The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

No doubt some of you revelers are wondering if we’re going to have our annual New Year’s Party this Year of Our Covid 2020, maybe figuring after 3 decades of these if we didn’t we’d have to leave town and hang a sign on the door saying
PARTY CANCELED THIS YEAR
SEE YOU SURVIVORS IN 2021.

If you’re still wondering, the answer is you need to get more than a vaccination when they’re available. Trump lost the election, the world is round once again and sadly this coronavirus isn’t a hoax. Someone asked if we might have a Zoom Party instead. We assume they had been celebrating a couple weeks too early. The idea of a festive zoom party has all the fizz of a non-alcohol champagne. Better than that would be a return to the pre-party days of falling asleep on the couch by 10 pm waiting for the ball to drop in Times Square on your black and white TV. In other words, hell no. We’d rather have a power point presentation of past parties than sit through a night of Zoom waiting for midnight, bad video, sound that glitches and disembodied voices. Our fervent resolution for New Years is NO MORE VIRTUAL SOCIAL TIME.

So sadly we’ve bagged our New Year celebration this year. We’ve asked Santa for a couple of vaccinations and two senators from Georgia which would mean next year’s bash will be exactly that. Meanwhile, hunker down, avoid friends and family, wear a mask and for godsake, stay off social media, no point living through the coronavirus only to contract brain rot. This plague will end and like the saying says, what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger. And if you believe that, by all means, come on over for our non-existent New Year’s Party.

So the Pope is now an Art Critic as well as the Last Word on morality. I’m not clear on how baby Jesus and Joseph and Mary got approved as cosmonaut religious icons and I’m really not sure why anyone would think the Pontiff would endorse a nativity scene that looked like a scene on the cutting room floor of Aliens, but geez, couldn’t he lighten up a bit? He’s accepted homosexuals, why not avante-garde artists? Maybe even offer up an encyclical giving contemporary sculptors a pathway into Heaven? Modern art, it seems safe to say, isn’t the Holy See’s cup of tea.

I hate to say it, but the guy sounds like a Philistine. Don’t get me wrong, I got plenty of friends who are philistines, who think maybe I should tone my own stuff down and maybe do some nice sailboats and Victorian windows and even colorful flowers. Not because they worry that I’m going straight to Hell, just that this modern stuff leaves them cold. I mean, what IS that you got here, Skeeter? Is it my damn job to figure it out? It’s like those paintings by that guy Piccollo or whoever with two eyes on one side of a backwards face? C’mon, I never met anybody looked like that? D’jou??

Give me that old time religion, apparently. Renaissance art and forget the Campbell’s soup crap. Back here in Crazy Land, Trump just mandated that any new government buildings in Washington D.C. have to be ‘classic’ architecture. That new fangled stuff, forget about it, nobody likes it, nobody wants it, nobody is willing to pay for it. Right. Hitler hated modern art too. Degenerate art, I think was his term. Trump’s? Who knows what goes on in that gerbil caged brain of his? You ever seen his baroque apartment, the one with the gold toilet, probably all you need to know. The man thinks he’s in Versailles. Without the waiting guillotines….

Hitler sure had some nice buildings. Sturdy stuff. Brutal to some, but hey, brutal’s in the eye or the gunsight of the beholder. Trump maybe thinks his Reich will last a thousand years too. The Pope’s has. Why not lock in for another couple millenia? Personally, and I sure don’t want to offend any philistines, stagnation doesn’t seem like much of an aesthetic. Innovation, experimentation, evolution, change … well, it may not be the gold toilet standard, but last time I looked, the world was hurtling into the future whether we decided to rebuild Rome again or not. These folks don’t want to learn from the past, they want to live in it.

  Back in the less consumer-driven days of early Christmas, we South Enders would hang our stockings by the chimney with great care. Mostly so they wouldn’t catch fire…I mean, we used that chimney for heat.  How Santa was going to get down the brick chute without scorching those red pajamas of his, us young’uns didn’t have a clue.  So we worried about St. Nick.  Well, mostly we worried he wouldn’t leave us anything at all while he was hustled off to the nearest burn unit.   Our parents told us not to lose any sleep over it – Santa probably had fire retardant uniforms.  Oh, right, like Kris Kringle moonlighted as a chemist half the year.       

    But Santa always did seem to find the South End on Christmas …  which didn’t help to explain the half empty stockings and the paucity of presents under the tree every year at our house.  We kids just figured Santa had checked his stupid list, probably twice, and we were blacklisted on the NAUGHTY side once again.  We even used to leave cookie bribes and a jug of something savory to drink when he showed up.  It was odd how the jug was always empty and still, the stockings were sadly deficient.  Pa always said the reindeer must’ve been thirsty and we’d say, hey, if Donder and Blitzen could find their way here and down a burning chimney with a 6 inch hole to the woodstove, how come St. Nick couldn’t find us?  And Ma would give Pa a dirty look and say, something was Blitzen all right, but it wasn’t the reindeer….

     Santa finds the South End pretty easily now, I’m telling you.  Come Christmas morning it looks like a China R Us down the middle of the living room, barely room to squeeze near the tree.  Nowadays we don’t leave Santa a plate of cookies.  He expects an ATM machine and a Visa Card.  Christmas down on the South End lasts and lasts – about 12 easy payments, then it starts all over ….

Neighbor, do you wake up mornings, look out your window over a cup of your favorite roasted coffee and discover the suburb you left behind two short years ago has followed you here to Paradise? Does it seem like four of your next door neighbors are saluting you with their Starbuck’s coffee? At night does it look like the sky is glowing an eerie electronic blue from 17 TV’s flickering out every living room window? During the day does it seem like every retiree from here to Elger Bay is mowing his weed and feed lawn on a precision close-order drill of riding John Deeres? Do you find yourself daydreaming of a place in the country where you’re the only lucky fella in the subdivision? Friend, stop thinking the grass is gonna be greener somewhere else… You know the chemical fertilizers aren’t any more effective there.

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I just saw a survey that showed where 30% of kids under the age of 4 years old have a TV in their room. Granted that Mom and Dad want their child not to feel deprived. No one, not even kidless me, wants a maladaptive, potentially hostile punk menacing his or her fellow pre-schoolers because of a deliberately imposed TV deficiency. Plus, it’s a great solution for a 2 year old’s fear of the dark. Boogieman under the bed? Believe me, he’ll pale in comparison to the nightly news.

I remember sitting in front of our first TV – a small box on metal legs with a rabbit ear antenna on top – waiting for Howdy Doody to come on down in the pre-dawn livingroom while we stared at the Indian chief test signal. TV didn’t program 24/7. No, it had the decency to Sign Off at 11 or midnight, let your brain de-fuzz awhile. Us kids would sneak a flashlight under the covers and read a book. At least until the Old Man came in and told us to go to sleep….

Obviously 30% of you don’t find anything wrong with parking a TV in the nursery. But I do. It feels like the scene in Invasion of the Body Snatchers where the parents — who’ve been snatched already — put the space pod under their kids’ beds. Somehow I doubt the tots are watching PBS. More likely they’re tuning in to 30 commercials an hour, making mental notes for what cereal to whine for or what candy bar or toy or the car they’ll want at 16. Might as well join us adults in the Consumer Nation. Plus it’s a great babysitter. Don’t worry about attention deficiency when they reach 6. They’ll have a computer by then.

Tomorrow I’ll probably see the study that 50% of kids under 7 have their own credit card. Just order up what they want with their I-phone and have it delivered overnight. Call now — our advertisers are standing by.

The other day I bought a bag of Frito-Lay potato chips and as is my wont from my early reading days as an 8 year old studying cereal boxes, I read the packaging. These potatoes, I was informed in a tidy paragraph written by public relations specialists who had no doubt conducted extensive customer surveys, were FARM-RAISED. Imagine! I’m guessing grown right in the ground. Tractors, fields, insecticides, migrant labor: farm raised. BOLD TYPE. Major advertising feature. The oils used were ‘natural’ too and this was worth trumpeting.

Holy cow manure, Batman, what’s the NEXT big thing in the food biz? Cheetos raised hydroponically? Personally I’m not sure consumers are really ready for food grown in the wild. Bugs, fungus, bacteria, all that creepy stuff a farmer is ill-equipped to handle outside a laboratory or a petri dish. We can grow meat without legs now, protein on a rope, and rumor has it the burger chains are nearing a breakthrough on cloning buns, with or without sesame seeds, directly on to the meat patty grown in secret underground hermetically sealed bunkers of Monsanto and Dow Chemical. You think they’re going to stick a filthy leaf of lettuce or a listeria riddled tomato on their antiseptically pure chemoWhopper? Get real. Not….

This whole Slow Food movement just flies in the face of 21st century culinary logic. We invented TV dinners so we’d have the time to watch more TV instead of wasting countless hours messing with the cooking of raw potentially contaminated food. These purveyors of old school eating call themselves environmentalists, but what about the damage from a bazillion cookbooks printed on paper from slaughtered trees? Next thing you know, they’ll advocate recipes for bark. A backlash is coming, count on that, the next step beyond vegetarianism. Stop eating plants. Stop the killing of carrots. It’s not only cruel, it’s filthy with germs and dirt. So Frito-Lay, nice try. But I’m afraid the world isn’t ready — we’ve turned the corner on 19th century farm products. Work on

We all got such short little spans of attention these days, we’re like deer in the median strip of the 6 lane digital highway. Used to be we prized skills like concentration, stick-to-it-ness, focus, diligence, all those traits that are long lost to anyone unlucky enough to own a television or a computer. Now we admire Multi-Taskers, jugglers of e-mail, news crawls, Facebook, text messages and a cellphone conversation while whipping up a dinner for the family between commercials during Fox news. Call me Old School, put a dunce hat on me and make me sit in a corner, but I don’t buy this multi-tasking one little bit. I taught school awhile before I took an early retirement and I’ve tried to teach attention deficit kids whose sole operational mode was switching from one thought to six others in the space of a minute. Trust me —this is a prescription for not learning much of anything, plenty of little.

Deep thinking seems to be a Lost Art. Down at the South End even Shallow Thinking has taken a hike. We got computers, TV, You-Tube, Linked-In, all that stuff like you-all, meaning, we got 3 minute max attention spans. My pals can’t listen to a whole CD — they hit random play and make a radio station out of their CD players.

The world is on constant Channel Surf, snippets of one crummy show, check out the ball scores, click to the news crawlers, bounce through 37 channels of Nature/Food/CNN/chopped liver then start over. The internet should be banned unless we’re on Ritalin. I just hope there are people, few though they may be, living on some remote island of the Digital World, maybe its south tail end, who can still Concentrate, who can plan and build — from start to finish without checking their stock quotations — a nuclear reactor or a Boeing 747 or a skyscraper or a cure for brain cancer.

I had hoped to end this on some pithy, humorous, neatly bundled conclusion — I really had. But … damn if I can remember where we started. Something about crummy memory, I think. All I can say is Alzheimer’s should hold no fear for most of us. We’ve already programmed ourselves for it…..

Merry Christmas, Everyone! I guess it’s okay to say Christmas, but if you find that offensive, Happy Holidays! This has been a great year for the Daddle family and as we do every year, we like to share our glad tidings. Daughter Brenda went back to community college after her degree from Swarthmore proved less than marketable. She is taking Business Accounting and expects to find much better prospects after graduation. We told her English Renaissance History narrowed her career chances, but you know kids these days. A year working for Burger King as an ‘essential worker’ convinced her to change her major. Even with the minimum wage increase that’s coming.

Son #1 Jeremiah served his 9 months and two weeks at the Snohomish County Jail for some breaking and entering. Drugs! You think you’ve warned them about the consequences but they think we’re just old fogies. Jerry should be fine after his Narcotics Anonymous regimen. For the time being he’s comfortable in the basement apartment Linda and I set up. Sure, I miss the pool table, but family always comes first! And it’s great to have him home again, even if we have to lock up our valuables and continually need to quarantine when he exposes us to the Covid his friends seem to always bring to the party.

Son #2 has joined a religious commune down near Santa Cruz. Brian is not supposed to contact his earthly family so we haven’t got much news to report. Occasionally he writes for money and we are happy to help out. Well, Linda is, I confess it irks me no end to send that little twerp anything beyond a message to Wake Up! But these things too shall pass, isn’t that what they say?

Linda is doing much better this year. As you might remember she struggled with some mild depression. Empty nest syndrome is what I thought it was, nothing she wouldn’t pass through soon. Boy, was I ever wrong this time! But her doctor has her on some very effective medications and her crying has greatly lessened. Jerry has been a great help. Sometimes he even makes his own lunches.

Retirement, as a friend of mine likes to say, is greatly underrated. Oh, I struggled a little with boredom at first. Like everyone. But right after my heart attack in February (not to worry, I’m okay, just a couple of stents) I started walking more. You know I never really liked exercise of any sort, but that ticker-tweet kicked me in the butt to get up off the couch and get outdoors. I’ve been walking every day. Truthfully, I walk almost all day. Linda says I’m obsessed, but I say a walk a day keeps the cardiologist away. I tried to talk Linda into walking with me, but she says 20 miles is too much for her. Ha ha. Her sense of humor is coming back!

We did make a couple of trips this year. One to Santa Cruz to see Son #2 at his Seeing Orb Commune, but we were told at the security gate no one was allowed inside, not even parents. Admittedly things got slightly out of hand and the sheriff’s office had to intervene, but in the end I settled down — without some damn mantra — and we drove to the coast and stayed at a very nicely restored auto court overlooking the beach before driving back home.

We also attended a Trump rally in October up at Lynden. The man can connect with an audience, I’ll say that, and we were happily surprised when he won again this year for another four year stint. He’s making America great again and even though I know some of you didn’t vote for Mr. Trump, I think you must to be pleasantly surprised. The business of America is business and this is a billionaire businessman. Okay, enough politics….

Hope you and your family have a warm holiday. We in the Daddle household are going to make Christmas Great Again. It will be Yuge, as Donald says. Ha ha! I mean Ho Ho! Love at ya! Linda and Jeremiah and Skeeter

Jihad Jack was parked in his usual spot at the beer-stained bar in the Pilot House, the South End Marina’s answer to marriage counseling. Any divorce attorney worth his margarita salt would drink nightly down there and write off his bar tab as a legitimate business expense. Jack was twirling his plastic trident in a concoction he’d gotten Brad, the usual bartender during Happy Hour, to ‘create’ for him, something with multiple boozes, eye of newt and a dash of habanero sauce. Jihad called it his Fox News Cocktail since he always watched it on the big screen directly in front of his customary stool.

“There it is,” he hollered so every manjack of us would halt our own conversation for his. “Cornavirus” he cried. “First E-bola and now it’s Covid! You tellin me it’s a coincidence?”

As usual us assembled drinkers began to choose sides, sort of touch football without a football, just fire a pass out over the seating area and see who wouold risk catching the hot potato. “What’s your point, Jack?” Jesse asked, as if he didn’t guess. “You think the government brought this here?”

“Damn right they brought it here,” Jack replied, “just like AIDS.”

Pete set his beer aside and asked, grinning, “What would be their strategy, Jack?”

“They want to inoculate us, can’t you see?? They want to make you bring your kids in and shoot them full of vaccines and autism. Who knows what’s in those shots?”

Dave, two stools downriver, who’s a Physician’s Assistant at the South End Clinic, took his glasses off to study this guy Jack. “You kidding me?” he finally asked. “We got measles cured. We vaccinated kids and it worked. That’s all you have to do. Vaccinate the population. It’s like polio. There’s a cure!”

Jihad Jack smirked. “Yeah, and you want to fluoridate the water too, I bet! The government’s got no right — NONE! — to tell me what to do.” Dave shook his head. “It’s like living in the Dark Ages, that attitude,” he muttered and returned to his beer.

“At least they didn’t have to study propaganda as history, Doc.” Dave half finished his glass and headed for the door. The Pilot House, most nights, is pretty rudderless. Trouble is, it’s the only watering hole for a long ways.

So okay, let’s say you’re in charge of who gets the first doses of the vaccines for coronavirus. Wait, let’s say I get to decide who goes to the top of the line. Nothing against you, but the whole point of this exercise is determining who makes these decisions. Rumor has it there’s a bunker somewhere under the Appalachian Mountains, a safe house, for bio ethicists brought in from who knows where to make the call who goes first, decide who waits while the pandemic keeps on killing. Life and death, who plays God?

The government, that’s who. The same government half of us think is a Deep State conspiracy, the government who created this phony baloney epidemic hoax so they could force us to wear plague masks and then probably find some excuse to take our guns. That government! But … for the time being, let’s agree that I am going to decide who gets the vaccine first, who gets it next, who gets it last. Skeeter the Beneficent, All Knowing, All Seeing, All the Damn Time! Hear me, Minions!

Okay okay, never mind, just go along with this a bit. I have to decree who gets the shots first when the vaccines are shipped in containers chilled to nearly 90 degrees below zero to the various states. First off, I may pull a Trump and deny the Red States much of the first batches. They didn’t believe this pandemic was real. They don’t wear a mask. They want to party in crowded bars and go to church and attend weddings and funerals even if the funeral will eventually be their own. But … being beneficent, I will relent and divvy up the pie equally. Based on population. Unless the Red States have undocumented immigrants they didn’t want to count in the ongoing census. We’ll go along with that, send them only based on what they wanted to count. Fair is fair and Skeeter the All Seeing is nothing, if not fair.

The bio ethicists, whoever they are and wherever they came from, want to give the first batches to the first responders, the hospital personnel, the nursing homes. Okay by me, seems obvious. Wouldn’t hardly need an ethicist to make that call. The next folks in line are the older folks, probably with underlying conditions. If I can figure out my underlying condition, I’m good with that. The old farts without underlying conditions, I assume, are next with sleeves rolled up. Probably me so I’m gonna go with this choice too. Because, as you’ve already seen, I’m fair. Maybe even the fairest of the fair.

Essential workers? You bet. Personally I might put them ahead of the elderly who smoked themselves onto a ventilator, but let’s be magnanimous here, they drove buses, checked out us customers at grocery stores, put themselves at risk same as first responders. Seems only fair they get protected right away. But you know and I do too, they’ll be at the back of the line. Minimum wage earners, essential to the rest of us with money enough to spend during the pandemic. Sorry, but you folks are young mostly. Gotta save the vaccine for us geriatrics.

Hard call, but somebody’s got to make it, right? Half of us probably won’t even take the vaccine if it’s offered. Who knows what’s in that stuff? Who knows what the long term side effects are? Who knows if it’ll even work longer than a month or two? Not that it matters. The government decided not to buy extra vaccine when they had the chance and now we’re at the back of the line for more. Sure glad they’re the ones making all the decisions, not me. If you don’t trust them, well, maybe there’ll be enough vaccine for old Skeeter.