The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

A friend’s son, newly graduated from college, mentioned to me the other day that I should consider ‘monetizing’ this blog. Apparently he confused me with a blogger who has an audience of more than a handful of layabouts on the South End. Shortly after the Election of 2016 I listened to a Southern California dude who had put out faux news stories impugning Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. He claimed he had tried to plant fake stories about Trump too, but, he said, the folks on the Donkey side of the political aisle weren’t nearly as gullible as the Trumpists. He felt bad, he said, that stories like his had cost Clinton the election — he had even voted for her — but that’s the way the ball bounces.

The interviewer asked if he would continue to print faux news stories and he said he was considering desisting, but … geez, he was making 6 figures and he had a mortgage and a family to support. It was going to be a hard call. “How did you find me, anyway?” he wanted to know.

Let’s see, on one side, honesty and integrity; on the other, outrageous lies and money, the more outlandish, the more money. Call me cynical and tell me to go play by myself, but I’m betting our friend holds his nose and keeps printing what sells. Me, I’m accustomed to poverty. Plus, we don’t have a mortgage. And we don’t have any outstanding loans and, well, we never did. So maybe it’s easier for me than this lowlife Southern California creep to walk away from dirty money.

And oh, if you were wondering about the headline of today’s blog, it’s just a trial balloon. I mean, how will I really know if I would turn down 6 figures if I don’t actually make 6 figures? This is called research and development. So … thank you for your help. I sure couldn’t do it without you loyal readers. And here’s a sneak preview of tomorrow’s headline: Trump Fails Urine Test! Again!

Feel free to forward this to friends and sponsors.

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These are dark days in the Funhouse. I know, I keep saying I’ll leave politics alone for awhile, maybe bring the firewood in from the back 40 or even tend to my so-called career. But honest to God and Abe Lincoln, how do you ignore the tweetstorm from our Comb-over-in-Chief when every day he drops a Breitbomb on the lying press? Yesterday he called Obama the lowest of the low for ordering a wiretap on his people in the Trump Tower. Proof? He don’t need no stinking proof?

Proof was so Then. We’re working on an entirely different political paradigm here. The media are the liars, not the liar himself. In a better, more orderly universe, we might expect the Congress, even his own party, to call a lie a lie. But the agenda these folks have in mind for transforming government to their own small privatized vision gives them the courage to maintain a distant but incredibly loud silence on these matters. If they can just get the EPA shrunk down to size, if they can get those corporate tax breaks enacted, if they can push back on the culture wars soon enough, well, what’s a white lie or two?

Profiles in courage, this is not. Of course when half the country, their voting base, believes the most outlandish garbage dished up by Fox or Breitbart, why should they take a stand for truth, justice or the American Way? This is Profile in Cynicism that takes our collective breath away. If the time comes when this self-absorbed bully in the White House is dragged away kicking and screaming, maybe we should take a good hard look at the folks who turned their gaze away when he was at his most outlandish. I get it that the voters are in an intemperate mood. I get it that they no longer trust politicians to look after their interests. I get it that a tough talking TV reality host might seem just the antidote to their problems. But c’mon, this is no game show. And the only thing so far that’s been drained from the swamp is my atrophied sense of humor.

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Well, the days of death panels are quickly coming to a close now that the GOP has set the date for the repeal of Obamacare. Or most of Obamacare. Or at least some of it. And they have even announced a replacement for the Affordable Care Act, the health care law that one third of this country doesn’t realize is the same thing as Obamacare. The good times are on their way again. And Republicans are crowing that the wicked witch is dead.

I don’t know if we should dig the grave just yet. Those folks who want to keep the Affordable Care Act and get rid of Obamacare, they might be disappointed when they learn that ignorance might be bliss, but it’s going to be expensive. And once again, when the sausage of this new health care bill gets ground, the process is going to be on full display. Drop the funding for Planned Parenthood? 65% of us want to keep it funded. Give vouchers for health care? You got tea party Republicans who see that as one more entitlement they can’t afford. Cut off Medicaid to the states who expanded Obamacare? Plenty of governors who are going to scream bloody murder. Drop the requirement that everyone has to get in the pool to drop insurance rates? I’m betting the kids and the healthy aren’t going to sign up. Might as well wait for that first heart attack.

We were just down at the Emergency Room a few nights ago, the mizzus and me. If you’ve only seen that on prime time TV, trust me, it’s an eye-opener on what the guts of health care look like when you need it NOW. Cat scan, x-rays, blood tests, urine analysis, lab work — you aren’t thinking about the cost right then. But you will…. Nearly two million of us will file bankruptcy protection from those bills this coming year. And 56 million of us will struggle to pay those bills. One of the sponsors of the new health care bill said today that folks might have to choose between buying that new I-phone and health insurance. No problem, save a couple hundred dollars and get themselves a …. what kind of policy does he think a few hundred dollars will buy under their new care plan??? At least he didn’t say choose between food and health care. But I suspect that will be the real choice for a large number of us. Compassionate conservatism long ago went out of fashion. It was an oxymoron then and now it’s a bad tweet.

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Down at the South End recycling centers we have a tradition of setting our unwanted possessions out beside the highway, no need for even a FREE placard, and by late afternoon or the next morning, whatever was offered to the motoring public will be gone, hauled away, recycled, possibly resold. Couches, TV sets, patio furniture, broken chairs, doesn’t matter, the stuff gets snapped right up.

I like to think our carbon footprint is so small, Trump’s hands would fit inside the tracks out there on the Great Camano Rift. But … it does get me to wondering, where does all this cast-off, broken down, beat up stuff go? And who is hauling it home? Free is always tempting, free is generally preferable to cheap, free is most of the time hard to resist. My neighbor who is moving lock stock and gun barrel to Arizona has been dragging everything from umbrella stands to step ladders out in front of our driveway. He asked me if I wanted to take first grab, but I said, geez, I just cleaned out my shack and the last thing I need to do is fill it back up with new crap. There’s enough Sisyphean ordeal in my life, no point driving to the dump and the Goodwill five times a week.

But someone is snatching up these goodies. I see a pickup stop, back up, pull over to the shoulder, then next thing I know he’s loading up the ladders, maybe the small table, all in a hurry as if the absence of the FREE sign means it’s maybe not. By the time he’s peeled out, along comes a sedan, up pops the trunk, in goes the little screen TV working order or not. The neighbors poke through the roadside displays, but most of it looks like what they got already or have thrown out last week.

Maybe the folks who mow the yards and maintain the lawns of the more well-heeled South Enders, maybe they’re the ones who see these roadside garage sales as an off-season Feliz Navidad. I mean, there are plenty of us South End natives who are poor down here, but we’re talking about the last two miles of a long skinny island, not a huge population of indigents, lately not even percentage wise.

It’s a mystery to me, but I decided I’m okay with that. Saves the neighbors hauling stuff to the dump and saves somebody some money grabbing free goodies. Win-win, as we like to say down here. Beats buying that junk new. Even if some of us apparently did.

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I just spent the morning with my friendly dentist. You want to darken your day, this is one way to blot the sun from a morning. Potential gum disease, stress fractured teeth, a ‘hard bite’, old fillings, potential crown work — it’s like having a TV that only plays Fox News’ Sean Hannity, all the negative opinion that’s fit to speak. My mouth has two months to live. I’m regretting I made the appointment, better just to live my final years in blissful ignorance, gumming my soup dinners happy to never floss again.

My buddy Roger tried that avoidance route, mostly because he couldn’t afford dentists. Half his mouth is devoid of teeth now. They rotted to the point the pain got too much for him, then he had them jerked, something the poor tend to do rather than pay for a crown or implants. Teeth are way down on the list when poverty dictates priorities. And even if he’d had health insurance — which he didn’t — dental health isn’t covered, don’t ask me why.

I got a lot of neighbors here on the cavity-prone South End who look like hillbillies without their molars and incisors. One year I was working building a winery for Professor Bob up north when my co-grunt put down his framing hammer and got down on hands and knees searching the plywood floor we were laying.

“Lose a contact?” I asked, getting down with him to search.

“Naw,” Randy replied, “my &^%$#!!tooth.”

It had rotted, literally, right out of his head. The kid was 22 years old. A minute later he found it by a box of 16 penny nails, a brown little molar, horrible there on the gleaming blonde plywood deck. Next day I asked if he’d gotten in to see the dentist. He shook his head no, opened wide to show me the gap in that rotten mouth of his was filled, then he grinned. “Nothing a little SuperGlue can’t fix.”

No brains, no headache, as my neighbor used to intone, philosophically challenged. I decided right then to buy an electric toothbrush and a year’s supply of floss. Saves me a fortune on SuperGlue.

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