The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammo

Seventeen dead in Florida this week. Just a routine slaughter in the Home of the Brave, Land of the Free. These mass murders come so regular now it’s hard to keep up with them. The President comes down and offers condolences then blames the FBI for being too busy trying to prove Russian collusion to stop the mayhem. The Senators offer prayers. Marco Rubio, Senator for Florida, got 3.3 million dollars from the National Rifle Association to keep his comments confined to prayers for the dead, nothing they could have done to prevent these tragedies. The Congressmen wring their hands and they all say we need to do something about mental illness. But they have offered up a budget to cut funding for exactly that. Trust me, someone here is mentally ill.

48% of guns in private hands in the world, the entire world, are in American hands. It is, according to those who receive campaign contributions from the almighty NRA, a God-given right, nothing short of the right to breathe. So what if you’re mentally ill, if you’re on the no-fly terrorist list, if you have a history of violence? You have a right to a gun. Or fifty. You might have to pass a test to drive a car; after all, it’s a dangerous weapon in the wrong hands. But a gun, not a problem. You might not be legally entitled to drink a beer at 18 but you can buy an assault rifle.

After the Las Vegas massacre there was some talk of banning bump-stocks, those neat after-market add-ons that could turn your semi-automatic weapon into a fully functioning automatic machine gun. You heard anything more of any bill that might ban those? No? Well, maybe you never heard, money talks, bullshit walks and the NRA has more money to buy off legislators than anybody else. You want to vote against anything that has to do with guns, you better want a job in the private sector.

The Sec. of Education wants to put guns in the hands of the school teachers. More guns, that’s the answer. And the power of prayer. Gloria Copeland, a member of Donald Trump’s spiritual advisory council, suggests prayer over vaccines to prevent the flu. I know what you’re asking: Donald has a spiritual advisor???? Me, I thought Stormy Daniels was maybe that advisor.

These are tough times for the Righteous Right. 17 dead and mostly kids. Versus a bucket of money from the NRA. My prayers are certainly with the victims. But my vote is going to anyone who has more sense than God gave to a turnip. Can I hear an amen to that?

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My old buddy Marco is getting evicted four days from now. He’s got a court date to tell a judge why he shouldn’t be thrown out on the street for not paying his rent. He’s not paying his rent because he hasn’t worked in half a year because his knee is blown out and L&I won’t pay for an MRI to see what’s wrong in there. He has a court date with L&I too, but by then he will be evicted.

Marco’s girlfriend, his latest, isn’t working either. She has a 3 year old child that she’s taking care of for her daughter and yeah, you probably guessed it, the daughter is too drug addled to take care of her own kid. So Marco and Debbie take care of the tot. The hard –hearted among us will no doubt see this as just another story of the poor making bad decisions that lead to them becoming poorer. And they got a good case.

Marco’s planning to move his and Debbie’s stuff out of the rental house this weekend, haul it to a storage unit that costs $150 a month, then go stay with his brother out of state until they figure out which end is up. I think I already know which of their ends is up, but here’s the kicker. Marco wants to adopt his girlfriend’s granddaughter. I mean, why not? He can’t afford a place to live, he hasn’t got a job and he doesn’t have any viable prospects for one. His girlfriend, if history is any indicator, probably won’t be with him long and he wants to adopt the kid.

Marco has a good heart. His trouble isn’t his heart, although judging by his physical condition, that may not be totally accurate. His trouble is his brain. He keeps making dumb decisions. He walked away this year from a house he owned with his ex that they sold for pennies on the dollar because no one would clean up the pigsty they’d made of it. Marco probably didn’t care; after all, his ex was going to take what profits were left from any sale. And did I mention Marco found his way into opioids and finally heroin? No? Well, there you go. Gateway drugs. To poverty.

I wish Marco all the luck in the world. The trouble is, most of it will be bad. You know it, I know it, probably in his lucid moments, Marco does too. The man is 60 years old and driving off the road into the scenery. If you wonder where the homeless hail from, well, some are from the South End. I just hope that 3 year old kid he wants to adopt gets a break. But the poor, often times, do get poorer.

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I don’t want you to think I’m jumping on the Trump bandwagon here, but … I do want you to know I plan to give out bonuses of up to 1000 dollars to all my employees. Sure wouldn’t want you to think I’m just going to bank all those profits from the business tax rollbacks that are coming my way. Boeing’s doing it, Pepsi’s doing it, Revisionary Glassworks, I’m pleased to announce, is doing it too. Least I could as my way of saying thanks. To my employees, I mean, not the President.

I suspect a lot of us mega-corporate types will be following suit. Good press, good will, good all around. Oh sure, I’ll raise my prices a little, cover my generosity, but that way you, the public, can share in my charitable glow. By the way, once I did a little checking, I noticed those other companies kind of cheated a bit. You got to read the fine print, maybe you didn’t know that, to find that those thousand dollar bonuses go to the folks who have worked there, oh, about a hundred years. You worked there, say, two or five, well, don’t expect a thousand dollar bonus on that next paycheck. Think a little lower. Think a lot lower. But those headlines say $1000, you say. Truth, maybe you haven’t noticed lately, is kind of slippery.

The Truth – capital T – in my case is that I plan to pay every single employee working for me now $1000 no matter how long they’ve been on the payroll. Ten years, Ten months, Ten days. Capitol T! It’s just Good Bizness, that’s all, and it’s the Right Thing to do, excuse all these capitals. No sir, you won’t see my glass company raising its prices to cover my incredible generosity. Not the way I work. And you could ask any of my employees. You know, if I had any. Right now I’m not only sole proprietor, I’m kind of the sole worker. And yes, I’m giving me a $1000 bonus, maybe more if those CEO’s are any kind of role models! And a big pat on the back!

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As most of you careful readers know, political correctness down here on the partisan shores of the steamy equatorial South End is probably not one of our more valued virtues. Maybe because we’re all trapped down at this skinny dead end backwash cul-de-sac, we’ve learned — the hard way usually —- that if we want to get along without civil war, we have to disagree without resorting to a full blown arms race. And believe me, we disagree. On most everything. That’s why we all ended up down here at the end of a tilting island at the end of America on the edge of a continental shelf sliding herky-jerky under another tectonic plate.
This week the talk down at Jolene’s Beauty Salon and Boutique revolved exclusively around the passage of the same sex marriage bill. Scissors and tongues snipped and clucked, but Jolene says no blood was spilled. Ronald, her frothy new beautician, might have intentionally miscolored Mrs. Adeline’s silver perm a tad on the electric blue side when she made the comment that ‘gayness’, seemed to her, was a lifestyle choice, but mostly the banter was affable.
Rhonda Wilkins did wonder out loud if the bill’s passage meant she and her no-account husband Tom’s opposite sex marriage would be annulled now. “That’s wistful thinking,” Wanda blurted from two chairs away in the middle of a henna touch-up on the minister’s mizzus who steadfastly refused to be drawn into a curling iron showdown, and if Rhonda hadn’t been curled herself and heat-lamped into her chair, she might have stormed out, but by the end of the drying cycle she was cooled down and still unhappily married to the love of her life whose zenith of ambition was to reach retirement before cirrhosis.
So Valentine’s Day on the metrosexual South End this year promises to be a cross between Mardi Gras and a Pink St. Patrick’s Day. Maybe no parades by the Diner, but a lot of closets opened for an early spring cleaning. Believe me, the South End could always stand a little more love…. And just in case Mrs. Adeline is right, some of us should think about renewing those old marriage vows. On the outside chance there really might be a statute of limitation.

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