The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

You got to give the Fat Man credit, it isn’t all hot air that fills that expensive suit of his.  He’s informed CNN he plans to sue them for defamation of his character when they disregarded his claims of election fraud.  Give him stars for over-the-top chutzpah, the boy learned his lessons well from that paragon of virtue, Roy Cohn, Joseph McCarthy’s pitbull attorney.  When the food bowl comes in empty, show em your fangs.  He plans to sue the other fake media moguls too, just in case you thought he was exhibiting unexpected mercy.

There is a gene in salesmen and con artists too that blocks shame and embarrassment the way a T-cell attacks a virus.  Show no doubt, attack when attacked, cry foul, turn over the checkerboard, never admit defeat.  Defeat is for the weak, the losers, the pitiable.  They deserve what they get.  And what they get is a life of regrets and debts.  Step over their bodies, leave em behind for the vultures and the other crybabies.  Kick a little dirt over them. But walk away.

It may very well be that the guy is batshit crazy, not the scheming wheeler-dealer the fake news makes him out to be.  Sure, he’s a crook, greedy as any billionaire cutthroat, but what if he really doesn’t know the difference between the truth and what he believes?  What if he’s a pathetic manchild who never got the love he craved from his indifferent father?  Oh, never mind, that would make him a loser and we know that can’t be countenanced by the Donald.  So where does that leave us?

Well, I for one, speaking for all us losers, hope he gets what he deserves, some quality time in a federal penitentiary, 3 squares a day and some new friends who might teach him a lesson or two in humility.  He can see the handwriting on the wall, probably why he’s more shrill, more insistent that he’s the True Winner, that the election a year and a half in the distant past was stolen from him, it’s the only explanation.  Winners don’t lose, amigo.  Winners always win in his world.  That world, sad to say, is shrinking fast.  Sue CNN, sue God, the walls are closing in.  You thought Mar-a-Lago was a cage, get ready for a real one.  Sue the warden, see if anybody still cares….

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Make Island County Okay Again, that’s my slogan.  And Make America shut up for awhile and pay attention to what’s really important.  My god, quit checking Facebooks and Instagrams and read a damn newspaper.  Today, in mine, there was a letter to the editor about our candidate for commissioner saying it was time to elect a man for the office, too many women commissioners lately and ours was ‘an evil woman.’  Don’t you just hate evil women?  The only thing I hate more than the satanic witches is the guys who want to burn them at the stake … for being a woman.  Sure, vote Neanderthal.

I ran for commissioner once.  Okay, I ran as a lark.  Wrote letters to the editor for and against myself until John Dean, the editor of the Stanwoodopolis Gazette, called to ask me politely to cease and desist.  ‘Hard for folks to tell what’s real and what’s not,’ he told me.  Wow, think of that, a time before fake news and hard journalism morphed into one and the same.  John was prescient, I guess, but that finger in the dike didn’t stop the flood that’s broken through in these misinformed times.  With some reluctance, I agreed to quit the field, fetch my hat from the ring and slink back into the nettle wilderness from whence I’d come.  John, however, caught the bug, ran for commissioner and won.  At least til the Tea Party candidate beat him the next cycle.

This misogynistic candidate running against our evil lady commissioner was actually commissioner himself awhile back.  He accused his opponent, then the Director of the Camano Center, of an agenda that would close down the Whidbey Navy Base, thinking, I guess, that Island County Commissioners have unlimited jurisdiction, probably suspicious too that she might confiscate the land and give it back to the tribes we took it from in the first place.  Back then he couldn’t pronounce the name of our island and had to be corrected at the town hall meeting.  Tomato, tomahto, Camano, Camahno,you might think he’d come a bit more prepared….

Politics is a tough racket even in the pre-Trump days.  Talk to some of these candidates nowadays and you hear stories of nasty encounters when they go doorbelling, guns brought out, curses yelled, full blown paranoid rage, welcome to the neighborhood.  Sic the hounds of hate on em!  It may be these times demand a tougher skin, a steely determination, a don’t-turn-the-other-cheek attitude, a knee-to-the-groin response.  You want a man for commissioner, Mr. Misogyny, better get yerself a metal codpiece, Skeeter and the Amazons are coming for you!

At least til the editor of the Gazette asks nicely for a cease and desist.  Again.

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I got a friend who just bought property a quarter mile down the road, up a dead end gravel road past some recent clearcuts, cars parked along the road, mobile homes hauled in, a small community of fellow South Enders perched on their plots in Paradise.  She has a small cabin with an extension cord for power off the neighbor’s grid, an outhouse,  a hose for water from the shared well and 5 acres with a few nice cedars and firs encroached upon by nettles and blackberries.  For now, summer time, the place is more than livable, it’s sunny and private, a refuge from the island’s gridlock and gated communities.

It puts me in mind of my arrival at my own shack some 45 years ago, all agog and wearing thick rose colored glasses, ready for a new start, anxious to leave behind all the baggage of my previous life.  Helping my friend move a shed back toward the woods the other day, all I could think about was the excitement I felt when I came here, my own woods, my own house, my new garden, the joy of going back to the land, planting fruit trees, shrubs, vegetables, learning to build sheds, remodel that shack, fix the well pump, all that pioneer stuff.  No doubt some would scoff and shake their heads, the dumb kid bought a pig’s ear, a logged off acreage mostly nettled and primitive and no damn wonder it cost next to nothing.

Beauty, so they say, is in the eye of the myopic.  Or something like that.  I remember the look my old man gave the place first time he set foot on the property.  Shack leaning into the mud, blackberries taking over, salmonberry jungles and nettle barriers, a son who should have known better than to move to the end of an island at the end of civilization, no job prospects, no homesteader skills, no damn sense.  What was the boy thinking?  He saw a shabby life ahead of me where I saw a new start.  I guess we were both right.

My friend is starting over.  She’s a bit older than I was and no doubt a helluva lot wiser.  She’s gonna do fine up there.  She’s already remodeling the cabin, got PUD coming today to hook up the power, water lines next and indoor plumbing.  She can see the future from her front porch steps.  And it’s wide open, an unlimited horizon.  I envy her, I really do, but for now I’m enjoying the nostalgia.  You go, girl!

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These are strange times in America.  The rest of the world is growing strange too.  Computers, cellphones, artificial intelligence – and no, I don’t mean Republicans – cloning, satellites, climate change, drone warfare – and no, I don’t mean Amazon deliveries.  The societal transitions are accelerating, the times, they are a chainging … fast.  When you hear folks say Make America Great Again, what they mean is stop these changes from happening, go back in time, I Like Ike … and Joe McCarthy, stop the sex changes, put gays back in their closets, teach white history, bring prayer — Christian prayer anyway — back into our schools.  Burn the witches!  Not just lock em up.

Folks are terrified of change now, folks are afraid of science now.  Hell, who isn’t?! Half the country worries about their jobs, their shrinking incomes, their kids’ future, global warming, Covid, monkey pox, nano trackers in their vaccine, immigration, inflation, world war 3.

If you’re a Democrat, you’re worried about Democracy itself, worried America will turn to nationalism, to authoritarianism, to totalitarianism, to Trumpism.  You’re thinking the Supreme Court just went rogue, that McConnell may be the devil incarnate, that Matt Gaetz will eventually become the Speaker of the House.  I know, we’re living in the Night of the Living Brain Dead.

But!  Before you build your zombie bunkers, consider this:  Obama was elected president.  I know, a long long time ago in a galaxy far from the America of today.  He said, quoting Martin Luther King, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”  There will be setbacks, there will be heartbreaks, there will be moments when you lose hope … but history is on your side.  Women can vote, gays are out of the closet, vaccines DO work, blacks will not return to Colored Only drinking fountains, coal mining jobs will go away … and we will not!

Gloom and doom will not prevail!  Optimism will!  Keep that in mind.  We’re the America that’s great.  We’re the party of the future, not the past.  We will prevail.  The future is what we choose to make it.  Spread the word, spread the word.  And whatever you do, go out and vote.

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