The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

My sense of humor went on strike yesterday. Nothing I could say or do, not even a considerable bump in the minimum wage I pay her, would convince her to come back, not even for a trial run. ‘Where you gonna go?’ I asked in a painfully pleading voice. ‘None of your business,’ she called out over her shoulder. I offered early retirement, vacation time, full health care, but nothing doing. I said at least leave me a phone number where you can be reached. ‘I need you more than ever,’ I admitted. ‘These are terrible times. If a man can’t laugh occasionally, he’ll go insane.’

‘Welcome to the club,’ my sense of humor growled just before slamming the door on the way out. I confess, I haven’t been attentive to my S.O. H.’s needs of late, but I didn’t think things had gotten so far beyond remedy. Sure, I read the papers, newsfeeds, blogs, all things political and yeah, it makes me eternally pissed off seeing my country run by punks and thugs as if they were operating a crime syndicate in a third world country. I mean, I did notice that my chuckles were few and far between, my drinking had picked up a notch, my messages to friends were growing darker, my response to phone solicitors was no longer amused, but I didn’t realize I had slipped into a steady dripping funk. Sinister thoughts were entering my fevered head, fantasies of terrible accidents befalling our dear Leader, subpoenas and impeachment wishes, presidential untreatable syphilis and worse, much much worse.

No wonder my S.O.H. took a hike! What’s funny about wishing harm to someone? Even if you hate the sonofabitch? But of course the corrosive part of hating this guy was that eventually I started hating the people that voted him in. And the politicians who make excuses for him. And the Party that enables this totally undemocratic dickhead. My S.O.H. doesn’t handle that kind of toxin, nothing humorous about it, no great punchline here. The trouble with hatred is it has no room for my S.O.H., none whatsoever, and couples counseling isn’t going to help, no way. We might have stayed together for the children, but … we don’t have kids. So I can’t blame my sense of humor for this. She knew it was time to go. Well before me, I see now. Maybe we can work things out eventually, I’m hoping but not real optimistic. Meanwhile, I’ll just stew in my own bile and trust in the power of a vestigial funny bone. You never know, sometimes they grow back….

I guess one way to tell if you’re an old timer or not is if you remember ordering an item from, say, the Sears Roebuck catalog, by phone or by mail, then waiting a week or three for delivery. Patience might not be your middle name back then, but it was definitely a requirement for a happy life. Now, of course, we live in the world of algorithms, computerized programs operating at speeds of nano-seconds. You can’t get your internet to punch up a You-Tube in three seconds, you move on, disgusted. We want it and we want it NOW!

Amazon started one day delivery awhile back in the Mesozoic Era, free with a subscription to Prime. You pay a yearly fee and voila, everything you order from the Godzilla of merchandizers comes not only without a shipping charge but comes next day. Great gimmick. I have friends who only order from these retailers just for the convenience of fast delivery. I suspect there are others who think similarly. But along comes Walmart and Target, offering the same deal but without requiring a hundred plus bucks a year, so there goes Amazon’s leg up.

Or does it? Amazon isn’t king of the jungle for chuckles, my friend. No, they upped the ante with the promise of Same Day Delivery. Why should my friends have to wait 24 hours for the gizmo they ordered this afternoon? It’s the equivalent of ordering from the Sears catalog. In the 21st Century!! Maybe you’ve noticed the U.S. Postal trucks on Sunday in your cul-de-sac, well, they’re Amazon deliveries, no rest for the wicked. Day of rest? I don’t think so…. Already they’re testing drones for faster deliveries, possibly door to door if the FAA will let them rent all the airspace they need. But you know and I do too, Walmart and Target aren’t going to sit still for this. They’ll be offering similar delivery times as Domino Pizza, half hour or your money back. Let the drone wars begin!

Rumor has it that in the ulta-secret labs Amazon operates beneath Mt. Rainier, a honeycomb of experimental workshops and testing warehouses, the Bezos boyz are working feverishly on time travel strategies. Order that thingamajig this morning and you’ll have it yesterday. Impossible, you say? Tell that to Sears Roebuck.

I don’t know about you, but I just can’t get enough of these calls to re-open the Clinton e-mail investigations. If Lying Hilary hadn’t used a private server back when she was Secretary of State and letting the Libyan Ambassador be killed, poor Mr. Trump wouldn’t be under a cloud of suspicion right now by those despicable and petty Democrats. If she’d been Locked Up, Locked Up, we could move on to issues that need to be addressed in America the Great 2019. But no, instead we have the controversy of whether or not our Great Leader was guilty of obstruction of justice when, as we all know, he can’t be guilty of a crime to hide his guilt if there was no guilt to begin with. Elementary, Watson. Catch 22.

And how about Whitewater while we’re at it? The woman killed Vince Foster, everyone knows it, but we let her get away with it. Justice for all? Pretty obviously, we need to go back and dig a little deeper. Bodies are decomposing from Arkansas to D.C. You know it, I know it, the Republicans know it, everybody but those obsessed Democratic Donkeys know it. It’s a disgrace is what it is! A national embarrassment!

Thank God for Lindsay Graham is all I can say, a veritable Profile in Courage, both faces. The Senator is properly outraged. While his fellow senators called for Barr to resign, Graham called for investigations into those investigators of the investigations of Clinton, triple jeopardy be damned. Something fishy in Denmark, hethinks. Methinks I smell rot too.

These are partisan times, no doubt, but in the Heartland where hardworking Americans yearn to raise their families, keep their manufacturing jobs, heat with coal and go to church to worship their Christian God, they don’t want to hear about their President being badgered and baited, they want to know why their government isn’t getting to the bottom of this Hilary scandal. If it takes another investigation, well, sir, let’s have another investigation. And if that one doesn’t turn up some bones and bits of rotting flesh, by god, let’s get ourselves another shovel and let Mr. Trump do his job. We got ours.

The Presidential Election of 2020 should be a helluva mudwrestling venue if the latest tweets give us any indication. Should the Boston Marathon Bomber get to vote? Will those pesky Democrats take away your guns? Will the rich be taxed more than they can afford to pay? Is America headed toward socialism or fascism? Will we forgive student loans? Should college be free? Medicare for All? Drill baby drill?? Attack Iran? Build a border wall? Uncle Joe Biden entered the fray yesterday by declaring this was a race for the soul of the United States. I sure hope not but he may be right.

Like a lot of my fellow Americans I’ve grown more cynical than I’ve been since Viet Nam and Tricky Dick. Compassionate conservatism, if there ever was such a creature, died in the swamps of D.C. the last few years. The rich, like the saying sez, get richer … and the poor, well, someone’s got to pay for those CEO’s and hedge fund managers.

The great question of the next few months will be to impeach or not to impeach. Trump has declared he will let no staff be interviewed further, something about executive privilege, which in his definition covers everything and everybody. The Democrats have become the Scaredycats, afraid following up on Mueller’s injunction to investigate further might backfire, but it seems like the only way to require testimony from the Trump minions. The Republicans, as always, are content to watch from the sidelines while the Russians, needless to say, have been completely exonerated. Thanks, everyone, for a job well done.

Me, I’d impeach the GOP. Why not? We’ve thrown out the rules, the Constitution, common sense, science and any notion of right and wrong. We have a corrupt megalomaniac in the White House who isn’t afraid of confrontation, who isn’t afraid to break things that get in his way, who isn’t bothered by the nuisance of laws. And he’s backed up by a Party that would apparently turn a blind eye to most anything short of murder (maybe) if it meant they could fight on for oil and gas, deregulation, gun rights, a border Wall and abortion restrictions. At today’s hearings with the Attorney General being questioned about bias in the Mueller investigation, they used their time to demand further investigations into Hillary’s e-mails.

So yeah, mudwrestling it will be. Down in the pit and dirty as we’ve ever seen. Uncle Joe is probably spot on. This will be a fight for the soul of a nation that has lost its way. Maybe some of these candidates will take the High Road, but like Joe sez, the goal is to get rid of the cancer at the center of our country. I’m dreading the next year and a half, but the time has definitely come to take the gloves off. I’ll vote for whoever can rid us of this creep.