest of an anxious America, you’re worried about that Chinese ‘observation’ balloon floating menacingly over Montana and moving toward a neighborhood near you with unknown intentions and possibly a cargo of new bio-weapons to unleash on the hinterlands.  What to do? What to do?  The Republicans want to shoot it down.  Or at least shoot down Biden’s non-response.  Maybe they think blowing up a balloon full of killer viruses that will float down like a toxic snowstorm on the unprotected livestock and denizens below is a good plan.  As good as their budget proposals anyway.

Those darn Chinese!  First they unleash the Covid virus they developed in Fauci’s bio-engineering lab in Wuhan, now they’re filling our stratosphere with pestilential orbs.  And our blogosphere with new and more potent conspiracy theories.  Qanon, no doubt about it, will link this balloon menace with the green comet pass-by, triggering mass panic among its ardent followers, no telling what ensuing terror would be unleashed across this great land.  The Chinese at least have a good plan.

The longer that menace floats across American airspace the more the danger from trigger happy Congressmen and gullible blog readers will become.  Biden is undoubtedly huddled with his advisors and the generals.  And his re-election committee.  If this drifting ball of poisonous rumors is allowed to cross the continent, no telling what the fallout will be even if the damn thing floats out into the Atlantic Ocean.  Political lives will be lost, you can count on that.

Down here on the South End the danger has already passed.  Wendy Schneider’s daughter’s  7^th birthday party was a few days ago.  She told me they’d rented one of those bouncy playhouses for her and all her friends, but made the mistake of filling it with a hundred small helium balloons that all said Happy 7^th Birthday, Tina! that floated for awhile at the top of the plastic roof, which was fine while the two dozen kids romped and cavorted, but when they exited for the birthday cake inside Wendy’s trailer, the bouncy house lifted off and was last seen headed over the long closed Tyee Store.   It’s very likely the thing was made in China.  And this may have been the plan all along.

Even as we sit here complacently congratulating ourselves on surviving the phony pandemic, a Chinese observation balloon is moving across Montana, no doubt monitoring the movement of cattle near Miles City with devious plans to deploy the bovines in who knows what sinister plot.  Some Republican congressmen who aren’t too busy investigating the FBI’s involvement with the J6 protests or the Hunter Biden laptop scandal or Doc Fauci’s bogus vaccines are demanding we shoot the thing down before it’s TOO LATE!

Holy Hinderburg, Batman, let’s get our priorities straight.  Forget about the damn balloon.  There’s a green comet on its way here.  This is no Kehoutek, no Halley’s, no errant asteroid, it’s a Green Comet, probably some environmental emissary from the far reach of the galaxy bent on signaling the Earth that green death is on its way.  Open your eyes!  You won’t need a telescope when this thing greenwashes our planet, obviously a message, even the final one, for what could well be an Eco-Armageddon.

You think investigating Doc Fauci is more important than saving the planet?  Maybe you should be asking yourselves what’s in that trail of green dust spewing out behind some malevolent iceball?  Is this the Storm that Qanon has been predicting?  Is this the End or just the Beginning?  Why hasn’t the government begun preparing nuclear spaceships to intercept this thing before it reaches us?  Why hasn’t the blogosphere lit up like the 4^th of July to warn us of imminent danger?  Is this because they know something we don’t?  That they want to keep us unprepared for the coming Storm?

Drop the investigations regarding the Intelligence Agencies and start investigating what’s behind the apathy toward this Green Comet.  The Chinese balloon is just a distraction.  It’s all a distraction!  Wake up!  The Green Comet is on its way!  The Green Comet is coming and nobody seems to care!

I love a good holiday as much as the next yahoo … but c’mon, this Groundhog’s Day business, let’s be honest, the Chamber of Commerce out there in Pullmyleg, Pennsylvania has pulled a fast one on those of us who take meteorologic prediction seriously.  Down here on the convergence zoned South End, No Way is a groundhog going to see his shadow on Feb. 2^nd.  Even if we had groundhogs!  This thing just gives Science a bad name.  And lately, the last thing it needs in these superstitious, fake news, impeachment trial, end-of-the-world times is a black eye over some mammalian hairball on the East Coast seeing its hairball shadow (or not) and then extrapolating that to El Nino or asteroid strikes on Wall Street or global warming.

Which is precisely why some of the more empirically minded boyz down at the Mabana Body Shop have been searching, in a deductive sort of methodology, an alternative Predictor of winter longevity.  Hellfire, if this Covid lockdown makes every day the same as the last one and the one coming tomorrow, we figure there’s no point in fighting endless monotonous inevitability.  We’ll just pull the covers up, collect unemployment and wait patiently for our vaccinations.  This is how civilizations thrive:  they figure out tides and seasons for planting schedules and harvest times and earlier happy hours.

The model the boyz constructed over the past decade or so is a local paradigm that utilizes a 5 gallon polyethylene bucket of fresh caught Dungeness crabs  —- I KNOW you’re going to point out they’re illegal this time of season, but listen, we’re putting em back when the data is collected.  Spirit of the Law, if not the Letter and that, in a clamshell is the very essence of the South End Way. —- So you got a pail of clacking claws and now you bring out a dog, any dog, any breed, random sampling, see?  And you let the pooch check out the crustaceans.  No shadows, no hibernating drowsy marmots.  And if the crab gets a lock on Snoopy’s snout, voila, studies have shown that is a true omen of an early spring.  The dog schnozz slips the noose, 6 more weeks of sleeping in.  Or six more months of a spiking pandemic.  Probably both.

Simple.       Like Einstein says, the more elegant the theory, the higher the probability it’s correct.  And the boyz down at the body shop will tell you, the accuracy here is in the 90 percentile range, statistically astounding.  We’re not claiming, like those unabashed self -promoters in Pennsylvania, that this will predict spring or the end of Covid for the entire country, but for all us Left Coasters, rest assured, Feb 2^nd now has science as its bedrock foundation.  We’ll leave it to the South End Chamber of Commerce how they want to capitalize on it.  Crab Dog Day.  Nice profitable ring to it, don’t you think, kind of like a cash register.  If we can keep PETA at bay….

Thank God for North Dakota!  Out there in the prairie state they have a little more time on their hands for deliberations on who can attend their schools than the rest of the country.  While they were declaring that no schools in their state could accommodate the needs of transgenders, they took the time to consider whether non-human students were welcome, those kids who identified with other species.  No doubt they were concerned that the litter box controversy sweeping the other 49 states would descend on theirs.

I get it, I really do.  Taxpayers are fed up with their money being spent on kitty litter.  And once that threshold is passed, what will the non-human demands be next?  Cat food lunches, kibble treats at recess?  Obligatory dog walks?  Leash laws rescinded?  No sir, the North Dakota legislature will not stand for it!  You want to be a cat, stay home.  Who needs a pack of meowing kids disrupting their classrooms.  New York might be so completely woke it would accommodate that, but out there in the windswept Rough Rider state, not gonna happen! Not if these legislators have their way.

And while they’re at it, how about M&M’s, those woke little rascals that are driving Tucker Carlson crazy.  Thank god too for Tucker Carlson, the Paul Revere of the anti-woke brigade.  No M&M’s should be allowed in any North Dakota classroom!

Down wind from Dakota the Missouri legislature passed a dress code for its female members, requiring them finally to cover up their shoulders.  Apparently the menfolk were distracted beyond reason by the sight of bare skin above the breastline and a need for decorum pushed the new rule to passage by a vote of 105-51.  Now, finally, the legislature can do the people’s work without being sexually stimulated.  Call it a win for good government.

Out there in the hinterlands the unwoke are finally addressing the pressing issues of their citizenry.  Hopefully other states will follow suit.  Before cat people take over our schools and women with bare shoulders are emboldened to take nudity to another, more dangerous, level.