The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

My Pop, bless his 95 year old heart, keeps sending me political e-mails. I guess he just wants his firstborn to be kept informed of the events of the world. So today I got one that was titled ‘Mystery of the Century’. It chronicles more than just one mystery, it had plenty more than just the usual Obama birth certificate. These folks go on as if no Hawaiian birth certificate had ever been produced so obviously evidence to the contrary of their conspiracy theory doesn’t really pass muster. Additionally, they wanted to see the Obama kids’ birth certificates, something real fishy there, someone hiding something, but I never could figure what the something was. And oh, how about the ‘fact’ that no one seems to remember Barack in the colleges he pretends to have gone to? Or the law degrees for himself and Michele that were voided, how about that?????

There were more, of course, maybe too many to fact check for my old man or the folks who send these e-mails from the rocks they live under, but when I talked to him he chuckled and said, well, they’re interesting, don’tcha think? So one by one I had to send him the fact check FALSE results of my painstaking research. And of course, I got no response. And won’t.

Maybe the Russians are behind this, maybe the alt-right, maybe the Trump machine (if I thought they were that capable), maybe it’s just the times we live in where the most outrageous lies are propagated for god only knows what reason other than to piss off people like me. All’s fair, I guess, in love and politics for some folks. Deep down I think folks are making money somehow. Monetizing their ranting and raving, boosting their ‘hits’ and capitalizing on the gullible.

… Course, on the upside, I been noticing this blogsite that usually gets less hits than a bottom dwelling baseball team has suddenly been raising its batting average, oh, by ten times the last couple of days and no doubt whatsoever in my pencil-shaved mind, the Russian trolls have found me and are using my innocuous words to their evil intent. I know I should complain to the FBI or the President or someone in charge of keeping the flames of liberty from flickering out completely, but … well, I thought I’d wait a day or three, maybe a month or more, years if necessary, to see what advertisers might flock to my clickbait. I mean, I’m all for freedom and democracy and all that fluffy stuff. But we’re talking capitalism here, in its rawest truest form. And if that doesn’t trump liberty and justice, well, I might as well move to Russia. Actually, I suspect the Russians are already here so why bother moving there? And Vlad, if you’re listening in, my agents are standing by for any lucrative offers….

I like to think I am a student of history, a person who would rather not repeat the past because I was too lazy to remember it. You know, unless it’s to make America great again. What I’m learning this past year is that it is important, very important, to lie. Not just lie, but lie bigly. Bigly beautiful lies. The wilder the whopper the better. Folks love it, they really do. Don’t ask me why, I’m a student of history, not the professor.

Maybe it’s just this era we live in, the one where folks are feeling a little insecure about their jobs and their future. Anxious about where the country is headed. Or the world. We want to bury our heads in some nice warm sandbox and build a tall wall to keep the rapists and killers on the other side of our borders. And I’m not just talking about those Canucks, believe me. Trust me on this, we got grievances. Lots of them and we want somebody to smack down the people and smite the countries who grieve us the most. Take that 9-11 attack. Okay, we didn’t really know who was behind it, but like some of the boys down at the Pilot Lounge said the following day, Somebody’s got to pay for this and they didn’t care who. Well, sir, we bombed the bejabbers out of Iraq and no, Iraq wasn’t really to blame, it turned out, but godalmighty, the boys felt one helluva lot better. Poke the bear at your peril, Little Jimmy hollered the day they caught Saddam Hussein in a hidey-hole.

Course, the whole Middle East is a mess now. Never did find those weapons of mass destruction. Now we’re a lot poorer, all those years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. But … damn! For awhile there we showed those Arabs who was boss, we surely did. They respect strength, isn’t that so? Forget negotiations, try a little of our special of the day: cruise missiles! Collateral damage, hey, that’s just the mainstream media, pretty good liars themselves.
A lot of folks bought the malarkey our current Leader puts out every day. He had the answers, all simplified and pre-packaged, and we the people bought it hook line and sinker. Not because we really believed the guy, c’mon, he’s the P.T. Barnum of the 21st Century. We just happened to like the lies. You want to believe the world is so complicated, so complex, there’s no hope in trying to figure out stuff. Skip the nuance. We want a tough guy, a guy who would run into that high school bare handed and take down a shooter with an AR-15. Dirty Harry without the 44 Magnum, that’s what we want, and yeah, you know he wouldn’t any more charge into that building unarmed except with a running semi-automatic Mouth, but dammit, somebody’s got to pay for this mayhem and it sure as heck isn’t going to be the NRA.

And anyway, like his soon-to-be-departed long term Communications Director, Hope Hicks said in sworn testimony, they’re just little white lies. The big ones, she refused to answer.

If you walk straight back into our woods, you will eventually walk out into the orchard behind us where the owners rarely come up. A driveway continues up the hill and ends at the outdoor wood-fired oven of the woman there who’s a bread baker. Her place adjoins 10 mostly wooded acres where, a dozen years ago a tree fell on a 5th wheel trailer, crushing it and its renter to the ground. The victim’s legs were pinned beneath the maple and the temperature was below freezing, but after who knows how many hours of agony, he managed to reach the revolver he kept in the nightstand beside his deathbed and shot himself in the head.

This is not the horror story I’m going to relate, but it is the same property. Two days ago some neighbors were taking a stroll on this 10 acres, one of them being Bob who had put $15,000 down on a potential purchase, meaning to add to his own 5. Another trailer was now on the property, rented to an itinerant truck driver, and they had ventured in to have a look, figuring when he didn’t respond to a knock on the door, that he was on the road and wouldn’t mind. So they walked past the trailer and into the woods. (Cue the creepy soundtrack.)

Just beyond the trailer they stepped over a cedar nurse log and noticed wire screen covering a hole in the ground, which, it turned out, was the hatch cover to an underground bunker that apparently went for some distance out of their sight. Odd, they thought, but having no flashlight, they resisted the urge to go down into the darkness. (In the movie, of course, they would go anyway.) They dropped the camouflaged screen back into place and planned to resume their investigation of the property, (music crescendo, rustling leaves, barking dogs in the distance) and see in the shrubs nearby a sleeping bag.

If you’ve seen any horror movies at all, you know NOT to walk over to that sleeping bag which looks like it has a sleeping tenant inside, albeit the end is duct-taped up and the bag looks pitched haphazardly into the bushes. Bob and the boys, apparently do not watch that genre of movies. They walked over and proceeded to undo the duct tape. (The music is a shrill near- scream with a bass heartbeat beating faster and faster, closer and closer.)

And then … they open the sleeping bag. Inside there’s blood everywhere and of course, a human body, a woman judging by the leopard bra. With her head decapitated. In the woods they hear motion and think they hear someone running off. Someone who had been watching them the entire time!

So … we have a monster in the woods now. No police have contacted us, no notices have given us warning. We heard from a friend on the sheriff’s call and from the baker who was at a dinner with us last night on whose property a high heeled woman’s shoe was found. State patrol, Island County sheriffs, a task force parked in her driveway. They were looking for more bodies and they were going to go down in that underground bunker. The island is narrow down here on the South End, about a mile across and few houses on the interior all the way down to the Head. It’s tough going in there but an easy exit onto the highway or up to a vacant house or one of ours.

Whatever is going on, it isn’t over. We have our doors locked and plan to keep them locked until someone finds the murderer. You think it can’t happen in the bucolic country, think again. We certainly are.

I don’t want to appear misogynistic. Of course a runway model can be intelligent or possess extraordinary attributes that would give Customs Folks reason to allow her into the United States of America on an Einstein Visa! Nobody is insinuating that the Donald pulled strings to have the immigration folks slip her through their incredibly complex security measures just because she was his squeeze. Certainly America doesn’t work that way. We’re the land of equal opportunity. You can be ugly even and be allowed in. I think. Well, maybe not if you’re getting the Einstein option. Then you need to be glamorous, beautiful, a model. With, of course, a very high IQ. Or specialized skills, like, oh, hugging a plastic blow-up whale in a Sports Illustrated swimsuit layout.

Not! that I’m saying you couldn’t have an affair with Donald and still have a high IQ. Certainly you could. It’s just, well, it’s sort of highly unlikely is all I’m saying. No offense, Melania. You seem like a perfectly nice person. The kind who would, if she ever got to be First Lady and had to pick a Cause, might pick Cyber-Bullying. It’s a great cause, really, but geez, wouldn’t Einstein have cautioned picking one that pretty much sums up yer Old Man?? I think he would have.

No, I’m not the kind of guy who would begrudge a person the right to come into our country with fantastic modeling skills. I just find it troubling that she’s married to an anti-immigration blowhard who games the system to his own advantage while at the same time denigrating those rapists and killers coming across our borders, those terrorists sneaking in on Lottery Visas, all those family members getting in via Chain Immigration where moms and dads and kids can join the newly assimilated émigré here in the Land of the Free. Melania’s folks came in that way recently, but … well, no buts, just another exception that proves Trumps rules. Consistency, after all, is the hobgoblin of little minds. The Trumps obviously do not have little minds.

I do think, however, we need to reword the inscription at the base of the Statue of Liberty, a little update for these hobgoblin times we live in, something along the lines of ‘Give me your runway models, your photogenic, your privileged masses yearning to be TV reality show stars, Send these, the swim-suited, tempest free, to me, I lift my camera beside the gold coin door.’ The rest of you, get a tummy tuck or stay home.

While I was queued up at the long lines of the South End International Airport two days ago pushing my duffle bag by footkick the two miles to the patdowns and X-rays, a nice TSA lady asked us if we had any pets. “Dogs, birds, snakes … peacocks? Yes,” she laughed, we’ve had peacocks.” I was seriously glad I’d left my chickens home to roost. No telling what the airlines demand for pet fees if they get $25 per piece of luggage one way.

Maybe it’s less for chickens or turtles or small reptiles, I wouldn’t know. I’ve ridden with small dogs in carrying cases their owners stuffed under their seats. No charge back then in the Friendly Skies, but I’m betting now there’s a price plus proof of rabies shots. The overhead bins are totally crammed so good luck stuffing little Woofsie up there. A snake, sure, always room for a coiled serpent. They can curl right up and snooze for hours, but they’re probably surly when they get disturbed. I’m sure, though, they’re defanged.

‘Comfort pets’, I guess we call these critters, what used to be ‘service animals.’ If you were blind, you had a trained dog to safeguard you crossing streets. I don’t know if a parrot is really trainable for that. Just does the talking, maybe, for the mute. Or a boa constrictor. Comfort? Well, that’s a tougher call. I had peacocks way back. No way were they a comfort, not with that scream of theirs like a kid being hit with a red hot branding iron. Pretty though. Be quite a show to spread a six foot iridescent fan and shake it in the aisles. But not comforting, sorry, not at 35,000 feet.

Who knows where this all ends? Noah’s Ark Airlines, maybe a niche in the industry where, for a small fee, they provide a flying kennel. Leash free areas even. Just one huge comfort zone. At least til the terrorists start using Cockapoodles to attack the flight crew. Then those pet fees are going through the roof….