The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Just when all those kooks who call in to late night radio talk shows about alien invasions and spacemen abductions were feeling maybe they should see a psychiatrist for their ‘condition’ in the face of a paucity of proofs for their unorthodox beliefs, along comes the latest revelation from the Egyptologists noodling endlessly with Tut, the boy king, and all the toys his minion priests buried with him. Today it was revealed that his dagger — a basic iron knife, not gold, not silver, iron! — was made from a meteorite. I suppose you and I and the scientists might conclude this dagger was made from a meteor that landed near Cairo. But I can assure you the late night alien hunters won’t.

No, they’ll know with a certainty as large as Bigfoot’s Butt this dagger came from outer space. Hell, they may even figure Tut himself came from the same place as the dagger, why not? Probably explain how the Egyptians were able to move hundred ton stones into pyramids, just hit them with the anti-gravity beam and drop them lightly into place, couldn’t be easier … if you’re an advanced alien culture. If you’re maybe troubled by the timeline here, don’t be. They got time travel down too.

We live in a world where fantasy and fiction are more than slightly blurred, maybe even sleeping together. I guess we could blame the internet or Rush Limbaugh or bad TV, but it’s probably not going to help. We’ve been disappointed in facts, bored with the real world and skeptical of science so now we’ve turned to snake oils, diet supplements and late night advertising deals. Call now and you’ll receive another Donald Trump, just pay shipping and handling. If you’re not satisfied, just send them back and we’ll refund your money. What we do about your gullibility, well, wait until tomorrow night. Yours, for only 19.95, the fabulous meteorite knife!! Slices dices and never dulls. Chops vegetables, saws lumber, moves slabs of stone. But wait! If you order now we’ll send you not one, not two, but three Tut daggers for the unbelievable price of 19.95. Just pay shipping and handling from our warehouse in the Milky Way.

The political season is in its final innings here on the South End. Down at the Diner the debates continue unabated, but practically everywhere else, we’re wore down, depleted, dejected and pretty much exhausted with the whole damn thing. Even the Pilot House, once Hotbed Central for lively late night alcohol fueled discussions, even the Pilot House has turned its short span of attention to the basketball tournaments and the baseball scores.

The tulips are coming in early up north in the fields of La Conner. I was thinking maybe going there instead of the caucus this Saturday. Last time I went to a caucus it was Carter running against Reagan. All the local politicos were in attendance. And me and the mizzus. We never really understood the process and we never went back. I like voting in private, to tell you the truth, not in small groups of people I don’t really know. The tulips, I get tulips. They come in early some years and some years late and rarely, but it happens, they bloom on time. This year they’re way early and the Festival, that two week traffic jam miles and miles long, well, it’s going to be pretty much after the harvest.

I spoze the folks stuck in the colorful backup out in the flats can while away the hours arguing whether global warming is to blame or if the low price of gas is a blessing or not. The big tour buses can haul up the city folks for a slow creep through the countryside and hope for a few fields of blazing candy color seen vaguely through the rain. Us locals pretty much avoid the whole show now. You’ve seen one tulip field, you’ve kind of got the idea.

I wish I could say the same about elections. I’ve seen a few, but … this one is very very strange. Maybe even troubling. Says a little too much about my neighbors, for sure, but hey, that’s the price of democracy. You admire a trash talking billionaire who thinks political correctness is just some liberals’ way to keep racism from rearing its ugly head, well, you got a new hero. You think all Moslems are terrorists and all Hispanics are on welfare, you got your candidate. You looking for a bully for the presidential bully pulpit, he’s got your back. They say we get the leader we deserve. This year we’ll find out if a rich reality show money grubbing pitchman is that person. If he is, I’m gonna lose a lot of my faith in this democracy. And in my neighbors.

The Snow Goose Bookstore is closing its cover this month after nearly three decades of serving the literati of Stanwoodopolis. The two sets of owners were the monks keeping the guttering flame of Uff-da civilization from going completely dark for the past 30 years. They were the Book Bambis vs. Amazon’s Godzilla where we all expected they would be Bezo toejam in a year, no more, but they held on despite terrible odds, through the Great Recession, despite Google, despite Kindle, despite a world whose attention spans are too short for a novel or a work of non-fiction or a poem by e.e. cummings.

Oh, I know, most of you will say ‘the world has changed, Skeeter, even if you haven’t, Gutenberg is dead, send him some flowers for his grave, move into the 21st Century, embrace the tweet, stick with haiku.’

First it’ll be the bookstores, then the libraries and finally books themselves. Who has time to read them anyway if e-mails are nudged aside by text messaging? U no, wen speling and puncs have dyed. My old pal Prof. Ralph visited from the hinterlands of Minnesota last week. He was, like myself, an English major back in our college years. I asked him what he was reading these days and Ralph just shrugged and said ‘not much’. Not much what? I asked and he said not much of anything. If us English majors have given up on the great American novel, maybe there really is no hope.

Prof. Ralph is writing, he said, probably a bit defensive about abandoning Hemingway and Updike. ‘A novel?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘philosophical musings.’ Great, a solipsistic diarist, completely uncontaminated by outside ideas, especially one who no longer reads anything, just what we need instead of the Snow Goose Bookstore. Close the door, shut the gates, the barbarians are definitely on their way.

Well, Buckaroos, Skeeter’s going into the hills once more on the annual Beer Hunt, must be about the 30th anniversary. A lot of trophy bottles mounted at the hunting shack up by Rosyln, Washington. The herds aren’t as big now, of course and the backlash from Orlando may actually put a crimp on our quest for new military style weaponry. In fact, I may suggest to my fellow beer hunters we just catch and release this year. Maybe photograph the elusive prey and mount blowups on the cabin walls.

Then again, these are hardened hunters and my wussie suggestion may get outvoted as a little too politically correct. We boyz are democratic, if nothing else. Last year we crossed the Cle Elum Lake dam where, since 9-1-1, the federal property has surveillance cameras and multiple No Trespassing signs. In those years just after the Towers came down, the Dam Keeper would come out and threaten us with arrest. We explained we were patriotic United States citizens, but dammit (no pun intended) we were walking across that dam. The other direction home was 15 miles in the dark.

We never learned if he reported us to the FBI. We never saw mention of terrorist infiltrators storming the dam in the Cle Elum Gazette. Apparently our numbers and our hostile demeanor were enough to convince the Dam Keeper not to mess with our semi-invasion. The Keeper is gone now, no doubt budget cuts in these fiscally fraught times, but the cameras and the No Trespass warnings remain. Last year a police cruiser passed us on the road to the dam, turned and passed us again. We apparently aren’t on their Watch List.

At any rate let’s hope we aren’t this year either. Until my return or extradition, feel free to peruse some old entries here. I don’t remember writing most of them, you probably won’t remember reading them either. On the South End, every day is brand new.