The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

For the past 25 years or so the mizzus and me throw a big New Year’s Party here on the South End, partly so we don’t get to know the sheriff’s deputies any better than we do now, which is what we tell the neighbors, but the real reason is a bit more shrouded in the mists of lost memories. I got a call today from Brent, an old friend now in Alaska, and it triggered a couple of neurons into firing spasmodically once more and voila, I was back in, oh, 1985 down at the shack with just a few of us struggling mightily to make it to midnight so we could toast the new year and pass out in our bunks.
My brother was here with his wife and we had Brent and Liz visiting from Portland. My brother is what you’d call a spark plug for party stuff. Meaning, when conversations lag, he springs into instant action. ‘Let’s go around the room,’ he says, ‘and tell what the best day of the year was for each of us.’ So Brent goes first and he relates a warm summer day when he and his collie were at the park and the sun was shining and the Frisbees were sailing and it was just a golden day, a boy and his pooch, fetching the Frisbee. Not maybe what my brother had in mind, I bet, but just a hippie dippy zen day that stood out for Brent more than some birthday or Christmas or the day he got a raise or the usual dopey stuff we trot out when you play Name Your Best Day.
I don’t remember what my favorite day was. I don’t remember Karen’s or my brother’s or my brother’s wife’s favorite day. But I remember Liz’s turn, Brent’s girlfriend who I’d know a long time. A real long time. A way too long a time. And as the clock ticked glacially toward 1986, gears needing oil, glasses waiting for that toast and then goodnight everybody, my brother sez, ‘Okay, Liz, what was your favorite day?’ And to this day I can remember Liz turning to Brent who was rubbing his collie’s head, probably still warm in his remembrance of a summer day in the park, and the clock’s hands stopping forever, the wood stove throwing a heat nothing like what she was focusing on poor Brent with a laser look that would burn through titanium like it was cheap plastic, and our glasses with champagne broke in the sudden stillness before she said, ‘My favorite day …. (and the ‘my’ was a small caliber bullet) My favorite day was the day we got back together, Brent.’
Maybe you’ve had a New Year’s ‘Party’ like that. The room emptying of air and sound and mirth, as if a stopper had been pulled from the tub of our happiness and no matter how hard you try, and Brent desperately tried, that stopper won’t go back in and all the merriment drains out by your feet and deep down in your cold curling guts you know, you know absolutely this is not the way you wanted to ring in the next year. You know what they mean by ill-omened now and all the months to come you will dread the next New Years’ Eve the way you would dread death itself. And of course Liz and Brent broke up and Brent moved to the furthest corner of the earth and my brother admitted maybe that wasn’t the best holiday icebreaker of all time and we decided either to forsake New Year’s altogether or bring so many people in we couldn’t possibly go around the room and play parlor games like Stab Your Lover.
And that is how the South End got its gala New Year’s Extravaganza Potluck and BYOB Party. And of course, you’re invited! Unless you got some serious issues with your girlfriend or boyfriend, lover or husband, wife or mistress. Then I think you got a new parlor game for you and a few select friends. Happy New Year anyway.

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Fa la la la yerself! There’s an ominous vibe to this year’s holiday, what with the stock market acting like the proverbial snowball headed to hell, the President pulling the plug on the Kurds in Syria followed by the resignation of Mad Dog Mattis who may have been the last adult in the White House after Kelly was booted. The Grinch didn’t steal Christmas this year, it’s the government shutdown. The only folks who got what they wanted in their stockings hung with care are the right wing talk show pundits. The rest of us deplorables, it’s just more of the same, daily temper tweets, irrational outbursts, a never ending series of small seismic tremors that signal … what?

Year 3 in the Trump Regime, can you believe it? The Prez has pretty much emptied out the cabinet of naysayers so now he can proceed with whatever agenda de jour he wakes up with. Fire the Fed Chairman, why not? Bomb Tehran, might be okay. Armwrestle with Little Rocket Man, sure…. The cuffs are off the big guy now, he’s feeling cocky and as always certain of his every action. The Trump kids are advising him if he needs extra affirmation, Jared’s got the Middle East just about straightened out and everything is coming up roses.

Except … well, that witch hunt. Damn, if it weren’t for Mueller and his 100% Democrat associates, America would be great again already. Instead, there’s this nagging cloud of corruption, collusion and criminality that hovers constantly outside the President’s TV room where Fox and Friends defends his every tweet. Those pesky indictments keep popping up and old loyalists now are singing like canaries. He didn’t get Time Magazine’s Man of the Year and this makes for a sour mood, forget that it’s all fake news anyway, still, it would’ve been a nice accolade and this time he wouldn’t make the mistake of letting Stormy Daniels roll it up and smack his face on his naked ass. No sir, he learned that lesson!

So if you’re feeling uneasy this season, trust me, you’re not alone in avoiding mistletoe and office Christmas parties belting out White Christmas. Times aren’t so simple. And you’re no longer the innocent citizen you once were. Better get used to it. As for a New Year’s resolution, good luck. Impeach him, lock him up (I know you’re considering it), you get Pence. Me, I’d rather have the Grinch back.

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I’ve been hearing a lot of chatter on the airwaves lately about disconnecting from Facebook. Folks are starting to tune into the good people at their favorite social media platform who really aren’t so much interested in their privacy as they are the monetization of their information value. Ya think??? Mark Z and his munchkin minions talk a good line about an open society being a good society, but now that the Russians and the trollers have access to your personal life, people are noticing what havoc this is producing.

So … there’s a movement afoot to disengage. That should show those geeks what’s what! Yeah, good luck with that. It’s like saying you’re concerned about global warming so you won’t buy gas for your car. Or turn on the heat in your house. I don’t have a Facebook account and if you think Mark is worried, think again. He has billions of subscribers. And plenty of corporations he can sell their data to. He’s making money, just like Amazon, just like Exxon, just like Google. You think he cares if the world is worse off? C’mon, he’s just another greedy monopolist. Sure, he talks like an evangelical, bringing truth and light to a world too long in the dark with its sad secrecy, its puny privacy, its pathetic avoidance of public scrutiny. Wouldn’t we all be happier if we shared our innermost desires and dreams?

Well, my dream was to be left alone, Mark. My dream was a world where fake news was understood to be phony baloney, not some viral campaign waged on your platform, one where truth was spelled with a capital T, not disparaged as bullshit. My dream was a country that valued courtesy and what is now condemned as political correctness, not one that spewed venom and trolled anyone who disagreed with another point of view.

I don’t blame Mark totally. I blame him and the others for being blind to the effects of their greed. You want to delete Facebook, be my guest, but you’re spitting into a digital wind. This is a monopoly that needs to be regulated, broken up, curtailed, sat upon, called to account. Unfriend them, sure, but lobby for the government to stop this. They’ve already done irreparable harm. If you think they’ll regulate themselves, call me, I have some Exxon stocks to sell ya.

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Two Toke Tom and myself were quaffing a couple of Christmas cheers down at the Pilot House Lounge yesterday, talking about the State of the Union, the last election, Santa’s illegal immigration status and our plans for the holidays. Me, I go away with the mizzus for 3 or 4 days, somewhere that hasn’t heard of Christmas or else is too impoverished to want to participate. We go with a few other childless friends, fellow bah humbuggers, hoping to avoid the DMZ of the War on Christmas we’ve been hearing about for way too many years.

“And you?” I asked Two Toke.

“Same drill,” he answered, holding his glass up for Jerry behind the bar to refill. Jerry had a red Santa stocking cap on, the tail slung over his shoulder. The place was humming and Jerry was hustling to keep up. “Going down to the Shelter and serve grub to the homeless,” Tom said, draining the last of his current beer. Tom had been doing this since I could remember.

“You make me feel like Scrooge’s black sheep kid,” I muttered and nodded to Jerry that yeah, I’d take another round, Tiny Tim would have to go hungry while his old man got hammered at the pub.

“Guilty conscience?” Jerry asked. “Not for long,” I answered, “maybe about one more beer. Tom here serves Christmas dinners to the homeless.”

“I get a free dinner myself,” Tom told Jerry, almost apologetically. Jerry shook his head. “You’re a good man, Charlie Brown,” he said over his shoulder with the Santa tail bobbing a white ball. When he came back with our drinks he said to Two Toke, “On the house, man.”

“Mine too?” I chimed in. Jerry laughed. “Oh, what the hell, yours too. Merry Christmas, boyz.

“You too, Jerry,” T.T. said.

“And to all a good night,” I answered, ever the comic smartass. What I meant to say was we need a few more Toms in this world.

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