The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

A friend of mine just wrote to say she might have discovered she has a heretofore unknown brother, discovered, apparently through the wonders of DNA analysis. He is either her half brother or the son of her father’s brothers, the result, she says of a one night stand in some hick town in Arizona with his mother who until he was 11 thought was his sister. Yeah, I’m confused too. To make the story all the more interesting, his mother is African American. Of course I’m interested in selling the movie rights…

There are studies that show between 10 and 30% of us may not have the right dad when we send those father’s day cards. This is a testament to the infidelity of the American Mom whose libido may have been vastly underestimated. I had a buddy, a white guy, who had a black kid. Kind of a surprise at the birth, but like he said, the mizzus got drunk at a party one night and hey, these things happen, but he was going to raise the kid, someone else’s genetically, his by choice. Gotta say, I was impressed. If you met his wife, you’d never guess her wild side judging by her mousey disposition.

Another buddy of mine got a knock on his door one day a few years back and found his old paramour of even further back darkening his doorway with her son in tow. He’d had a fling with her when she was 15, picked her up in a park, took her home and carried on an affair for a week or two. Yeah, I know what statutory rape is. He did too, but it didn’t stop him. So now the chickens were flying home to roost. My pal, being the distrustful sort, decided to call her bluff, especially since the kid was pretty dark like his mom and didn’t show much Caucasian. And because she wanted money. Turned out the boy wasn’t his after all. I don’t know if he gave her some money anyway, but I hope he did.

I guess these DNA tests are great for exploring the family tree. Personally, I’m okay letting Dad be Dad. I don’t need to be sending multiple father’s day cards every damn year….

A few days ago Donald Trump told an interviewer that he wouldn’t mind if the rich, including himself, paid a little more in taxes. Keep in mind that this is the billionaire who paid zero income tax in 10 of the 15 years before becoming president. In 2017 he paid $750. In 2020 he paid no tax. I suspect most of us who paid that kind of tax wouldn’t mind a small increase either. I know I wouldn’t. Of course a few days later he reversed himself, saying a tax on the wealthy would give the rich a reason to leave the country. Some loss, I say. What, we’d lose a few thousand dollars here and there, maybe lose nothing some years?

Raise taxes on the rich? C’mon, who do you think runs this country, who do you think makes the laws, who do you think you’re kidding? What you’re watching these first 100 days is a graduate level course in how to balance the budget and still give the wealthiest a tax break they think they so richly deserve. Slash the government, fire its workers, eliminate programs for the poor, maybe even gut Medicaid, strip a bit of the safety nets, sure, why not balance it on the backs of those who can least afford it? And while we’re at it, let’s lay some stiff tariffs on every nation on earth, maybe generate revenue there, so what if the price of groceries and consumer goods goes up a little, just a minor pain on the poor for long term gain later. Right? Right??

Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Trust me, the rich don’t mean that to apply to themselves. The President is having a soiree for all those who buy his meme cybercurrencies. He’s selling Bibles and tennis shoes, perfumes and steaks, he’s selling out everyone but his rich friends. Conflict of interest? Don’t make us laugh. This is the Gilded Age. Like the man said before pulling back on one tariff plan that had sent the stock market reeling, it’s a great time to Buy. Hint to all you poor folks: jump in the Market now, the water is great.

Mind the sharks, though….

Clyde stopped by our place yesterday, wanted to know if I wanted some wood flooring. Clyde’s notorious for scrounging lumber — beams, 2×4’s, plywood, chopped off rafters and joists full of nails — he takes it all, he and his partner Fred. They’re true South Enders, no building parts are too unworthy for future projects. No oddly shaped root or burled tree trunk couldn’t be imagined as a trellis or a doorway or a garden gate. Their greenhouse/apartment is a testament to homesteader ingenuity, from the recycled plumbing for a radiant heat floor to the gnarly limbs of a cedar tree that frame a window made from sliding glass door panels. The roof is raftered with bridge beams and salvaged lumber, all covered with earth and plantings, a green ecosystem.

So when Clyde asks if I want some wood flooring, red lights go off and a siren shrieks deep down in my hippocampus. “You don’t want it yourself?” I ask, meaning, what’s wrong with this flooring if you boyz are turning it down? Clyde avows how they don’t need flooring and anyway, it’s all mismatched remnants. Like they don’t have mismatched remnants from one end of their property to the next??? “Use em for furniture,” I advise. “I took my leftovers and made cabinets and bookcases, banjos, hell, it’s hardwood.”

“We’re jammed up,” Clyde says sadly. “Stuff we got now is getting powder post beetles. We couldn’t use it all in the rest of our lifetimes.” Which is true! They’re beyond Scroungers now, heading toward Hoarders. It’s a fine line, I know, and only a packrat like myself who’s scrounged most of his life is qualified to define the slip from Collector to Psychopathology. Clyde, I diagnosed, had stepped back from the Abyss. Enough was finally enough. Clutter was one thing, tunnels to the kitchen and bathroom quite another.

No mas! There comes a time when a sane man knows implicitly to STOP. Before it’s too late. Before madness descends like a dark curtain blotting light and reason.

Today I picked up 10 boxes of hardwood flooring, enough to lift the front end of my truck. No, I don’t really need flooring. But, you never know, right? Now if I can just figure out where to store all this wood until I need it….

Someone mentioned to the mizzus the other day he was glad to see her husband’s bi-weekly column in the Crab Cracker was funny again. I guess he figured I’d misplaced my sense of humor for awhile there but thankfully gotten it returned from the Lost and Found. Moonshine Wit and Wet Powder Wisdom is the maybe not so catchy name of my diatribes and musings which might imply bad philosophy could easily be substituted for a funny bone. Occasionally I even wax serious, if not exactly profound.

Maybe I’ve misjudged my readership. If so, I apologize to the dozen or so of you who follow Skeeter’s literary meanderings. I suppose I ought to be grateful for the criticism, maybe steer myself out of the ditches and back onto the freeway. Art is like that too. You sell something and straight away you think maybe stick to that design, no point going all ‘creative’ here when you’ve got a winning formula. After all, you need to make a living.

But … this is nothing less than a curse for anyone hoping to explore his or her or they’s creative imagination. I know plenty of good artists whose work in a certain direction didn’t sell well so they went back to work that did. Believe me, this is a prescription for self-imitation and eventually the demise of artistic exploration. I should know — I find myself pulled in the direction what few past successes pointed me. It’s like a riptide, you have to swim perpendicular to the pull, otherwise you’re sucked out to the sea of your own stunted creativity. And yeah, you may die of starvation instead of drowning in your own mediocrity.

Course, here I am once more yammering about something that’s not what anyone would call humorous, probably risking losing those two dozen readers’ attention, maybe yours too, all because I want to keep mine. If you were expecting some punchline to cap this rant off, well, just not feeling funny today, I guess, my apologies. Again. Maybe next time….

Maybe you wake up in the middle of the night, cold sweats and a fevered brain, unable to sleep, impossible to think clearly. You feel an anxiety, you have labored breathing, you feel mood swings from rage to despair. You’ve talked to your doctor and he suggests you try an extra adult beverage in the evening before he prescribes lithium. He tells you you’re not alone, that half his patients lately seem to be suffering similar symptoms. Mass hysteria, he mumbles to himself, and you go home thinking you should seek a second opinion. Or a third. Or double down on those adult beverages.

You decide to quit watching the news, stop reading the papers, forego the radio. It doesn’t help, not a bit. Menopause? you wonder, or in half the cases, male menopause. Hot flashes, mood swings, depression. You discover half the neighborhood is suffering the same malady. Something in the water? Something in the air? A terrorist nerve toxin, maybe?

And then, out of the blue, right after the President sides with Putin over his own intelligence agencies and even some of his Fox Friends wonder what in the world?, Rand Paul, of all people, comes out and says this hysteria is nothing more than intense hatred that blinds you to … well, maybe not facts exactly, but Trump’s latest diplomatic move. He even gives it a name; after all, he is a doctor. Okay, an ophthalmologist. And you are having trouble seeing straight. He calls it Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Meaning, you hate the guy so much you can’t see what he’s doing is smart, strategic and possibly even visionary. You can’t see it because you’re blinded by hatred. If he calls the EU our foe, if he believes Putin when he tells him he didn’t tamper with the elections, if he tells you he’s saved you from nuclear war with N. Korea, if he lambasts our NATO allies and drops tariffs on them and the rest of the world, well, you only see red. You’re locked and loaded with piss and vingear. You have TDS, my friend. You’ve doubled down on the double negatives.

You want to hold him accountable for all the wild promises he made this last election, end the war in Ukraine in a week, find peace in the Middle East immediately, end inflation right away no problem, build the Wall, round up the illegal immigrants. Well, he’s rounding up the immigrants but all you can see are shades of the Japanese internments of World War Two. Why? Cause you hate the guy. And when he says he’ll clear out Gaza and make a beautiful resort playground there, you probably can’t imagine making reservations. No, because, well, you know the reason.
And from here on out, you will hear that diagnosis again and again. There’s no cure and I suspect no one is looking for one. So today, when the Trumpster reverses once more, imposing new tariffs, reducing others, suspending a few, jumping back to his original position, which, if you remember, was before he explained the double negative he actually meant to say, well, you probably gnashed your teeth and beat your fists and screamed into the storm. Because you hate the guy so much, you are blinded to the genius of his strategy. You probably even think, like me, that Trump Derangement Syndrome isn’t a description of us, it’s a perfect description of him. Quite a disease….