The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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The other day I bought a bag of Frito-Lay potato chips and as is my wont from my early reading days as an 8 year old studying cereal boxes, I read the packaging. These potatoes, I was informed in a tidy paragraph written by public relations specialists who had no doubt conducted extensive customer surveys, were FARM-RAISED. Imagine! I’m guessing grown right in the ground. Tractors, fields, insecticides, migrant labor: farm raised. BOLD TYPE. Major advertising feature. The oils used were ‘natural’ too and this was worth trumpeting.

Holy cow manure, Batman, what’s the NEXT big thing in the food biz? Cheetos raised hydroponically? Personally I’m not sure consumers are really ready for food grown in the wild. Bugs, fungus, bacteria, all that creepy stuff a farmer is ill-equipped to handle outside a laboratory or a petri dish. We can grow meat without legs now, protein on a rope, and rumor has it the burger chains are nearing a breakthrough on cloning buns, with or without sesame seeds, directly on to the meat patty grown in secret underground hermetically sealed bunkers of Monsanto and Dow Chemical. You think they’re going to stick a filthy leaf of lettuce or a listeria riddled tomato on their antiseptically pure chemoWhopper? Get real. Not….

This whole Slow Food movement just flies in the face of 21st century culinary logic. We invented TV dinners so we’d have the time to watch more TV instead of wasting countless hours messing with the cooking of raw potentially contaminated food. These purveyors of old school eating call themselves environmentalists, but what about the damage from a bazillion cookbooks printed on paper from slaughtered trees? Next thing you know, they’ll advocate recipes for bark. A backlash is coming, count on that, the next step beyond vegetarianism. Stop eating plants. Stop the killing of carrots. It’s not only cruel, it’s filthy with germs and dirt. So Frito-Lay, nice try. But I’m afraid the world isn’t ready — we’ve turned the corner on 19th century farm products. Work on

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We all got such short little spans of attention these days, we’re like deer in the median strip of the 6 lane digital highway. Used to be we prized skills like concentration, stick-to-it-ness, focus, diligence, all those traits that are long lost to anyone unlucky enough to own a television or a computer. Now we admire Multi-Taskers, jugglers of e-mail, news crawls, Facebook, text messages and a cellphone conversation while whipping up a dinner for the family between commercials during Fox news. Call me Old School, put a dunce hat on me and make me sit in a corner, but I don’t buy this multi-tasking one little bit. I taught school awhile before I took an early retirement and I’ve tried to teach attention deficit kids whose sole operational mode was switching from one thought to six others in the space of a minute. Trust me —this is a prescription for not learning much of anything, plenty of little.

Deep thinking seems to be a Lost Art. Down at the South End even Shallow Thinking has taken a hike. We got computers, TV, You-Tube, Linked-In, all that stuff like you-all, meaning, we got 3 minute max attention spans. My pals can’t listen to a whole CD — they hit random play and make a radio station out of their CD players.

The world is on constant Channel Surf, snippets of one crummy show, check out the ball scores, click to the news crawlers, bounce through 37 channels of Nature/Food/CNN/chopped liver then start over. The internet should be banned unless we’re on Ritalin. I just hope there are people, few though they may be, living on some remote island of the Digital World, maybe its south tail end, who can still Concentrate, who can plan and build — from start to finish without checking their stock quotations — a nuclear reactor or a Boeing 747 or a skyscraper or a cure for brain cancer.

I had hoped to end this on some pithy, humorous, neatly bundled conclusion — I really had. But … damn if I can remember where we started. Something about crummy memory, I think. All I can say is Alzheimer’s should hold no fear for most of us. We’ve already programmed ourselves for it…..

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Merry Christmas, Everyone! I guess it’s okay to say Christmas, but if you find that offensive, Happy Holidays! This has been a great year for the Daddle family and as we do every year, we like to share our glad tidings. Daughter Brenda went back to community college after her degree from Swarthmore proved less than marketable. She is taking Business Accounting and expects to find much better prospects after graduation. We told her English Renaissance History narrowed her career chances, but you know kids these days. A year working for Burger King as an ‘essential worker’ convinced her to change her major. Even with the minimum wage increase that’s coming.

Son #1 Jeremiah served his 9 months and two weeks at the Snohomish County Jail for some breaking and entering. Drugs! You think you’ve warned them about the consequences but they think we’re just old fogies. Jerry should be fine after his Narcotics Anonymous regimen. For the time being he’s comfortable in the basement apartment Linda and I set up. Sure, I miss the pool table, but family always comes first! And it’s great to have him home again, even if we have to lock up our valuables and continually need to quarantine when he exposes us to the Covid his friends seem to always bring to the party.

Son #2 has joined a religious commune down near Santa Cruz. Brian is not supposed to contact his earthly family so we haven’t got much news to report. Occasionally he writes for money and we are happy to help out. Well, Linda is, I confess it irks me no end to send that little twerp anything beyond a message to Wake Up! But these things too shall pass, isn’t that what they say?

Linda is doing much better this year. As you might remember she struggled with some mild depression. Empty nest syndrome is what I thought it was, nothing she wouldn’t pass through soon. Boy, was I ever wrong this time! But her doctor has her on some very effective medications and her crying has greatly lessened. Jerry has been a great help. Sometimes he even makes his own lunches.

Retirement, as a friend of mine likes to say, is greatly underrated. Oh, I struggled a little with boredom at first. Like everyone. But right after my heart attack in February (not to worry, I’m okay, just a couple of stents) I started walking more. You know I never really liked exercise of any sort, but that ticker-tweet kicked me in the butt to get up off the couch and get outdoors. I’ve been walking every day. Truthfully, I walk almost all day. Linda says I’m obsessed, but I say a walk a day keeps the cardiologist away. I tried to talk Linda into walking with me, but she says 20 miles is too much for her. Ha ha. Her sense of humor is coming back!

We did make a couple of trips this year. One to Santa Cruz to see Son #2 at his Seeing Orb Commune, but we were told at the security gate no one was allowed inside, not even parents. Admittedly things got slightly out of hand and the sheriff’s office had to intervene, but in the end I settled down — without some damn mantra — and we drove to the coast and stayed at a very nicely restored auto court overlooking the beach before driving back home.

We also attended a Trump rally in October up at Lynden. The man can connect with an audience, I’ll say that, and we were happily surprised when he won again this year for another four year stint. He’s making America great again and even though I know some of you didn’t vote for Mr. Trump, I think you must to be pleasantly surprised. The business of America is business and this is a billionaire businessman. Okay, enough politics….

Hope you and your family have a warm holiday. We in the Daddle household are going to make Christmas Great Again. It will be Yuge, as Donald says. Ha ha! I mean Ho Ho! Love at ya! Linda and Jeremiah and Skeeter

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Jihad Jack was parked in his usual spot at the beer-stained bar in the Pilot House, the South End Marina’s answer to marriage counseling. Any divorce attorney worth his margarita salt would drink nightly down there and write off his bar tab as a legitimate business expense. Jack was twirling his plastic trident in a concoction he’d gotten Brad, the usual bartender during Happy Hour, to ‘create’ for him, something with multiple boozes, eye of newt and a dash of habanero sauce. Jihad called it his Fox News Cocktail since he always watched it on the big screen directly in front of his customary stool.

“There it is,” he hollered so every manjack of us would halt our own conversation for his. “Cornavirus” he cried. “First E-bola and now it’s Covid! You tellin me it’s a coincidence?”

As usual us assembled drinkers began to choose sides, sort of touch football without a football, just fire a pass out over the seating area and see who wouold risk catching the hot potato. “What’s your point, Jack?” Jesse asked, as if he didn’t guess. “You think the government brought this here?”

“Damn right they brought it here,” Jack replied, “just like AIDS.”

Pete set his beer aside and asked, grinning, “What would be their strategy, Jack?”

“They want to inoculate us, can’t you see?? They want to make you bring your kids in and shoot them full of vaccines and autism. Who knows what’s in those shots?”

Dave, two stools downriver, who’s a Physician’s Assistant at the South End Clinic, took his glasses off to study this guy Jack. “You kidding me?” he finally asked. “We got measles cured. We vaccinated kids and it worked. That’s all you have to do. Vaccinate the population. It’s like polio. There’s a cure!”

Jihad Jack smirked. “Yeah, and you want to fluoridate the water too, I bet! The government’s got no right — NONE! — to tell me what to do.” Dave shook his head. “It’s like living in the Dark Ages, that attitude,” he muttered and returned to his beer.

“At least they didn’t have to study propaganda as history, Doc.” Dave half finished his glass and headed for the door. The Pilot House, most nights, is pretty rudderless. Trouble is, it’s the only watering hole for a long ways.

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So okay, let’s say you’re in charge of who gets the first doses of the vaccines for coronavirus. Wait, let’s say I get to decide who goes to the top of the line. Nothing against you, but the whole point of this exercise is determining who makes these decisions. Rumor has it there’s a bunker somewhere under the Appalachian Mountains, a safe house, for bio ethicists brought in from who knows where to make the call who goes first, decide who waits while the pandemic keeps on killing. Life and death, who plays God?

The government, that’s who. The same government half of us think is a Deep State conspiracy, the government who created this phony baloney epidemic hoax so they could force us to wear plague masks and then probably find some excuse to take our guns. That government! But … for the time being, let’s agree that I am going to decide who gets the vaccine first, who gets it next, who gets it last. Skeeter the Beneficent, All Knowing, All Seeing, All the Damn Time! Hear me, Minions!

Okay okay, never mind, just go along with this a bit. I have to decree who gets the shots first when the vaccines are shipped in containers chilled to nearly 90 degrees below zero to the various states. First off, I may pull a Trump and deny the Red States much of the first batches. They didn’t believe this pandemic was real. They don’t wear a mask. They want to party in crowded bars and go to church and attend weddings and funerals even if the funeral will eventually be their own. But … being beneficent, I will relent and divvy up the pie equally. Based on population. Unless the Red States have undocumented immigrants they didn’t want to count in the ongoing census. We’ll go along with that, send them only based on what they wanted to count. Fair is fair and Skeeter the All Seeing is nothing, if not fair.

The bio ethicists, whoever they are and wherever they came from, want to give the first batches to the first responders, the hospital personnel, the nursing homes. Okay by me, seems obvious. Wouldn’t hardly need an ethicist to make that call. The next folks in line are the older folks, probably with underlying conditions. If I can figure out my underlying condition, I’m good with that. The old farts without underlying conditions, I assume, are next with sleeves rolled up. Probably me so I’m gonna go with this choice too. Because, as you’ve already seen, I’m fair. Maybe even the fairest of the fair.

Essential workers? You bet. Personally I might put them ahead of the elderly who smoked themselves onto a ventilator, but let’s be magnanimous here, they drove buses, checked out us customers at grocery stores, put themselves at risk same as first responders. Seems only fair they get protected right away. But you know and I do too, they’ll be at the back of the line. Minimum wage earners, essential to the rest of us with money enough to spend during the pandemic. Sorry, but you folks are young mostly. Gotta save the vaccine for us geriatrics.

Hard call, but somebody’s got to make it, right? Half of us probably won’t even take the vaccine if it’s offered. Who knows what’s in that stuff? Who knows what the long term side effects are? Who knows if it’ll even work longer than a month or two? Not that it matters. The government decided not to buy extra vaccine when they had the chance and now we’re at the back of the line for more. Sure glad they’re the ones making all the decisions, not me. If you don’t trust them, well, maybe there’ll be enough vaccine for old Skeeter.

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