The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I keep hearing how what us South Enders want fom our health care is more choices. Me and the mizzus, both past Medicare age now, started shopping for supplemental insurance. If we wanted choices, whoo-ee, we got em!! Well , not so much in different companies offering competitive prices so much as the two companies offering plans with plenty of their choices.

Maybe you want Plan X, pays 80% of Medicare A’s deductible, 100% of Med B’s. For $50 more a month you can get 100% pay on A & B. Want to save $$$’s, go for Plan D, you pay $3200 out of pocket before D kicks in, maxes out at $50K or Death, why they call it Plan D, you will opt for death before bankruptcy. Plan Z you can get some nursing home care, but not on Plan Y. Out of country coverage? Some yes, some no. Want co-pay or Medicare D, check out plan C? Need dental or glasses, Plans X and G and maybe N, but see if it covers contacts, bifocals or Lasix.

The list goes on. And on. And on some more. If you got a month or so, download the prosepectus of 43 pages or so per plan. Price per month is pretty prominent, you won’t need bifocals, but try to compare those prices with the juggling options, you’ll need something for your vertigo, check if it’s covered on your Medicare D, the pharmaceutical part. And if you’re not like ma and me, you’re searching for the equivalent of Medicares A and B in those health plans, god help you.

Call me cynical but if I didn’t know better with all this accumulated Wisdom old age is supposed to accrue along with arthritis and prostate problems, I’d say the health care industry makes this purposely obfuscated, a labyrinth of impossible to calculate connections between the fees and options, throw the dice, pay the price, take two aspirin, hope you make it til morning….

So … do I want more options? I don’t know. It seems like that stupid beer ad for the most popular beer in America: More Taste, Less Filling. It doesn’t have any taste whatsoever and it’s less filling because it’s mostly water. Still costs plenty, that’s for sure. Health care: more options, less expensive? We’re all being sold a bottle of snake oil, just 25 different labels on the same bottle. Glad we got those choices, though! Well, maybe if you’re wealthy….

Judging by the outcries from the GOP primary candidates who didn’t win their elections, citing voter fraud, ballot tampering, alien abductions and Satanic interventions, it’s increasingly clear to all but those living under rocks in this country that there’s really no point holding elections.  Let’s just assume the Republican candidate won.  If there are two Republicans, well now, that’s a dilemma.  Pretty obviously the dead are voting (for Democrats), the voting machines are rigged (in Democratic precincts), the ballots are being tampered with (by Democrats), illegals are voting in vast numbers (only for Democrats) and foreign countries are manipulating the computer results (always in the Democrats’ favor).  Any fool can see that!  And trust me, there are plenty of fools out there.

I gotta say, fair play and good sportsmanship used to be prized in America.  We didn’t really like folks who swept the chessboard off the table just before checkmate because it seemed, well, unseemly, maybe even petty and impolitic.  Those days, needless to say, are long gone.  Now the Republicans are, like the President-in-Exile, declaring fraud prior to the elections, no doubt relying on evidence that must be withheld from courts and the public, evidence that needs no proof, just good common horse sense.  If Tucker Carlson says there’s fraud, that’s plenty good enough for the rest of us.

So obviously to anyone with two good eyes and a nose for cheating, elections no longer make sense.  Republicans would win every time if they were fair and square, but they’re not!  Republicans never lose in a fair fight, never!  It’s like a law of physics, just not written down.  If their opponent wins, they cheated.  Period.  End of discussion.  Confiscate the ballots, send the National Guard to secure those voting machines, recount and recount until the lost votes are found.  Republicans never lose.

So why are we wasting our time holding elections in the first place?

You got to give the Fat Man credit, it isn’t all hot air that fills that expensive suit of his.  He’s informed CNN he plans to sue them for defamation of his character when they disregarded his claims of election fraud.  Give him stars for over-the-top chutzpah, the boy learned his lessons well from that paragon of virtue, Roy Cohn, Joseph McCarthy’s pitbull attorney.  When the food bowl comes in empty, show em your fangs.  He plans to sue the other fake media moguls too, just in case you thought he was exhibiting unexpected mercy.

There is a gene in salesmen and con artists too that blocks shame and embarrassment the way a T-cell attacks a virus.  Show no doubt, attack when attacked, cry foul, turn over the checkerboard, never admit defeat.  Defeat is for the weak, the losers, the pitiable.  They deserve what they get.  And what they get is a life of regrets and debts.  Step over their bodies, leave em behind for the vultures and the other crybabies.  Kick a little dirt over them. But walk away.

It may very well be that the guy is batshit crazy, not the scheming wheeler-dealer the fake news makes him out to be.  Sure, he’s a crook, greedy as any billionaire cutthroat, but what if he really doesn’t know the difference between the truth and what he believes?  What if he’s a pathetic manchild who never got the love he craved from his indifferent father?  Oh, never mind, that would make him a loser and we know that can’t be countenanced by the Donald.  So where does that leave us?

Well, I for one, speaking for all us losers, hope he gets what he deserves, some quality time in a federal penitentiary, 3 squares a day and some new friends who might teach him a lesson or two in humility.  He can see the handwriting on the wall, probably why he’s more shrill, more insistent that he’s the True Winner, that the election a year and a half in the distant past was stolen from him, it’s the only explanation.  Winners don’t lose, amigo.  Winners always win in his world.  That world, sad to say, is shrinking fast.  Sue CNN, sue God, the walls are closing in.  You thought Mar-a-Lago was a cage, get ready for a real one.  Sue the warden, see if anybody still cares….

Make Island County Okay Again, that’s my slogan.  And Make America shut up for awhile and pay attention to what’s really important.  My god, quit checking Facebooks and Instagrams and read a damn newspaper.  Today, in mine, there was a letter to the editor about our candidate for commissioner saying it was time to elect a man for the office, too many women commissioners lately and ours was ‘an evil woman.’  Don’t you just hate evil women?  The only thing I hate more than the satanic witches is the guys who want to burn them at the stake … for being a woman.  Sure, vote Neanderthal.

I ran for commissioner once.  Okay, I ran as a lark.  Wrote letters to the editor for and against myself until John Dean, the editor of the Stanwoodopolis Gazette, called to ask me politely to cease and desist.  ‘Hard for folks to tell what’s real and what’s not,’ he told me.  Wow, think of that, a time before fake news and hard journalism morphed into one and the same.  John was prescient, I guess, but that finger in the dike didn’t stop the flood that’s broken through in these misinformed times.  With some reluctance, I agreed to quit the field, fetch my hat from the ring and slink back into the nettle wilderness from whence I’d come.  John, however, caught the bug, ran for commissioner and won.  At least til the Tea Party candidate beat him the next cycle.

This misogynistic candidate running against our evil lady commissioner was actually commissioner himself awhile back.  He accused his opponent, then the Director of the Camano Center, of an agenda that would close down the Whidbey Navy Base, thinking, I guess, that Island County Commissioners have unlimited jurisdiction, probably suspicious too that she might confiscate the land and give it back to the tribes we took it from in the first place.  Back then he couldn’t pronounce the name of our island and had to be corrected at the town hall meeting.  Tomato, tomahto, Camano, Camahno,you might think he’d come a bit more prepared….

Politics is a tough racket even in the pre-Trump days.  Talk to some of these candidates nowadays and you hear stories of nasty encounters when they go doorbelling, guns brought out, curses yelled, full blown paranoid rage, welcome to the neighborhood.  Sic the hounds of hate on em!  It may be these times demand a tougher skin, a steely determination, a don’t-turn-the-other-cheek attitude, a knee-to-the-groin response.  You want a man for commissioner, Mr. Misogyny, better get yerself a metal codpiece, Skeeter and the Amazons are coming for you!

At least til the editor of the Gazette asks nicely for a cease and desist.  Again.

I got a friend who just bought property a quarter mile down the road, up a dead end gravel road past some recent clearcuts, cars parked along the road, mobile homes hauled in, a small community of fellow South Enders perched on their plots in Paradise.  She has a small cabin with an extension cord for power off the neighbor’s grid, an outhouse,  a hose for water from the shared well and 5 acres with a few nice cedars and firs encroached upon by nettles and blackberries.  For now, summer time, the place is more than livable, it’s sunny and private, a refuge from the island’s gridlock and gated communities.

It puts me in mind of my arrival at my own shack some 45 years ago, all agog and wearing thick rose colored glasses, ready for a new start, anxious to leave behind all the baggage of my previous life.  Helping my friend move a shed back toward the woods the other day, all I could think about was the excitement I felt when I came here, my own woods, my own house, my new garden, the joy of going back to the land, planting fruit trees, shrubs, vegetables, learning to build sheds, remodel that shack, fix the well pump, all that pioneer stuff.  No doubt some would scoff and shake their heads, the dumb kid bought a pig’s ear, a logged off acreage mostly nettled and primitive and no damn wonder it cost next to nothing.

Beauty, so they say, is in the eye of the myopic.  Or something like that.  I remember the look my old man gave the place first time he set foot on the property.  Shack leaning into the mud, blackberries taking over, salmonberry jungles and nettle barriers, a son who should have known better than to move to the end of an island at the end of civilization, no job prospects, no homesteader skills, no damn sense.  What was the boy thinking?  He saw a shabby life ahead of me where I saw a new start.  I guess we were both right.

My friend is starting over.  She’s a bit older than I was and no doubt a helluva lot wiser.  She’s gonna do fine up there.  She’s already remodeling the cabin, got PUD coming today to hook up the power, water lines next and indoor plumbing.  She can see the future from her front porch steps.  And it’s wide open, an unlimited horizon.  I envy her, I really do, but for now I’m enjoying the nostalgia.  You go, girl!

These are strange times in America.  The rest of the world is growing strange too.  Computers, cellphones, artificial intelligence – and no, I don’t mean Republicans – cloning, satellites, climate change, drone warfare – and no, I don’t mean Amazon deliveries.  The societal transitions are accelerating, the times, they are a chainging … fast.  When you hear folks say Make America Great Again, what they mean is stop these changes from happening, go back in time, I Like Ike … and Joe McCarthy, stop the sex changes, put gays back in their closets, teach white history, bring prayer — Christian prayer anyway — back into our schools.  Burn the witches!  Not just lock em up.

Folks are terrified of change now, folks are afraid of science now.  Hell, who isn’t?! Half the country worries about their jobs, their shrinking incomes, their kids’ future, global warming, Covid, monkey pox, nano trackers in their vaccine, immigration, inflation, world war 3.

If you’re a Democrat, you’re worried about Democracy itself, worried America will turn to nationalism, to authoritarianism, to totalitarianism, to Trumpism.  You’re thinking the Supreme Court just went rogue, that McConnell may be the devil incarnate, that Matt Gaetz will eventually become the Speaker of the House.  I know, we’re living in the Night of the Living Brain Dead.

But!  Before you build your zombie bunkers, consider this:  Obama was elected president.  I know, a long long time ago in a galaxy far from the America of today.  He said, quoting Martin Luther King, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”  There will be setbacks, there will be heartbreaks, there will be moments when you lose hope … but history is on your side.  Women can vote, gays are out of the closet, vaccines DO work, blacks will not return to Colored Only drinking fountains, coal mining jobs will go away … and we will not!

Gloom and doom will not prevail!  Optimism will!  Keep that in mind.  We’re the America that’s great.  We’re the party of the future, not the past.  We will prevail.  The future is what we choose to make it.  Spread the word, spread the word.  And whatever you do, go out and vote.

Some of you radical leftists out here tonight maybe remember the good old days when the Owl Party ran candidates for public office every year.  Weird policy statements in the voter pamphlet, strange photos, a real hoot, no pun intended.  I’ve been spending some quality time reading our local Island County pamphlet.  Gotta say, I miss those Owl Party chuckleheads … but … we got plenty of humor anyway if you bother to read these.

I’d like to say the funnier ones are always the Independents, The America First Party Republicans, The Maga Republican Party, The Trump Republican Party, my favorite the JFK Republican Party, but we got plenty of Democratic howlers too.  One fellow, running for U.S. Senator, claims that bitcoin will fix our broken monetary system and quote provide relief from the failing US dollar.  He advocates privacy, individual sovereignty, and private property.  ‘In summary,’ he wrote, ‘Bitcoin’.  Kinda like that scene in The Graduate where Dustin Hoffman gets a one word tip on the future.  Plastic.  Bitcoin?  I suspect that was written before cryptocurrencies’ bottoms dropped out and the US dollar reached parity with the euro.

But I’m not here to disparage folks running for public office.  We got plenty of Americans who do that every day — and I’m not just talking about Fox News.  All of these folks in politics, even the certifiably crazy ones, are willing to throw their hats in the ring out of some sense of patriotic obligation.  And sure, some are there to protect their own self interests, maybe help the rich get a little richer, but some are genuinely wanting to make government work better, lift up the underprivileged, advocate for the homeless, make our health care system work for all of us, provide social services along with better roads and adequate police departments.  Their political statements won’t make you laugh, but they do provide food for thought.  Janet St. Clair’s reiterates what she’s been doing the past four years and what she’d like to keep doing the next four years.  Personally, I’m glad to hear someone speak up for the homeless and the underprivileged, the poor and the sick.   I think maybe the rich will do okay, they’ll do just fine.

Tip O’Neill, Speaker of the House for ten years in the 70’s and 80’s, famously said all politics are local.  I guess Tip never dreamed of the Internet, never imagined Facebook and Twitter, never heard Hot Talk Radio or watched Fox News and the likes of Tucker Carlson.  In the time since he was Speaker the world has shrunk to the size of the South End, all local politics are nationalized, globalized and shrink wrapped to fit in an Amazon drone delivery.

When Karla Jacks was running for commissioner, her opponent and his trolls accused her of planning to shut down the Navy Base on Whidbey.  That opponent is still running to save Alt Field from you radical leftists.  Commissioners in Island County are powerful people apparently.  But not even Janet has managed to override the Navy and the U.S. government.  Probably just needs another term in office.  I say we give it to her.  Like the rich, I think NAS Whidbey will do okay.

Janet St. Clair, ladies and gentlemen, and you antifa too….

Lately there’s been a lot of breast beating, fist slamming, head slapping outrage over Joe Manchin pulling the plug on the latest attempt to address climate change.  Big surprise considering he has business ties to the coal industry, gets a small fortune in donations from the oil and gas industry, and basically is a supposed Democrat in a state that voted Trump by a huge margin.  Poor Joe.  He gets to be the scapegoat for us radical leftists.

But c’mon, Joe isn’t really the problem, is he?  Every single member of the Republican Party votes against any bill that addresses global warming.  Even some in the Democratic Party vote against Cap and Trade, emissions reductions, solar and wind subsidies, all those bills that really don’t have a ghost of a chance against a block vote in the Senate by all those GOP ostriches who see obstruction as their best tactic to win back the White House.

Maybe they really don’t believe global warming is a reality, just another antifa myth to throw a curveball at the gullible public.  Or, like Covid mask mandates and vaccinations, just big government telling us what to do.  You know, like save lives.  Course, to be fair, they argue that it’s better to lose a few old geezers to the virus than it is to harm the economy.  Money talks, in case you live under a rock, and big money talks loud.  You could argue that millions of hospitalizations and deaths would hurt the economy but … seriously, you still think logic works on a party of science deniers?

England just broke its all time high temperature yesterday.  By a whopping 3 plus degrees.  India is setting records.  America is setting records.  Let’s pretend it isn’t man made, just nature doing its natural thing.  But I think most of the Ostrich Party knows it is man made, they just don’t want to cut into profits, they don’t see sacrifice as a national good.  Pretty clearly, they’ve made it clear that it’s every man for himself in the Yew Ess Aye, good luck to the women, the trans, the gays and lesbians.  The Titanic might be sinking but they’ll be the first to elbow their way to the lifeboats.

Good old American independence, Marlboro Men all, captains of their destiny, Ayn Randians to the end.  Existential Threat?  Not for them.  Their kids maybe, their grandkids for sure.  But meanwhile, there’s still money to be made.  The cost for their progeny, well, let’s just worry about the quarterly earnings and let them fend for themselves.  History will not be kind.  And when the sand they got their heads tucked into reaches Sizzle, it may be too late for these birds, just an underground shish-kabob, tastes exactly like chicken.

Let me state at the outset, I am no real woodworker.  This is not false modesty, trust me.  My real woodworking friends will tell you I’m a screw and glue carpenter, a 90-10 guy, the sort who possibly tries to be better but loses interest part way through and figures 90% is close enough.  Really more like 80%.  I could make excuses, lack of good tools, insufficient training, a shop that’s a shack on its way out, but the truth is I’m too lazy to learn joinery techniques, good finishing skills or more exotic methods of the trade.

What I figure, see, is the design is the thing.  The design, if it’s artsy fartsy enough, will more than compensate for primitive building strategies.  Plus, use interesting woods, laminate them, draw the viewer’s eye to those rather than give a close inspection to the slightly off joints or the rough finish.  More than likely I’ll attempt a difficult design, get in over my head, then have to adjust on the fly.  Real woodworkers proceed with a set of plans.  Me, well, not so much.  Let me give you a case in point, my latest project.

I have an old colonial maple hutch that’s a little too wide for where we have it so I thought maybe I would make a replacement, one that would actually fit the space.  But naturally I wasn’t going to duplicate the old one in miniature.  I am, if not a woodworker, supposedly an artist.  Hence, I needed to make an art piece.  What I did was, first off, laminate these narrow strips of wood I had laying around the shop, maple and walnut lengths until I had a pretty sizeable pile of 2×3 lengths, some with a maple strip in the middle, some the reverse.  Lots of them, enough to make a skeleton framework, no plywood carcass, no plywood back, no doors in the lower cabinet.  My goal was to create a sort of intricate ghost cabinet, bones but no skin, everything visible.

Naturally I didn’t have a finished design in mind, just figured I’d build it piece by piece and hope for the best.  Sometimes this actually works.  Sometimes not.  I have 5 acoustic guitars I could show you that would illustrate both.  This, though, I wanted a lower cabinet and an upper bookcase with shelves, the bookcase resting on top of the bottom, slightly narrower.  The shelves, since I’d laminated everything in the bodies of both, got made from strips of maple and walnut and some left over bubinga from the guitars.  A ton of glue went into this hutch, let me tell you.  Clamps by the dozens squeezed glue out of joints that had to be cleaned up when it dried.  There was lots of sanding, 60 grit to 100 to 150 and on and on.  A real woodworker would have taken it to 350 to 400 and even to 600 grit.  Me, I quit at 220, figuring further sanding would be wasted on my finish techniques.  Plus, think about a framework of so many pieces of laminate and imagine nice finish work in those hard to reach spaces.  I couldn’t either….

Yesterday I put the final shelves on the bookcase and oiled the entire hutch.  There’s a joy in watching plain sanded wood come to life as the Danish seeps in and gives it color and depth.  And a small sense of accomplishment … despite the limitations of my woodworking skills.  What I think, and what I want to convey, is that you don’t need to be a professional woodworker to build your own stuff.  There is no satisfaction like doing it yourself.  Although, I have a couple of guitars that convinced me that might not always be true.  And why I quit building them.  But they do look nice hanging on the wall….

Techno Tom was morosely stirring half a pint of sugar into his coffee, no doubt figuring the sugar blast would quadruple the jolt from the Diner’s caffeine.  Freddie Fairlane, one table over with the other Flatheads, the vintage car guyz, watched for awhile then moseyed over to sit at Tom’s table.  “You seem a little down in the mouth, amigo,” he said.  “Lose your best friend?”

Techno didn’t even look up, just kept stirring that coffee he was apparently never going to drink, maybe just let it congeal to a cold pudding.  “I didn’t lose my best friend, Fred, but I’m losing my shirt … and maybe my marriage too.”  Freddie grabbed his plate of half eaten heart attack, chicken fried steak, greasy potatoes, side of four eggs and made himself at home beside Tom.  He wolfed down a couple forkfuls, then, mouth crammed with cholesterol, asked him what the hell he was talking about.

“I put most of my retirement funds into bitcoin, that’s what I’m talking about.  Seemed like a sure bet at the time … not so much now.”  Fred swilled his coffee, took another shovel load of breakfast, then asked what was bitcoin.  Techno Tom put his head on the table next to his undrunk coffee cup and made a whimpering noise that attracted attention from most of the Flatheads, men who had known defeat themselves at the hands of rusted bolts and impossible to diagnose electrical problems, defeats they mostly kept locked inside their garages or simply expurgated with howls of rage out of hearing from their fellow enthusiasts.  Misery may love company but most of us aren’t looking for an invitation.

Fred had quit chewing his chicken fried steak.  The spectacle of his seating companion head down on the formica table top made eating, even for Freddie, an unhelpful remedy for whatever problem Tom was unable to cope with.  He looked back at the table of his automotive pals who were all staring at the strange tableau before them, one that even in the notoriously eclectic Diner seemed a bit out of place during a quiet breakfast.  Fred put down his fork and raised an eyebrow to the onlookers before shrugging helplessly.  “Any of you guys know what a bitcoin is?”  Tom, without lifting his head, quietly groaned.