The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

My name is Skeeter Daddle and I’m an art alcoholic.  Stained glass art, to be specific.  And now a chicken artist, to be precise.  We hopeless addicts find ourselves in baffling and unpredictable predicaments, victims of the vicissitudes of economic necessities.  Over the years I’ve made windows to keep neighbors from peering into clients’ bathrooms while they do their ‘business’, I’ve created art for kitchen cabinets that prevent viewing their mismatched dishware, I’ve designed murals for schools in red-leaning areas of the state that weren’t really wanted but were offered as part of a 1% for art program by our leftist government here in Washington.  In other words I go where the money leads, no need to prove the adage of ‘starving artists.’

Just before the Covid plague swept the client base pretty much flat, I got a commission to do the neighbors’ barn, a series of five fairly sizeable windows that faced their new house.  They seemed hesitant to ask me, assuming no doubt that Picasso wouldn’t paint the side of an outhouse if his neighbor asked, but … like I said, pride is not one of my virtues or vices.  Art is art and barn art works just fine for me.  And besides, most of my large scale glass murals in the realm of public art commissions were drawn on that barn’s loft floor once the hay bales were moved to the sides.  It was actually an honor to do those barn windows.

So when the same neighbors’ broached the idea of another window up at the barnyard, this time for a chicken coop, you can guess, rightly, that I jumped at the opportunity.  Chickens need art too, you know, and maybe you didn’t know that a happy hen is a good layer.  I suggested piping in classical music, create a veritable chicken cathedral up there, get ready to corner the egg market of the South End.  So I accepted the challenge, happy to focus on something other than geo-politics, inflation, pandemic paranoia and partisan warfare.  I can now turn my attention to a design that will maximize egg production.  And hopefully not make the goats jealous of their cackling brethren.

Babies have rights, in case you’re some libtard snowflake living under a bituminous rock who thinks they have to go through 9 months of gestation before they can get a driver’s license or a social security number.  Unborn babies have the same rights as we do, sweetheart.  They can get a tax deduction from the IRS, sign up for pre-natal care subsidies, get a concealed weapon permit, use the HOV lanes with their mom and … well, they’ve got the same rights as you and me.  Of course, if you’re a pregnant mother of one of these unborns, you better behave.  Drinking, drugs, smoking cigarettes or vaping, that’s child abuse now, clear and simple.  Light up a Camel, you should be arrested, fined or both.  Personhood cuts both ways….

I’m wondering if sperm might qualify for personhood.  Lots of those out there, potential humans, and if states start to outlaw birth control, well, there’s all the evidence you need for claiming a few extra deductions come tax time.  Probably get a refund in 6 figures every year.  Me, I had a vasectomy at 21 so I lose out in any case.  My bad luck for killing all those potential kids I never had.  Might even get me hauled into jail for mass murder.  My cross to bear, I guess.

Nevertheless, it might be nice if we had the same concern for kids after they’re born as we seem to prior.  You want the government telling you you have to give birth to that unwanted fetus, let them help out, let them pony up some money for food and rent, maybe find you some daycare that’s affordable enough to let you work your minimum wage job, let them be the nanny state they seem to hate unless it’s got something to do with controlling your own body.  Life, so they holler, is precious.  Don’t want to stop a beating heart … unless we use a gas chamber or a drone missile.

And I don’t even want to get into the stem cell controversy.  More slippery a slope than the birth canal.  All I know is babies in the womb are protected now from pretty much every threat from abortion loving woke liberals.  Good luck once they’re born, life will get a little tougher.  Probably why they’ll need that concealed carry permit.

My old roommate in the days we lived in the Seattle ghetto back in the late 70’s told me today his property taxes down there in Gomorrah were killing him.  Second kid finishing college, he’s still working, so’s his wife, they’re still paying off a 40 year mortgage.  Always the optimist, I said well, Joe, your place must be worth a fortune in that city where real estate prices are practically lunar.  He said you know the house, built in 1919, sort of run down.  He said he didn’t know what it was worth, but couldn’t be all that much.  I said I’m betting a million.  He said you gotta be kidding.

When I got off the phone I checked his estimated house price on the internet.  Yeah, I know, it’s not always accurate, give me a break, I’m not making an offer on the place.  It was worth a tad over one million bucks.  I don’t know what he paid for the place back in the 80’s, too much is what he told me then, but he wanted to get in before the prices made it impossible.  I remember at the time thinking it was too much too.  I do know what I paid for my ghetto chalet.  It was being auctioned off by Uncle Sam as a HUD repo and I bid 24, 000 dollars, 6 over the starting price.  Naturally, while I was googling up real estate figures, I checked on the old homestead.  You guessed it, over a million bucks.  And the neighborhood is still what they call ‘transitional’, meaning the gentrification hasn’t rooted out the meth dealers yet.

So Joe is a millionaire.  On paper.  He would be if he sold the joint, packed his belongings into a VW van like he used to have, lived on the road, king of it, matter of fact.  Maybe collect his social security early to help pay for the gas.  Forget his cares and woes, forget the property tax bills, just take the money and run.

His kids will never own a home.  Unless they move to some dirt patch in Alabama.  The American Dream of buying a house, mowing the lawn, erecting a fence between you and the neighbors, finally paying off the mortgage which means you paid twice what the place cost to the bank that gave you the loan, then cashing in when you die so your kids can inherit the equity, well, that dream is dead.  Meantime, you can bask in the knowledge that you’re a millionaire.  Enjoy it while you can.  Before inflation eats it up.

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….