The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Thank God for North Dakota!  Out there in the prairie state they have a little more time on their hands for deliberations on who can attend their schools than the rest of the country.  While they were declaring that no schools in their state could accommodate the needs of transgenders, they took the time to consider whether non-human students were welcome, those kids who identified with other species.  No doubt they were concerned that the litter box controversy sweeping the other 49 states would descend on theirs.

I get it, I really do.  Taxpayers are fed up with their money being spent on kitty litter.  And once that threshold is passed, what will the non-human demands be next?  Cat food lunches, kibble treats at recess?  Obligatory dog walks?  Leash laws rescinded?  No sir, the North Dakota legislature will not stand for it!  You want to be a cat, stay home.  Who needs a pack of meowing kids disrupting their classrooms.  New York might be so completely woke it would accommodate that, but out there in the windswept Rough Rider state, not gonna happen! Not if these legislators have their way.

And while they’re at it, how about M&M’s, those woke little rascals that are driving Tucker Carlson crazy.  Thank god too for Tucker Carlson, the Paul Revere of the anti-woke brigade.  No M&M’s should be allowed in any North Dakota classroom!

Down wind from Dakota the Missouri legislature passed a dress code for its female members, requiring them finally to cover up their shoulders.  Apparently the menfolk were distracted beyond reason by the sight of bare skin above the breastline and a need for decorum pushed the new rule to passage by a vote of 105-51.  Now, finally, the legislature can do the people’s work without being sexually stimulated.  Call it a win for good government.

Out there in the hinterlands the unwoke are finally addressing the pressing issues of their citizenry.  Hopefully other states will follow suit.  Before cat people take over our schools and women with bare shoulders are emboldened to take nudity to another, more dangerous, level.

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I don’t get out as much as I should.  When I get news from the outside world, I realize that I’ve stuck my head in the South End sand and tried to avoid negativity.  If I stayed off my newsfeeds on the computer, stopped listening to NPR down at the studio and canceled our subscriptions to the local fishwrappers , I might have a chance to live a life free of menacing intrusions into my otherwise peaceful little dreamworld.  But as you know and I do too, the outer world is forever scratching at the door to get in.

Today is the day the Memphis murder of a young black guy by 5 black cops is going to hit the airwaves, probably inciting riots and outrage and the sequel to the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis.  The Black Lives Matter protests obviously didn’t have their memo read down there in Tennessee.  And the folks who argue that Critical Race Theory has no place in their school systems will get to make the argument once more.  The fact that the alleged murderers were all black too should make their case a bit easier.  Lost in the shuffle will be any need for reforming police departments to eliminate this sort of endemic violence by cops.

But I’m ahead of myself here.  This is tomorrow’s news.  Today I’m more worried about what I discovered going on in Indiana where their legislature is proposing its schools ban furries, those kids who identify with animals apparently.  Maybe our schools out here have furries too, I don’t really know, but now I really am concerned.  And maybe lucky I don’t live in Indiana where, for all I know, the furries are infiltrating their classrooms.

You really can’t make this stuff up.  Although Indiana can.  We live now in a world right out of National Enquirer.  Nothing much is too insane to consider not only a possibility but probable.  Litter boxes in the schoolrooms ,Jewish lasers from outer space starting forest fires, critical race theory being taught in kindergarten, Big Foot running for the U.S. Senate, Jesus orbiting earth in a spaceship, go ahead and make up a few of your own, post it on Facebook, let it go viral and next thing you know it’s squatting in every living room on the one eyed computer screen.

Furries!  Missouri wants to ban litter boxes so I guess they got furries already too, they’re spreading west!  I’m keeping my eye out for the school bus drops, see if the furries are here yet and yeah, I bet they are.  I’m okay with it so long as they stay out of my garden.  I got enough furry pests in there already.

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If you’re one of the vast many who read this blog, I want to thank you.  I know you’ve been loyal patrons of my off-kilter sense of humor and moonshine wit all these years and refrained from writing nasty responses and for that I want to thank you further.  But lately I’ve been contemplating how to increase this readership.  There are teenage girls on Tik-Tok who have a million or more viewers who wait eagerly every day for tips on beauty aids.  Out there in the wild wild west of blogland there are sites that draw jaw-dropping numbers of dedicated readers. And while I appreciate your own dedication, I’ve decided it might be time to up the ante.

After some cursory investigation of more successful blogsites it is apparent that what I need is a bit more clickbait than the puny stuff this column has been offering over the years.  Sure, the South End might interest a few dozen of you, but c’mon, this is a world where Qanon rules and health supplements draw millions.  Politics and cures for what ails ya, that’s the ticket to fame and fortune on the internet.  Trust me when I say I’ve weighed whether promoting quack cures or warning the world about new and worse conspiracies out there compensate for the irreparable damage it might wreak on those who are susceptible and gullible, who might think the most outrageous claims and insane theories are 100% true if they read them on the internet.

And I’ve come to the conclusion that yes, if I can crank my viewer numbers up a bit, it would be worth it.  The world is a pretty crazy place already, you got to admit, and if tossing a burning bottle of snake oil into the mix adds to the global insanity, well, what’s one more bot, one more wild exaggeration, one more dubious claim, one more bogus accusation, one more cure for cancer announcement in the big scheme of things.  Especially if the increased readership leads to product endorsements, paid advertising and increased revenue streams.

So, fair warning, dear reader, in the future the Daddle Diaries will be a much more exciting ride, hopefully a viral one.  But never fear, we’ll be bringing you a panacea for that virus, one in product development even as this goes to press.  The South End will once again lead the way.

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Marjorie Taylor Greene is one gun-totin, shoot-from-the-lip, pistol packin mama.  Tough as a Georgia peanut, that girl, and a brain nearly as big.  She loves her social media and social media loves her.  If Donald Trump needs an extra bodyguard, he couldn’t do much better.  If he needs someone to make him look like a moderate RINO, look no further, the woman isn’t just right of him, she’s right of Genghis Khan.  Her latest statements on Steve Bannon’s hot talk show let us know that if she had managed the January 6^th insurrection, her and Steve, the mob would have come armed to the teeth and the coup would have been successful.

Okay.  So much for the positive side of freedom of speech.  In America you can pretty much spew hate, advocate it, repeat it, retweet it and it’s just fine.  In Germany you mouth off that the Holocaust was a hoax perpetrated by Zionist swine and see how far you get.  Trump and his buddy Ye or KanYe or his ministerial name as interplanetary messenger, they can dogwhistle all day long, give hope to the true believers that think their problems are caused by blacks or Jews or immigrant rapists, and half this country will nod their heads in agreement, okay now to entertain those racist notions, screw the ‘woke’ snowflakes.  Personally, yeah, I find it troubling, but hey, I believe in free speech and I guess if I have to look around at half my fellow grocery shoppers and know that a goodly number of my neighbors are guilty of thoughtcrimes, well, better to know your enemy than not, I figure.  I don’t want books banned and I don’t want Universities quarantining their students from ideas they find objectionable.

Having said that, what I do fear is that miraculous internet we got, the one where phony ideas, faux facts, bogus quotes and all the rest ricochet around the web like rabid bats, contributing to the expanding ignorance of our so-called civilized world.  Get ready for what’s coming next, pal, the AI programs that will duplicate anyone’s voice, write convincing text in anyone’s syntax and style, present a video photoshop of you or me or the President of the Free World, all made to dupe the reader or listener or viewer.  Try to figure out what is real and what is phony, but good luck.  We don’t trust the news media anymore, folks who might have the ability to factcheck this stuff, so what’s coming down the digital highway is way scarier than anything coming out of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s quacking mouth.  The truth?  You can’t handle the truth!  Actually, you probably could … if only you knew what was real and what wasn’t.  None of us will handle the subterfuge.

Marjorie’s not going to take the Capitol with an armed militia.  But the trolls are going to muck up the world with enough flak and clickbait to make it impossible to see through the fog.  Freedom of Speech?  We can’t handle freedom of speech! Not in the digital world.

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Maybe Reggie would never have noticed the slow drain of his savings account over long periods of time, something in his artistic sensibilities that kept him from the hard work of managing his finances, but Lisa, his bookkeeper, slipped up, running his credit card at the Southendomish Casino.  Reggie noticed it and thought at first it was some mistake since he had never set foot in the Casino, but when he mentioned it to Lisa, she stammered some cockamamie explanation so implausible, he knew instantly he was looking at the tip of a very deep iceberg, one that proved ultimately to descend about 65,000 dollars.

We pals of Reggie’s weren’t surprised he could have made a ton of money selling his art, what we had a hard time believing was he could save any of it.  The man could sell a $10,000 painting and spend it faster than he’d painted the canvas the night before.  And he could paint like an amphetamine monkey.  65 grand was a pretty hefty embezzlement by my neighbor across the road, a dour non-descript woman who kept to herself and trimmed her shrubbery on sunny days, nobody you’d suspect of a gambling problem turned felony.  But then, who do we really know all that well?  My great aunt in northern Maine, a nurse in a doctor’s office, shared the needle and bed with her boss, a small scandal in her town and our family.  You never know….

Reggie did hire a forensic accountant, tracked his losses and confronted Lisa, who even in the face of insurmountable evidence, denied she took a dime.  He threatened to go to the cops, she told her church members Reggie was an unmitigated liar.  Touche’.

In the end Reggie couldn’t imagine years of depositions, trials, cops, lawyers and lawyers’ bills.  Better, he told me, to spend his energy on art than revenge.  That, I guess, is the difference between an artist and a writer.  In the end neither will get rich so who cares how the pie gets sliced, right?  And of course Lisa blew hers at the blackjack table.  She died a year ago, penniless and in debt.  Maybe, just maybe, there is such a thing as Karma.  Course, I expect Reggie will end up the same way, just a little faster thanks to Lisa.

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