The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Jerry Hatrick had converted the back booth of the Marina’s Pilot House Lounge into a personal office, judging by the papers strewn around his empty pint glasses. “Whazzup?” Flathead Fred asked amiably as three of us yahoos slid in with our own beers at risk of foaming onto Jerry’s table top filing cabinet. “You doing your taxes early this year??”

Jerry pushed a pile of papers into a heap, leaned back with a groan and said, “Just trying to decide whether to take Social Security now … or wait.” The boyz are all over this one since we’re of that age. Fred took his at 64 even though the benefits were way less than if he’d waited til 70. “I’m grabbing what I can before they go broke,” he told Jerry. Phil laughed. “Fred, if the government goes broke, you got worse troubles than no monthly check.”

“Laugh all you want, Phil, I’m hedging my bets. There’s less people putting in and more of us taking out. You do the math.” Jerry said that’s exactly what he was trying to do before we interrupted. And that was assuming he lived until, oh, 90 and then how much would the difference be if he took early retirement and what would it be if he took it at 66? The last thing he needed was Fred’s monkeywrench logic, which included inflation, health insurance, nursing home care and anything else he could throw in to muddy Jerry’s mathematics. “Whadda you think, Skeeter?” Phil asked about ¾’s of a pint into the discussion.

I’m 70 and even though I was eligible for an early pay-out myself, I hoped to hold out til the bitter end. Recently I got my earnings statement for the past 47 years. Four years I made zip. Nada. Zilch. Nine I didn’t break into 4 figures. The boyz always considered me semi-retired and so do I … since about 1975. Truth is, I tell em, I’ll be working as long as I can. Which, of course, cracks the table up.

“Next you’ll be wanting us to buy your beers out of sympathy,” Fred crows, shaking his head. Fred worked for 45 well paid years as a construction foreman. His reduced benefits would look pretty good to this grasshopper who fiddled away his working years. Jerry’s going to have a hard time too, I know. But his working days are over with his arthritis problems and pretty soon he’s going to have to roll the dice like the rest of us. If I know Jerry, he’ll have a few more pints, divide by an even number, weigh the empty glass and then flip a coin. Just like the rest of us high rolling gamblers….

Well, now that the euphoria of the Trump Firing is beginning to wear off, no doubt most of you are slowly learning that the post-Donald era is about to begin. No more late night tweets, no more foaming at the mouth by our leader, no more firing of aides who thought he was a moron and said so publicly, no more tell-all books by his lawyers and friends and relatives and previous cabinet heads, no more Trump Comedy Show. Oh sure, there will be the indictments and trials, the tax returns finally becoming public, possibly even incarceration, but all those will take place in Covid Time, meaning, staggered out in endless weeks and months, not the rapid fire minutes we’ve come to expect the last four years.

And those wild and crazy cast of characters that zipped through the White House, here one week, gone the next, a constant merry-go-round of hirings and firings, all the Bannons and Stephen Millers, the Giulianis and those kids of Trump, a kaleidoscope of insanity, a circus really of clowns piling into the VW bug, a thousand clowns one after the other so that you could barely keep track of who was Sec. of State this week or who was running the EPA, half of them never confirmed anyway, but lordy, there were a lot of them and they never failed to light up the twitterverse. You think you’re not going to miss them? Oh, you’ll miss them. What will you spend your time on if not the constant news cycle once Biden Boring becomes the norm. No drama Joe. Smooth running government machinery. Sure it sounds good now, but wait a month or so, you’ll be watching cute kitty You-Tube videos again, nostalgic for the Orange Man. You’ll be online shopping, a consumer junkie, addicted to Ebay and Google but better than the void left with no Donald.

If you’re lucky, the P.T. Barnum of politics will reinvent himself, find the backers for a new network and return triumphant on your cable TV subscription, maybe a small additional monthly premium but nothing half the country wouldn’t gladly pony up, forget the mortgage payment an occasional month. America needs Trump the way a junkie needs smack, no price would be too high. Sure, you think you can kick the habit. You think your mental health would improve. They all think that way. Until someone sets the needle on the table next to them. The Trump Network: Not just prime time, Trump all the time.

It took awhile, but it was an entertaining wait. If you’re waiting for that high minded, let’s get behind the newly elected president, concession speech, you’ve got an even longer wait. Inside the Ovoid Office, furniture is being smashed, aides are being trashed, and believe it, tongues are being lashed too. There is no going gentle into any good night for this spoiled brat. The chessboard has been overturned, the lawsuits filed, the sychophants lined up to agree that the election was rigged, ballots were faked, the dead voted and those mail-in ballots were illegal.

What did you expect? Well wishes for the country? A call for unity? High minded speeches? C’mon, the guy is a thug, a crime boss. He’s thinking about revenge, he’s looking for a club, he’s talking tough with Rudy, he’s crying foul on the phone to Fox News. He’s using a ball bat to smash Obama’s painting down the hall. The Trump Tantrum Show, ladies and gentlemen, is just on the pilot program. We have two more months to witness the greatest meltdown in U.S. history, greater than the Nixon drunken prayer meetings with Henry call me Hank Kissinger. This should be epic. Heads will fall, windows will be broken, bad craziness will be the order of the day. You think he’s leaving that White House without being dragged out of there, you weren’t paying attention the last four years. This petulant little man is stewing in his own ego.

How do exact revenge on the millions of people who voted against him? Oh, bet your stimulus check on it, he’s working on it. Grinding teeth, spitting obscenities, scaring the staff. Who’s got the nuclear football, they’re probably wondering. Who’s going to put the strait jacket on this foaming mouthed monster? Kellyanne? Mikey Pence? They’re hiding in the coat closet, hoping to survive two more months without insult or injury. Good luck, gang.

They know what he’s thinking. Once he’s deposed, the IRS and the federal courts are coming with subpoenas. The fines and penalties may scare him more than possible incarceration. The Wizard of Odd may very well be broke. He certainly won’t have fine clothes on behind the suddenly pulled back curtain. Just a naked jaybird. And very possibly a naked jailbird. No, don’t expect him to leave without a hook and a chain.

Oh yeah, the suspense is killing me, waiting for one of the last four states in play to declare Sleepy J the winner. Half my friends want it decided, verdict in, guilty as charged, but me, I’m in no hurry. The man is pacing his Ovoid Office like an amphetamine monkey, raging, tweeting, chewing on his 500 dollar tie. His minions are out in the hinterlands like the Wicked Witch’s flying apes, filing lawsuits, asking for recounts, asking for the counts to stop, demanding the counts continue. This is a full on mental meltdown of a 5 year old brat.

I’m surprised anyone is surprised Trump isn’t going into that good night gently. He pretty much telegraphed the game plan the last few months. But I bet like the first time four years ago, he was shocked to be this close and that must be a tough horse pill to swallow this time, so close … and yet so far. At first I hated the suspense of waiting for the finale, now I’m enjoying watching the noose tighten. Georgia! Who’d a thunk it? I bet Stacey Abrams is going to be offered a nice cabinet post for a reward. She deserves it.

Nice to see the Trump boyz becoming the spokesmen for their daddy. The nuts don’t fall far from the tree. The longer this goes on, the more I’m starting to enjoy the suspense, let him swing in the wind and feel the noose tighten every hour, every day, every ballot drop. Pig on a spit. Hear him sizzlin on that grill, y’all!

I say recount every state, lob a thousand duds into the court gears, cry me a river, let the pigs squeal to their dirty black hearts’ content, I’m going to savor my victory beers as long as it takes. Jan 20th, we get a D-9 in front of the White House and drag his sorry ass out of my life. He can have his new Trump Network, let Eric and Don Jr and Barbie have a half hour slot, but I don’t have to watch anymore. My national nightmare is over, fini, done. Ding dong, the witch is dead.

Four years ago we had an election party here at the hacienda, about 4 dozen or so friends gathered to watch Hillary Clinton be crowned queen of America. Things were going swell, toasts made, food eaten, drinks flowing … until about an hour into a news broadcast that predicted Florida voted Trump, then most of the Deep South and finally the Rust Belt. People left in droves and quite a few left in tears. Trust me, we swore we would never have another election party so help us god.

Fast forward what seems like a lifetime, those four years of Donald J. Trump, the man who has a pathological need to inject himself into our daily lives the way Covid did three years later. Every damn day was another round of Trump, every news feed was more Trump, every social media platform was Trump and Trump and in case you were looking for another helping, Trump. Those four years seem like an eternity in the rearview.

The pollsters, just like they did in 2016, predicted a landslide, a blue tsunami, a massacre. And just like 2016, they were absolutely wrong. By midnight the election was a virtual dead heat and we were dead on our feet, muttering incoherently as we shuffled off to our sleepless bed depressed and angry and considering emigration to some far off land. The Senate was back in the hands of Moscow Mitch and Trump was calling for the voting to stop, he’d already won.

Yesterday, the day after, he was declaring victory but demanding vote counting stop in Pennsylvania and demanding vote counting continue in Nevada and Arizona. Logical coherency is not one of the President’s many virtues and whether this is what half the country loves about the man, all I can honestly say is after four years of him I have no idea what people love about this narcissistic huckster. Business acumen? Christian ideals? Well considered policies? Family values? Honesty? Nice hair?

Today the country and the world are waiting on the last states left to finish their tally. Any one that falls into Sleepy Joe’s box means the end of Donald J. Trump’s presidency. My long national nightmare will be over, to quote Gerald Ford regarding Watergate and the Nixon near impeachment. No doubt in my mind whatsoever we won’t see the man slink quietly into the shadows. Fox will set him up with a news show or he’ll start his own network, let him rant to his heart’s content. Trust me, we haven’t seen the last of this snake oil salesman.

But … he will no longer be the bull in the White House china shop. What the next four years bring, your guess is good as mine. Still, half of us are ready for some sanity.