The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I keep hearing how what us South Enders want fom our health care is more choices. Me and the mizzus, both past Medicare age now, started shopping for supplemental insurance. If we wanted choices, whoo-ee, we got em!! Well , not so much in different companies offering competitive prices so much as the two companies offering plans with plenty of their choices.

Maybe you want Plan X, pays 80% of Medicare A’s deductible, 100% of Med B’s. For $50 more a month you can get 100% pay on A & B. Want to save $$$’s, go for Plan D, you pay $3200 out of pocket before D kicks in, maxes out at $50K or Death, why they call it Plan D, you will opt for death before bankruptcy. Plan Z you can get some nursing home care, but not on Plan Y. Out of country coverage? Some yes, some no. Want co-pay or Medicare D, check out plan C? Need dental or glasses, Plans X and G and maybe N, but see if it covers contacts, bifocals or Lasix.

The list goes on. And on. And on some more. If you got a month or so, download the prosepectus of 43 pages or so per plan. Price per month is pretty prominent, you won’t need bifocals, but try to compare those prices with the juggling options, you’ll need something for your vertigo, check if it’s covered on your Medicare D, the pharmaceutical part. And if you’re not like ma and me, you’re searching for the equivalent of Medicares A and B in those health plans, god help you.

Call me cynical but if I didn’t know better with all this accumulated Wisdom old age is supposed to accrue along with arthritis and prostate problems, I’d say the health care industry makes this purposely obfuscated, a labyrinth of impossible to calculate connections between the fees and options, throw the dice, pay the price, take two aspirin, hope you make it til morning….

So … do I want more options? I don’t know. It seems like that stupid beer ad for the most popular beer in America: More Taste, Less Filling. It doesn’t have any taste whatsoever and it’s less filling because it’s mostly water. Still costs plenty, that’s for sure. Health care: more options, less expensive? We’re all being sold a bottle of snake oil, just 25 different labels on the same bottle. Glad we got those choices, though! Well, maybe if you’re wealthy….

By now you’ve heard the news: Amazon has announced plans to create a second headquarters outside Seattle and Gomorrah’s gridlocked environs. Needless to say this has set off a bidding frenzy for who can offer the most tax reductions, the best qualified personnel and the most advantageous living conditions for Amazon’s elite management team bent on taking over the entire world.

And what major metropolitan city in this country or somewhere else wouldn’t want to claim that citadel of power as their own economic engine? Who wouldn’t want property values to shoot through the roof in the first year, doubling or even tripling the price of a modest home and swelling the tax base? Who wouldn’t want rental prices doing the same, forcing the undesirable poor to move somewhere far outside their upscale neighborhoods? And who wouldn’t want to jumpstart their transportation system by injecting thousands upon thousands of Amazonians bent on reaching headquarters by train, by bus, by self-driving automobiles? No, the bids and the proposals are already pouring in the very first week of the retailing Godzilla’s announcement.

Here on the South End we have our own pitch, one we think may just carry the day. Admittedly we don’t have much transportation infrastructure, just a two lane blacktop that loops around the end of the island. And housing opportunities are, well, a bit Spartan and okay, mostly non-existent. Plus, qualified personnel and high tech training programs are what we could charitably call nascent, but actually are fairly non-existent, although Stanwood is building a fine new high school . I guess we could offer tax incentives. No B&O taxes, possibly forever. And gifts for the executives. You know, free crab. All the crab they can eat. Anytime they want it. We’ll even crack it for them.

What we really have to offer — and we think they’ll see the wisdom in this — is the chance to start at Ground Level, no impediments, no necessity to sweep aside the existing infrastructures, just a Fresh Clean Start. Sounds good to us too! Rome wasn’t built in a day, but Amazonia? We think you could do it here on the blank slate of the South End. Think about it, but not too long. Tyee Store may be expanding soon, pretty tough competition down here, and they may not roll over the way Whole Foods did, Mr. Bezos.

If you listen close these days, you can hear the Four Horses of the Apocalypse thundering down the highway here on the South End. Some of my more paranoid pals are watching with growing concern the trajectory of Hurricane Irma down in the Carribean as it churns toward Florida. Two more storms are forming right there too and of course all are on the heels of Hurricane Harvey. Up and down the western coast the mountains and foothills are burning like the Maw of Hell.

“Probably going to have the Big One,” Little Jimmy is pronouncing over his plate of runny eggs easy over down at the Diner. He’s an unlikely prophet of doom, but for the moment he has the boyz’ attention. He sops up the orange goop with a flourish of rye toast, takes a small bite, then drops it back down in the coagulated mess. “Fires and hurricanes, earthquakes might be next.” Jim’s not a religious nut, but he’s been going through a divorce and who knows, maybe he’s got his own fault lines ready to shift tectonically.

Two Toke splurts a little coffee and chokes on what goes down his windpipe. When he finally gets cleared out, he says, “C’mon, Jim, you aiming to be head pastor?” Jim declares, “I’m just reading the Signs, Tom. Bad moons rising, see what I’m getting at?”

“I suppose the eclipse has something to do with all this?” Fat Freddy mutters from an adjoining table. Outside the air is hazy with the dense smoke of the Cascade fires that has swept into the Puget Sound, turning the sun a sunset red even at mid-day. It is eerie, we all would have to admit.

“I don’t know, Fred, I’m just saying …. Something’s going on. All these disasters one after the other, is it just coincidence?”

Tom motions to Brenda for a refill of what he’s lost to flabbergast. “Let’s not get carried away, Jim, we get fires every year and last time I looked hurricanes too. Way of the World.”

“End of the world maybe,” Jimmy said miserably. Brenda held the coffee pot hesitantly over his cup. “Got time for a refill?” she asks.

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.”