The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

You might think, being a savvy reader of these blogs, that anyone running for office, looking for a job or applying for grants would know that in this post-Zuckerberg world we all live in, fudging on the facts of their resume would be a ticket to shame and humiliation.  But apparently there are those who missed the memo.  This guy Santos in New York, for instance, who won an election to be a U.S. Representative, not only embellished his resume, he created a persona totally fictitious.  Running in a district that had plenty of Jewish voters, he claimed he was Jewish.  Now he admits he meant he was jew-ish, not a real Jew.  Slick, George, very slick.

Didn’t go to college either, although he campaigned on his degrees.  Said he was a successful business guy, worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs.  Business-ish, I guess.  Give the man credit, he should have been a novelist.  Or a blog writer.  Instead he was drawn to politics.  Where, it should be noted, he succeeded.  Like a few others, I might add, who have zero sense of shame and who, once elected, have no intention of stepping off.  Thanks, Donald, once again.

Okay, like the man said, you can fool some of the people all of the time and you can fool all of the people some of the time, but all you need is 51% on election day … or something like that.  Santos is unrepentant, figures a little braggadocio on his background is no big deal.  The Democrats are calling for him to step down and worst case calling on the Republicans not to seat him in Congress, something akin to admitting lying is wrong, same folks who voted not to seat Joe Biden.

But then, what do I know?  I’m just a Pulitzer Prize winning blog writer.  Who graduated from Harvard and won a Silver Star in Viet Nam.  Or that my glass business is in Forbes Top 500?  And who’s thinking about running for Commissioner and possibly Senator.  Did I mention too that I’m Christian … ish?

Just testing the waters….

With the pandemic lockdowns in the rearview maybe it’s time to look ahead to what might be the year we leave the plague past behind and point our faces to the future.  Seems like the past few years we’ve been stuck in the doldrums, nothing but the doldrums of Trump and inflation, disease and a war in Ukraine to make a miasma of pessimism drag our moods down.

Course the war will drag on, inflation might slow a big but not a lot, the variants of the coronavirus will continue to kill the unvaccinated and yeah, Trump is his own variant, probably going to kill the Republican Party and maybe that alone is cause for celebration.  So far the country survived an insurrection, even seemed to start to come to its senses.  The fear mongers and the unwoke are still with us but Trump gave plenty of folks reason to reconsider what harm this narcissistic tyrant crybaby and his sycophant wrecking crew could wreak.  Plenty, it turned out.

It might just be that the country is ready for more optimism than the doom and gloom promulgated by the man who keeps telling us he’s the only yahoo who can save the country from going down the tubes.  The man who on Inauguration Day of his one and only term of office chose to air grievances and cast blame.  America first, he intoned, but what we discovered he meant was Me First.  Any cost, including democracy itself.

So okay, he says he’s going to run again.  Another year of this guy ranting and raving, blaming the media, pandering to the racists and bigots, castigating the immigrants, spewing his anger at an election he refuses to believe he lost.  Plenty of folks will still believe him, but not a majority any more.  The guy will be a joke, a nasty chapter in the history books and hopefully a lesson to be learned the hard way about the corruption of power.

But … we survived the plague, the one created by the virus and the one by politics.  Maybe this will be another year of the same, a deja-vu of the last few.   With a little luck we might move past that.  With a little optimism we will move past that.  Me, I feel optimistic this brand new year.  I’m ringing out the old and looking forward to 2023.

Seasons Greetings, Everyone!  CEO Skeeter Daddle here to offer any of you inconvenienced by this Christmas Holiday’s glitches at South End Airlines.  Admittedly this was an inopportune time to experience problems flying to grandma’s house and for that we at South End want to offer our sincere apologies.  As many times as it takes.  Refunds and rebookings may take a little longer, but rest assured, the South End Family will do our darndest to make it up to you.  Lost presents and lost baggage will be found and returned to you and your loved ones.  Think Christmas in January.  After all, no one really knows when Baby Jesus was actually born.  And no one really knows when we’ll get our cancellations straightened out.

We here at Crisis Central want you to know that once we’ve returned to our full schedule, we will be committed to vastly improved service.  You are valued customers and as such we are devoted to keeping you in the air On Time.  This unfortunate holiday meltdown was the result of terrible weather across the country, not, as some have suggested, pilot and crew cutbacks or outdated technologies or our very economic point to point terminal system.  Like our competitors we are dedicated to your safety and our bottom line.  Sure we made incredible profits this last year and of course we could have used that to upgrade systems, hire more personnel and probably charge you for increased baggage fees and fees for the use of our very hygienic bathroom facilities.

That, needless to tell you loyal flyers, is not the South End Way.  Which is why, once again, we want to apologize for God’s winter mess-up this holiday.  Ice and sleet and snowmageddon, let’s face it, you were probably lucky not to face Nature’s wrath out there at grandma’s.  Not that we’re scapegoating the Lord, heaven forbid.  But global warming, well, that’s something all of us are responsible for.  We’re doing our best.  Now it’s time for you all to step up as well.  Happy New Year and see you back in our friendly skies in 2023.  Peace, Skeeter

You really can’t blame Donald J for wanting to overturn the election when he lost.  As he told Hope Hicks, his aide and confidante, he was concerned about his legacy, one that would be down the tube if he was shown to be a Loser.  Maybe he and I have very different notions of what constitutes a Loser, but for my money, the stuff I actually do pay taxes on, Mr. T was always a Loser.  Fortunately for him, I think his legacy is pretty secure, just maybe not what he had in mind.

If he just stepped away from the mirror long enough, he might realize that history will pass judgement on his Presidency, probably sooner rather than later.  Attempting to overthrow the government, well, if that doesn’t rank him #1 in the category of worst and most dangerous man to sit in the Oval Office, I’ve got a hat I’ll eat, maybe two.  He has enshrined himself a very special place in history, one that should last far into the future, hopefully.  Maybe he won’t overtake a Hitler or a Stalin as the Worst World Leader, but here in the U.S., he takes the cake and yeah, I know, we’ve only been a country for a couple hundred years.  Still, he wins hands down.  So much winning no one will much care he lost the second term.

It doesn’t look like he’ll get his face carved onto Mt. Rushmore any time soon, something he’d hoped for, but historians will carve him up for decades to come, if not centuries, dissecting his every tweet, analyzing his mental state, comparing his presidency to Millard Fillmore’s, theorizing about his capitulation to a guy like Vlad Putin, parsing his tax records, working through his court depositions and upcoming verdicts, making sense of the fines and prison times.  A wealth of information will flood the history books.  A wealth the man always craved.  And finally, in the end, received.

Legacy?  You got it, buddy.

Today is New Year’s Eve, plenty of time to make those resolutions for 2023.  Being a South Ender, it’s difficult to conjure up anything much that needs improvement, but then again, nobody’s perfect, I guess, so I’ve been wracking my brain for some small trait that might need bettering.  So far I’m kind of stumped.

Don’t get me wrong.  It’s not like I think I’m Buddha or anything, not as if all my waking thoughts are pure as the driven snow, not like I couldn’t find a flaw or two in my persona, but jeez, you start messing with a good thing, hellfire, you might just be asking for trouble, create some distortion in the cosmos, open yourself up to worry and woe.  Sure don’t want to start the New Year off on the wrong foot, stumble into 2023 when a waltz might have been more apropos.

Oh, sure, I suppose I could be more generous maybe with those donations to the Food Bank or the Senior Center.  And I could probably dial up my Humility a notch, but I’m not really after Sainthood, not that I was actually in the running.  At least I don’t think so ….  And besides, it’s hard, really hard, to be humble as a long term South Ender.  We Old Timers just try not to be Braggers, about as close to humility as we can get.

So maybe, once again, I’ll leave the Resolutions to all the rest of you.  And please, whatever you do, don’t resolve to move down here on the South End thinking that migration or refugee status would suffice.  It’s not that simple and honestly, some of my fellow Enders, just between you and me, could use some serious improvement.  Maybe that’s my Resolution: to help these folks.  To be a Light and a Way!  To show them the Path!!

Then again, that attitude just puts a dent in my Humility Index.  Naw, folks got to make their own Resolutions.  Sorry, you’re on your own.  Same as last year.  Good luck to ya!  You’ll be fine.  Probably.

Most of us, if we were billionaires (or will be soon), probably wouldn’t mind showing the world just how wealthy we are.  Sure, you could buy that super yacht, a palace or two, maybe an island in the Caribbean, but easier to brag would be just let the folks back home take a gander at the last few years of tax returns.  Okay, maybe it might prove embarrassing that you didn’t pay very much on millions of earnings, but that’s just you, the big boyz don’t apologize for deductions and deferments and carried over losses and all the rest of the loopholes in tax laws.  After all, they didn’t pay all that money for lobbyists to end up paying what you pay.  Wake up!  The rich get richer, ever hear that little jingle?

But my man Trump isn’t like most billionaires.  He actually prefers to brag about his money, not show you his money, and he certainly doesn’t want anyone peeking at his tax returns.  You might think a savvy businessman who’s gone through more than a few bankruptcies and is still a billionaire would be amused if not outright happy to let the gawking losers check out how a winner wins.  Oh sure, the trolls think maybe he isn’t as rich as he says, maybe only a one billion billionaire, not the bragging amount.  Trust me, I could get over any embarrassment over exaggerating a billion or three.  You probably could too.

So what makes the King of the Casinos, the Entrepreneur who can sell his naming rights for millions, what makes him want to hide those tax returns?  Couldn’t be fear of an audit.  After all, he claims he would show them to us soon as the current IRS audit is concluded.  Meaning, if my logic isn’t haywire, he’s already being audited.  Ya think?

If you ever wonder why the GOP fights to defund the IRS, I can’t think of a better example than Donald J. Trump.  Hire a team of lawyers and accountants, play fast and loose with the loopholes, then count on the IRS being a little too undermanned to come checking.  Maybe making these returns public might be Clue 1 that a lot was hidden, a great deal was bogus and the light of day might just be the first step in a real audit. Like the man in the movie said, Show us the Money!

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.