The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Check out the dude chillin in the LAX airport. Got his feet up on his suitcase, shoes off, got his hat tilted down over his eyes, got this little notebook and a pen. Goin home, goin home on the next flight out, finished with pitching his proposal for the biggest sheriff station in America, nice fat art budget, no telling if he won or lost.

You think he’s stressin, you’d be guessin. But you’d be wrong. The dude isn’t stressin, the dude is chillin, glad to leave sunny Southern California and its 10 lane freeways crawling 5 mph for 50 miles the day before. Which IS stress inducing when the dude wants to catch that next plane home with little room for delays at the car rental or the shuttle bus or the TSA line, any one of which would make him miss that flight with none until the following day.

What Joe Cool here knows — and you don’t — is these competitions are always crapshoots. The deck is stacked with jokers in hidden cards. A project you think you’ve won hands down goes to some dark horse. One you’re certain you lost lands in your lap. Joe’s been to this rodeo before. Joe doesn’t even mind mixing metaphors the way a blind bartender mixes drinks. Joe’s just glad to be chillin. Goin home. Getting the hell out.

If he wins the commission, swell. If he loses it, another will come along. The days when it seemed like life and death, succeed or get a minimum wage job, win or lose the farm, those are just memories gladly forgotten.

Oh, a small part of Joe Cool misses the tension, the excitement, the hunt. He misses the thrill of competing all-out. And he misses the elation of winning, but not the agony of defeat. He misses those but only a little. This is a blood sport, competing against other artists, some nationally known, but now he doesn’t bleed. He doesn’t even carry band-aids, not with ice water in those veins. Check him out, he’s chillin. He’s goin home. Later on he’ll find out if he’s a Loser…. But not right now.

Wandering cluelessly into the swamps of sexual harassment should make any of us men more than slightly wary. In fact it should scare the bejeebers out of any but the most hardened of my brethren who suffer from toxic masculinity, a malady most likely not treatable with pharmacological remedies or conversion therapy. For the rest of us feminine scientists, a wise man might just avoid the subject altogether and keep his hands in his pockets.

But … I am obviously not a wise man nor do I have deep pockets. So with some trepidation, let me opine about Uncle Joe. I happen to like Joe Biden. I would even vote for the guy under the right circumstances, although honestly, I think the country needs new ideas, not Joe’s call for comity and a genial hug all around. Joe is an old white guy who says he learns his lessons, but geez, c’mon Joe, you let those creeps tear up Anita Hill without much protest. Apologize all you want, you let her dangle in the wind while that committee gave her a hundred lashes. And for that and a few other latter day come-to-jesuses, I really have some qualms about your judgement. Nobody is going to heal the divisions in this country so let’s stop thinking you’re the one. I just want someone decent and intelligent and mostly ready to fight for a new vision for this backass country we’ve become. Not too much to ask, is it?

And yeah, I get it too, Joe. Some folks don’t like to be touched, hugged, kissed or otherwise have their personal space violated. Don’t care how touchy-feely, good natured you are, there are boundaries. Personally I don’t see you as a groper. At least not like our President who even boasts about groping women, then mocks you for harmless hair kissing. And for all those GOP who suddenly find their partisan sanctimoniousness, I have nothing but the utmost contempt.

But here’s the thing. I’m still pissed off about Al Franken being forced out of his Senate seat. Uncle Joe, well, this may cost him a serious run at the Presidency, something he should have taken a shot at four years ago. Al Franken, give me a break. The man was horsing around for the cameras, pretty juvenile comedy, but hey, the guy was a comedian. He didn’t harass. He didn’t grope. He didn’t even kiss hair. And yet, in the frenzy of the MeToo moment, Gillibrand and her colleagues demanded he step off the gangplank, as if his malfeasance rose to the level of a Weinstein or a Kavanaugh or a Trump … and the man, decent beyond the bounds, stepped off.

Gillibrand will not get my vote, trust me on that. Al Franken was a good and honorable senator. And funny as a boatload of monkeys. Go back and read his books, if you haven’t. You’ll laugh out loud. If there were justice in this world, and you know lately there is none, Al would be running for President in 2020, not banished as a scapegoat to political correctness run amok. At some point we have to more narrowly define the boundaries of what is acceptable behavior and what is not. Uncle Joe, from my vantage point, is not a monster and not a harasser, but he’s probably not going to be President either, okay by me. And Al, if you’re reading this instead of working on your next book, throw your hat in the ring. You got my vote and I didn’t need an apology.

If there is a more devolved creature on God’s green earth than a used car dealer, it’s got to be a rental car service rep. I’m in L.A. waiting for a car I reserved, but, oh, we’re sorry sir, we don’t have one available. They tell me they’ll have one in 30 minutes so here I sit an hour later as rush hour traffic builds, something I’d hoped to avoid by flying in early. What do you do, what do you say? You gonna walk??

These lowlifes have more scams than dogs have ticks. Extra insurance, cheap gas if you let them charge you for a fill-up as if it were on Empty, all kinds of bogus deals for the unwary or those in a hurry. RENTER BEWARE ought to be in large block letters over every Budget, Alamo, Avis, Bend-Over rental agency in America. I blew a tire in Arkansas on a car with over 30,000 miles and was charged for a new tire that I spent a day rounding up, ordering and finally getting it put on even though the old one was 75% used up. Sure, I argued politely. Course I asked to speak to the manager who explained patiently that since I hadn’t purchased the insurance policy (an amount approximately equivalent to the cost of the tire) I would have to pay for a new tire. He even agreed, finally, that, yes, it was unfair to charge me full price for a tire nearly beyond its expected lifespan. And then he said, “Here’s what I’m gonna do. Take some coupons for a discount on your next rental.” Well, there’s a sucker born every day but I don’t plan to be born again, not with religion and definitely not with rental car goons.

A nice couple sat next to me on the bench reserved for Suckers. Same deal, same scam, same sorry story. Their car would be arriving, oh, oddly enough, about when mine was expected — an hour ago. My guess (and I didn’t want to depress them any further than the depth they’d already sunk to) was we’d both get the same car, kind of a ride share deal. I’m just hoping we’re going in the same direction….

When the investigation on Hillary’s emails was completed, the GOP and Trum demanded to see the full report. They didn’t get the Reader’s Digest condensed report, they got the unredacted entire enchilada. If that wasn’t complete enough, they grilled her for 11 straight hours. And when it was over they chanted Lock Her Up, Lock Her Up! It would be mind-boggling to watch these hypocrites defend the notion that we have all the information we need on the Mueller investigation based on a 4 page summary by an Attorney General whose stated position prior to getting the nomination was that a sitting president can’t be indicted for matters such as obstruction of justice — until you remember we are 3 years into the Trump era where facts are ridiculed, news demonized, political enemies are mocked and bullied. Hypocrisy? Gimme a break.

Yesterday all 9 Republican members on the House Judiciary Committee called for Adam Schiff’s resignation for being too partisan, this from the boyz who demanded to see complete FBI reports on various topics and whose chairman at the time, Nunes, dropped them off after dark at the White House. Hypocrisy? Gimme another break.

Schiff countered their unanimous demand to step down with an item by item detailing of Trump’s transgressions, a list that laid out the case for future legal problems for Donald and said of each, ‘some may find this okay.’ At the conclusion he told his smirking and whispering accusers that he was NOT okay with it and that when we accept these actions of the President, that will be the day America has lost its way.

It is heartening to hear a full throated defense of justice when a lot of us are beginning to think we’ve already lost our way. I know there are days when I want to throw up my hands, turn off the news and just walk the beach. Trump called Adam Schiff ‘Pencil Neck Schiff’ at a ‘Victory Lap’ rally in Michigan shortly after. Some may find this okay — and most of the crowd did — but … I’m not okay with this. I can only hope most of us never will be. The man needs to go … and so do his Enablers.