The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I was reading in the fake newspaper we get every morning how a dead grey whale had washed up on the shores of Everett’s industrially pristine waterfront, so to minimize the rotting smells of blubber decomposing in the unseasonable sunshine, the DNR folks were going to tow it to ‘an undisclosed location on Camano Island’. For those of you not versed in the topography of our fair island, let me explain that the only place remote enough for cetacean disposal is the South End, an eight mile stretch of shoreline with high bluffs from our place to the opposite side where houses end and a desolate stretch of beach forms the Head where few humans interrupt the gulls and eagles.

So me and the mizzus grabbed a camera and went in search of the carcass before decomposition would make it unapproachable even by telephoto if the wind were blowing the stench in our direction. The tide was minus 2, making the circumnavigation possible without being caught half way and forced to hunker down up in the driftwood logs against the eroding bluffs to wait for hours before proceeding further. We had fair winds and a warm sun in our face. We were on a mission: to find the great grey whale.

We walked to the Head, photographing eagles and Mt. Rainier, but no whale sightings. Plenty of whale holes where the beasts had plowed the sandbars for ghost shrimp, but not the bloated body of Moby. We plunged ahead, turning north past the Tulalip tribes’ tidelands at the southernmost point of the island, the true South End, where a century back their people had been killed in the dozens by a landslide while encamped in the very place we now walked. Ahead lay 3 or 4 isolated coves, perfect for the dumping of giant marine carcasses far from human habitation. I figured one of those would be the burial ground.

A fever not unlike that of Ahab took possession of me, an obsessed quest for the great mammal, dead or alive, it no longer mattered. We stumbled across rough cobbles, past shipwrecks, below eagles’ nests, around landslides, over sandflats soft with the cavities of a million clams, all the while expecting the whale, always the whale, around the next bend, behind the fallen boulders, but no, there was no whale by the time we reached Tyee and its ghetto of beach houses jammed relentlessly together between the base of the bluffs and the rising sea levels.

The whale, we learned later, hadn’t yet been towed. It was arriving that night. This morning I’m debating whether to walk the Head again. The fever has yet to abate. The great fish is out there. Dead as last night’s fevered nightmare. Dead, but not gone. Somewhere on the remote stretches of the South End, she rises, thar, thar she rises! You know and I do too, I will have to return as well.

And when the bloodlust diminishes, when the great grey beast has bleached white its bones in the relentless sun of the South End, we will, all us inhabitants down here, collect our refuse, our trash, our composting detritus and hopefully barge it down to ‘an undisclosed location’ in that pristine city to the south, a fair exchange, the very least we could do to return the favor.

Maybe you get up every morning, like I do, dreading the latest tweets, the next outrage, the newest cracks in the Constitution and you think, like I do, just 20 more months, if we can just weather a little more than a year and a half, we’ll wake up to a Return to Normalcy, we’ll have survived the madness, we’ll take back our lives. But then you pick up a paper, like I did today, and read that Billy Graham’s braindead kid thinks Trump deserves two more years, ‘reparations’, he calls them, for the injustice of having Mueller investigate his contacts with the Russians and now that Barr has declared complete exoneration for any possible obstruction of justice, well, time to toss out the Constitution and give our Leader a few bonus years.

You can’t make this shit up, you really can’t. When Pelosi raised the possibility of Trump declaring the 2020 elections bogus and refusing to leave office, she was echoing the President’s own attorney, Michael Cohen, who suggested just such a scenario. What you are learning, each and every pre-caffeinated dawn, is that everything is possible, no matter how twisted, no matter how illegal, no matter how improbable. There’s no use trying,” [Alice] said: “one can’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Alice is getting plenty of practice these days. More than six some days. Ten thousand lies since Trump took office, about ten a day, a remarkable record. And now we just take it for granted. ‘Ignorance is strength,’ Orwell said in 1984. Now we got a strong man in the White House. ‘Freedom is slavery. War is Peace.’ The news is fake. Up is down. The sky is falling.

Me and my friends are sick of it. We’re fatigued by the slow rolling tidal wave of idiocy, corruption, lawlessness, mendacity and ignorance. The GOP, watching their party taken over by thugs and crooks, has decided to go along in order to survive. Survive as what? Toadies to a mad king? My friends used to believe a price would be paid for such cowardice, but we don’t anymore. We just hope and pray we can survive til the next election. We hope the madness will end then. “But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked. “Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.” Most mornings, that seems to be true. But then, what is true anymore….?

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 they grow back….

I guess one way to tell if you’re an old timer or not is if you remember ordering an item from, say, the Sears Roebuck catalog, by phone or by mail, then waiting a week or three for delivery. Patience might not be your middle name back then, but it was definitely a requirement for a happy life. Now, of course, we live in the world of algorithms, computerized programs operating at speeds of nano-seconds. You can’t get your internet to punch up a You-Tube in three seconds, you move on, disgusted. We want it and we want it NOW!

Amazon started one day delivery awhile back in the Mesozoic Era, free with a subscription to Prime. You pay a yearly fee and voila, everything you order from the Godzilla of merchandizers comes not only without a shipping charge but comes next day. Great gimmick. I have friends who only order from these retailers just for the convenience of fast delivery. I suspect there are others who think similarly. But along comes Walmart and Target, offering the same deal but without requiring a hundred plus bucks a year, so there goes Amazon’s leg up.

Or does it? Amazon isn’t king of the jungle for chuckles, my friend. No, they upped the ante with the promise of Same Day Delivery. Why should my friends have to wait 24 hours for the gizmo they ordered this afternoon? It’s the equivalent of ordering from the Sears catalog. In the 21st Century!! Maybe you’ve noticed the U.S. Postal trucks on Sunday in your cul-de-sac, well, they’re Amazon deliveries, no rest for the wicked. Day of rest? I don’t think so…. Already they’re testing drones for faster deliveries, possibly door to door if the FAA will let them rent all the airspace they need. But you know and I do too, Walmart and Target aren’t going to sit still for this. They’ll be offering similar delivery times as Domino Pizza, half hour or your money back. Let the drone wars begin!

Rumor has it that in the ulta-secret labs Amazon operates beneath Mt. Rainier, a honeycomb of experimental workshops and testing warehouses, the Bezos boyz are working feverishly on time travel strategies. Order that thingamajig this morning and you’ll have it yesterday. Impossible, you say? Tell that to Sears Roebuck.