The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I had a cousin whose husband taught in an upscale private school outside of Chicago. Some of the parents hired him part time to do maintenance and lawn work on the weekends, no doubt tossing him crumbs to supplement the low salary he was paid to teach their debutantes. One of his benefactors, upon answering the front door when Fred first came to the job for hedge trimming, refused to talk to him, informing him brusquely that the ‘help’ were required to use the back door, then unceremoniously slammed the door in his face. Welcome to the caste system, American style!

Fred must have needed the money is all I could figure because he went to the back door, knocked once more, received m’lord’s instructions and went to work manicuring his hedges. I know what I would have done, but then, easy for me to say back then since I didn’t have a wife and a kid, a mortgage, car payments, credit card debt and the rest. But the story stuck with me. And not just because my cousin actually had been a New York debutante and was the daughter of a vice president of a national tobacco company. Maybe she understood the perks and privileges of the rich and famous, let her husband lick boots, that’s how it works.

I read today that Ivanka and Jared refused to let the Secret Service agents assigned for their protection use any of their six bathrooms in their upscale digs. For a time they had a porta-potty sitting out by the street for the ‘help’ to use during those long waits. Course, the neighbors took umbrage, probably what his and her majesty wanted after complaints that the Secret Service cars were taking up precious parking spaces in their tony neighborhood, so eventually the agents had to locate other bathroom spots, everything from knocking on neighbors’ doors to using nearby businesses to relieve themselves, then finally renting a latrine in a basement for 3000 bucks a months.

I know what I would have done, fertilized the Kushner’s flower beds, but then, I’m not a patriotic civil servant with a career at stake, am I? But … I am a little weary of this kind of snobby royalty totally lacking in any sense of noblesse oblige. Just like their papa, the guy who took a tour with the Secret Service in their SUV after testing positive for Covid. I think it’s time to show these folks the back door and ask them to use it on the way out. And don’t come back.

A few days after the storming of the Bastille, King Donald has barricaded himself in the bunker of the White House, no doubt rabidly occupied with binge-watching his favorite news channels hoping to gauge the pulse of a nation that watched with incredulity the spectacle of a President encouraging his minions to march to the Capitol and stop the certification of Biden. Some dare call it treason, some merely sedition, and most call it criminal. Even his pandering former Attorney General, picked to be his personal lawyer in the Justice Department, called it outrageous and said it was time to Go.

Social media has banned his tweets and rantings. Members of his own party are considering invoking the 25th amendment, the one that removes an incapacitated president from office, Congress is eyeing impeachment once more, Cabinet loyalists are resigning while major corporations are withdrawing funding and support for the legislators who backed the move to block counting the electoral college votes. The worm has turned. With less than two weeks remaining in his term the Donald is a cornered animal, dangerous to everyone and to himself. What he might do, nobody knows including the Donald. Nasty business, politics.

Let’s be honest here and quit sugarcoating this. Trump is batshit crazy. His narcissistic balloon that’s the size of the Hindenburg dirigible is about to go up in flames. The man is a menace. The folks who toadied up to him are abandoning ship now. Apparently, even for the most loyal, a line has been crossed. Up ahead, even they can see the signpost that reads Welcome to the Twilight Zone. For the rest of us, well, we can sit smugly watching the unraveling of this Administration, say I told ya so, but we all know those yahoos that rallied behind the Trumpster and scaled the Capitol battlements are a sizeable percentage of our neighbors and friends.

They want to smash government. They don’t care how. If they can’t do it at the ballot box, by god, they’ll do it with clubs. Trump may be hauled away in a strait jacket, jabbering like an amphetamine monkey, but these folks will still be here to warn each other of the Lizard People and the phony Covid. They could care less about facts or logic, those are worthless to them. The fall of Trump will just be another warning sign. The Apocalypse is nigh, the End is near. Insanity is contagious.

Tough week for the forces of Good! The Great One, the anointed Leader who would bring the world back into the Light by leading his minions into the cavern of the Lizard People, the Capitol Building, instead drove home to watch the show on the television in his bunker. His troops scaled the battlements, broke down doors and penetrated the Halls of Darkness … only to find nobody had a plan. Not the capitol police and certainly not them. So much winning!

And worse! The twitter feed of their Anointed One was cut off at the neck. The President was banned from sending messages to his minions. What does this mean, the confused followers wondered. Some said the riots were the work of fake flag brearing Antifa soldiers, pretending to be the followers of the GodKing, but actually the footsoldiers of the Satanist pedophiles who feigned fear in the chambers of the evil, their goal to ultimately humiliate the President and delay the Storm, that day of reckoning when the deep state traitors are finally brought to their deserved desserts.

Trump had promised to reveal the Truth of the election frauds, not that his people needed proof. What they needed was the Plan. They needed him to mount his steed and ascend the steps in front of their angry legions. They needed a hero. They needed encouraging tweets. Once inside the bastions of iniquity, nobody knew what to do. Oh, sure, they stole a lectern and sat in Nancy I-eat-children- Pelosi’s desk. They scribbled some encouraging graffiti on the walls and busted up some furniture, strewed some file cabinet evidence of crimes against nature committed by the enemy pretending to cower in congressional chambers. But … what to do next? Did they miss the secret message? Did Donald give them a clue that they just didn’t decipher?

Or … whoa! Was this actually part of the Plan? Was this a ruse to make the evildoers rise up and try once more to impeach their Savior? Ho ho, wouldn’t that create a backlash out in the backwash?! The Lizard People might just have overplayed their hand! The Storm was coming after all! Inauguration Day might just be the promised reckoning. The imposter Biden would be revealed for the cannibal fraud he is, the socialist menace, the sick pederast who, once the Truth was known, would be the one who would be stepping down. Trump would ascend the podium, Trump would be President another term, possibly more. That must be the Plan! The Storm was coming and the Storm was coming soon! Bet your sweet tweet on that!

I only had one serious New Year’s Resolution this year. No, not to improve myself by reading more. Not to exercise more. Not to be kinder to my fellow man. Not to quit swearing, not to watch less TV, not to quit drinking, not to work harder, none of that stuff. No, my one and only resolution was to put politics in the rearview, stop being a news junkie, let the country take a nap with Sleepy Joe at the wheel now that Donald J. Trump was tossed on the ash heap of history, a pathetic little loser who would spend the remainder of his pathetic little life in courtrooms and hopefully in a jail cell where he could write his three volume memoirs with all the time in the world.

Four years of this spoiled brat of a man was plenty. Every day seven days a week four weeks a month twelve months a year for four long years the billionaire king intruded on my serenity like a roof leak dripping on my favorite things until they turned soggy and mildewed, drip drip drip until I thought I would lose my mind. The man lived to be in the spotlight. It was all he wanted. Me me me, wah wah wah, as incessant as a rash of poison ivy, scratch me scratch me scratch me til it bleeds and spreads and spreads some more. No end to it, just one outrage after another, mindless infuriating idiocy, the bleating of a baby who wants food all day and all night. It was as if insanity was forever knocking on the door of my head wanting in, wanting to use the bathroom, wanting to borrow the phone, wanting to eat my dinner, wanting to watch TV, let me in, let me in, let me in!

But he lost the election and for awhile that knocking on my door grew more distant. He seemed to have retreated to his rat cage in the back of the White House to nurse his grudge, refused to talk to reporters, maybe left the spotlight for awhile. My resolution seemed safe. No more Trump. No more stupid politics. The adults were back in charge. Sure, not nearly as exciting but hey, exactly what I needed for awhile. He could start his own TV talk show, okay by me, I wouldn’t be tuning in. Tweet your heart out, loser, I don’t have an account. Move down to Mar-a-Lago, it’s as far from the South End as anyplace in America, far far away, not even close to my radar.

No telling what the next few weeks bring. A call for the military to overturn the election? Make Jared ambassador to Mars? Call a few more governors or Secretary of States where he lost to Biden? Pack the Supreme Court with his Medal of Freedom recipients, folks like Rush Limbaugh and Jim Jordan? Buy Greenland? Attack Iran and nuke North Korea? Mandate no mask wearing? Arrest Sleepy Joe? Who knows? What I do know is my New Year’s Resolution is in shreds. It looks like a long year again. Maybe next New Year I’ll keep my vow….

Yesterday I got one of those calls I really hate to get, the ones where the caller asks if I have my TV on. Last times I got one of those the Trade Towers had been hit by commercial jetliners and the Challenger had blown up after launch with all on board. Nervously I turned on the television. Had Trump bombed Iran?

Or maybe it was just the earth shattering news that Georgia had elected two Democratic senators in the runoffs. Good news for me, maybe not for Moscow Mitch. But I didn’t really expect to get good news and for once I was right. The screenshot of the first channel to pop up was like the movie World War Z where the zombies are crawling on each other’s backs to scale the barrier walls protecting the humans on the other side. Mobs of folks were storming the nation’s capitol building where, I knew, Congress was in the process of certifying the electoral college votes. Giant Trump banners and American flags and Confederate too were dragging the ground as the mob pushed up the stairs, clambered over the walls, climbed the scaffolding, a seething angry wave of people surrounding the Capitol, breaking windows, breaching barriers, busting down doors. The news moderators were incredulous. So was I.

Cut to a few scenes inside. Legislators on the floor, huddling with their cellphones, fearing for their lives, gunfire in the background. Protestors dropping into the chambers from above, sitting in the office chairs of Senators and Representatives, smashing glass while the Capitol police aimed revolvers in their faces.

When the first Tower collapsed, I still remember the feeling that this couldn’t be happening, all those people inside descending to streetlevel, all those people dead. Could a skyscraper collapse like that? Watching the chaos inside the Capitol Building, I thought the same thing, can this be happening? Where were the National Guardsmen, the DC cops, the Secret Service? Could rioters just walk right in while every Senator and Representative were inside, trapped and at their mercy? Could this happen in America?

Well … yes it can. The President, the same fellow who’d spoken to these folks earlier and asked them to take their grievances to the Capitol, watched it, just like you and me, on TV. His attorney, the former hero mayor of the city of the Twin Towers, had urged them to resort to ‘trial by combat’ if the phony elections giving Biden the win weren’t overturned. Whatever we thought America was yesterday, it isn’t the same today.

What it will be tomorrow is in the hands of the people who enabled the Man in the High Tower, knowing all along he was unfit to be the leader of a democratic country. Courage may be in short supply, but the fear they felt yesterday might be the greater catalyst.

I don’t know about you, but I was looking forward to a brand new year with partisan politics in the rearview for awhile. Sleepy Joe could run the government with eyes closed, you know, while he was taking his afternoon nap, and maybe everybody would calm down for awhile, take a breather, focus on getting past this plague. But no, one hundred and forty GOP Representatives and a dozen Republican Senators intend to refuse to ratify the electoral college votes this week. They claim the election was fraudulent, the voting booths were removed, zombies voted, the ballots were counted multiple times, aliens manipulated the results and blacks and latinx votes should be thrown out. Vice President Pence mumbled that yes, Congress should look into these irregularities, discrepancies we all know exist.

I’m apparently living in CrazyTown. The President took an hour yesterday from his intense Covid management to call the Sec. of State in Georgia to implore, to whine, to wheedle and finally to threaten him to find about 12,000 votes to put him over the top. Last time I looked, even if he won the Peach State, he comes up short. He already tried to twist the arms of the Michigan folks. He’s lost about 100 times in state and federal courts to show the least amount of irregularities, some tossing out his lawsuits with disdain and contempt. This would all be, as one justice characterized the suit brought before him, laughable … if this were a sitcom.

But it’s not a sitcom, it’s potentially a national crisis. And we already have one of those in the coronavirus plague that’s killed over a third of a million of us, much of it due to negligence on the part of this Administration, one of the many reasons Trump lost by 7 million votes. That’s a lot of Venezuelan zombies to account for. Even adding in the Lizard People who may have voted too.

CrazyTown will be a Netflix original, unless I’ve missed my guess, but the last thing I need — and you either — is a bingewatch of further outrages by this sore loser and his gutless sycophants. Threatening the Sec. of State unless he alters the election results is a federal crime. It’s impeachable if we had the time or the courage, but of course, the vocal defenders of the Constitution won’t lift a finger. Not even the second time. Is this a great country or what?

So you thought the New Year would be better than the last, didn’t you? You thought maybe a regime change would do the trick. Or that vaccine would cure what might ail ya. You thought things couldn’t get any worse now that the election was over. Well, that light you saw at the end of the long dark tunnel of 2020 could just be a train headlight bearing down on you. And the new year has barely begun.

If you were thinking Donald J. Trump was leaving office in a few short weeks, here’s your first clue that nothing much has changed. He ain’t going anywhere. He’s not conceding, he’s not playing by any bogus rules of a few hundred years of succession, no sir, he’s screaming foul! The elections were rigged, they were hacked, dead people voted in zombie apocalypse numbers, mail in ballots were a fraud, the whole thing was phony just like the fake news that insists Sleepy Joe won by 7 million votes. No, Donald J. Trump does not lose. Nobody fires the greatest president in American history. Nobody!

Ted Cruz is leading the crusade to stop this week’s certification of Sleepy Joe. He and nearly a dozen of his fellow senators want a commission to investigate the worst fraud in our country’s long experiment with democracy. They want to overturn the election results based on their certainty the votes were wrong, the votes were bogus, the votes were phony, the votes were really for Donald J. Trump. Any fool can see that. The Proud Boys can see that. Over one hundred representatives in the House could see that. Biden didn’t win this election, not by a long shot, and a panel commissioned by Ted and his pals will prove that without a doubt or one whit of evidence. Take their word for it, Trump won.

You can bet that most of those Senators are either running for president in 2024 or their own seat in the next couple of elections. Pence, who has about as much chance of being the GOP candidate as Mister Ed the Talking Horse, waffles on this one too, first asking not to have the lawsuit invalidating the certification of the electoral college votes, then saying he welcomes Team Cruz’s efforts to investigate possible fraud in the states that Biden won. Profile in courage, not too much. Say adios, Mike. We hardly knew ya. But what we knew was plenty.

So if you thought 2021 would be a fresh start, hang onto your crying towel. The jackals are in the tunnel too. They smell blood on the tracks and they’re howling for meat. If you think democracy doesn’t hang in the balance, you must have been quarantined with Covid most of last year hooked up to a ventilator. We have met the enemy and for once I can tell you, he isn’t us….

As you may have read doomscrolling through your Qanon feed, the Lizard People are among us. These alien reptiles, according to very reputable sources on the internet sites that were created to warn the unsuspecting prey in our naïve ranks, have infiltrated Hollywood and the governments of the world. Bob Hope, according to the Lizard experts, was one of them. So is Queen Elizabeth and George W. Bush. Hillary and Bill Clinton too. Henry Kissinger might not be a surprise to some of you, but he’s an alien reptile as well.

These extraterrestrial human imposters are so deeply entrenched in our society it’s nearly impossible to distinguish them from the tail-less ordinary lizards who make your everyday life a living hell. The deep state existed long before our present era, let me tell you. Freemasons, you bet, all lizards from beyond the galaxy. Illuminati, bet your scales on them being monsters from Mars! In fact, the penetration of these flesh eating Silurians into our governments and our entertainment industry is so pervasive, it’s difficult, if not damn near impossible, to tell the aliens from the two legged humans they impersonate.

What is so manifestly needed here is a Guide to Lizard People Identification. You need to know if that person next to you in the Safeway line, the one who refuses to wear a plague mask, is actually just a Trump supporter who thinks the election was rigged and the virus is a hoax, not a flesh eating reptilian who isn’t buying groceries for dinner because he’s got a pantry full of your neighbors. You need to know the difference, my friend.

The Democrats who abduct children for their sexual pleasure and their beastly appetites, at first glance might seem prime candidates for Lizard classification. But as you know, they have a secret basement in the one story pizza joint in D.C. A little too obvious, don’t you think? The last thing they would do is set up shop in a pizza parlor with menu items like spleen of Mormons or tongue of Caucasians. Think about it, these aren’t stupid geckos, they’re interplanetary travelers. No, those Democrats are ordinary folks just like you and me … with peculiar tastes.

How about Mitch McConnell, you ask? Looks like a turtle, slinks around on his scaly belly, does untold harm to the human race. Afraid not, once again. Just your run-of-the-mill self-serving politician. He eats flies for breakfast, not humans. In other words, sometimes diet is an indicator. Not those Democrats, however, who do eat human flesh, but I didn’t say this would be clear cut, now did I?

Long forked tongues make for quick ID. And scales behind their ears if you care to get close enough to look, which I don’t advise. Claws instead of fingernails are pretty good clue. And hissing sounds, a real tell-tale. Check for a secondary eyelid and for vertical pupils, almost always a positive identifier. Tailored clothes to hide a prehensile tail isn’t as clear cut, but combined with other known traits, it’s useful information. A double row of razor sharp teeth are a give-away if the reptiles unclench their scowl, which is not often.

I know you want to ask if the Trump is one of them. Some say he’s the alpha lizard, but before you make a rash judgement, consider this. Qanon has identified him as the hero crusader who will save planet Earth from these flesh eating monsters. My own take is a bit more measured. I don’t think he’s completely human, but I can’t, with certainty, declare him a Lizard Person. A lizard, yes, but not the extra-terrestrial kind. I could be wrong.

Wow, just when you thought you’d gotten to know the man …. After all, you’ve been deluged for four long years by an incessant torrent of tweets that reveal ten times a day what a spoiled rich brat this guy is. He was the horrorshow punk in the Twilight Episode who would turn his family members into animals if they hurt his delicate feelings, even make them disappear forever. He was a monster, that kid, and that kid is still getting his feelings hurt in the rat-cage of the White House. He’s pissed. Nobody dares go near the room where he’s raging, not if they value their careers. They can hear the furniture being smashed and the dinners thrown against the historic wallpaper. Horrible noises all night long. Wailing and gnashing of teeth. Ranting about the Fox News betrayal, yelling at an imaginary Bill Barr.

You go in and tell him he lost the election. See how he takes the news. The only people going in that wreckage of a room are the sycophants who want him to declare martial law, confiscate suspicious voting machines, appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Biden’s boy. Toadies who tell him what he knows to be true: he won. He won by a landslide. And where are his loyal followers? McConnell and Pence, they’ve abandoned him. Half the Republicans are saying he may not be president another four years. You can hear him howling their names, vowing revenge. They’ll be sorry, the bastards. They’ll pay! This thing isn’t over yet, not by a long shot. He’ll campaign against these traitors!! He’ll ruin them! And if he has to destroy the Republican Party to do it, by god, he’ll wreak havoc on these people, these creeps. He’ll bring the temple to the ground!! He’ll pardon all his cronies. He’ll pardon his family. He’ll pardon himself, not that he has anything to be pardoned for, just so he can show them who runs this show.

Lost? LOST??? He’ll show them who lost. Donald J. Trump does not lose. Donald J. Trump is a winner!! So much winning we will get tired of it. Biden, president? Give him a break! Sleepy Joe won? Don’t make him laugh. We’ll see who gets the last laugh. If it means dragging down the entire country, that’s what it means. Nobody, and I mean nobody, tells Donald J. Trump he lost that phony election. He’s a winner, He won by a landslide. The rest is fake news. He’s been telling you that for a long time. Half of you know he’s telling the truth. The rest of you will learn the hard way.

Some of the boys down here on the South End were deep into a night of nog over at the Tyee Store and Saloon when the subject of New Year’s Resolutions reared its ugly head.  We’d pretty much solved most of the burning issues of the day that Congress can’t or won’t address, and with world peace close at hand and a solution for global economic recovery looming in our fevered LED’s, we naturally turned to self-improvement, the final obstacle to Nirvana.

     Self-improvement, in case you’ve never met a dyed-in-the-alpaca-wool South Ender, isn’t high on his Honey-Do List.  If it’s on the list at all…..  I’m not saying we don’t think we could use some polishing, but all those so-called vices other folks resolve every January One to curb or cut back on or eradicate completely, are those very traits we hold in high esteem.  We sure aren’t in any hurry to canonize ourselves.  We aren’t aiming for perfection.  Okay, maybe we could stand a bit of sprucing up, but we all know what a slippery slope that is.  Mabana Mike quit the bottle for 13 weeks two New Years ago and by the 3rd week he was an insufferable convert not only to Sobriety but worse, Piety.  Every day was like an AA meeting with Mike and he might as well have started his own church, passed out nicotine patches and offered  up 3 more cups of decaf coffee to the gods of abstinence.

     No, we decided long ago it’s better to accept our little blemishes and move on the best we can.  You live in a Shangri-La-La like we do, you don’t want many more monks claiming blissful enlightenment.  Next thing you know hordes of tourists seeking Truth, Wisdom and the South End Way will be clogging our backwash blacktop.  Plus, Tyee Store isn’t legally zoned for monasteries or temples.  We’ll probably just save everyone the grief and skip the resolutions again this New Year.  Good luck, though, to the rest of you….