The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

April Fool’s Day came on Inauguration Day this year and now with every day’s events sprung on us citizens, we’re barraged by the unbelievable, the inside out and upside down, by faux news and ‘lying’ media. Naturally, the one day set aside as a national holiday for the absurd was canceled. In an executive order tweeted at 3 A.M. from the West Wing, President Trump (no joke!) announced April 1st would no longer be a day to mislead the gullible and those with atrophied funny bones.

As a possible substitution he suggested Paul Ryan introduce a bill to the House of Representatives making the day officially Shoot A Liberal Day. “Only kidding!” he tweeted. “Ha ha. But GREAT idea!!” The National Institute of Funny Bone Reconstruction immediately issued a protest to the White House counsel demanding that 364 days of the calendar year be restored to truth telling, not alternate facts, in order to repair the badly damaged national sense of humor.

Anxiety has spread across the land, the NIFBR argued. “Reality, no longer fact based, has eroded to the point where the average citizen feels like Alice in Wonderland, wandering a topsy-turvy minefield of impossible juxtapositions. What was up is down, what was inside is out, what seemed true is now lies. If everything is true, nothing is true,” the Institute wrote in their brief. “We are experiencing national insanity as a result of endless April Fool’s Days. Restore the holiday, Mr. President!”

Mr. Trump tweeted: “Never heard of the Funny Boners. Liberal Losers?? They should thank me. Every day is unbelievable! So hilarious!”

At least for now April Fool’s Day is officially rescinded as a national holiday. Press Spokesperson Kellyanne Conway stated emphatically later that morning that this was not what the President meant. When asked for clarification, she said he meant exactly what he said, not what you thought he said. “It’s not my job,” she added, “to interpretate.”

I just got word my TV, a 32 inch Vizio, is spying on us. Evidently it’s capable of sending data back to its central headquarters where our avid interest in all things PBS are collected, collated and analyzed. For all I know these statistics are being sold to the Trump administration and filed under NEVER WATCHED ONE EPISODE OF THE APPRENTICE. ALERT THE FCC IMMEDIATELY!

I blame myself. I brought the cyclops into our house well aware that it was not my friend. It was a time-stealer, an electronic sedative, a babysitter and worse, a mediocre mess of programming. But I never imagined it as a spy. Oh, maybe I had some subliminal fears. Might explain the time when I lived in Seattle and Gomorrah that I tied a dummy to a chair and set the chair in front of a TV set in the living room. The TV had a Thunderbird wine bottle smashed through its picture tube. Guests who came over fell into two categories: those who treated it like an art installation and those who averted their eyes and ignored what to them was a disturbingly unacceptable tableau of deviant behavior.

Deviant behavior was probably the correct answer. Once, in the same year, my roommates and I dragged a TV into the vacant lot next door and proceeded to stone it to death. We hooked it up to an extension cord for maximum spark and implosion. When I moved up here to the island, we continued the tradition, but by then we aimed for peak destruction and tossed the one-eyed beast into a bonfire before smashing its eye. It became a kind of tradition, this television destruction. But like a lot of traditions, it lapsed over time.

Back in about 1982 my parents visited and were seriously alarmed that the only working TV in the shack was an old black and white with something wrong with the volume. At top volume it only whispered. Watching it was like a return to silent movies. Without the piano man. So naturally they decided to give us an early Christmas present in September. Our first color TV. So they could watch it when they visited when we’d exhausted conversations.

And now, 35 years later, we still have a TV. A TV we watch. And a TV that watches us. I suppose we could watch reruns of the Apprentice to give the appearance of compliance to the Donald’s ego. But we don’t have cable and I doubt we could find those reruns. I’m thinking maybe it’s time to return to those old traditions and just burn the bastard.

Seven Habits of Successful South Enders

START THE DAY BEFORE NOON

At least on work days. The other five days, sleep in. You earned it.

LEARN HOW TO READ
Writing is no longer essential, but … the successful South Ender can tweet, twitter and text, even if spelling is marginal.

LISTEN TO OTHERS
Especially on Facebook and other social media. Keeping track of friends’ and enemies’ likes and dislikes is an invaluable tool in the South End toolbox. Decision making is easy, just see what the herd is doing.

WORK AT LEAST ONE HOUR A DAY.

No matter how severe the hangover, the lethargy, the ennui or excess hedonistic activities. Work isn’t ALL bad.

WORK OFF THE GRID

No South Ender worth his or her salt works in order to pay half his or her income to the IRS. Barter heavily with your neighbors and friends. Crab, clam, trap, fish, hunt or grow it! Food is free and food is fun! If you buy your dinners, food is neither.

LEARN TO REPAIR

Your own car, truck, toaster, wellpump, toilets, etc. You can’t barter or sell busted stuff and repairmen cost an arm and a leg per hour PLUS that service fee to drive half a day to and from your hell-and-gone address. Knowing a few handyman tricks can save you another part-time job at the fast food joints 50 miles away.

MARRY UP!

Chances are you’ve embraced an aesthetic lifestyle. You artists and musicians need supplemental income and unless you plan to work full time low paid minimum hour jobs, a second salary is essential. Marry one.

If none of these suggestions work for you, plan on moving soon. Life on the South End is mostly for those with alternative-fact occupational schemes. If you landed here thinking this was just a suburb of America, get yourself a GPS and head back to the mainland. Not guaranteeing jobs necessarily, but at least the possibility exists out there in Trumpland when America’s CEO brings them back. And those of us who stay, well, we could use the extra elbow room. Good luck to ya!

A few weeks ago some Silicon Valley bazillionaire announced he thought it was highly possible this little reality we live in is some sort of computer simulation. Yesterday I read where two physicists were theorizing the universe is actually two dimensional, not three or four, but similar to a holographic image. I guess they’ve all been watching too many reruns of The Matrix.

It’s a discouraging notion, this idea that the Creator is a computer programmer, at least to me, a boy with nary a binary bone in his body. The tech boyz must think God was created in their own image, but I suppose if I’d invented the silicon world and made a fortune, I might see it their way too. Life, as the Bard once said, is but a dream and maybe it’s a cyborg dream after all, some simulation by an artificial intelligence where we all live in a fractal virtual world.

I’ve never been much interested in this kind of speculation, the stuff that religions are based on and faith revolves around. The universe is way too large for me to get my mind around and I only get to live an incredibly brief lifespan in the big scheme of things. I just figure there must be better ways to spend my time than dream up explanations that aren’t provable, then try to convince others they’re true and maybe have them worship at the font of this ersatz wisdom. Maybe even have them give me money. Maybe fight wars with the infidels who refuse to see the Light and the Way.

I know it’s appealing to create a world in our head. We probably do it all the time, every day, year in and year out. At least I do. Reality is pretty slippery and if you don’t believe it, you haven’t done psychedelic drugs or you don’t have friends who have lost their moorings. Reality is pretty much a misnomer, something I hate to admit in this newspeak world of ‘alternative facts.’ The truth is (if I can still use that word), if reality is relative, we haven’t got any solid ground to stand on. But I can still walk the beach, hike the woods, till the garden. One day I may wake up and find it’s all gone. More likely, someday I just won’t wake up. Then, maybe, we should reprogram, check for updates, add some apps, reboot. Hopefully then things will revert to normal. You know, if you believe in normality.