The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Bomb Cyclone. I guess we got a new name to replace some of the tired old ones. I thought it was the description of the Bannon kiss-and-tell book, all those gossipy tidbits that must have the Liar-in-Chief tearing his orange hair out, which, if we’re to believe the book, is dyed but turns orangutan coloration because the boy has the patience of a two year old and doesn’t leave the dye on long enough to give it a natural color. Apparently he has a bald pate and grows what’s left into the comb-over of comb-overs, but … well, wait, bomb cyclone isn’t that at all, fuggedaboutit. It’s meteorological, apparently.

Who says you don’t need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows? My god, the weather these days demands an entirely revamped vocabulary. Polar Vortex, move over, let Beethoven bring you the news! Global warming? Naw, we’re calling it Climate Change. Snowmageddon, cute. Wind shear hurricane, okay. Haboobs, no, it’s not the U.S. Cabinet, it’s a sand storm. (I know, maybe we should switch the names.)

Bomb Cyclone. Where’s TSA when we need them? Weather terrorism. Who’d a thunk it? The meteorologists needed to explain the damn thing, something to do with barometric dives of x mm’s per hour or minute or, geez, if it’s that technical, maybe a better name. Low pressure cannonball in a hurricane. Course, polar vortex? Never much liked that one either. Faux science? I don’t like it at all, but hey, us plain folk at least get it.

Maybe I’ll go back to watching politics and skip the new lexicon of weather related events that always, and I mean always, lead some to question whether this was climate change or just the usual bomb cyclone. Who can say? Me, I blame it on the haboobs. They seem to be everywhere these days.

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Jeez, it’s only three days into 2018, three crummy days of religiously trying to ignore the news cycle and the tweets and the incessant rants about whose nuclear buttons are bigger … and I’d been doing pretty good, ya know, not lurching for the nitro to keep my heart from racing toward aortic Armaggedon, when Steve Bannon comes out with his little tell-all. How do you avert your eyes and ears? The knives are out now for real and the clowns are making chopping sounds with their fat white lips. D.C. is a comedy show! No it’s a tragedy! No, wait, it’s a soap opera! Hold on, it’s all fake! Naw, it’s a cartoon show!

Sadly, it’s the United States of Amerriment, a slapstick Punch and Judy that barely stops long enough to give its corporate sponsors time to pass a tax reform bill that gives them millions in breaks. While you were laughing and howling at the latest gaffe, they were fleecing you like the snake oil salesmen they are. But isn’t it worth the Ride?? My god, Bannon’s gems are hilarious. The President goes to bed with a cheeseburger every night at 6:30 with his phone and three TV’s. Melania cried when the Donald won the Presidency. Ivanka is dumber than a brick. But she had a deal to be the first female President. The POTUS attention span is short. How short? He won’t read a one page brief. His handlers tried to tutor him on the Constitution — he made it to the 4th Amendment then left the room. Melania and Trump don’t sleep together! He eats fast food because he’s afraid someone will poison his meals, but not McDonalds’ pre-prepared burgers and fries. Don’t touch his dirty clothes on the White House floor! Don’t change his sheets! Germs, germs, everywhere!!

Congressmen met with psychiatrists to ascertain what level of craziness they had on their hands. Bannon gave it 33% he would be removed via the 25th Amendment for incompetence, about 19 amendments past Donald’s attention span.

Donald, of course, is firing back. Bannon not only was fired, he lost his mind! Says he wasn’t involved in the campaign win, now he will learn how hard winning is without the Trumpster. The President and his lawyers are screaming bloody murder, fake stories, libelous lies!! The liar-in-chief hollering in pain about his treacherous advisors lying! You can’t make this up. You live by the lie, you die by the lie.

And I’m supposed to keep my stupid New Year’s Resolution while this vaudeville show is playing night and day?? Easier to give up smoking. Way easier. And yeah, I know it’s a terrible addiction, these tweets. But if I turn away, I’ll maybe miss the next episode, the one that will make all the others seem banal. All I know, just like the rest of an insomniac audience, it just gets better and better. Drain the swamp? Why, when it’s so darn entertaining?

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I got a knee that’s been bothering me. For about three years. I finally figured it wasn’t going to heal up so I went to my local clinic, got a checkup and was sent into town for some X-rays, then back to the original doc who took ten minutes before we both came to the same diagnosis: I was NOT Fred with the bad wrist. When we finally got Skeeter’s medical file, he told me he didn’t see anything particularly wrong, no doubt scribbling in my chart after I left — HYPOCHONDRIA.

A year later and no improvement in that knee, I switched clinics and tried again, this time asking the attending physician for an MRI, which he scheduled along with more X-rays. The MRI, I was certain, would show him the cause of my knee pain, hopefully something easily repaired. When I scheduled my consultation after the MRI came back and my answering machine mentioned ‘torn cruciate ligament’ I was confident we were going to get to the root of my chronic problem. At last!

My next doc mentioned he hadn’t had time to read my MRI’s yet, but he took a moment to have a look. “I see some arthritis in that left knee,” he told me and I told him my problem was in the right knee. “Not much arthritis there,” he said after studying the photos, “but that must be it.” (I’m sure he underlined the aforementioned HYPOCHONDRIAC in red ink.)

“I know I’m shy a few credits on my medical degree,” I protested, “but it sure feels like something’s wrong in there. A tear maybe?”

He patiently explained he was an osteo-surgeon and if I wanted a knee replacement, he was my man. “Whoa,” I said, “I’m not shopping knees today, I just want to figure out what this problem is.”

Disappointed, I went home, back to Plan A — see if it would heal itself. A month later my brother asked how the MRI’s turned out. When I told him, he said let’s look at your charts (his wife is an RN) and when I told him I hadn’t seen them, he explained it was almost two decades into the 21st Century, they would be available On-line, let’s have a look, so we did and right there in black and white on the MRI report were my two ligament tears, anterior cruciate and posterior too.

That was three months ago. I know I should go back, get a 3rd opinion, see if this knee can be repaired. My trouble is, I figure 50/50 they’ll amputate the leg. Probably the left one. So for the time being, I’m sticking with Plan A. Seems a helluva lot safer bet.

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By now you’ve probably concluded that the Alt-Right Apocalypse half of us predicted for 2017 didn’t materialize. Yah, shure, the boy-king hasn’t been impeached and he hasn’t shown us his taxes and he won’t distance himself from the Trump businesses and those tweets of his keep us in a constant state of near hysteria. That’s Entertainment!

I got home from most of a tweetless week without opening a newspaper or listening to the news on radio or TV. Didn’t peek at a computer once for the latest news feed. But now we’re back from the Wilderness and the daily papers arrive at our mailbox and I’ve turned the computer back on. Lots of shrieking and tearing of hair over Melania’s Santa outfit or Ivanka’s photo with a Confederate flag somewhere far behind her, statistics on the total days Donald has gone golfing after he used to criticize Obama for picking up a putter, stuff like that. If I were Trump’s publicist, I’d put out incendiary stories exactly like those, endless petty fluff to distract all us enraged snowflakes from the clause in the tax reform bill to open up the Arctic to drilling or to kill the Obamacare mandate that requires folks to buy insurance.

NOT that every perceived insult by the Trump family’s Christmas cards isn’t earth shattering and probably contributes to Global Warming, it’s just that if EVERYTHING the Trumps do is outrageous, then the really outrageous becomes trivialized. I mean, I don’t care what Melania wore yesterday. I don’t worry about a photo with a rebel flag flying from some redneck’s shanty in the distance. Call me overly insensitive, but I don’t give a good goddamn. I do care about the Russians hacking our elections. I do care about those business deals Donald may have had with Putin. I do care that half his advisors and cabinet members are incompetent or liars or both. I do care the EPA is dismantling plenty of protective regulations. I even care that all those right wing judges are being approved. And I can go half crazy thinking about these Republicans who don’t seem to mind working hand in glove with a man who systematically attacks the intelligence community, the press and the Constitution all in the course of a few tweets, daily and with impunity.

So here is my own New Year’s Resolution, a few days early. I plan to keep an ear to the ground, certainly, but I’m going to quit searching the clouds for every little chunk of cumulus that might be cracking loose. I expect soon enough the jolly rich giant will come crashing to earth and that blot overhead will disappear and the sun will shine through once more. The sky will still be intact and I bet it’ll be blue once again.

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