The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

When I was a little sprout, we would make the pilgrimage back to my parents’ homes in Northern Maine. If Maine conjures up visions of lobstermen and weathered Cape Cod clapboard houses on the rugged Atlantic coast, let me disillusion you. Northern Maine is not scenic, not postcard picture whatsoever. It is poor, mostly peas and potato fields where the Great Northwoods threatens to reclaim its territory, some logging and plenty of drinking. Like a lot of America in the harshest climates, it belongs to another era.

Our grandparents’ houses, most of the time we went back, lacked indoor bathrooms. On my dad’s side, there was an attached shed off the kitchen and further off that was a two seater outhouse, which, if you want to be accurate, was sort of an indoor outhouse, something I’ve never seen before or since. My mom’s folks’ farmhouse sported an outdoor outhouse, one seater. They were potato farmers, living hand to mouth, and most of Gramp’s carpentry went into additions for the kids they kept having, not, apparently, for fancy double hole outhouses. That, or they were more private in their restroom etiquette.

What we had when we visited was a thundermug. You see em in antique stores now, usually an enameled metal pot with a lid but sometimes porcelain for the Martha Stewart crowd of the early last century. When we came to the South End, we had a working indoor toilet, something folks usually inquired about before they visited the first time, relieved we were so newfangled modern. But our stairs to the bedroom was nearly vertical so I did what my grandfolks did, I kept a chamber pot up there, emptied it every morning, no need to brave those skinny stairs you had to turn sideways to ascend or descend.

The last year or so the toilet in the shack kept backing up. I’m not going to shock you with tales of the attempted repairs, but I finally gave up. We had a few visitors (and ourselves) who stayed down there with apologies for the non-functioning toilet, but hey, here’s the thundermug, save you an accident on those stairs, no need to thank me. Which, I guess, might explain the diminishing number of guests this year.

But I digress. The point is, and yeah, I plan to get to it, the point is I finally decided to return to the 21st century whatever it took. Today I dragged out the old antique model and hauled in a new crapper, one that advertised itself as ‘pressurized’, whatever that means, but what I hoped would mean the contents of the bowl would rocket out at the speed of sound to somewhere else, not just swirl around and possibly flood over the rim like in the past. To be honest, my expectations of success were low. To be totally honest, I didn’t think I had a rat’s chance, but I really hate to admit to defeat and I really hated to go back to using my outhouse back in the woods, not that I mind, mind you, I just remember the woman who came to a studio tour a dozen years ago, desperate to use the loo that was out of order and ended up back in our spider infested one seater back in the nettle forest. Believe me, I never want to see a look on anyone’s face like hers when she was done. Some folks appreciate their modern luxuries. As you can see, I was doing this for them.

Oh sure, Albert was smart, real smart, I’ll give him that. Knew a lot about relativity, black holes, time warps, all that voodoo stuff nobody here on terra firma cares much about, especially now that science is pretty much on the way out for half the population. So he says, yeah, like he’s a psychiatrist too, that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Big whoop. Maybe he never heard that when you conduct an experiment, say looking for subatomic particles, the results change depending on the guy running the experiment. Same thing, do it again and again, but different result.

So okay, I tore down my last acoustic guitar I built over a year ago, pre-Covid, don’t ask me why, I just did, all right? I’d built 5, figuring the next one would be an improvement, and the one after that might be, well, maybe not perfect or anything, but surprisingly good, possibly more than good, even amazing. Halfway through the teardown I felt Albert breathing down my neck, whispering his little litany about insanity and repetition and expecting better results, kind of like having some punk walking behind you with a stick after dark dragging it across a picket fence, ominous beyond reason.

I had hoped the lessons I learned from those 5 guitars might serve me well, but the first 2 didn’t, the first 3 weren’t much improved, and the 4th, well, it seemed worse. And here I was deconstructing the last one, making a mess of it, growing impatient, wondering why I was going to the trouble and listening to the ghost voice of Mr. Unified Theory of the Damn Universe, give me a break. At one point I almost smashed the thing on the shop table I was so pissed off at how it was going, maybe give Albert a quick review of the Big Bang or Galactic Entropy, but, being the mellow man I am, I just smashed some other stuff and plowed gamely on.

I will make no more guitars. How’s that for a learning curve? How do you like that for a definition of Sanity? The trouble is, though, you put your nose to something like this, give it your best shot, try to improve, try to learn from your mistakes, try to justify the hours and the days and the weeks you spent, only to come up short … and that little worm of failure starts to eat at you, starts to make you question all the other misadventures you tried, the other follies that seemed worth trying at the time but, in retrospect, seem, oh, silly or stupid or just incredibly wrong-headed. And then the worm digs a little deeper and you start to think maybe this is the story of your life, these wrong turns, these pratfalls of projects, this whole way of looking at things, until you stand at the edge of your own personal black hole, and yeah, okay Mr. Super Smart, you’re looking at what might be your own insanity, too late to change all the mistakes now, just line up those 5 guitars and listen to them not so gently weeping in your nightmares.

At least they’re not banjos. That would be a madness unendurable. Although I’m certain my next banjo will be a masterpiece….

Google cars came out with some statistics recently. Driverless cars don’t have accidents really … and the few they do have are cars with drivers running into them. Some of the boyz in the Flatheads, our vintage car club, were flabbergasted. They’re old school guyz who revel in memories of souped up engines, backroad drag races, cue ball shifter knobs and dangling dice on the rearview. They love their rods, they love their memories and they go apoplectic to imagine a future of robot automobiles they can sit in the backseat and read a paper. They have fond memories of other uses for that backseat.

“The Age of the Automobile is coming to an end,” I made the mistake of saying to Two Toke Tom at the Diner where it was overheard by half the Flatheads at the breakfast pow-wow where they’d pushed half the tables together to make room for about a dozen car enthusiasts. Their Packards and Chargers and 88’s were lined up outside the plate glass like an outdoor Museum for Testosterone, right next to Tom’s beater with the cracked windshield and the missing front quarter panel, all gleaming with fresh wax and loving care. I might have been wiser announcing we ought to confiscate guns in an NRA meeting.

Freddie, the head honcho Flathead, jerked his head in the direction of my blasphemy. “What are you drinking, man???” he practically shouted. Brenda spilled coffee on Harry’s hand, missing his cup by a quarter mile. “Yeoww!” he hollered in pain. The whole café was now on Alert. “I only mean the day is coming when cars will drive themselves. They don’t have accidents, Fred, and if they don’t have accidents, guess what the insurance companies are going to demand? You want to drive your big Dodge, fine, but guess what they’ll charge your Charger for the privilege?”

“Over my dead fender, Skeeter.” Two Toke raised his cup. “Amen, brother Fred, Amen.”

“All I’m saying, Fred, is half the folks out there on the road these days aren’t driving anyway. They’re text messaging, they’re talking on the phone, they’re wobbling over the center line and they’re drifting onto the shoulder. They go from 60 mph to 30 mph. I don’t know what all they’re doing behind the wheel, but it sure isn’t driving. Might be okay with me if they let the computer do that for em so they can pay attention to their smartphone.”

Fred snorted and the assembled Flatheads snorted in agreement. Brenda mopped up Harry’s table and dried his hand. Harry would live, Two Toke would get a good laugh on me later and the Flatheads would all drive down Memory Lane with rumbling mufflers, KaHooga horns, mohaired upholstery, big fins and whitewall tires like mastodons crossing back over the Bering Strait to a garage somewhere in the Pleistocene.

I’m starting to realize I live in a nuthouse. Every day I wake up and the howling is louder from down the block, the crazies banging their heads and smearing god knows what on their walls, a cacophony of madness that disturbs my sleep. They think most everything is a conspiracy of some insidious sort, plots by the government, deep state master plans to control their lives, schemes by the corporations to manipulate them in evil ways. The election was a fraud, the Plague is phony, climate change is a hoax, Black Lives Matter is an insurrection, General Robert E. Lee is a true American Hero, the list never ends.

This week the Conservative Political Action Conference cheered when they were told the vaccinations for Covid hadn’t reached the percentage the current Administration had hoped for. Hurray hurray! It’s something like applauding when the fire truck gets to the apartment complex completely ablaze too late to save the occupants. Hurray! Hurray! Government employees, those fire fighters, bad, bad! They claim the government is going door-to-door encouraging you to get vaccinated. Supposedly to protect yourself and your neighbors. Oh, right. Like our government cares? What next, door-to-door gun confiscation, they ask.

Their hero, D.J. Trump, actually snuck out and got himself and his mizzus, wait for it, yup, vaccinated, jumped right to the head of the line. Didn’t want to make a public scene of it, just wanted to protect himself. When he contracted Covid, he got all the drugs and care a President is entitled to, but … god forbid he would admit that he might have died without those extras that you and I wouldn’t have access to. That’s leadership. Real leadership.

I talked yesterday to some folks from Eastern Washington. They don’t believe the Covid is real, just another form of a flu, nothing to see there. I mentioned how over 600,000 Americans had died of that form of flu, call it what you want, the Spanish Flu was nothing but a flu either. They said they didn’t believe the numbers. Forget about arguing that the numbers are probably under-reported. Nice folks, but hey, it’s hard to have a discussion or a debate when anything you say is countered with a simple I Don’t Believe That. They did mention that they made a homemade concoction of elderberry remedy in a gummy bear to ward off colds and flu for their kids. Worked too!

What do you say to that? Do you hope their children contract Covid to prove your point? Or do you run to the supplement store and buy remedies for that loud howling in your ears every morning? Money back guarantee, no doubt.

A lot of my cohorts are boiling mad about the folks who refuse to vaccinate, blaming them for the latest surge in Covid cases, hospitals filling up and kids dying of the virus. They blame them for the mask mandates that are being imposed and the shutdowns that are sure to come. When they see footage of anti-vaxxers and Proud Boys attacking journalists, they see red. When they hear the governor of South Dakota welcoming the 700,000 bikers at their yearly Sturgis rally, they go practically bonkers. If you get can calm them down for a few moments, they’ll grow apoplectic about Texas and Florida where mandates are handed down outlawing mandates, what my pals see as government intervention to prevent government intervention.

I can’t say I blame them for their outrage. I’d like to move beyond the plague, maybe turn my attention to the Afghanistan civil war, another wasted effort by the United States, trillions of dollars, lives lost, a hopeless quixotic attempt to bring democracy to a country barely out of the Stone Age and apparently happy to stay there. We never really learn, do we? Korea, Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan, not quite ready for prime time, but we figure, this City on the Hill, we can bring the news to these folks even if we have to ram it down their throat. Somebody forgot to tell the powers that be these people have a civil war on their hands and nothing we do is going to change that. I mean, Duh.

They just have to fight it out, terrible as it is to watch, but nothing we do will prevent it. Course, we could always just sit back and sell them weapons, get it over with soon as possible. Twenty years in Afghanistan. Now we’ll blame the Democrats for leaving too soon. Or we’ll blame the Republicans for declaring we would be leaving (too soon). Some folks want to stay there another 20 years, some folks want to shut the door, pull the shades and pretend it never happened.

My war was Viet Nam, something about a Domino Effect, communism sweeping through Indonesia. The French gave up and their civil war kicked right back into gear. The Russians left Afghanistan and … well, here we go again. The Taliban are back, fun loving warlords that they are. Maybe Putin is itching for a sequel, but I sort of doubt it. And don’t look for Kabul Part 6 from our own Department of Defense. We took awhile, but I suspect we learned our lesson.

Meanwhile, back at the farm, my cohorts are mad as hell and they say they aren’t going to take it anymore. MAGA folks and Proud Boys are bashing in the Capitol doors, taking it to the street. I guess we got our own civil war to worry about here. Hopefully some Do-Good country won’t decide to intervene.

Sometimes, when you think you might be the only person who can save the world, you have to commit acts that you know are wrong. The surf instructor who murdered his two kids with a spear gun and left them in a ditch told police that he knew killing them was wrong, but … the fate of the world was in his hands. The kids, he had learned through visions and dreams, were going to grow into monsters that would threaten life on this planet because they had serpent DNA.

I don’t know. Maybe they did. The Lizard People, as you must have heard, are among us. Alien beings infesting our gene pool. I suppose our surf instructor might have tried one of those DNA testing sites, see if maybe the serpent DNA was really mostly Balkan or Southern Mediterranean. A buddy of mine has 1% Neanderthal. If they can detect Neanderthal DNA, for sure they could find lizard DNA. Course, the surf dude was pretty certain his kids had serpent DNA without any damn test, which, at least for me, raises the question, where did they get it? Mom sleeping with alien invaders? Or … and this is the most troubling, did they get it from him??? (Cue the creepy soundtrack.)

Qanon believers are multiplying faster than lizard genes in the Land of the No Longer Free and it might be time we thought about banning spear guns before mass spear gun killings become commonplace. These are weird times, definitely, what with Covid, bat viruses unleashed on the world, climate change, self-driving vehicles and rockets buzzing overhead with billionaire passengers. The idea that Democrats are keeping children for their sexual and culinary appetites isn’t so far-fetched in these times. Lizard People living among us? Sure, why not. They’re probably the monsters who want to vaccinate an acquiescent population, pump their DNA into the veins of the unsuspecting, then take control of the earth. Spear guns don’t kill, Lizard People kill.
Don’t wear a mask, don’t get inoculated, don’t worry, be happy. The surfers of the world may unite and save us despite ourselves. And whatever you do, do not, I repeat, do not get one of those DNA tests. Just gonna ruin your day.

Don’t, whatever you do, put down on their death certificate as the cause of death, Covid. It’s just too damn embarrassing. They never believed the lies of the mainstream media, not one bit, that coronavirus was worse than the flu. Don’t put Flu down either as a cause of death. Too close to home. No, put Underlying Causes. That’s it. Underlying Causes. Their relatives will be relieved and that, after all, is what matters, no point rubbing salt into their collective wounds.

I run into folks all the time who deny the claim that over 600,000 of us red white and blue Americans died of Covid. Not true, they say. Bullshit, they say. I say what do you mean and they reply most of these victims died of, wait for it now … Underlying Causes. The Covid was just the little shove over the edge apparently, but what killed more than half a million of us was … Something Else. At this point in the conversation I usually head for the door.

Nevertheless, it’s revealing that there are places in this country where the coroner will list other causes of death rather than Covid. I suppose he could put down Stupid, but that’s nearly as embarrassing as Covid. The sad point is that after a year and a half of this pandemic, with a vaccine that would save their lives, they refuse to get an inoculation. And sadder yet is that this decision is pretty much correlated to political party affiliation. Cause of Death: Republicanism?

Thanks a lot, Fox News, for spreading the doubt among your viewers, all you commentators who got vaccinated. Cause of Death: Tucker Carlson? Or the hundreds of social media sites spreading misinformation. Cause of Death: Facebook?

I guess Underlying Causes pretty much covers all of the above. But … I would prefer to list something a little more specific, even if we avoid calling it Covid: Darwinism. Course, most of the deceased don’t believe in that either. Rest in Peace, y’all.

Down at the Diner normality is slowly returning. Well, the New Normality, I guess. After being shut down briefly for non-compliance with plague masking, the café began to adhere to the governor’s edict that masks must be worn by customer and staff alike. As soon as some of the quarantines lifted, the Diner was first in line to rip those N-95’s off their ears and breathe free once again. Eager to recoup the winter’s lost revenues, they built a makeshift beer garden out by the parking lot next to the building, fenced it off and offered tourists and residents adult beverages near the gas pumps. Even brought in music, small groups and a night of open mic.

Course, they had forgotten about checking with the Liquor Board for permits for a beer garden, or if they had checked, went ahead without them. So for a time the music by the pumps and the open mics went on hiatus until the snafu was corrected. Damn government regulations! Last week I drove up to hear what the open mic folks might have to offer, maybe catch a beer and sit in the sun. And while it’s not Margaritaville or a sunset rich view of the Puget Sound, it’s pleasant enough. Unless you happen to be sitting next to the air return for the café’s HVAC system, 95 degree breezes fluttering your hat, although, to be fair, there are a few more seats further from the desert breeze.

I lasted one cold beer, at least until the guy with the saxophone stepped up to the microphone and butchered Duke Ellington. I was in 5th grade band classes with kids who could play like this, but I’m not in 5th grade anymore and I honestly believe before you perform in public, you ought to learn to halfway play your instrument. Just saying….

Saturday night the mizzus and me went to hear a very good fiddler play old time music, solo and then with friends. It was indoors after the only rain of the summer soaked the beer garden, all very convivial for a small super spreader event, the beer was good, the place was packed. After a dozen songs or so a 30 something woman parked next to me who started yelling in my right ear GET CLOSER TO THE MICROPHONE!! or YOU NEED TO TURN UP THE AMP!! or SING LOUDER!! until finally I got up and moved away from her. She immediately charged over to ask AM I ANNOYING YOU??

Now, a bigger man, a more mature man, a man mellowed by the South End laid back lifestyle might have said, no, ma’am, I just had my right ass cheek going dead so I thought I would move to a different seating position, nothing at all to do with the new tinnitus in my right ear … but, of course, that would be a different man than myself. When she took umbrage to my telling her hell yes you’re annoying me, you’re screaming in my ear louder than the damn band, she seemed suddenly enraged for some reason. To which she spluttered and told me YOU NEED A NEW HAT!!

I didn’t have the heart to tell her it was a new hat, figuring it probably wouldn’t lower the volume. I started to tell her she needed a …. stopped myself, then said, aw, let’s quit here, why don’t we? When the song ended, I grabbed The mizzus from across the room and left. Good times at the diner, obviously, are back.

I got a message a few days ago from a friend’s wife that my buddy was in the hospital and not doing very well, maybe I ought to hustle down there before it was too late. So I dropped what I was doing, jumped in the jalopy and headed south to the hospital where I worked graveyard shift weekends for ten long years back in the 80’s. If you want to hop a time machine, this is one way to do it. That Pain Motel was small back when I started, had an ER with maybe 4 or 5 rooms that burned up in a fire about 1982, then had one with about 10 but now sports 70 or so. Big city hospital.

I parked in the multi-story garage, got my temperature checked at the front door, followed signage to one of the two 8 story towers that now engulf my old haunts, took an elevator up to what they euphemistically called the End of Life Wing, got my buddy’s room number at the nurses’ station and went to the end of the hall to see him. His son was coming out of his room and we introduced ourselves. He said he had to step out a few minutes, that Dad was in a coma, had been for the past two days, but go on in, he might wake up any moment. Disappointed that I got there too late to find my pal conscious, I went in and sat down. After a few long minutes where I never saw a muscle twitch or a nostril hair ruffle, I finally put my hand on his forehead to check for temperature.

Now, I’m no doctor and I don’t play one on TV, but I did work in that hospital for 10 years so when I tell you he was dead, you can be pretty sure he was. There were no monitors attached to see if it had gone flatline, but this was, after all, the End of Life Wing. I stayed awhile longer, said my piece just in case and headed out. His son was exiting the elevator as I was entering. ‘You leaving already?’ he asked. ‘Yeah, kind of a poor conversation,’ I said. ‘Stick around, he might wake up any minute.’

I’m not entirely immune to the idea of a miracle. Like I said, I worked there ten years and saw plenty of death and dying and okay, once in a blue moon someone come back to life in one of our Code Red drills in the ER. You get inured to pain, blood, horror, suffering and death working there. You see people who should have died but didn’t and you see folks who died when they shouldn’t have. My friend’s dying was no surprise, just a bit early and unannounced. I didn’t say to his kid his dad was gone and he ain’t coming back. Hope isn’t a fool’s errand, but then again, there always came a time when we stopped CPR and quit putting the paddles to the patient. The doc sometimes would ask us assembled in the room if anyone had any ideas. We never did. And no one ever said, let’s stick around, the patient might wake up any minute. Then again, the patient was never our father.

Okay, let’s stop the wishy-washy denials from the Radical Left, those poor saps who think Trump was a latter day Fuhrer bent on destroying American democracy. C’mon, the man was an exemplar of the Ayn Rand homage to capitalist captains of industry and commerce. He built the Trump Tower, after all, and it stood up to the 9-11 attack on the other towers. You think God didn’t have a hand in all of that? Of course he did! That’s why Donald J. Trump is the Chosen One!!!!

Maybe you didn’t notice the last four years or so most of the churches, the white churches anyway, supported Mr. Trump. If they didn’t believe the man was a serial porn star adulterer who cheated on his wonderful wife Melania, why would you? And they didn’t think he was a tax cheat, not for one Leviticus minute, no sir, he was doing what any of us with a few billion dollars would do, hire the best tax attorneys and take every deduction this corrupt Congress offered. When you’re rich — and everyone in America has the same opportunity to be rich — you’ll change your tune. And trust me on this, God wants you to be rich. He is, after all, on the dollar bill. So forget about trusting me, trust Him. Like Donald J. Trump, he wants you to be wealthy. And no, he doesn’t want your taxes wasted on welfare cheats, immigrants or alternative energy. Give me a break, if God wants to change the climate, there’s nothing you can do to stop that.

Anyone with half a brain knows that the End Times are upon us. You may not want to admit it, but deep down in your snowflake heart you can hear the drumbeats picking up. Global warming? That’s just the furnace of Hell getting closer. At least for you. For those of us who’ve been expecting the Second Coming, President Trump was the answer to our prayers. He moved the capital of Israel back to Jerusalem, didn’t he? Prophesies, partner, Apocalypse Now, baby!
Just like the Good Book predicted and it’s no coincidence Donald J. Trump’s favorite book was the Bible. Old and New both! Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth! Oh, he was sent here all right. To do the Lord’s bidding! You unbelievers, all you libtard politically correct crybabies, hard times are coming for you, hot times like nothing you can imagine.

No, God is a Republican. And vengeance is His, He saith. Tremble before His might, His terrible sword is coming down, His wrath will be like nothing you’ve ever witnessed and Congress will be returned to the GOP. Let it be written. Let it be done. Thank God for God!