The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

If you’re like me (I know, you hope you’re NOT!), you’ve been diverted lately from the usual political comedies by the tragedies in Houston and now Florida which is in the crosshairs of Hurricane Irma. Irma? Who comes up with these names, some bored yahoo in the basement of the National Storm Appelation Department? And if you’re like me, you feel lucky to be torn away from the 24/7 drumbeat of Trump Tweets and maybe you even feel a little guilty considering the suffering of folks down there in the Bible Belt whose God has apparently forsaken them.

But now along comes that bombastic bomb thrower Rush Limbaugh to suggest the hurricanes are nothing more than liberal conspiracies to alarm the masses and thereby open the door for legislation on Global Warming, as big a hoax to the Rushter as the notion that Obama was born in the same country as him. Lies, all lies! A conspiracy of the left! An evil plot to destroy America! But he can stop them, maybe only he can stop them, by broadcasting the truth from his beacon of Brietbart babble.

Thank God for the Rushman! Faux hurricanes! Who’d have thought the Left could stoop so low. Bogeyman meteorology!! What’s next? Glaciers supposedly melting? Polar bear uprisings? Icebergs plowing into San Francisco? Is there nothing too low for these liberals to stoop to?

Apparently not, according to Herr Limbaugh. But … today he has decided to, well, let’s just say he’s decided to play it safe. He’s evacuating himself from the phoney baloney hurricane that’s nothing but liberal hot air. Not, I’m sure, to protect himself. No, the man is far too courageous for that. Truth, he would tell you himself, is all the defense he needs. The mouth is mightier than the sword. Or the whirlwind. Or whatever …. No, I’m sure he’s taking a small break from the routine of Savior, maybe indulging in a much needed vacation. Either way, I’m sure we could use a much needed vacation from Rush. And if that hurricane should actually make landfall with 150 mile sustained winds, don’t think it’s proof the libs were right. Probably brought on by the sudden vacuum of the Rushster gone silent.

The Little Church of the Ravine has a huge flock down here on the sin-saturated South End. The new pastor, Rev. Jeffrey, recently removed from his post in Eastern Washington, preaches on the side of punishment over redemption. His new parishioners figure those wheat farmers must have responded better to prods than to penance. The rest of us know Jeffrey has a rough row to hoe if he thinks South Enders are going to respond to Fear. If abject poverty hasn’t scared us yet, the good Reverend is tilling soil dryer than Eastern Washington’s.

Faith takes a lot of forms down here and the Little Church of the Ravine is only one of many. We got spiritualists and Ouija Boarders, Tea Leaf Readers and Palmists, Y Ching Tossers and the just plain superstitious. You name it, we probably got one or two back up the holler. Most of em don’t mind admitting to some faith based mysticism, they just want to believe in Something. Mostly we accept each other’s cosmology — even if Rev. Jeff makes it plain where he thinks that leads.

Jerry the Card Counter lives a half mile up the road and throws in with us boys occasionally at our weekly poker game. Jerry plays the odds mathematically, analyzing probabilities in his engineer’s head. Don’t even ask if he buys lottery tickets. Jerry usually goes home a winner. Partly because he never plays a hunch and partly because he drinks less than the rest of us, a good combination for profit, but not for fun.

Jerry is a believer in science. Which is fine. But he doesn’t like it when I say, peering over my 4 sequential cards and going for an improbable inside straight, that science itself is unprovable and so it too is essentially faith based. Jerry, nearly apoplectic at such heresy, forgets the odds of his own hand to unleash a spirited defense of Empirical Inquiry, then meets my raise by raising me back. The boyz all fold at the high cost of calling bluffs and embroiling themselves in epistemological exercises. “You can’t prove anything, Jerry,” I say calmly, looking at the last card Fearless Fred dishes me. I bet 3 bucks, the limit for our games.

Jerry can’t help himself, meeting my 3 and raising 3 more. “Science is fact-based, Skeeter!” he yells, thumping down a puny 2 pair when I throw my money in the pot, aces over eights, all black, ‘the dead man’s hand’, what Wild Bill Hickok held when he was shot down.

“Not true, Jerry. The Uncertainty Principle. The experimenter affects the results on the quantum level. It’s a strange world down there, Buddy. Believe what you want — it might make it come true.”

Jerry’s watching as I lay down a ten, then the jack and the queen, both lining up with the king next and I hold the final card until he can’t stand it any longer.

“Dammit!” he explodes when I lay down the Ace of Hearts with a gentle slap and big smirk. “What a lucky bastard!”

I smile as I rake in the big fat pot. “Sometimes, Jerry, you got to bet the hunch and hope the quarks line up. It’s all about believing. Next game is 7 card stud, gentlemen. Jokers wild. My deal.”

Rainin rainin rainin, original song written and sung by Laura Goldberg

“Nobody likes lawyers … until you need one.” My brother, attorney at law

Texas is drowning. Well, maybe not all of the Lone Star state, but the Houston area just got the most rainfall in U.S. history, some 50 inches in less than a week when Hurricane Harvey stalled over them and dumped the equivalent of one and a half inches over the entire continent. That, for you literalists, is a helluva lot of bathtubs overflowing.

The President even flew down there, no insignificant deal when you consider he has no Trump resorts or hotels to overnight at with his contingency. And you thought Houstonians were suffering! Nevertheless, tens of thousands are homeless, roads are impassable, 40,000 houses are ruined and the rest will soon be filled with black mold and soggy drywall. FEMA will bring in the formaldehyde trailers and contractors from all over the country will haul crews and equipment into Houston for a years-long cleanup estimated to be 50-100 billion dollars.

This is a catastrophe of the first order. All that chatter of Texas seceding from the United States, that’s going to be forgotten soon as Ted Cruz tries to round up the federal relief funds he voted against after Hurricane Sandy. The Damn Government?? You can forget that kind of cowboy talk now, not when folks need a hand.

All that blather about self reliance, independent Westerner, keeper of the Alamo’s legend — let’s cut to the chase. We have government to do the things we can’t do individually. The Texans will learn soon enough that this is not Evil, it is not necessarily Big Brother — it’s the way we build and sustain civilizations. So if secession is what they want, fine, turn down the money, Ted, the rest of us can use it to build roads, schools and courthouses.

Remember the Alamo, Ted. But keep in mind, they all died.

So I’m in the grocery store frequented by the high school crowd at lunch breaks and on the wall of their latrine I find scrawled with a knife: Dare to be Normal. Driving into the parking lot minutes before, I had noticed a young girl dressed hat to boot in black, adorned in all manner of body puncture, looking for all the world like a poster child for National Sado-Masochism Day. Except for the pink stuffed animal strapped to her backpack. Inside the rough exterior of our would-be dominatrix lurks the soft heart of an innocent adolescent, apparently.

When I left the store I noticed a small knot of teenagers waiting at the crosswalk beside the highway for the light to change. All identical to the teddy bear toter, sans the teddy bear. Sure, it occurred to me to roll down the window and yell Dare to be Normal! but …. And here’s the rub …. These kids were normal. When we went to high school, we all pretty much looked homogenous — go check out your yearbook if you still got one. I don’t really want to dare anybody to be normal. Vote Ike again. Drive a Chevy. Drink Coke. Eat a Popsickle. Listen to the Beatles. Join the Army. Get a Job. Cut your Hair! Take out the Nose Ring!! Buy something at the Mall!!! Get married !!!! Have a family!!!!!!! Get a cemetery plot ahead of time!!!!!!!

Next time I’m in the grocery store, I’ll be looking for my little graffiti writing conformist. I assume he’ll be the one who isn’t dressed Goth, doesn’t have tattoos, wears blue suede shoes and a letter jacket and sports a butch crewcut regular color. He’ll look like my old man, is what I figure. And Dad, if it IS you philosophizing on the bathroom wall, knock it off! The kids will turn out like you after all, count on it.

“Cursed are the evildoers!” Pastor Paul cried to the congregation of the Little Church in the Ravine this past Sunday. “God will smite them and their wicked ways!” he exclaimed as he held his battered leather bound King James version above his head, a mighty instrument of the Lord. “Just as he punished the wicked in Noah’s day, so will he punish them now!” And with that he pounded his Bible to the plywood pulpit with a resounding bang that stunned his flock.

“There is no escape from the Lord’s Judgement! The Sodomites are drowning in their own sin. The EndTimes are truly upon them! They will be judged just as each and every one of us will be judged. Only the repentant will be saved. Only those who renounce their sins. Ask yourselves, each of you, do you want to drown in a sea of fire? Do you?”

Pastor P. was sorely agitated, obviously. The assembled sinners were squirming in their metal folding chairs, quiet as the condemned. Down in Houston the waters were rising by the hour. The Great Flood, as Paul had predicted many a Sunday service, was finally upon them. The news from Texas was grim and getting grimmer. No one was to be spared in a city of millions. People were being rescued off their roofs, by fishing boats and helicopters. Houston was one gigantic lake with no escape.

Pastor Paul had paused for effect and was just about to exhort once more, lifting the Bible up for another hammerblow, when Sarah Jensen suddenly stood up in the middle of the aisle where she had been sitting. Her mother lived in Houston and she hadn’t heard Word One since the hurricane took out power and communications to the city. Her mother was 83 and certainly no sinner, Sarah had been thinking. She lived in a groundfloor apartment by herself, managed to get around with the help of a walker, lived day to day by herself. Sarah was fearful she would be trapped in that apartment with no one to help her and here she was 2000 miles away listening to Pastor Paul ranting about Judgement Day.

She had stood up, but once up, she couldn’t move. Just stood there like a small tree in the torrential current of Pastor Paul’s fiery sermon. It was as if she had risen to leave, perhaps. Or …. what? Catch her breath? Every eye in that congregation waited expectantly for her to do something. To speak. To sit back down. To leave the church. But Sarah didn’t move. Finally tears began to fall from her bowed head, slowly at first, a hot trickle, then a constant stream. Someone touched her hand. Pastor Paul seemed to be speaking, maybe to her. How long she stood there, she didn’t know. And when they helped her to the door and then to her car, she didn’t care. It seemed like it was raining all over the world.

Sarah’s mom called later that afternoon from a Red Cross shelter. Some Samaritan in a fishing boat had motored down her block calling to folks who might still be trapped indoors. He heard Sarah’s mother answer from inside her apartment and he carried her out through the brown swirling floodwaters to his skiff. The man had another elderly gentleman on the seat beside her and in the back were two dogs her rescuer had found swimming side by side. The man by her side said to her over the noise of the outboard motor once they were under way, “Kind of a small Ark, ain’t it?”