The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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….

Something weird is going on down here on the techno-challenged South End. Something troubling and as yet unexplained. The weather, for one, but I don’t think this is causative. Although, since none of us believe in science anymore, the possibility is there that it could be. Make up something, anything, or better yet, imagine some conspiracy, then forward it to all your ‘friends’. Post it on your social medias. Hope the Russians amplify it on who knows how many websites. When it shows up on Fox and Friends, you know it’s probably true. Fair and balanced, at least. As good a test as any so far as the President is concerned.

We used to play a game in grade school called Telephone. At least I think it was called Telephone. Or maybe it was Gossip. Who cares, make up a name of your own. You start out with a sentence, something like: Tomorrow if it snows we’ll get out of school. The first person who gets this turns to the desk next door and whispers it in the ear of another student who then passes it on to the next and so on. By the time it gets back around after about 30 iterations, it was amazing what sausage emerged from the grinder. Nothing like the beginning and of course the whole point to us little munchkins in 4th grade was how distorted information got the more folks passed it on.

Course in our modern computerized times, the message is pretty much just copied and pasted or else forwarded whole. Not much room for message evolution. But what we got instead is all this phony baloney information being disseminated by … someone. For some unknown reason … For what nefarious purpose? The Russians pick it up, amplify it with all their phony websites that look semi-legit and voila, half the stuff you get on Facebook or Yahoo news or Twitter is really Fake News, just what the President keeps saying about anything which seems negative about him. You don’t know WHAT to believe anymore and so, in this miraculous Age of Information we live in, we have filled our brains with digital poop. Most of which makes us angry and polarized and ultimately Cynical. Which I suspect is the whole point. We don’t believe the media, we don’t believe the President, we don’t believe politicians, we don’t buy Science, we don’t believe in much of anything other than Facebook. We might as well drag our cellphones and laptops into a cave and go back to cooking with fire. If we still believe in fire.

But … and lest I’ve digressed too far from the original point, something weird is going on with this little blogsite. In less than two days its number of visitors (let’s call them Curious Minds) has spiked beyond anything reasonable. Ten times the usual and curving skyward. Hell if I know why. I suppose I should be pleased, but I’m mostly baffled. Oh sure, probably these posts are suddenly scintillating and incisive, no doubt the result of my … my … well, who knows? Maybe the Russians know.

Maybe you do.

Anyway, hopefully any day now the advertisers will be knocking on my door and I can quit my day job, just pound out this moonshine wisdom and wet powder wit until my retirement fund is full. For those of you who have made this possible: спасибо Comrade Putin!

Maybe you’ve heard the internet chatter to run Oprah for president. Aiiee Carumba! I guess I need to watch more TV. Seems to me we’re looking for politicians who are popular television personalities now. Reagan, Trump, now Oprah. Dr. Oz for Vice President. Dancing with the Stars winners for cabinet posts. Maybe we’ll like government better if we fill it with our favorite stars of screen and TV.

On the other hand, maybe we should just have a National Lottery. No skills needed, just luck. A lot of luck, the kind that might take a person a long ways with trade negotiations, arms deals, welfare reform, tax reductions, Supreme Court nominations, health care fixes, all those decisions we thought took professionals with expertise and experience. I guess we don’t need that now. We need someone with ratings. We need someone with luck. That’s all we need.

Civilizations fall. Greece, Rome, the Mayans, the Incans, Aztecs, American Idol. Way of the world. Somewhere along the line the droughts hit, food becomes scarce, plagues decimate the population, the neighbors wage war, leaders become too corrupt or too inbred or too inept. Ratings go through the bottom.

Always something as we say on the South End, yet another lost civilization. Why not take a run at TV game show hosts running the machinery? Jeopardy or Wheel of Fortune. One luck, one trivial pursuit. Spin the wheel, pick a door or a curtain, go for the Daily Double. Sure you could lose it all on a single roll, that’s the fun for us in the audience. I’ll take the Middle East for $600, Alex. “What is the 6 Day War?” No???

The Oprah brand is as vast as Trump’s. As president she can recommend books, offer magazine subscriptions, dole out sympathy. We can struggle together with her weight issues, follow her tabloid accounts. We can hope she heals the country. I’ll wager $2700 on U.S. Government, Alex. “What have you got to lose?”

Good try, but sorry, that is not the answer we’re looking for, Skeeter. That leaves you with only $100. Thanks for playing Jeopardy!