The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

For most of my early elementary school years, every Valentine’s Day our teacher would have us write little cards to everybody in the class. I guess they believed in Universal Love, although looking back, I know they were good God-fearing Georgians and probably didn’t intend to promote what would now be banned behavior in most of our cautious classrooms outside Sodom and Gomorrah. WILL YOU BE MY VALENTINE? we asked everybody oh so sweetly. So innocently. Who knew the Supreme Court would probably be the ones to answer that ultimately. So I guess the jury is still out…..

Whatever the ruling from the folks in the black robes, we’ll still have Valentine’s Day, celebrated not so much for Cupid and his/her aphrodisiac-tipped arrows as a marketing tool for florists and chocolatiers bent on cashing in on the lovefest. And why not? After all, candy’s sweet, flowers are fragrant. They celebrate Love, and lately, that seems more and more an endangered species. I see the boyz down my end of the island rushing in to the wilted flower section of the Tyee Store MegaMart after work on the anointed day, hoping to grab a last minute bouquet of anything colorful and perfumed, about to go home to the love of their life with a handful of posies instead of the usual quart of Steel Reserve 9%. And maybe they buy a card, something saccharine and hokey and cloying as only Hallmark can manage, then they get back in their 4×4 extended cab Dodge Ram one ton with the workboxes and ladders and upside down wheelbarrows filling the acreage of the truckbed, and for a moment, right before they tear another hole in the cratered blacktop of the parking lot, we’re back in Mrs. Fleming’s 2nd grade class in backwash Georgia with all the rest of our love struck classmates, scribbling Valentines and putting candy hearts with inscriptions in the envelopes. For everyone.

A few years back the South End String Band wrote a little ditty about the Barefoot Bandit and submitted it to the Ron and Don show on KIRO radio, at the time the slot with the largest listening audience in the entire Pacific Northwest. We got something like 25,000 hits and the Band, unaccustomed to prime time notoriety, had heads swelled to the size of Goodyear Blimps. Well, the size of pumpkins anyway. Okay, we were mildly amused.

As we followed our number of hits daily, we noticed at the bottom the COMMENT section so naturally we checked to see what our admiring public had to say about our soon-to-be-classic Side A. To say it was an eye-opener is an understatement. It was a stick in the eye, is what it was, a few dozen trolls unloading on us for everything from celebrating a criminal to undermining the Judeo-Christian faith, stuff so far off the wall it was hard to get our mind around what they were driving at. Except that they seemed angry and angrier, dumping toxic waste and their disgust with the world into their commentary.

I didn’t understand then, and probably don’t now, this trolling stuff. I mean, are people really this creepy? The poisonous venom spewed in those comments was troubling and still is. Occasionally I peek at the comments to some news feed, just to see what the peanut gallery has to say, and invariably find myself blown back by the sheer unadulterated nastiness. Maybe, I sometimes think, it’s just seven maladjusted teenage guys venting their rage at a childhood with no toys and bad parents. After I get the taste of their venom out of my mouth I desist peeking at these commentaries for a few more months. Who needs to spoil their day reading noxious stuff from people you (hopefully) will never meet? It’s worse even than the punk who flips you off in his car for some unknown slight. You want to follow him to the gas station and see what’s bothering him?

Seven guys. Not likely. I have been trying to wrap my head around this country voting for a mean spirited, misogynistic, racist bully who shoots from the lip via tweet at every imagined slight. All I can come up with is there are a lot more trolls than those seven dwarfs. And they not only vent on the comment section, they vote.

So you voted in this guy thinking, what, he’d mature once he took the oath? How many folks married the person they wished he or she would be, only to find out they were the same sad sorry sack they’d dated? And now what? You’re supposed to reform this goof of a husband?

All your friends told you the guy was a jerk, but no, you thought you could manage him. Sure, he flirted with your girlfriends, might’ve even slept with your best friend, but you weren’t married yet, he was ust sowing some wild oats. Later he would be faithful. Okay, he was a thin-skinned hothead and offended your family, but you figured he was maybe just drinking a bit too hard, something you’d correct with a little encouragement or maybe some nagging. And if he seemed a bit, oh, I don’t know, obstinate maybe … or … resistant to criticism … or … all right, just damn pigheaded most of the time … you thought he was just showing off for your friends and missing the mark somewhat. Nothing that wouldn’t level off once he’d slipped those rings on your fingers.

But now you’re wondering, was this all just crazy hopeful expectation? Were you so desperately alone, even this philandering, blowhard know-nothing looked, if not good, at least okay? Were YOU drinking a little too heavily perhaps? Oh sure, sometimes he said mean things, but you didn’t think he’d lay a hand on you, did you? And now your friends are saying you should leave the sonofabitch after that last black eye and Sheila, your former best friend, finally confessed that yeah, he’d basically raped her that night after he’d taken you home and given her a ride to her apartment.

The folks are tearing their hair out over this son-in-law. They’d offer to pay him for a divorce, but he’s got more money than Midas has gold. He’s contented to be at the Thanksgiving table, to hell with the looks that could kill across the carved turkey, he ain’t going nowhere, and Christmas looks like Halloween coming back again, no treats this time.

We wish we could offer some advice. We wish we could offer condolences. But we warned you, didn’t we? Trouble is, you brought this bully into our neighborhood and now he’s our problem too. He feels like he’s entitled and he’s got the clout to back it up. Thanks, Eve, for bringing the snake into the Garden. Now, how do we get rid of him???

You live on the wild wild South End, you know the Long Arm of the Law isn’t all THAT lengthy and the Reach of Rome isn’t either. Frontier Justice is what we got, more often than not, although I’m not saying I’m an advocate. Me, I’m like most of us down here at the end of the county road —- I just want to be left in peace.

Dan the Woodcarvin Man is of the same mind, maybe more so. He got a new neighbor on the north side of his 5 acres, pretty much out of sight through a stand of woods, although with the new hound that came with the new couple, not exactly out of earshot. It drove him a little crazy all that incessant barking, and he spoke with the couple finally when it chased his cat up a tree and it took two days to get it to come back to terra firma. The wife flat out told him their dog never left the property and slammed the door behind her when she stomped back inside. Dan and the husband — he thought his name was Jesse — stood there in awkward silence. Until Jesse’s sweetheart stormed back out and told Jess to get his ass inside and Dan to get his off her property.

Robert Frost said good fences make good neighbors. He meant it ironically. A week after being thrown off their property, a gyppo with a chainsaw the size of a Ditch Witch rolled in and in an hour, half a dozen huge firs and cedars were kissing the ground, two on Dan’s fence and his property, one was even his own tree, a prized old cedar. The nice couple, when he mentioned it to them through a half open front door after he got home to discover the clearcut backyard, told him the tree in question was theirs and his fence was too. Woodcarvin Dan wanted to be Headcarvin Dan for a brainbusting moment or too, but murder, even down here, WILL bring the Law.

I’m not gonna tell you Dan’s a pacifist, but he doesn’t look for trouble either. He had the property surveyed to prove his claim, left the stakes ribboned and ran a new fence two feet inside those. A week later he received a court summons that informed him his neighbors were suing him for trespass, for threatening to kill their dog and for his surveyor’s trespassing as well. Dan hired a local lawyer, legal papers went back and forth with their attorney, they went to court and the judge ruled in Dan’s favor. So far he was only out $6000. Justice occasionally prevails, but it doesn’t come cheap.

Last I heard, Dan had gotten another legal letter from his neighbors’ lawyer, this time that he’d threatened to harm their kid. Dan’s never talked to the lad other than one time to ask him NOT to play in his pond. And the Neighborhood Association, according to Jesse’s wife, was going to file an insurance claim for their shed half on Dan’s property his fence runs into the middle of. Dan, nearly berserk and rapidly going broke, asked me for advice. Which tells you all you need to know about his state of exasperation and desperation.

Quit hiring attorneys, I said. Let them pay the legal fees. They’re bluffing, I said. They’re obviously insane. They’ll be bankrupt by the end of the year, the place will go on the market, they’ll move to a new place to torment someone else. Dan asked, “You really think so?” I said, “How the hell would I know, Dan?”

So Dan’s living in Paradise with the Neighbors from Hell, the Hitler Family. You tell me, so I can tell Dan, what’s he supposed to do? Maybe better fences might not make the neighbors better, but he wouldn’t have to look at them. I don’t think Dan wants to build the Wall of Jerusalem over there …. but he’s thinking about it.

It should come as no great surprise to any of us that after the election primaries morphed into a clone of Survivors that the Presidency of the Donald would end up being an endless series of entertaining incidents. The cast, handpicked by the King of Apprentices, is wickedly delightful. Kellyanne and her beloved Alternate Facts, the best so far being the episode of the Bowling Green Massacre, never fails to impress an audience with her toothy mendacity. She’s the wicked witch of the west room. Steve — I’m no neo-Nazi, I just play one in the White House – Bannon, plays the Wizard of Odd to Trump’s scarecrow (I wish I had a heart). The alt-righteous Breitbart publisher doesn’t get many lines, but he writes the darkest scripts. Sean Spicer, the lovable boob who has to run the daily press conferences while defending his always chuckle-headed truth-avoiding boss, may have the hardest role, but … he shows up every day, Ed McMahon to Johnny but without the good natured laughtrack at his bad jokes. And the ever lovable telegenic Mr. Pence, hoping for the Impeachment episode as soon as possible while there’s still a government left to govern. Oh, let’s don’t forget Maryann to her Gilligan, the ever fashionable Melania, standing by her man despite all the crotch grabbing tell-tales. Fox News Channel runs this as news and entertainment, fair and balanced, but certainly nothing like the truth.

Today’s episode, a belly buster comedy, revolved around D.J’s daughter Ivanka’s clothing line being dropped from Nordstrom. Papa tweeted how unfair it all was, this capitalism disregard in regard to the Good Fairy Ivanka. So unfair! Especially when the family fortune rests on the Trump Brand and if some knee jerk retailer downgrades the Brand, well, that’s lost revenue. Proof, no doubt, there is really no conflict of interest that the nattering Democrats seem so worried about. The bizness of America, after all, is bizness. So great!

I guess the folks who voted for this guy are getting their money’s worth and better yet,they don’t even have to subscribe to the Trump Network to get the entire series on Netflix or Amazon, it just downloads hourly, tweet after tweet, a regurgitation of injured pride and cock of the walk crowing. So bad! So beautiful! We’re living in a reality TV show now, the audience as the voter, the audience as the public, the audience as captured viewer. All sponsored by the Trump Brand! So lucrative! But wait! If you act now, they’ll send you another tweet, just pay shipping and handling. Honest truth!