The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

If you listen close these days, you can hear the Four Horses of the Apocalypse thundering down the highway here on the South End. Some of my more paranoid pals are watching with growing concern the trajectory of Hurricane Irma down in the Carribean as it churns toward Florida. Two more storms are forming right there too and of course all are on the heels of Hurricane Harvey. Up and down the western coast the mountains and foothills are burning like the Maw of Hell.

“Probably going to have the Big One,” Little Jimmy is pronouncing over his plate of runny eggs easy over down at the Diner. He’s an unlikely prophet of doom, but for the moment he has the boyz’ attention. He sops up the orange goop with a flourish of rye toast, takes a small bite, then drops it back down in the coagulated mess. “Fires and hurricanes, earthquakes might be next.” Jim’s not a religious nut, but he’s been going through a divorce and who knows, maybe he’s got his own fault lines ready to shift tectonically.

Two Toke splurts a little coffee and chokes on what goes down his windpipe. When he finally gets cleared out, he says, “C’mon, Jim, you aiming to be head pastor?” Jim declares, “I’m just reading the Signs, Tom. Bad moons rising, see what I’m getting at?”

“I suppose the eclipse has something to do with all this?” Fat Freddy mutters from an adjoining table. Outside the air is hazy with the dense smoke of the Cascade fires that has swept into the Puget Sound, turning the sun a sunset red even at mid-day. It is eerie, we all would have to admit.

“I don’t know, Fred, I’m just saying …. Something’s going on. All these disasters one after the other, is it just coincidence?”

Tom motions to Brenda for a refill of what he’s lost to flabbergast. “Let’s not get carried away, Jim, we get fires every year and last time I looked hurricanes too. Way of the World.”

“End of the world maybe,” Jimmy said miserably. Brenda held the coffee pot hesitantly over his cup. “Got time for a refill?” she asks.

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If you’re like me (I know, you hope you’re NOT!), you’ve been diverted lately from the usual political comedies by the tragedies in Houston and now Florida which is in the crosshairs of Hurricane Irma. Irma? Who comes up with these names, some bored yahoo in the basement of the National Storm Appelation Department? And if you’re like me, you feel lucky to be torn away from the 24/7 drumbeat of Trump Tweets and maybe you even feel a little guilty considering the suffering of folks down there in the Bible Belt whose God has apparently forsaken them.

But now along comes that bombastic bomb thrower Rush Limbaugh to suggest the hurricanes are nothing more than liberal conspiracies to alarm the masses and thereby open the door for legislation on Global Warming, as big a hoax to the Rushter as the notion that Obama was born in the same country as him. Lies, all lies! A conspiracy of the left! An evil plot to destroy America! But he can stop them, maybe only he can stop them, by broadcasting the truth from his beacon of Brietbart babble.

Thank God for the Rushman! Faux hurricanes! Who’d have thought the Left could stoop so low. Bogeyman meteorology!! What’s next? Glaciers supposedly melting? Polar bear uprisings? Icebergs plowing into San Francisco? Is there nothing too low for these liberals to stoop to?

Apparently not, according to Herr Limbaugh. But … today he has decided to, well, let’s just say he’s decided to play it safe. He’s evacuating himself from the phoney baloney hurricane that’s nothing but liberal hot air. Not, I’m sure, to protect himself. No, the man is far too courageous for that. Truth, he would tell you himself, is all the defense he needs. The mouth is mightier than the sword. Or the whirlwind. Or whatever …. No, I’m sure he’s taking a small break from the routine of Savior, maybe indulging in a much needed vacation. Either way, I’m sure we could use a much needed vacation from Rush. And if that hurricane should actually make landfall with 150 mile sustained winds, don’t think it’s proof the libs were right. Probably brought on by the sudden vacuum of the Rushster gone silent.

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The Little Church of the Ravine has a huge flock down here on the sin-saturated South End. The new pastor, Rev. Jeffrey, recently removed from his post in Eastern Washington, preaches on the side of punishment over redemption. His new parishioners figure those wheat farmers must have responded better to prods than to penance. The rest of us know Jeffrey has a rough row to hoe if he thinks South Enders are going to respond to Fear. If abject poverty hasn’t scared us yet, the good Reverend is tilling soil dryer than Eastern Washington’s.

Faith takes a lot of forms down here and the Little Church of the Ravine is only one of many. We got spiritualists and Ouija Boarders, Tea Leaf Readers and Palmists, Y Ching Tossers and the just plain superstitious. You name it, we probably got one or two back up the holler. Most of em don’t mind admitting to some faith based mysticism, they just want to believe in Something. Mostly we accept each other’s cosmology — even if Rev. Jeff makes it plain where he thinks that leads.

Jerry the Card Counter lives a half mile up the road and throws in with us boys occasionally at our weekly poker game. Jerry plays the odds mathematically, analyzing probabilities in his engineer’s head. Don’t even ask if he buys lottery tickets. Jerry usually goes home a winner. Partly because he never plays a hunch and partly because he drinks less than the rest of us, a good combination for profit, but not for fun.

Jerry is a believer in science. Which is fine. But he doesn’t like it when I say, peering over my 4 sequential cards and going for an improbable inside straight, that science itself is unprovable and so it too is essentially faith based. Jerry, nearly apoplectic at such heresy, forgets the odds of his own hand to unleash a spirited defense of Empirical Inquiry, then meets my raise by raising me back. The boyz all fold at the high cost of calling bluffs and embroiling themselves in epistemological exercises. “You can’t prove anything, Jerry,” I say calmly, looking at the last card Fearless Fred dishes me. I bet 3 bucks, the limit for our games.

Jerry can’t help himself, meeting my 3 and raising 3 more. “Science is fact-based, Skeeter!” he yells, thumping down a puny 2 pair when I throw my money in the pot, aces over eights, all black, ‘the dead man’s hand’, what Wild Bill Hickok held when he was shot down.

“Not true, Jerry. The Uncertainty Principle. The experimenter affects the results on the quantum level. It’s a strange world down there, Buddy. Believe what you want — it might make it come true.”

Jerry’s watching as I lay down a ten, then the jack and the queen, both lining up with the king next and I hold the final card until he can’t stand it any longer.

“Dammit!” he explodes when I lay down the Ace of Hearts with a gentle slap and big smirk. “What a lucky bastard!”

I smile as I rake in the big fat pot. “Sometimes, Jerry, you got to bet the hunch and hope the quarks line up. It’s all about believing. Next game is 7 card stud, gentlemen. Jokers wild. My deal.”

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Rainin rainin rainin, original song written and sung by Laura Goldberg

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“Nobody likes lawyers … until you need one.” My brother, attorney at law

Texas is drowning. Well, maybe not all of the Lone Star state, but the Houston area just got the most rainfall in U.S. history, some 50 inches in less than a week when Hurricane Harvey stalled over them and dumped the equivalent of one and a half inches over the entire continent. That, for you literalists, is a helluva lot of bathtubs overflowing.

The President even flew down there, no insignificant deal when you consider he has no Trump resorts or hotels to overnight at with his contingency. And you thought Houstonians were suffering! Nevertheless, tens of thousands are homeless, roads are impassable, 40,000 houses are ruined and the rest will soon be filled with black mold and soggy drywall. FEMA will bring in the formaldehyde trailers and contractors from all over the country will haul crews and equipment into Houston for a years-long cleanup estimated to be 50-100 billion dollars.

This is a catastrophe of the first order. All that chatter of Texas seceding from the United States, that’s going to be forgotten soon as Ted Cruz tries to round up the federal relief funds he voted against after Hurricane Sandy. The Damn Government?? You can forget that kind of cowboy talk now, not when folks need a hand.

All that blather about self reliance, independent Westerner, keeper of the Alamo’s legend — let’s cut to the chase. We have government to do the things we can’t do individually. The Texans will learn soon enough that this is not Evil, it is not necessarily Big Brother — it’s the way we build and sustain civilizations. So if secession is what they want, fine, turn down the money, Ted, the rest of us can use it to build roads, schools and courthouses.

Remember the Alamo, Ted. But keep in mind, they all died.

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So I’m in the grocery store frequented by the high school crowd at lunch breaks and on the wall of their latrine I find scrawled with a knife: Dare to be Normal. Driving into the parking lot minutes before, I had noticed a young girl dressed hat to boot in black, adorned in all manner of body puncture, looking for all the world like a poster child for National Sado-Masochism Day. Except for the pink stuffed animal strapped to her backpack. Inside the rough exterior of our would-be dominatrix lurks the soft heart of an innocent adolescent, apparently.
When I left the store I noticed a small knot of teenagers waiting at the crosswalk beside the highway for the light to change. All identical to the teddy bear toter, sans the teddy bear. Sure, it occurred to me to roll down the window and yell Dare to be Normal! but …. And here’s the rub …. These kids were normal. When we went to high school, we all pretty much looked homogenous — go check out your yearbook if you still got one. I don’t really want to dare anybody to be normal. Vote Ike again. Drive a Chevy. Drink Coke. Eat a Popsickle. Listen to the Beatles. Join the Army. Get a Job. Cut your Hair! Take out the Nose Ring!! Buy something at the Mall!!! Get married !!!! Have a family!!!!!!! Get a cemetery plot ahead of time!!!!!!!
Next time I’m in the grocery store, I’ll be looking for my little graffiti writing conformist. I assume he’ll be the one who isn’t dressed Goth, doesn’t have tattoos, wears blue suede shoes and a letter jacket and sports a butch crewcut regular color. He’ll look like my old man, is what I figure. And Dad, if it IS you philosophizing on the bathroom wall, knock it off! The kids will turn out like you after all, count on it.

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