The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The South End Advisory Committee met last night in emergency session. The last time they convened a similar gathering was back in 2001 following the Trade Tower attacks when an alarmed citizenry demanded they beef up our shoreline defenses to counter what, at the time, seemed like imminent terrorist incursions. Since then the South End has pretty much kept its head in the sand, so to speak, ignoring the Great Recession (which seemed to most of us just a continuation of our unemployment woes), the Iraq War (we’re pretty much all too old to enlist) and the rise of ISIS (it’s hard to behead those with theirs buried in the beach). But sometimes events arise that demand attention, demand action, demand a committee meeting.

And certainly this was one of those times. Now that the Trump Tweet presidency has left the station, small groups around the country have declared themselves Sanctuary Zones. Sanctuary cities, sanctuary universities, sanctuary Starbucks, sanctuary nursing homes, sanctuary daycare centers. The question on last night’s table: should we declare ourselves a sanctuary too? Ethel Birmbach, current President of the Council, called the meeting to order. “Deportation is not an option,” she declared almost immediately. “These are our neighbors and friends, not our enemies.”

Randy Primplucker, a realtor for WindyRear Realty and the only member on the council actually born on the South End, argued for a quick vote “to protect our neighbors”, but Betsy Birdcall took him to task. “We don’t really know who some of these people are, Randy. Sure, you might have sold them their property, but beyond a credit check, how do you know what their backgrounds are? I’m not arguing for detention camps or even forced deportation, I’m just saying we shouldn’t assume there’s nothing nefarious going on in our community. The government won’t be looking out for us, that’s for sure.”

“These people already have detention camps,” Ralph Van Vleet practically shouted. “They put up their own gates! What are they hiding behind those gated walls? Why are they so nervous? Who are they trying to protect? Who do they think they’re fooling?”

“For godsake, Ralph,” Patty Plankton replied. “These people pay the lion’s share of our property taxes. Let’s don’t charge in half-cocked.”
Ethel pounded her hard rubber mallet on the desk that served as podium. “Calm down, everybody,” she commanded. “Randy, we all know you have financial ties to these folks. Maybe you should recuse yourself on this issue. This is way too important to have monetary issues clouding our judgement.” Randy protested meekly, but finally acquiesced.

In the end the Council voted 5 to 3 to declare the South End a Sanctuary. Up in the gated communities the 1% breathed a collective sigh of relief that, for the time being at least, their taxes would not go any higher. At least not until after the Trump presidency or a turnover in the South End Council. Down here we protect our own.

Content Advisory: Readers should be aware that the following might contain adult language, sexuality, some light violence and possibly was processed with products containing peanuts. Reader discretion is definitely advised.

You would be amazed, flabbergasted really, gobsmacked actually, what you turn up when you spend days looking for something you lost. In my quest to find my lost funny bone, I searched high and low, near and far, under and over, in and out. I found stuff I hadn’t even remembered losing. In a suitcase up in the shack’s attic stuffed in an alcove I found old manuscripts, early poems and some photos of my ex-wife. I remembered why I stuffed them in a suitcase and buried it behind a couple layers of detritus and memories.

Downstairs, in a desk drawer that hadn’t been opened in about two decades, I discovered mouse-eaten letters from friends and from the mizzus back when I first moved to the South End. Sure, I saved em. And someday I’ll sit down and read them again, same as I did 20 years ago when I found them that time out in a box in the woodshop and brought them where I hoped the mice wouldn’t go nearsighted reading them in the dark. Handwritten letters, imagine! Now there’s a lost concept.

I found a couple of tools I’d mislaid, some plumbing parts I could’ve used when I searched for them a few months ago, an old outboard boat motor in the weeds where the blackberries were strangling it, a backpack I haven’t used in I hate to tell you how long, a couple of cameras that take actual film which is another Kodak moment but one that’s relegated to history. Back in the walk-in closet which is barely walk-in-able anymore there were boxes of photographs and slides. I started to dig through those, but geez, I could’ve gotten sidetracked for weeks and I was on a mission to find that missing sense of humor. Old photos would spin me into a cobweb of inescapable reverie I might not free myself from for days, if not months.

In the back of an old Hoosier cabinet I found some tattered pieces of my innocence. I’m not even sure how long it had been lost, but it sure looked like a long time. A long hard time if the tears and rips were any indication. Funny how you never really noticed it was gone until you stumble onto it and then, what good is it? Probably better if I hadn’t. There were old Boy Scout merit badges and little medals from some school in Georgia for some forgotten things those Southern Daughters of the Confederacy had thought important. I found my old I Ching yarrow sticks that I quit using back probably when my innocence was lost. I remember throwing them when I bought the shack, asking if I should take a chance on moving from my ghetto hellhole to a dilapidated house at the end of the world. It said good fortune would surely follow. Why would I quit the sticks when it predicted my life so accurately?

And of course I came face to face with my long lost youth one night searching the back rooms of the studio. Sometimes I like to think I’m still that same kid who moved out here back in ’77, the same optimistic yahoo who called up his old girlfriend and asked if she’d come out and live with him in a love shack in the woods by the Puget Sound with a view of the Olympic Mountains, the very same boy who never wanted to work for anyone, who kept searching for an alternative to the American Dream which didn’t seem like much of a dream to him, who really had no direction home, no direction at all, just a misguided faith in himself and a longing to be a country boy, a half assed Huck Finn who preferred being a bum to selling himself to some job he would hate but probably learn to accept.

I barely recognized him. And I’m sure he didn’t recognize me even though he had that imbecile grin on his face like something was funny but maybe only to him. It was just a brief encounter, sort of like a shadow you catch behind you before the sun drops behind the clouds and it disappears. But I was sure it was a younger me. You know it when you see it and there’s no doubt. None at all. Course, doubt is what made me lose him in the first place. Ironic, isn’t it?

Good news, everybody!! Great news, actually! I found my sense of humor. It was laying half scorched down by my burn pile, the slash I’d burned a week or more ago, sooty from the ashes and a little charred. I saw it peeking out from where it had been covered after the monsoons we’ve been having daily washed the ash partly off. Looked like a half burnt branch, but I recognized it immediately. It must have fallen in the fire the day I torched that pile.

I have to admit it’s like getting back your shadow, but darker. To be expected, I suppose, after a close call with cremation. You’d lean a little toward black humor yourself. But hoo boy, is it ever good to find that slightly crispy funny bone. Yesterday I was reading about Trump lambasting Clinton and the Greens for calling for a Wisconsin recount. So sad. A shame. But then he tweets that if the election hadn’t been rigged, he’d have won the popular vote by millions. I laughed out loud, I laughed until I hurt. I did not laugh until I cried and that is the best part.

Yesterday I read where his personal advisor Kellyanne (I know, she’s an oxymoron) got on the Sunday talk shows to denounce even the possibility that Trump’s nemesis Romney would be considered for a post as Sec. of State. This is the vampire woman — I have this on reliable rumor from a newsfeed translated from the Russian— who files down her incisors pre-dawn daily. The woman who ran the Ted Cruz PAC calling the kettle black. I spurted coffee out my nose. My stomach hurt from laughing so hard, it really did.

It gets better. Melania announced she won’t move to Washington DC. No gold toilets in the White House. Last night I listened to the Miami Cubans celebrating the death of Fidel. One woman said she came to Florida when she was 9 years old and she hoped to go back before she died. Then she wished Trump would reinstate the embargo Obama had lifted. The reporter simply nodded solicitously, a terrible tragedy, his demeanor suggested. My grin nearly took my ears off.

Once again I’m expecting some good laughs in the news now. We got four years of comedy coming up like a Netflix serial that I can binge on until it goes into syndication. Today’s episode: that black redneck Milwaukee sheriff who hated the Black Lives Matter protests a few months back, a possible nominee for Homeland Security. The jokes just keep on coming….

The other day I went looking for my sense of humor. I searched everywhere I could think of. I looked in all the closets, checked under the laundry, dug through cabinets and behind the sink, under the beds, in drawers I hadn’t opened in years. Nothing. It had to be here somewhere, it couldn’t have wandered off on its own. I’m sure I just put it down absent mindedly and walked off so if I retraced my steps, maybe I would run into it.

It’s been a few days and I’ve been to the studio, the shop, the woodsheds, back on the trails, down to the beach. Nothing. Not a trace, not even the shadow of a smile. It’s been raining nearly constantly lately and I’m worried I left it outside where it’s shrunk down to something small enough for the slugs to slime over, something I might not even want to find much less use again, just some icky sog of a remnant nobody would recognize.

The shortest day of the year is coming up and I really need to find that funny bone. The sun comes up about noon and starts sinking immediately, the rain drips off our clogged gutters, the storms keep blowing down trees in the back 40 and the news is too bleak to listen to anymore … at least without that lost sense of humor. I checked on E-bay to see if maybe someone had stolen mine and now was selling it, used, slight wear, free shipping. Not only didn’t I find mine, I didn’t find anyone offering a reasonable replacement.

Although, someone from Wisconsin had one for sale. “Funny bone, never used, won’t be needing it. Voted Trump. Best offer.” Bidding started at $25 with a $250 shipping charge. I noticed it had yet to get a single bid even though it had been listed since the election. The idea of an unused, nearly new sense of humor was seriously tempting. And at this point of desperation the exorbitant price was almost acceptable. But I’m going to hold out for one that’s more tried and true. That one from Wisconsin, I bet it’s dark and mean spirited. You know, if it even works. I worry that its idea of funny is to belittle and bully, then laugh out loud at the victim’s misery. Just make fun of others who are different, whose religion isn’t the same, who have a disability. I’m not sure how much I’d be willing to pay for that. At least not yet.

Meanwhile, I’m going to keep looking for mine. It’s got to be here somewhere. I just worry if I don’t locate it soon, if I find it after prolonged inactivity, it’ll be like my flashlight batteries, pretty much dead. Inauguration Day is coming right up. I’m going to need to find it before then. That, or buy the one on E-bay and take my chances.

Pulling the Wool

Sure, you’ve had two weeks to recover from the shock of this year’s presidential election debacle, two weeks to shake the hangover, two weeks to get back up and move forward … but … you still can’t get your head around it, you still want to wake up from that nightmare, you still crawl out each morning and realize, oh yeah, it’s a new day in America. The rich, surprise surprise, are going to get richer and you, yup, you know what crumbs you’ll be getting. It’s a new day, all right and it will last at least four years. Or maybe — I know you can’t say it out loud and I know you don’t want me to either — maybe this will be the rest of your life.

My brother swore an oath to go 60 days with a moratorium on talking about, commenting about or thinking about Donald J. Trump. I tried to Move On myself, took a vacation, pulled the sheet up a little higher. Most of you have too. And if I hear another yahoo tell me about the five stages of grief, believe me, they will get to pass through them in a furiously short time. I mean, shut your front door! And don’t talk to me about ditching the Electoral College!! You got more odds of emigrating to Mars than passing a constitutional amendment. We couldn’t even get the womens’ rights amendment through, fat chance of the misogynists who won with the College voting to make the next election easier for you next time. And this talk of the Electors switching their votes to Hillary for the good of the country….geez, c’mon, consult with a Realist.

Today the Green Party ponied up the money to recount Wisconsin. Check the voting machines, see if there’s a paper trail, watch for Russian hackers, look for malfeasance. God help us if there was a discrepancy in the vote counting in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan. Trump always claimed it was rigged. Course, now he’s singing a happier tune, nothing new here since the election and his continual flip flopping. This from the man who sez it like it is.

Ever since the economic meltdown and the Great Recession, I’ve wondered why people weren’t in the streets with pitchforks. Wall Street particularly. Why the populace wasn’t up in arms crying for some justice. Why some CEO’s weren’t dragged from the High Suites and made examples of. It is the utmost irony that the beneficiary of that pent up rage was a billionaire non-politician with a potty mouth and a mean streak. The boy won, I’ll give him that, but the mob expects some swift action to alleviate their grievances. I suspect a few months into his term, they’ll realize politicians fudge the truth, they might even lie, but politicians at least know the difference. They voted this guy in with the slimmest of hopes he would shake things up based on his campaign promises. Fat chance he’ll get away with that phony baloney. Unless, of course, most of the rest of the country has pulled the sheets up higher too.