The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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.

I don’t get out as much as I should.  When I get news from the outside world, I realize that I’ve stuck my head in the South End sand and tried to avoid negativity.  If I stayed off my newsfeeds on the computer, stopped listening to NPR down at the studio and canceled our subscriptions to the local fishwrappers , I might have a chance to live a life free of menacing intrusions into my otherwise peaceful little dreamworld.  But as you know and I do too, the outer world is forever scratching at the door to get in.

Today is the day the Memphis murder of a young black guy by 5 black cops is going to hit the airwaves, probably inciting riots and outrage and the sequel to the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis.  The Black Lives Matter protests obviously didn’t have their memo read down there in Tennessee.  And the folks who argue that Critical Race Theory has no place in their school systems will get to make the argument once more.  The fact that the alleged murderers were all black too should make their case a bit easier.  Lost in the shuffle will be any need for reforming police departments to eliminate this sort of endemic violence by cops.

But I’m ahead of myself here.  This is tomorrow’s news.  Today I’m more worried about what I discovered going on in Indiana where their legislature is proposing its schools ban furries, those kids who identify with animals apparently.  Maybe our schools out here have furries too, I don’t really know, but now I really am concerned.  And maybe lucky I don’t live in Indiana where, for all I know, the furries are infiltrating their classrooms.

You really can’t make this stuff up.  Although Indiana can.  We live now in a world right out of National Enquirer.  Nothing much is too insane to consider not only a possibility but probable.  Litter boxes in the schoolrooms ,Jewish lasers from outer space starting forest fires, critical race theory being taught in kindergarten, Big Foot running for the U.S. Senate, Jesus orbiting earth in a spaceship, go ahead and make up a few of your own, post it on Facebook, let it go viral and next thing you know it’s squatting in every living room on the one eyed computer screen.

Furries!  Missouri wants to ban litter boxes so I guess they got furries already too, they’re spreading west!  I’m keeping my eye out for the school bus drops, see if the furries are here yet and yeah, I bet they are.  I’m okay with it so long as they stay out of my garden.  I got enough furry pests in there already.

If you’re one of the vast many who read this blog, I want to thank you.  I know you’ve been loyal patrons of my off-kilter sense of humor and moonshine wit all these years and refrained from writing nasty responses and for that I want to thank you further.  But lately I’ve been contemplating how to increase this readership.  There are teenage girls on Tik-Tok who have a million or more viewers who wait eagerly every day for tips on beauty aids.  Out there in the wild wild west of blogland there are sites that draw jaw-dropping numbers of dedicated readers. And while I appreciate your own dedication, I’ve decided it might be time to up the ante.

After some cursory investigation of more successful blogsites it is apparent that what I need is a bit more clickbait than the puny stuff this column has been offering over the years.  Sure, the South End might interest a few dozen of you, but c’mon, this is a world where Qanon rules and health supplements draw millions.  Politics and cures for what ails ya, that’s the ticket to fame and fortune on the internet.  Trust me when I say I’ve weighed whether promoting quack cures or warning the world about new and worse conspiracies out there compensate for the irreparable damage it might wreak on those who are susceptible and gullible, who might think the most outrageous claims and insane theories are 100% true if they read them on the internet.

And I’ve come to the conclusion that yes, if I can crank my viewer numbers up a bit, it would be worth it.  The world is a pretty crazy place already, you got to admit, and if tossing a burning bottle of snake oil into the mix adds to the global insanity, well, what’s one more bot, one more wild exaggeration, one more dubious claim, one more bogus accusation, one more cure for cancer announcement in the big scheme of things.  Especially if the increased readership leads to product endorsements, paid advertising and increased revenue streams.

So, fair warning, dear reader, in the future the Daddle Diaries will be a much more exciting ride, hopefully a viral one.  But never fear, we’ll be bringing you a panacea for that virus, one in product development even as this goes to press.  The South End will once again lead the way.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is one gun-totin, shoot-from-the-lip, pistol packin mama.  Tough as a Georgia peanut, that girl, and a brain nearly as big.  She loves her social media and social media loves her.  If Donald Trump needs an extra bodyguard, he couldn’t do much better.  If he needs someone to make him look like a moderate RINO, look no further, the woman isn’t just right of him, she’s right of Genghis Khan.  Her latest statements on Steve Bannon’s hot talk show let us know that if she had managed the January 6^th insurrection, her and Steve, the mob would have come armed to the teeth and the coup would have been successful.

Okay.  So much for the positive side of freedom of speech.  In America you can pretty much spew hate, advocate it, repeat it, retweet it and it’s just fine.  In Germany you mouth off that the Holocaust was a hoax perpetrated by Zionist swine and see how far you get.  Trump and his buddy Ye or KanYe or his ministerial name as interplanetary messenger, they can dogwhistle all day long, give hope to the true believers that think their problems are caused by blacks or Jews or immigrant rapists, and half this country will nod their heads in agreement, okay now to entertain those racist notions, screw the ‘woke’ snowflakes.  Personally, yeah, I find it troubling, but hey, I believe in free speech and I guess if I have to look around at half my fellow grocery shoppers and know that a goodly number of my neighbors are guilty of thoughtcrimes, well, better to know your enemy than not, I figure.  I don’t want books banned and I don’t want Universities quarantining their students from ideas they find objectionable.

Having said that, what I do fear is that miraculous internet we got, the one where phony ideas, faux facts, bogus quotes and all the rest ricochet around the web like rabid bats, contributing to the expanding ignorance of our so-called civilized world.  Get ready for what’s coming next, pal, the AI programs that will duplicate anyone’s voice, write convincing text in anyone’s syntax and style, present a video photoshop of you or me or the President of the Free World, all made to dupe the reader or listener or viewer.  Try to figure out what is real and what is phony, but good luck.  We don’t trust the news media anymore, folks who might have the ability to factcheck this stuff, so what’s coming down the digital highway is way scarier than anything coming out of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s quacking mouth.  The truth?  You can’t handle the truth!  Actually, you probably could … if only you knew what was real and what wasn’t.  None of us will handle the subterfuge.

Marjorie’s not going to take the Capitol with an armed militia.  But the trolls are going to muck up the world with enough flak and clickbait to make it impossible to see through the fog.  Freedom of Speech?  We can’t handle freedom of speech! Not in the digital world.