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 life can turn funny again….

Count me in as a huge fan of Donald J. Trump’s mission to make our government more efficient. Obviously it was a wise choice to put the richest man on earth in charge of the effort to weed out incompetency, complacency, graft and just plain sloth. If anyone knows how to downsize, it’s Elon Musk, the billionaire who cut the staff of Twitter to its core. Send him into the Department of the Treasury to root around in its highly classified files on … well, just about everyone. Our social security numbers, our financial records, all that highly sensitive data we change our passwords frequently for and need additional authentication to access ourselves. Is he a robot?

Course, as Department head, Mr. Musk sent a crew into the data banks without security clearances of any kind. I’ll leave it to you if that constitutes incompetence or potential graft (to use information for his personal fiscal aggrandizement), lack of judgement or nefarious activities. Take your pick, he’s fired.

The upper management decision to immediately eliminate USAID left shipments on the docks, in warehouses and on cargo ships. A slower rollout might have prevented this waste but no, incompetence and a reliance on gut instinct left governments and agencies scrambling. Efficiency? Not exactly, but probably the exact opposite. Someone needs to be fired!

We just came out of the worst pandemic since the Spanish Flu so obviously we can stop worrying about future outbreaks, might as well cut out funding for the Contagious Disease Center and the National Institute of Health, not going to need any bogus and toxic vaccines the soon-to-be head of the Department of Health and Human Services has been warning us scientifically infatuated citizens about. If he were already confirmed, we’d have to fire him. Probably could save ourselves some waste of time and reject him beforehand.

When the fires of Los Angeles swept through residential neighborhoods and firefighters ran the hydrants dry, orders went out from the highest office to have the Army Corps of Engineers open the floodgates on the dams to send billions of gallons pouring toward that imperiled city. Unfortunately no one did any research, asked any probing questions, consulted the experts no doubt in line for elimination and so those billions of gallons, unexpected by the downstream farmers, drained into fields that might need that water in the coming droughts of summer. Nothing reached L.A. Incompetence? Mismanagement? Lazy thinking? Absolutely! He should be fired! No questions asked. Pack up your belongings and vacate the White House immediately.

Down by our Garbage Free end of the island we got about 16 trucks a week from Waste Management plying our neighborhood. Big green plastic bins get rolled out to the end of the driveway and the big green trucks stop, drop their metal arms, lift the bin up and into the maw of the trucks’ rear ends then move on to the next. The mizzus asked if maybe we shouldn’t sign up for curbside pickup, save me that awful trip to the dump.

The trip I make about every 3 months. When I arrived at the primitive South End, the dump was actually that, a dump. Roll up, toss our garbage into a pit. Frank ran the dump back then and about half what we tossed he took home. Old TV’s, busted toasters, dead lawnmowers, Frank figured they were worth keeping. Sort of recycling before recycling was cool.

Admittedly there weren’t many of us living on the island back then, but when the population grew, the county installed coin-op dumpsters. For 50 cents we could load the bin and a compactor crushed it all down. A decade later they added barrels for glass and plastics and paper. We had to sort the glass — clear, green and brown — and most weeks the barrels were full so folks dropped the stuff on the ground. The dump was a dump once again.

Now we toss all the recyclables into one place. Easy. Real easy. I don’t know why either folks still use the highway to toss their bottles and cans, maybe just the irrepressible urge to dump as soon as the container is empty. But a lot of us evidently think the roadside is their personal dump. If I thought too long about it, I’d become more cynical than I already am and none of us needs that. Litter’s bad enough.

So when folks drop their garbage in the middle of the parking lot at the park I maintain, I’ve stopped sorting through it to find a letter with their address or a magazine with their name on the label. I have to live near these folks, but I sure don’t want to get to know them. I got enough enemies as it is … so I’m real glad most of the newcomers can afford curbside pickup.

The South End Advisory Committee met last night in emergency session. The last time they convened a similar gathering was back in 2001 following the Trade Tower attacks when an alarmed citizenry demanded they beef up our shoreline defenses to counter what, at the time, seemed like imminent terrorist incursions. Since then the South End has pretty much kept its head in the sand, so to speak, ignoring the Great Recession (which seemed to most of us just a continuation of our unemployment woes), the Iraq War (we’re pretty much all too old to enlist) and the rise of ISIS (it’s hard to behead those with theirs buried in the beach). But sometimes events arise that demand attention, demand action, demand a committee meeting.

And certainly this was one of those times. Now that the Trump Tweet presidency has left the station, small groups around the country have declared themselves Sanctuary Zones. Sanctuary cities, sanctuary universities, sanctuary Starbucks, sanctuary nursing homes, sanctuary daycare centers. The question on last night’s table: should we declare ourselves a sanctuary too? Ethel Birmbach, current President of the Council, called the meeting to order. “Deportation is not an option,” she declared almost immediately. “These are our neighbors and friends, not our enemies.”

Randy Primplucker, a realtor for WindyRear Realty and the only member on the council actually born on the South End, argued for a quick vote “to protect our neighbors”, but Betsy Birdcall took him to task. “We don’t really know who some of these people are, Randy. Sure, you might have sold them their property, but beyond a credit check, how do you know what their backgrounds are? I’m not arguing for detention camps or even forced deportation, I’m just saying we shouldn’t assume there’s nothing nefarious going on in our community. The government won’t be looking out for us, that’s for sure.”

“These people already have detention camps,” Ralph Van Vleet practically shouted. “They put up their own gates! What are they hiding behind those gated walls? Why are they so nervous? Who are they trying to protect? Who do they think they’re fooling?”

“For godsake, Ralph,” Patty Plankton replied. “These people pay the lion’s share of our property taxes. Let’s don’t charge in half-cocked.”
Ethel pounded her hard rubber mallet on the desk that served as podium. “Calm down, everybody,” she commanded. “Randy, we all know you have financial ties to these folks. Maybe you should recuse yourself on this issue. This is way too important to have monetary issues clouding our judgement.” Randy protested meekly, but finally acquiesced.

In the end the Council voted 5 to 3 to declare the South End a Sanctuary. Up in the gated communities the 1% breathed a collective sigh of relief that, for the time being at least, their taxes would not go any higher. At least not until after the Trump presidency or a turnover in the South End Council. Down here we protect our own.

The other day I went looking for my sense of humor. I searched everywhere I could think of. I looked in all the closets, checked under the laundry, dug through cabinets and behind the sink, under the beds, in drawers I hadn’t opened in years. Nothing. It had to be here somewhere, it couldn’t have wandered off on its own. I’m sure I just put it down absent mindedly and walked off so if I retraced my steps, maybe I would run into it.

It’s been a few days and I’ve been to the studio, the shop, the woodsheds, back on the trails, down to the beach. Nothing. Not a trace, not even the shadow of a smile. It’s been raining nearly constantly lately and I’m worried I left it outside where it’s shrunk down to something small enough for the slugs to slime over, something I might not even want to find much less use again, just some icky sog of a remnant nobody would recognize.

The shortest day of the year is coming up and I really need to find that funny bone. The sun comes up about noon and starts sinking immediately, the rain drips off our clogged gutters, the storms keep blowing down trees in the back 40 and the news is too bleak to listen to anymore … at least without that lost sense of humor. I checked on E-bay to see if maybe someone had stolen mine and now was selling it, used, slight wear, free shipping. Not only didn’t I find mine, I didn’t find anyone offering a reasonable replacement.

Although, someone from Wisconsin had one for sale. “Funny bone, never used, won’t be needing it. Voted Trump. Best offer.” Bidding started at $25 with a $250 shipping charge. I noticed it had yet to get a single bid even though it had been listed since the election. The idea of an unused, nearly new sense of humor was seriously tempting. And at this point of desperation the exorbitant price was almost acceptable. But I’m going to hold out for one that’s more tried and true. That one from Wisconsin, I bet it’s dark and mean spirited. You know, if it even works. I worry that its idea of funny is to belittle and bully, then laugh out loud at the victim’s misery. Just make fun of others who are different, whose religion isn’t the same, who have a disability. I’m not sure how much I’d be willing to pay for that. At least not yet.

Meanwhile, I’m going to keep looking for mine. It’s got to be here somewhere. I just worry if I don’t locate it soon, if I find it after prolonged inactivity, it’ll be like my flashlight batteries, pretty much dead. Inauguration Day is coming right up. I’m going to need to find it before then. That, or buy the one on E-bay and take my chances.