The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Maybe you saw where a gang of killer whales over in Europe launched coordinated attacks on sailboats, the speculation being that a dominant female orca had been injured by some encounter with a ship and was severely traumatized. Traumatized is a nice way of saying she was mightily pissed off. Out there in Mother Nature the birds are dropping rapidly in numbers, the insects are being reduced too and of course the amphibians are thinking about skipping metamorphosis and staying in the water. We humans haven’t been too kind to the creatures who share the planet. A little busy developing combustion engines, clearcutting the Amazon and working to develop artificial intelligence.

Course we homo sapiens aren’t too concerned, not yet anyway. Global warming? Climate change? What, me worry? We got our jet skis and our air conditioners, who cares about a few less mosquitoes, right? If we have to put up dams to keep the Atlantic from flooding Florida, well okay, we’ll put up sea walls and tide gates, not gonna stop burning coal just because a few environmentalists are whining, sure not gonna litter up Arizona with fields of solar arrays. The future will take care of itself, always has, always will. The birds, well, they’re on their own.

But … I just wonder if this gang of killer whales might be a harbinger of nature taking revenge. I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds as a kid, the world under siege by billions of feathered attackers, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. What if all the insects banded together in massive swarms? Or the frogs formed militias? And the snakes joined them? I know, it sounds paranoid, but dammit, what are those orcas up to? We even gave a few of them nice homes in the swimming pools of SeaWorld and fed them their favorite fish and all we asked was they do a few acrobatics for the paying customers. Geez, talk about ingrates.

I don’t know about you but I plan to keep an eye out down by the garden for any … well, unusual activities by the squirrels or the robins. Yesterday I watched two robins attacking a red squirrel, something I thought was probably normal. Today I’m not so sure.

As a home improvement specialist I had a set of toilet seat hardware break, no big deal, just buy the replacement parts and attach them back on the seat and top. Trouble was, when I did just that, the seat top had to be held so that it wouldn’t slam back down. The seat and top were custom fit by me about 30 years ago when I built the house, big thick curly maple and maybe the new hardware wasn’t spec’d out for twice that thickness. Although … it had worked well enough for 3 decades. Plumbing, as any of you know who have ventured into that matrix of horror, is as mysterious as it is implacable, a labyrinth of broken dreams and leaky futures a mere mortal might emerge from babbling and cursing. Me, I have been there many times and some might conclude that this is the reason for more than most of my, let’s call them ‘problems’.

Today I spent four hours assembling new hardware. Backwards, upside down, inside out, you name it, I screwed it in, I screwed it out and I screwed it up. Nothing I did seemed to work, most were just total lack of engineering brains, something I have none of apparently. I have the kind of brain that is spatially dyslexic, so I flip the hinge backwards, then realize my mistake. And then do it again. And possibly, later, one more time. Something in my synapses is short circuited, I don’t know what else to call it.

In the end I had a toilet seat whose lid had to be hand held to keep it up. I suspect some evil femme in a factory somewhere in Hunan modified the design to accommodate women’s pleas to us men to leave the damn lid down when we’re done peeing, but of course the problem is more likely in the design of my weak brain. Finally, out of frustration, I took an old wood toilet seat from the shack and replaced it with the Chinese revenge model, then hauled it up to the house here and installed it. Thirty years on that curly maple throne and now I’m stuck with a store-bought.

Nevertheless, all dark toilets have a silver lining, isn’t that what they say? And mine is to hurry down to the patent office to lock in my new specially designed SEAT DOWN commode for the women of the house whose husbands refuse to listen to their laments and protestations and leave the seat down when they’re done. I expect to make a fortune and trust me, I don’t care how many threatening messages I get from pissed off men who tried to fix that seat on their own so it would stay up. Of course I’ll pass some of the royalties on to that Chinese factory worker. If I can ever locate her….

I just read that 60% of wage earners in the Land of Opportunity are living paycheck to paycheck. Which means they don’t make enough to save anything for, oh, that next ER visit or the unexpected auto repair or the jump in their house or apartment rental. Sure, some folks just spend everything they make anyway, wouldn’t matter if they got a 50% raise in their hourly wage, they’d run out and buy more, probably put it on their credit card, pay the monthly minimum, ignore the huge interest accumulation and just sink deeper in debt. But … I suspect most of these 60%ers are struggling to feed their families, pay the mortgage or the rent, cough up the car payments and buy clothes for their kids. Their incomes are probably down in the minimum wage bottom area.

Nice to know, though, that the Fed keeps jacking the interest rates to try to keep inflation at bay. Or put another way, the Fed wants to see unemployment rates rise. And the last thing they want is for hourly wages to start rising too, just another form of inflation. The lower the unemployment numbers, the more employers will have to pay to entice workers to hire on to flip burgers, repair tires, serve café patrons, scan groceries or make beds at the motels. Yeah, it’s a vicious cycle, a downward spiral, at least for the poor.

Housing prices are going through the roof. Gas is high. Try to find an affordable used car or get in line to buy a new Honda. Supply chain issues, price gouging, too few rental apartments, remote working, you name it. Opioid addictions, homelessness, civil unrest, what’s not to like if you’re the Fed? Crank up those unemployment numbers, keep the wages low, spare the rich. This time around we have the debt ceiling crisis looming, a game of chicken where the right wingers in the GOP put a gun to everyone’s head and dare them to refuse more tax cuts for the wealthy and less benefits for the poor. You might think the richest country in the world might worry less about its billionaires and more for those 60% hanging by a thread. But you’d be wrong…. The rich, in case you hadn’t heard, just keep getting richer.

A couple of our friends’ daughters were dutifully dragged along to our dinner party awhile back. They’re in their late 30’s, working women, one divorced and the other dating, which means, I’m guessing, they’re both dating. I don’t ask, give me that much credit. Once we got past the health care issues of us Boomers, all those geezer geriatric complaints, we finally settled into politics. Trump, Biden, the smackdown rematch coming up in 2024.

“I can’t believe,” Katie, the daughter of our oldest friends, said, “the same two old white guys are going to run again.” Jenny, the divorced kid of our other two oldest friends, rolled her eyes and chugged the half finished glass of sauvignon, then filled it with a sloppy flourish. “No kidding,” she growled, shaking her head. Her latest paramour lightly touched her wrist, no doubt worried we geezers would take umbrage, but he was the new squeeze, he’d learn soon enough us old birds were hard to rile. If he lasted long enough ….

“There ought to be an age limit. Reagan went out with Alzheimers. Biden’s a hundred years old, give or take. Trump’s going through his 10th childhood, the spoiled old fart. It’s time to retire some of these white dudes, put em in a Home!” Wally, I think her beau’s name was, took his hand home, wrapped it around an empty beer bottle and probably felt like he’d walked into an assisted living facility by mistake.

I wandered over to the fridge, pulled a beer, opened it and handed it to Willy or Wally or whatever. “New blood,” I said lamely. “Gotta say, we old farts are leaving you with a helluva mess. We didn’t do doodly about climate change, left you with more guns out there than most armies have. We had our fun and you’ll get left with the bill. Seems only fair you might have Senators or Presidents who had some new ideas. We seem to have run out of them. Can’t even come up with new candidates. Gridlocked Congress is our answer. History’s gonna be a little harsh with us,” I said, “but give us this, we gave you rock and roll.”

So okay, not a great trade-off.