The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

We’re about to head out before Christmas hits its Big Finale, Santa sets his GPS and leaves all his elves waiting for that fat bonus which is as likely as a Peking Pension Plan.  Just shut the door behind us, leave the island and motor past the malls jammed with desperate folks on their last frenzied Push, credit cards and stress maxed, feeling like Jimmy Steward when the bank run ends.  Only without the Norman Rockwell town to back him up with community support….

I remember the Old Christmas.  The one where we were poor as churchmice and all those gifts to friends and family felt like one more weight on the anchor dragging us below the surface.  The folks who make minimum wage or who are unemployed or who pick our crops for next to nothing — Christmas isn’t A Wonderful Life, let me tell ya.

I know, we say the same thing every year.  Christmas.  Too commercial.  Too materialistic.  Too phony baloney.  A month or two of seriously clichéd songs, TV specials, movie reruns.   Scrooge, the Grinch, Tiny Tim, Christmas Future, Miracle on 34^th St., all to sell cars, perfume, watches, toys, baubles and bullshit.  I’m as sentimental as the next he-man, but C’MON!!  It’s a tad excessive.  It’s pretty close to obscene.  I’m sorry, Virginia, but Santa is an executive at Wal-Mart, hate to be the one to break it to you.

I could tell you we go away to some dark hollow to escape all this … but the truth is, we leave so we don’t dampen the neighbors’ spirits here on the cynical South End.  No need to thank us.  It’s our gift.  And as always, it’s really the thought that used to count.

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The final hearing of the January 6^th Select Committee is scheduled for today, the last installment of the series before turning it over to the next Select Committee, probably Jim Jordan’s unbiased handpicked kangaroo court, this one to investigate the investigators who will announce the winners of their choice for criminal charges.  I think (spoiler alert!) we can expect Donald to be their first pick.  So much winning for the guy he’s probably sick of winning.

Whether the Department of Justice prosecutes based on this recommendation remains to be seen.  But irate MAGA Congressmen are already making it clear to the Department that a Select Committee will be formed to investigate Merrick Garland and his G-men.  Clear your calendar, Mr. Garland, the wannabe Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy made clear, same guy that pointed the finger at Trump after the insurrection that scared him but who went to Mar-a-Lago shortly after to beg forgiveness from the soon-to-be-impeached President-in-Exile.  The hunger for power can make a man grovel.  Lord only knows what else Kevin would do for the scepter. So much for profiles in courage in this era.

Who needs Netflix serials when you got this kind of tragi-comic material on everything from the New York Times to Twitter? Not great for managing a country, maybe, but hey, It’s Entertainment and after all, we voted for a reality TV show huckster so let’s play this out, see who’s Fired! Course, we need to update the Select Committee panel shows, don’tcha think?  Something a bit fresher, something to appeal to the Gen X’ers, maybe think out of the box.  Or the Congress.  Take it to the street, why not?  Studio audiences in Poughkeepsie and Mankato, load up the Truth Bus and journey to the hinterlands.  Between witnesses, let’s have some song and dance, something lively, patriotic of course, move those booties!  To the right, hopefully.

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C’mon, you Trump Haters, you gotta give the man his props.  Here he is, under siege from all quarters, depositions bombarding him constantly, lawsuits aplenty, rape charges in the works, the Trump Organization under assault, the classified documents still turning up in their hiding places, his approval ratings tanking, even his fellow MAGA mouths suddenly quiet … and yet, AND YET!, the man has time to create his own NFT trading cards.  You and I, we’d be stressed beyond imagining, locked in with a team of high powered attorneys 24/7, no time to slurp diet cokes or scarf down burgers, just non-stop injunctions to stall the proceedings, court filings to install Special Masters, telephone calls to shaky allies not to cooperate with the hounds the Feds are sending in packs.  Give him credit, money speaks to him much louder than the possibility of lengthy jail time.  Money, after all, is his air.

Us mere mortals would take cover, maybe use acid to remove our fingerprints, undergo plastic surgery to change our faces, grow a beard, shave our heads, whatever it took to escape the constant pounding of the press, the Democrats, the Twitter Trolls and the Department of Justice.  Slip off to some isolated island no one has heard of, live off coconuts and whatever other food source washes onto the beach.  Throw away our cellphones, delete our social media accounts, issue false death certificates.  Or worst case, ask Putin for permanent residency no extradition could touch.

But we’re ordinary citizens.  This man is anything but.  Acknowledge that!  If there is one man who deserves his own super-hero trading cards, that man is Donald J. Trump.  No kryptonite can touch him, no subpoena can scare him, no legion of women claiming sexual harassment can detract him.  Teflon tough?  No, sir, this is the Man of Stainless Steel.  Fires surrounding him, he shrugs off the mortal danger and issues his trading cards.  Mock him if you will, but give him his money.  That’s all he wants.  Your esteem, certainly.  But mostly, the money.  Give it to him.  You owe him that much.

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I know as well as you do that being the richest man on Planet Earth gives a person certain rights that others may not enjoy.  Plus, being the brains behind space exploration, self-driving cars, battery technology and all the rest surely qualifies a man as smart, possibly even a genius.  But pardon me, when that same person rolls out with an unqualified opinion, definitely political in nature, on one of the largest social media platforms he now happens to own, all I can say is please be quiet, Elon, sit down and shut up for awhile.  Nobody really needs an egotistic conspiracy theorist, we got plenty. With more on the way.

Lately the boy genius has been spreading rumors that Pelosi’s husband’s attack might have been, not a brutal assault, but a romantic assignation gone wrong.  You know, just a guess but why not put it out there?  Today he tweets that we need to prosecute Doc Fauci.  Not that he needs any proof of wrongdoing, mind you, just wants the man jailed.  For crimes imagined and otherwise, apparently.

I might expect this from my MAGA-mad uncle Ralph in Biloxi who just sits all day feeding himself macro-doses of Breitbart and Fox, fills his brain with jumble-de-gook and wants the culprits in whatever suspense thriller kooky conspiracy he’s absorbed with today brought to justice.  Justice being, more than likely, straight out of Dirty Harry.

Musk has shown himself for what he really is, a genius moron.  A guy with a lot of brains who evidently doesn’t use them part of the time, just another Tech Giant whose ego lets him think whatever he believes must be true, facts aside.  A spoiled boy who has more money than God and now can play God.  He’s my idea of why we should not have billionaires in this country.  Nobody needs billions of dollars.  And for my money, squat as it is, nobody needs Elon Musk’s opinion either.

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Maybe somebody’s trying to tell me something but lately I’ve been invited to a couple of what I thought were merely get-togethers at local watering holes, a few friends, some new, some old, that turned into preliminary meetings for possible men’s groups.  We could meet monthly, share our latest medical insults, discuss erectile dysfunction remedies, ponder strategies for dealing with the Big D.  All items I might consider useful … just before the nurse yanks the IV’s out and disconnects the ventilator.  The thought of a drum circle of old farts mulling over geriatric distresses, reading treatises on the Final Stage, swapping surgical intrusions and offering comradely commiserations, trust me, if I want to feel old I can do it on my own just fine, thanks.  Insofar as prescriptions for how to cope with geezerhood, I got my own ideas that don’t need to be passed around the tavern table.

Maybe the boyz are going through some ‘stage’ of life, no doubt Chapter 8 in the Aged Man’s Guide to Peace of Mind.  Me, not so much.  Course that might change when I’m diagnosed with (Chapter 2 — Pathologies of the Mature Male), but for now I’m fine with the aches and pains, the soft tissue injuries that take four times longer than when I was young, the memory loss and …, well, no need to write my own book here, there are plenty of tomes to choose from.  And yeah, the Plague Years were a treat.  Lost about 20 friends and neighbors in a little over a year, (Chapter 6 of Grief and Loss for Seniors) what might for some of us lead to troubled inquiries into the tenuousness of our brief existence on this planet, but I’m a yahoo who thinks life is probably long enough, no point reaching for the Methuselah cure and an old age of dementia and parts replacement.  (Chapter 2 —Forget You Have Alzheimers and Enjoy Television).

The boyz are a good crew, plenty enjoyable to quaff a pint or two with, crack wise, compare the latest anecdotes of lives that are more interesting than most, one-up each other since half of us are amateur comics, musicians, filmmakers, writers and fellow artists, what, in a different time and place, might come to be referred to, like the Hudson School or the Paris Group, the Vienna Café or Greenwich Village, as the Camano School.  But that isn’t going to happen either, not if I can help it.  Art, like aging, is not a team sport.  We worked alone all our lives, struggling with our demons and with our muses, by our lonesome.  Too late now to call the hotline for assistance.  Why on earth would anyone think we moved to the South End if we were searching for counseling or consolation or support?  We wanted that, we’d have moved to Stanwoodopolis and whiled away the hours at the Duck Inn with the farmers and the fishermen.  Too late now, boyz.  Too late now.

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