The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I got a buddy who’s required to take a drug test before he’s hired on as a consultant for an oil consortium. He worked ramrodding the construction site for the same oil companies for decades up at Prudeau Bay where part of his job was making sure the riggers stayed drug and alcohol free through long days and longer nights. Sorta like Wyatt Earp asking the cowboys to stick with Coca-Cola Saturday nights, if they wouldn’t mind….
So now that he’s retired and going back for consulting, I guess the Big Boyz are worried he’s fallen into decadence and drugs along with the rest of us South Enders. The required test is given in Bothell so my pal dutifully makes an appointment, navigates the I-5 bumper car gauntlet, arrives with a full bladder of freshly filtered latte which he desperately wants to unload ASAP, but, unsurprisingly, is told to wait. Short time later, long past that anguished outcry of a Guernsey with 10 gallons of unpasteurized backed up past an udder while the farmer is out drinking with his Scandihoovien reprobate buddies, the secretary comes in with the bad news that the urinary nurse in charge of the drug testing doesn’t come in on Fridays. Yah, shure, you guessed it — it’s Friday. Can I leave you the sample? he asks through clenched teeth, bent over in pain and growing anger. And … well, shure, you guessed right again and no, sir, that would be against the rules.
My buddy is almost 70 years old, drug free as a priest, a loyal employee and now he’s made to stand hunched over, practically peeing his adult diapers and trying to come to grips with What Is Wrong With This Picture? Do they suspect him of Viagra dependency? Do they merely want him to understand his real place in the corporate hierarchy? Are they testing for latent homicidal urges, maybe see if he’ll snap in the lab offices where only a contract worker will be sacrificed, not a VP of operations?
All I can say is, my buddy must really want to avoid retirement to endure this kind of knee-jerk, low brow humiliation. The rest of us on the South End … well, let’s just say the drug tests down here are only for quality control.

Well, it’s time again for a vacation to the snowy tundra of Wisconsin, maybe take a breather from the strange politics of this primary season, give you a break too from these ramblings and rantings.  I’ll try to keep up but if I fall behind, scroll down for some oldies and maybe not too goodies from the distant past.  I barely remember writing them so you probably don’t remember reading them.

Help us drive the snakes out of Stanwoodopolis this Thursday night 6-9 PM with a wee Celtic celebration at the Stanwood Hotel. We’re greenin’ the town and celebrating an early spring. Lads and lassies one and all come down and dance to the wild jigs of the South End String Band. There be blarney stones plenty to kiss and leprechauns to toss. If you’re lucky enough to be Irish … you’re plenty lucky enough! Thursday night we’re ALL Irish.
Stanwood Hotel March 17th, 6-9 PM

Maybe you missed the big news this week: physicists have observed gravitational waves, something Einstein predicted 100 years ago. Or maybe you heard, but you’re like me, wondering what I’m supposed to do with this breaking news, run out and buy a surfboard? A few years ago, okay, over a billion years ago two black holes ate themselves, distorting space and time just like Albert said they would.

You might be asking yourself, where do black holes go when they shrink and shrink and grow incredibly dense? Their gravitational pull sucks in even light itself. Hard to see the inside of these if no light is emitted. Telescopes are pretty much useless, sorry Hubble.

I wonder sometimes if the reason people don’t believe in science is that deep down we don’t understand it. Take quantum physics, for instance. Really strange behavior on the subatomic level. Particles behave different if they’re being observed. Don’t know about you, but this is mind boggling to me. How do you trust experiments if the experimenter affects the results just by watching?

The world we live in is beyond us now. Computers and lasers, microwaves and particle accelerators — I suppose they made Facebook possible and maybe that’s plenty for 95% of us. Gravitational waves, oh boy, let us see back to the Big Bang, sure, but will it give us better cellphones or 3-D printers? Those we can believe in, not the mumbo jumbo that contributed to ceating them.

Pretty soon our cars will do most of our driving, our machines will do most of our thinking. Satellites will spin in geosynchronous orbit and our TV reception will improve. Hopefully these gravitational waves won’t fuzz things up. We got some favorite programs to watch.

Every once in awhile I get wind of another town that thinks it would be a good idea to arm the teachers in their schools. Having been a teacher for a very short career, I probably would’ve liked carrying a sidearm. Cut down on a lot of backtalk, for sure. And saved the cut-ups a long trip to the principal’s office. Course, when I think about it calmly, seems sort of harsh to inflict capital punishment from the front of a classroom. They are, after all, children.

I guess being Americans and all, the idea of a fully armed populace is appealing. You don’t hear many stories how some hijacker or bank robber met his match with a Dirty Harry packing heat, but that could change quick if we just advocated for universal ‘conceal carry’. Probably take some collateral damage, planes decompressing in a shoot-out at 30,000 feet, 7-11 customers caught with their Big Gulps in a withering crossfire. But it wouldn’t take long for us pacifists to realize we need to return fire ourselves, simple law of survival in the urban jungles of America.

We’ve maybe seen too many Westerns, all those cowboys with six shooters slapping leather on their hip and a Winchester in a scabbard beside the saddle. The folks down in Malheur rode in fully armed and they can’t understand why the Feds and the troopers and the sheriff won’t surrender. Or at least negotiate to give them the range land they say belongs to them, these folks up from Utah. Too many Westerns, like I said. Then, a month into their occupation, one dead and most under arrest, the remaining gang wanted amnesty before they left. Lucky for them the bureaucrats whose headquarters they liberated and whose jobs they disrupted didn’t take their own 2nd amendment rights as seriously. Be like letting the kids in my old classroom carry live ammo — for sure my odds would go way down.