The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Francine rolled into the County Administration offices looking like the dog had dragged her to work.  “These three day holiday weekends are going to be the death of me,” she muttered to Harvey, the county’s health officer.  Harvey looked up from his list of septic tank inspections for the week and said, “What?  You don’t like football playoffs all day long, all weekend long?”

Francine tossed her purse behind the counter and made a bee-line to the coffee urn in the back corner.  She was still growling by the time she returned with her quart mug Big Gulp steaming with fresh joe.  “One ballgame is one too many, Harve, but honest to god, there must have been a dozen.  Wally had a friend or ten over, beer cans everywhere and crummy leftover pizzas far as the eye could see.”

Wally was her 26 year old son, laid off from the lumber mill in Sedro Wooley three years ago, unemployment exhausted and now a refugee in Francine and her husband Trey’s basement which they’d finished off into living quarters.  If you called a room with no windows, a small bed, apartment sized fridge and a makeshift toilet and sink ‘living’.  He had a small TV in there but mostly Wally watched ESPN on the 48 inch drive-in theater screen in Trey and Francine’s living room.  Meaning, his real living was upstairs.

“How long are kids supposed to stay in the nest, Harve?  Riddle me that!”

“I read the other day that nearly half of children from 18 to 30 were living with their folks.  You’re in good company, Frannie.  Just takes longer these days for kids to grow up, I guess.”

“When I was 18, I couldn’t wait to get out of my parents’ house.  Got an apartment with a couple of girlfriends in Seattle, found a job and got out.  What’s so hard about that?”

Harvey put his appointment list down.  “Remember what you paid for the apartment, Fran?  My first one was 75 bucks, some sad little second story one bedroom over the TV repair shop down in Ballard.  75 bucks a month.  What do you suppose that would go for now?  I bet you couldn’t find anything cheaper than a thousand.  On top of that, figure how much some minimum wage job would pay.  Might tell you why kids are living at home.”

Francine took a slow hit off her Big Gulp cup.  “You think we should charge Wally rent?”  The idea seemed to grow immediately in her imagination.  She was looking at Harvey and already nodding her head.  Why not? she was saying more to herself than him.  Room and board too!  Yes, why not?  “Harvey,” she finally said out loud, “you’re a genius.”

Harvey shrugged.  Tomorrow Franny would be muttering about the same thing.  The kid couldn’t afford rents in the area, he sure couldn’t afford Francine’s.  “Or,” he said, shuffling papers, “you could move away.  That’s what we did.  Jim, our son, didn’t want to leave his friends.  I hear Phoenix is nice.  At least winters….”

If you’re like the rest of an anxious America, you’re worried about that Chinese ‘observation’ balloon floating menacingly over Montana and moving toward a neighborhood near you with unknown intentions and possibly a cargo of new bio-weapons to unleash on the hinterlands.  What to do? What to do?  The Republicans want to shoot it down.  Or at least shoot down Biden’s non-response.  Maybe they think blowing up a balloon full of killer viruses that will float down like a toxic snowstorm on the unprotected livestock and denizens below is a good plan.  As good as their budget proposals anyway.

Those darn Chinese!  First they unleash the Covid virus they developed in Fauci’s bio-engineering lab in Wuhan, now they’re filling our stratosphere with pestilential orbs.  And our blogosphere with new and more potent conspiracy theories.  Qanon, no doubt about it, will link this balloon menace with the green comet pass-by, triggering mass panic among its ardent followers, no telling what ensuing terror would be unleashed across this great land.  The Chinese at least have a good plan.

The longer that menace floats across American airspace the more the danger from trigger happy Congressmen and gullible blog readers will become.  Biden is undoubtedly huddled with his advisors and the generals.  And his re-election committee.  If this drifting ball of poisonous rumors is allowed to cross the continent, no telling what the fallout will be even if the damn thing floats out into the Atlantic Ocean.  Political lives will be lost, you can count on that.

Down here on the South End the danger has already passed.  Wendy Schneider’s daughter’s  7^th birthday party was a few days ago.  She told me they’d rented one of those bouncy playhouses for her and all her friends, but made the mistake of filling it with a hundred small helium balloons that all said Happy 7^th Birthday, Tina! that floated for awhile at the top of the plastic roof, which was fine while the two dozen kids romped and cavorted, but when they exited for the birthday cake inside Wendy’s trailer, the bouncy house lifted off and was last seen headed over the long closed Tyee Store.   It’s very likely the thing was made in China.  And this may have been the plan all along.

Even as we sit here complacently congratulating ourselves on surviving the phony pandemic, a Chinese observation balloon is moving across Montana, no doubt monitoring the movement of cattle near Miles City with devious plans to deploy the bovines in who knows what sinister plot.  Some Republican congressmen who aren’t too busy investigating the FBI’s involvement with the J6 protests or the Hunter Biden laptop scandal or Doc Fauci’s bogus vaccines are demanding we shoot the thing down before it’s TOO LATE!

Holy Hinderburg, Batman, let’s get our priorities straight.  Forget about the damn balloon.  There’s a green comet on its way here.  This is no Kehoutek, no Halley’s, no errant asteroid, it’s a Green Comet, probably some environmental emissary from the far reach of the galaxy bent on signaling the Earth that green death is on its way.  Open your eyes!  You won’t need a telescope when this thing greenwashes our planet, obviously a message, even the final one, for what could well be an Eco-Armageddon.

You think investigating Doc Fauci is more important than saving the planet?  Maybe you should be asking yourselves what’s in that trail of green dust spewing out behind some malevolent iceball?  Is this the Storm that Qanon has been predicting?  Is this the End or just the Beginning?  Why hasn’t the government begun preparing nuclear spaceships to intercept this thing before it reaches us?  Why hasn’t the blogosphere lit up like the 4^th of July to warn us of imminent danger?  Is this because they know something we don’t?  That they want to keep us unprepared for the coming Storm?

Drop the investigations regarding the Intelligence Agencies and start investigating what’s behind the apathy toward this Green Comet.  The Chinese balloon is just a distraction.  It’s all a distraction!  Wake up!  The Green Comet is on its way!  The Green Comet is coming and nobody seems to care!

I love a good holiday as much as the next yahoo … but c’mon, this Groundhog’s Day business, let’s be honest, the Chamber of Commerce out there in Pullmyleg, Pennsylvania has pulled a fast one on those of us who take meteorologic prediction seriously.  Down here on the convergence zoned South End, No Way is a groundhog going to see his shadow on Feb. 2^nd.  Even if we had groundhogs!  This thing just gives Science a bad name.  And lately, the last thing it needs in these superstitious, fake news, impeachment trial, end-of-the-world times is a black eye over some mammalian hairball on the East Coast seeing its hairball shadow (or not) and then extrapolating that to El Nino or asteroid strikes on Wall Street or global warming.

Which is precisely why some of the more empirically minded boyz down at the Mabana Body Shop have been searching, in a deductive sort of methodology, an alternative Predictor of winter longevity.  Hellfire, if this Covid lockdown makes every day the same as the last one and the one coming tomorrow, we figure there’s no point in fighting endless monotonous inevitability.  We’ll just pull the covers up, collect unemployment and wait patiently for our vaccinations.  This is how civilizations thrive:  they figure out tides and seasons for planting schedules and harvest times and earlier happy hours.

The model the boyz constructed over the past decade or so is a local paradigm that utilizes a 5 gallon polyethylene bucket of fresh caught Dungeness crabs  —- I KNOW you’re going to point out they’re illegal this time of season, but listen, we’re putting em back when the data is collected.  Spirit of the Law, if not the Letter and that, in a clamshell is the very essence of the South End Way. —- So you got a pail of clacking claws and now you bring out a dog, any dog, any breed, random sampling, see?  And you let the pooch check out the crustaceans.  No shadows, no hibernating drowsy marmots.  And if the crab gets a lock on Snoopy’s snout, voila, studies have shown that is a true omen of an early spring.  The dog schnozz slips the noose, 6 more weeks of sleeping in.  Or six more months of a spiking pandemic.  Probably both.

Simple.       Like Einstein says, the more elegant the theory, the higher the probability it’s correct.  And the boyz down at the body shop will tell you, the accuracy here is in the 90 percentile range, statistically astounding.  We’re not claiming, like those unabashed self -promoters in Pennsylvania, that this will predict spring or the end of Covid for the entire country, but for all us Left Coasters, rest assured, Feb 2^nd now has science as its bedrock foundation.  We’ll leave it to the South End Chamber of Commerce how they want to capitalize on it.  Crab Dog Day.  Nice profitable ring to it, don’t you think, kind of like a cash register.  If we can keep PETA at bay….