The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I guess it’s news worthy to report each and every professional athlete who decides to make a political statement by refusing to stand up for the national anthem. Personally, I’m still trying to figure out what the hell spangled means. Splattered maybe? My handy dictionary sez it’s plastic or metal objects that are shiny. I guess Betsy Ross’s old flags might have had sewed-on plastic stars, but I kinda doubt it. Not that it matters, it’s a song, not a Magna Carta.

When I was a teacher, the school where I taught always played the anthem every morning through the loudspeaker in each classroom. My kids would dutifully rise and put their little hands over their hearts and listen half heartedly to the words, probably no idea they came from the War of 1812. Me, I’d sit at my own desk. The kids didn’t know quite what to think of this treasonous act and were too timid to ask. And I didn’t feel it necessary to give them my reasons. My business, my class. Freedom in America.

When I was a kid myself in Georgia, we had to recite the Pledge of Allegiance every morning and then one of us would read a verse from the Bible. Even as immature as I was, something about this smacked of tyranny. When my turn came to pick a verse, I picked the shortest one in the New Testament: ‘Jesus Wept’. Short and sweet and it always got me a trip to the principal where I was treated like an atheist communist sympathiser. Mr. Crawford would sit me down in the little room outside his office and explain to me, a Yankee intruder in his Confederate fiefdom, that insubordination would not be tolerated. When I tried to explain that I had met the terms of my assignment by reading a Bible verse of my choosing, he glared down at me like I was the grandson of William Tecumseh Sherman, the man who burned a swath through the state in the Civil War, and said ‘You know what I’m talking about here, Little Man.’

Indeed I did. Indeed I do. These folks who won’t stand up for the Star Splattered Banner do too. You think it’s a free country, think again. The herd makes its demands and you pay a price for ignoring them. But like the weekend armchair patriots like to say, freedom isn’t free.

Jesus wept.

A friend of mine just wrote to say she might have discovered she has a heretofore unknown brother, discovered, apparently through the wonders of DNA analysis. He is either her half brother or the son of her father’s brothers, the result, she says of a one night stand in some hick town in Arizona with his mother who until he was 11 thought was his sister. Yeah, I’m confused too. To make the story all the more interesting, his mother is African American. Of course I’m interested in selling the movie rights…

There are studies that show between 10 and 30% of us may not have the right dad when we send those father’s day cards. This is a testament to the infidelity of the American Mom whose libido may have been vastly underestimated. I had a buddy, a white guy, who had a black kid. Kind of a surprise at the birth, but like he said, the mizzus got drunk at a party one night and hey, these things happen, but he was going to raise the kid, someone else’s genetically, his by choice. Gotta say, I was impressed. If you met his wife, you’d never guess her wild side judging by her mousey disposition.

Another buddy of mine got a knock on his door one day a few years back and found his old paramour of even further back darkening his doorway with her son in tow. He’d had a fling with her when she was 15, picked her up in a park, took her home and carried on an affair for a week or two. Yeah, I know what statutory rape is. He did too, but it didn’t stop him. So now the chickens were flying home to roost. My pal, being the distrustful sort, decided to call her bluff, especially since the kid was pretty dark like his mom and didn’t show much Caucasian. And because she wanted money. Turned out the boy wasn’t his after all. I don’t know if he gave her some money anyway, but I hope he did.

I guess these DNA tests are great for exploring the family tree. Personally, I’m okay letting Dad be Dad. I don’t need to be sending multiple father’s day cards every damn year….

Yesterday the smog index for pollution particulates here reached a number where air quality advisories were issued to the region’s asthma and emphysema sufferers. I hafta admit, the smoky haze on the South End looked worse than the days of burn barrels when everything from plastic to rubber was incinerated in 55 gallon drums. Now that the drums are plastic, the neighborhood pollution is way down, score one for polycarbonates!

We’ve just set the record for the longest drought in history here in the Pacific Northwest and we still have a month of typical drought to go. British Columbia is burning and the fires are only starting here in America and I’m not talking political partisanship. The smoke from those northern blazes has been pulled down here, giving us red ball sunsets but obscuring the Olympic Mountains all day long. Beijing was one tenth the pollution level we were. Another day and we’ll all be taking our hikes in surgical masks if we dare to venture outdoors at all.

If you walk through our back 40 you can see the remnants of the fire of the 1880’s. Charred cedar snags rise out of the nettle canopy and the stumps of old growth fir show blackened bark even to this day. My former neighbor used to pile brush and debris on our side of the property line and when I asked him about it, he told me it was a fire break. You know … for his property, not ours. Changed my opinion about him 180 degrees. Good fences might make good neighbors, but not fire breaks.

Nature, in case we didn’t know already, can turn on you fast. Some folks are muttering already about global warming — and of course it may be partly or mostly to blame — but even the cyclical explanation isn’t any comfort. Me, I’m just hoping those burn barrels are definitely a thing of the past.

I used to raise peacocks.  You ever seen peacocks strutting thru a South End shack yard, it’s sorta otherworldly.  They brought an elegance that was indescribable to our backwash palace.  You ever HEARD one of these exotic creatures, you might reconsider classing up the bottom land.  They got a scream like a child being tortured.  I guarantee the neighbors will wear out 911 with their calls of mayhem and madness at your place.  Course when I had the peacocks, we didn’t have neighbors.  No, they didn’t move away because of the noise, they just hadn’t discovered the fabulous South End yet.

      My peacocks, no offense to you Bird Huggers out there – my peacocks had a head about the size of a big martini olive.  And inside that head they had a brain the size of, well, a pea.  My peacocks were not bright.  They made a chicken look like Albert Einstein.  They thought my Banty hen, who’d hatched their eggs, they thought she was not only Einstein, but their mama and God too.    Don’t ask me what I was thinking.  My brain isn’t real big either.  Although I’m pretty sure who my mama is but don’t ask me about Pop.  I’m like the peacocks – I just go on faith.

     I had the peacocks a few years until Mama Banty got picked off by a Wily Coyote.  They wouldn’t come back to the henhouse after that, so they roosted in the cedars every night.  Dumb or not, they figured out the climbing ability of a coyote.  Finally they decided to go looking for Ma.  The Police Blotter in the Stanwood Gazette – and this is the Gospel Truth – would report on their progress north.  Peacock sighting at Dahlman Road.  Peacocks seen gathering at Sunnyshore.  Eventually they found a chicken surrogate ma up by O-Zi-Ya.  O-Zi-Ya is Southendomish, meaning, I think, Ornithological Orphanage. 

Sometimes I miss those little pea-brains.  Although I can sleep longer w/o an alarm clock that sounds like a nightmare.  I wonder, though, if I’d kept em, if the South End mighta stayed, oh, I don’t know, less developed.  Maybe forced the new neighbors to move north instead.

We just got back from a trip to the Great Smokeys. No, not the ones out in the Appalachians, the ones all over Washington State, the Great Hazies. Got home and turned on my computer only to discover it had died. Ordinarily I don’t grieve for machines that have given up the ghost, but you maybe know yourself that a goodly part of your life resides in those PC’s and Macs. E-mails, files, photos, news, all the digital connections that keep us tethered to the outside world.

Sad, really, since our outside world here is pretty much all we used to need. Another day or two of internet withdrawal and it will be again, trust me. So bear with me, or not. I know blogger loyalty is probably not high on anyone’s list these days, and if you need to move on, I’ll try not to feel too spurned. In the computer world, you trip, the folks behind you will trample you to death. I understand that. Which is why I’ve hijacked the mizzus’ machine to type in this message.

But now I have to turn my attention to computer repair. Always iffy, always dangerous, always scary. Yesterday I managed to reach into the motherboard, changed a cmos battery, rebooted … and nothing. Today I go in with a hammer. We’ll see soon enough who’s boss here. Although … I think we all know how this movie ends. Cyberspace … where nobody hears me scream.

A man can only take so much of this summer heat. Naw, not the actual temperature outside. The constant coverage by the news media giving advice about not locking your kid in the car when you go in for your liquor purchase, wearing sunblock, drinking fluids, staying indoors, taking cold baths. I can’t take it anymore. Even Trump gets backpage coverage behind the weather. I mean, c’mon, it’s not an oven out there, it’s a hot summer day. Take a swim, take a shower, take a break, man.

Which is what I’m going to do. We’re driving over the mountains and into some REAL heat, triple digits with air quality alerts from the fires burning in British Columbia and Montana and our own state’s conflagrations. Beats listening to the caterwauling from the hyperventilating meteorologists, that’s for certain.

Anyway, if you’re not passed out already from heat prostration, let me offer my own advice. Go right now to the refrigerator and grab yourself a cold one. Sit back down and scroll thru some back posts with frequents trips to the refrigerator or, if necessary, to the nearest air conditioned grocery store with beer coolers. And don’t leave the pooch or the kid in the car while you run in. Do keep drinking fluids. And go easy on these sketches, maybe a couple per adult beverage. I’ll be back when the temperature comes down. Or my own beer supply runs out. God help us all.