The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I can’t remember the last time I woke up to howler monkeys howling. After one red-eye to Atlanta, a long layover, another long flight to San Jose, a 3 hour immigration queue that looked like an NFL bathroom line with only one bathroom (this one had none), then a ride in a single propeller puddle jumper, followed by a 4 wheel drive straight up a one lane rutted mountain road with vertical drops of hundreds of feet both sides, we made it to Costa Rica Larry’s hacienda, an aerie overlooking the Bay of Tambor and the Pacific Ocean. With only a couple of airline hours of sleep, we slept the sleep of the muerto. Until dawn and the howlers ….

If you thought, from my exaggerated and hyperbolic descriptions of the South End, that we lived on the edge of some wild frontier, trust me when I say we’re not in Kansas here. Two miles up this mountain and civilization drops away like an Alzheimer memory. There are a couple of houses up here and one that is actually inhabited more than a couple of weeks of the year. At night we can see the lights from the fishing marina ten miles away and a few from Tambor Tropicale, a small resort with an outdoor bar that is Larry’s second home. Probably will be ours too. But up here on the aerie’s nest, isolation is the operative word.

Except, of course, for our fellow denizens, boa constrictors, vultures, wild pigs, birds beyond counting, insects and alien plant life. We’re anything but alone. The place is what you’d call fecund with a bio-diversity that is astounding. And we’ve been here all of one day. Plenty of folks come down to Costa Rica to visit, but not too many escape completely the way Larry has. We’ll go home too in a week. But I bet we’ll be sorry to leave. And that wild South End, it will look about two years from its first strip mall.

It’s been chilly here in Paradise the past few weeks. Burning wood the way a train fireman shovels coal, trying to keep warm. Back east the Bomb Cyclone has descended and friends and relatives send desperate missives concerning frostbite and frozen pipes. I’d like to help, but as you know, the Lord helps those who help themselves. I guess we have to assume the Lord is a Republican.

No, we’re going to venture out of our comfortable little cocoon here on the South End and head down to Central America. We got a buddy who works with the turtles there and he plans to rub our noses in how slow we’ve been to come on down where he has a hacienda on the Pacific slope of a mountain overlooking Tambor, then he’s going to vacation with us around his Costa Rica.

We’ve never been very south of the U.S./Mexican border. Oh, a couple of times we slipped across. Once we had a carload of empty cerveza bottles lying around the floor of a ’62 Chevy Impala we’d driven across the desert before accidentally, in our inebriation, found ourselves in four lanes of traffic, apparently crossing back into the Yew Ess Aye, not a ‘welcome back’ for four gringos trying to explain those empty beer bottles to the nice Mr. Customs Man. Once we’d ascertained the immediacy of our Situation, we acted swiftly and jettisoned that evidence. Sadly, we probably created flat tires and heartache for our fellow returnees. C’est la vie, as we say in Tijuana.

Another time I ventured down Baja when the State Department had issued warnings for us Americanos to leave, much less arrive, while the getting was good. That time I had a ’64 Chevy Belair, bald tires, pretty much on its last legs, and I had planned to donate it to the Mexican Department of Transportation when the machine gave up its ghost. It didn’t, I returned stateside, only to have it die in front of my ghetto estate in Seattle. I haven’t been back to Mexico since. Or anyplace further on….

So it’s off to the jungles for a couple of weeks. If I come across a howler monkey with a laptop, I’ll post a blog or two. But I don’t really expect the little primates to loan theirs out to a chimp like myself. Which means, once again, you get a reprieve from these trenchant malcontented observations intruding on your pastoral computer surfings. Now you’ll find out what you’ve been missing. No need to thank me. Thank the howlers instead.

Bomb Cyclone. I guess we got a new name to replace some of the tired old ones. I thought it was the description of the Bannon kiss-and-tell book, all those gossipy tidbits that must have the Liar-in-Chief tearing his orange hair out, which, if we’re to believe the book, is dyed but turns orangutan coloration because the boy has the patience of a two year old and doesn’t leave the dye on long enough to give it a natural color. Apparently he has a bald pate and grows what’s left into the comb-over of comb-overs, but … well, wait, bomb cyclone isn’t that at all, fuggedaboutit. It’s meteorological, apparently.

Who says you don’t need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows? My god, the weather these days demands an entirely revamped vocabulary. Polar Vortex, move over, let Beethoven bring you the news! Global warming? Naw, we’re calling it Climate Change. Snowmageddon, cute. Wind shear hurricane, okay. Haboobs, no, it’s not the U.S. Cabinet, it’s a sand storm. (I know, maybe we should switch the names.)

Bomb Cyclone. Where’s TSA when we need them? Weather terrorism. Who’d a thunk it? The meteorologists needed to explain the damn thing, something to do with barometric dives of x mm’s per hour or minute or, geez, if it’s that technical, maybe a better name. Low pressure cannonball in a hurricane. Course, polar vortex? Never much liked that one either. Faux science? I don’t like it at all, but hey, us plain folk at least get it.

Maybe I’ll go back to watching politics and skip the new lexicon of weather related events that always, and I mean always, lead some to question whether this was climate change or just the usual bomb cyclone. Who can say? Me, I blame it on the haboobs. They seem to be everywhere these days.

Jeez, it’s only three days into 2018, three crummy days of religiously trying to ignore the news cycle and the tweets and the incessant rants about whose nuclear buttons are bigger … and I’d been doing pretty good, ya know, not lurching for the nitro to keep my heart from racing toward aortic Armaggedon, when Steve Bannon comes out with his little tell-all. How do you avert your eyes and ears? The knives are out now for real and the clowns are making chopping sounds with their fat white lips. D.C. is a comedy show! No it’s a tragedy! No, wait, it’s a soap opera! Hold on, it’s all fake! Naw, it’s a cartoon show!

Sadly, it’s the United States of Amerriment, a slapstick Punch and Judy that barely stops long enough to give its corporate sponsors time to pass a tax reform bill that gives them millions in breaks. While you were laughing and howling at the latest gaffe, they were fleecing you like the snake oil salesmen they are. But isn’t it worth the Ride?? My god, Bannon’s gems are hilarious. The President goes to bed with a cheeseburger every night at 6:30 with his phone and three TV’s. Melania cried when the Donald won the Presidency. Ivanka is dumber than a brick. But she had a deal to be the first female President. The POTUS attention span is short. How short? He won’t read a one page brief. His handlers tried to tutor him on the Constitution — he made it to the 4th Amendment then left the room. Melania and Trump don’t sleep together! He eats fast food because he’s afraid someone will poison his meals, but not McDonalds’ pre-prepared burgers and fries. Don’t touch his dirty clothes on the White House floor! Don’t change his sheets! Germs, germs, everywhere!!

Congressmen met with psychiatrists to ascertain what level of craziness they had on their hands. Bannon gave it 33% he would be removed via the 25th Amendment for incompetence, about 19 amendments past Donald’s attention span.

Donald, of course, is firing back. Bannon not only was fired, he lost his mind! Says he wasn’t involved in the campaign win, now he will learn how hard winning is without the Trumpster. The President and his lawyers are screaming bloody murder, fake stories, libelous lies!! The liar-in-chief hollering in pain about his treacherous advisors lying! You can’t make this up. You live by the lie, you die by the lie.

And I’m supposed to keep my stupid New Year’s Resolution while this vaudeville show is playing night and day?? Easier to give up smoking. Way easier. And yeah, I know it’s a terrible addiction, these tweets. But if I turn away, I’ll maybe miss the next episode, the one that will make all the others seem banal. All I know, just like the rest of an insomniac audience, it just gets better and better. Drain the swamp? Why, when it’s so darn entertaining?

I got a knee that’s been bothering me. For about three years. I finally figured it wasn’t going to heal up so I went to my local clinic, got a checkup and was sent into town for some X-rays, then back to the original doc who took ten minutes before we both came to the same diagnosis: I was NOT Fred with the bad wrist. When we finally got Skeeter’s medical file, he told me he didn’t see anything particularly wrong, no doubt scribbling in my chart after I left — HYPOCHONDRIA.

A year later and no improvement in that knee, I switched clinics and tried again, this time asking the attending physician for an MRI, which he scheduled along with more X-rays. The MRI, I was certain, would show him the cause of my knee pain, hopefully something easily repaired. When I scheduled my consultation after the MRI came back and my answering machine mentioned ‘torn cruciate ligament’ I was confident we were going to get to the root of my chronic problem. At last!

My next doc mentioned he hadn’t had time to read my MRI’s yet, but he took a moment to have a look. “I see some arthritis in that left knee,” he told me and I told him my problem was in the right knee. “Not much arthritis there,” he said after studying the photos, “but that must be it.” (I’m sure he underlined the aforementioned HYPOCHONDRIAC in red ink.)

“I know I’m shy a few credits on my medical degree,” I protested, “but it sure feels like something’s wrong in there. A tear maybe?”

He patiently explained he was an osteo-surgeon and if I wanted a knee replacement, he was my man. “Whoa,” I said, “I’m not shopping knees today, I just want to figure out what this problem is.”

Disappointed, I went home, back to Plan A — see if it would heal itself. A month later my brother asked how the MRI’s turned out. When I told him, he said let’s look at your charts (his wife is an RN) and when I told him I hadn’t seen them, he explained it was almost two decades into the 21st Century, they would be available On-line, let’s have a look, so we did and right there in black and white on the MRI report were my two ligament tears, anterior cruciate and posterior too.

That was three months ago. I know I should go back, get a 3rd opinion, see if this knee can be repaired. My trouble is, I figure 50/50 they’ll amputate the leg. Probably the left one. So for the time being, I’m sticking with Plan A. Seems a helluva lot safer bet.