The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The mizzus just bought herself one of those gizmos that keep track of how many steps she takes. Our friends kept shining around with theirs, forever mumbling about 6500 already or need to make 2000 more, about as interesting to a guy like me as it was when she got interested in computers back in the Dark Ages and the first ones got semi-affordable. Not enough beer in the entire world to make those conversations interesting to the guy who swore he wouldn’t own one until it could talk to him, steer him through its intricacies and pat him on the back when it had taught him some new program. Course, instead of getting simpler, they got way more complex and I realized if I waited much longer I might as well reconcile myself to the life of a caveman living in the Bronze Age. Ugga bugga meets the Flintstones. Yabba dabba do!

This fitbit contraption straps on her wrist and needs to be worn all day if you want an accurate count. Don’t ask me who came up with 10,000 steps, no doubt the result of extensive studies and only coincidental it happens to be a nice round number. The average joe has a stride between two, two and a half feet, so 10,000 steps comes to, oh, 5 miles, give or take. Doesn’t matter to the fitbit if you walk all of it at once, maybe get some aerobic benefit, or just waddle out to the kitchen for another snack. You just need to hit 10,000 of em.

Now, I don’t want to be too dismissive of this technological wonder. If it gets folks off their tush and makes them feel guilty when they only get to 8000 steps that day, I guess that’s progress. Gotta be better than looking at a computer screen or a TV all the livelong day. And it’s not like the thing starts to administer shocks in increasingly painful feedback when you fall short of the 10K goal. Although I suspect the next generation Apple version will have that app built in. For your own good, you understand. Impose a little discipline to the lax.

And I expect my health insurer will want those records before another year goes by. Average 8500, premiums go sky high. And you thought smoking was problematic for those folks. Why not? The lazy bastards who refuse to keep themselves in tip top shape ought to pay more than us fitbitters, don’t you agree? Stick a GPS on that device with a built in transponder, the data goes to the HMO in real time, 24/7, save you the trouble of emailing. After all, could add a few steps to your day with those kind of savings….

Lindsey Graham, the senator who argued during Clinton’s trial “impeachment is not about punishment. Impeachment is about cleansing the office. Impeachment is about restoring honor and integrity to the office.” Right, Lindsey. But of course that was long long ago far far away, in a land grown totally unrecognizable. Now he has the Trump’s ear, imagines himself the emperor’s tailor, and refuses to read the transcripts of the impeachment hearings. See no evil, hear no evil, but speak a lot. The man is the donkey to Don J. Quixote.

If you had illusions that given the evidence to prove extortion of the Ukrainians by withholding military aid to fight the Russians who invaded their country unless they investigated Joe Biden’s boy, you must be 10 years old and still sleep with a teddy bear and the lights on. Politics isn’t for the faint of heart, but you haven’t seen anything like this since Chicago ’68. Even Nixon looks fairly benign these days, but then, he wasn’t mobbed up like Daley and Donald. Crimes are crimes only if you get caught. And if you get caught, so what? Justice is for the weak, the strong don’t care. Don’t underestimate the current mobster in the White House, he plays to win. Cheat, steal, bribe, lie lie and lie some more. Show the slightest weakness and the wolves will eat you from the shoes up. And obviously there are those who think these traits are real strength, a strength that will be used to help the little guy, them.

A week ago Lindsey was open to impeachment if the facts warranted and quid pro quo was proven. I guess if you refuse to look at facts, impeachment becomes a closed door. Today the good Senator remarked that the policy of Trump and his underground State Department was too incoherent to be effective. He admitted he sneaked a peak at some of the transcripts released so far, enough at this point to make the call. You really can’t make this stuff up. But the point is, Lindsey and his fellow apologists would win Olympic gold medals in mental acrobatics trying to defend what is essentially, indefensible. Their mamas should wash their lying mouths with soap.

Richard Nixon was brought down by the evidence anyone could hear on the tapes he made in the Oval Office. Donald Trump would have destroyed those tapes. Or just sequester the Ukraine phone call with Zelensky in top secret vaults and hand out redacted transcripts. He claims to want to weed out corruption in that country, why he needs to have Biden’s boy investigated. Irony, obviously, is not this emperor’s strong suit. If he had one at all.

We just got home from a wee vacation down at the Columbia River Gorge where we met up with old friends to hike and reminisce. We rented an old log cabin built by some biker dude who used to drive his Harley up to the location where Mt. Hood was perfectly framed beyond the orchards that dot the valley. From the antiques to the old photos on the walls, the place was like going back a century to a less complicated era. Mostly it was a respite from newspapers and politics and the impeachment hearings. To say it was a much needed tonic from those would be an understatement and a half.

But we’re back now, catching up on all things Trump and the ongoing impeachment investigation. It feels like my friend who returned from Nepal to find that returning home was more like PTSD, a head-jarring culture shock of consumer overdose and information overload. I mean, how many cereals do we possibly need glutting up an aisle or two in every grocery store from Miami to Seattle? Forget about the fact that most of them are diabetes-inducing processed crap marketed to kids who will be addicted to sugar before preschool. We want more choices, not less. We want more Trump, not less. We want our politics to be entertaining, not informative.

When we left less than a week ago, Trump and his apologists were bitching about ‘the process’, same one they used on Hillary with Benghazi, hypocrisy be damned! When the folks being interrogated testified that a quid pro quo existed between Trump and the Ukrainians, they argued at first that these people weren’t in the room, weren’t on the phone call, weren’t reliable witnesses, weren’t loyal, might even be spies and traitors. They screamed bloody murder that not every Republican Senator and Representative could be at the hearings, totally unfair, totally undemocratic. Everybody and their brother has been ordered by the White House to ignore subpoenas to appear before this witch hunt, but a few have defied that and testified anyway, probably to save their reputations and their hides. Now that transcripts are being released and testimony is under oath, well yeah, there was a quid pro quo to get dirt on Biden’s boy and find a secret server in Ukraine under a bed maybe in a farmhouse possibly outside Kiev in exchange for Congressionally mandated millions for a military fighting the Russians, they argue that if it was true, so what? Get over it, it’s done all the time, it’s how we do business.

Turns out Giuliani and Rick Perry were running an undercover State Department to get this done. You don’t hear from Rudy these days and Rick is stepping down from his cabinet post but not, he assures us, because it has anything to do with this Ukraine mess. The new line from the apologists is that okay, so it was quid and pro and quo too, it’s hardly an impeachable offense. Maybe looks bad, might even be the wrong thing to do, but not criminal, not illegal and certainly not impeachable.

The chickens are home too, to roost. The arguments from the apologists get wilder and wilder, the corner they’ve painted themselves into gets smaller and smaller. Their reasonings make as much sense as a box of Count Chocula, no nutrition, just empty calories. They’ll be adding a prize in every box soon, the way they used to when I was a naïve kid growing up in an America I thought I didn’t recognize any more. But it’s the same old con, the same old snake oil, the same old shell game. We’ve always had Trump, we just never put him in charge before.

Scientists down here in the super secret ultra-secure bio-labs of the South End have discovered a fungus that lives in the gut of a select few that self-ferments carbohydrates into alcohol. This break through, described by Dr. Lacti of the Elger Bay Institoot, opens the portal to untold riches for the savvy entrepreneur who can isolate that particular strain of fungus. Budweiser, he told a reporter from the Crab Cracker, has already shown considerable interest.

“Imagine watching the Super Bowl with all your pals,” the biologist told the Cracker, “and you take a pill then eat potato chips, say, or heavily processed crackers and voila, the carbos ferment immediately. No beer required. None of that gassy, heavy bloated feeling. By half time you’ve probably saved ten dollars. Who wouldn’t choose that?”

Dr. Lacti declined to estimate the cost of the fungi pill, but he said it probably would be a nominal cost. “Unless, of course, Budweiser buys the patent.” When asked to interview one of the subjects of the study, the doctor cited confidentiality concerns, but the Cracker, through intensive investigation, learned that the original source of the breakthrough was Fairlane Freddie who had been pulled over for DUI after a morning breakfast of pancakes with biscuits and gravy at the Diner with the Flatheads, the island vintage car club, when his 1965 Ford Fairlane was seen weaving repeatedly across lanes.

Freddie, a six year member of Alcoholics Anonymous, fought the charge and in the months before his trial, discovered that he had the rare disorder Dr. Lacti was now trying to market. “I gotta tell ya,” Freddie told the Cracker, “I thought they were crazy. Hell, I thought I was crazy. But it turns out I got Auto-Brewery Syndrome. Tell that to the Flatheads. They think I’m distilling in my car. But actually, I’m distilling in my stomach. Weird, huh? I eat a piece of toast, I’m high as a Katmandu Kite. The judge let me off thanks to Doc Lacti, but I’m not supposed to drive on pancakes anymore. Strictly eggs and bacon here on out.”

Down here on the bibulous South End, plenty of my cronies who brew nettle ales are more than a little concerned by this discovery. As Two Toke Tom confessed to me, the thought of ingesting raw nettles, fungus or no fungus, was enough to set him off on a panic attack. “It may be the end of the moonshine era, Skeeter. This damn science, what are they gonna dream up next?” I didn’t have the heart to mention Dr. Lacti was working on a self-vaping cannabis fungus. No point ruining another hobby of his. Life is plenty hard enough on us entrepreneurs.

I know a lot of you snowflakes out there on the hinterlands of the South End would like to give reparations for slavery. I get it. Of course we don’t have any descendants of slaves living on the South End, but your bleeding heart is in the right place. You, like me, probably feel guilty we don’t have people of color living down here, this being practically the white bread bastion of the island. Sure, we let Hispanics drive in for the day. Somebody’s got to mow our lawns and trim our hedges. Geez, you think our own kids are going to do that? Or us???

But while you’re emoting like crazy for the sins of our great great great great grandfathers, those genetic creeps who bought and sold human beings for fun and profit, how about a remorse or two for a real victim, the President. The guy has been under siege for three long years, subjected to the water torture of the Mueller investigation in which he declared himself totally exonerated. But what about the mental price the poor man paid? The sleepless nights, the friends who were unjustly indicted and convicted, the embarrassment of those porn star pay-offs, the judgement of Melania, the constant harassment to see his tax records, the scrutiny of his real estate empire, the whining about emoluments … and now an impeachment hearing in the House. Hasn’t the guy suffered enough?

Maybe, just maybe, a little compassion is in order here. Obviously he doesn’t need fiscal reparations. I mean, the man is a billionaire. Money means nothing to him. He tells us that every time he gets dinged for diplomats and our own government folks staying at his swank hotels. In fact, he will tell you himself that being president has cost him hundreds of millions of dollars. And he’s fine with that. Doesn’t bother him one bit. It isn’t about the money, he says again and again, it’s about service to the country. Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to pay him back.

So if money won’t make amends, what can a grateful nation offer to a man who has everything? And the answer, good citizens, is another few years in office for the years he lost to those witch hunts. In his own modest way he himself has broached the idea. When his term comes up, just tag on a few extra years as make-up. This would give him the time needed to finish all those programs and projects that were held up by investigations and inquiries and, let’s be honest, just mean-spirited probes by his envious enemies. Time to build the wall, time to get those trade agreements done, time to secure that Syrian oil, time to bring coal back to the heartland, time to get rid of unneeded regulations, time to cut more taxes on the already over-taxed rich. So much work to be done and so little time left. How about it? How about four or five extra years? You know he deserves it. The slaves, c’mon, that was way back when….