The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The pundits and political scientists, the sociologists and the couch philosophers, plus half us yahoos will parse this last election til the cows come back to the barn that’s leaning into yesteryear. We’ll find bigotry, blame the Latino turnout, fault the woman candidate’s presumed expectation of presumptive victory, dig into Alt-Right and Fox News and Breitbart. We’ll find plenty of fodder to explain a Trump victory.

Jobs are going away, the middle class is shrinking, the gap between rich and poor — once a leapable ditch — is now a Grand Canyon. The white majority is gone and the immigrants are coming! The immigrants are coming! Terrorism rocks the Middle East and Europe and now here. A college education costs six figures and may not translate to anything but a lifetime of tuition debt. And to top off everything, monthly cable costs for a citizenry desperate for digital opioids, keeps going through the roof. What’s a poor white boy to do? Well, vote for the carnival barker selling snake oil, a panacea for all our ills, that’s what.

I know this, if nothing else: there’s a Disquiet on the land, an Unease out there in the Starbucked suburbs, a Dread covering the wired cities. Change is coming, scary as a Terminator who keeps getting up after being killed time and time again. The Terminator, of course, is the computer we brought into the livingroom, carry on our belt or in our purse, wired our house to, runs our car, plays our music, knows our habits and buying preferences, watches us constantly.

Future Shock. It’s here. It’s been here a few decades now, accelerating like a car we’ve lost the steering on. Half of us can’t program a Blu-Ray much less comprehend Implications. We just see the landscape blurring at breakneck speed. The Industrial Age isn’t closer than it appears in the rearview, it’s gone, nothing now but nostalgic longing for a past that ain’t comin back.

The social fabric is being torn apart. We are Borg now, getting our news exclusively from Facebook. Only 15 percent of the Facebook news feed folks look somewhere else. You read it on Facebook, it’s got to be True. So what if it’s just pablum and paid pandering? It’s all we need, right? We are morphing into the Hive and we know the relationships aren’t quite … what? Real? Deep? Meaningful? We don’t know, we can’t predict, we’re afraid of what’s coming next. Wait?! What’s that signpost up ahead? Naw, it’s not Rod Serling. It’s Mark Zuckerberg. It’s Big Brother.

If there was a place worse than homelessness itself, the While-a-While was it. Ancient RV’s, rusted out Winnebagos, Airstreams down on their axles — they all came to die, slowly sinking into the wetlands, grass up to their pitted aluminum windows that seldom opened anymore, a muddy trail leading to the communal restrooms and showers which occasionally all functioned but not usually.

In the summer the While-a-While offered tourists and fishermen some spaces, most without power, for $25 a night. Half the permanent residents had come and for reasons best left for late night binge talk, they ended up trapped there. Milt came 20 years ago in his reconditioned Cortez, a heavy 20 foot industrial RV built when gas was 24 cents a gallon but was now too much for Social Security retirement if he wanted to actually drive it somewhere else. And now it was a rusted relic, flat tires, busted front axle, long dead battery. Milt lived there with his menagerie of cats, half of them feral, all of them breeding like rabbits. Residents who’d ventured inside claimed the place smelled like one giant litter box over a gas burner.

Most inmates of the While-a-While gave Milt a wide berth. If familiarity bred contempt, with Milt it bred outright hostility. He was a hermit now among enemies, most of whom he’d alienated over slights so small they never really understood they were slights and so they concluded the man was a total asshole, a near universal assessment at the trailer park. If you were a dog owner, too bad if they growled or chases Milt’s feline herd. If your politics were left of Genghis Khan, too bad, you were a hopeless radical. If you drank or used drugs, he wrote you off. So what if he’d done more of those than half the park in a quarter of the time — he’d reformed, rehabbed and now was righteous as a born-again preacher.

Maybe we all end up where we deserve at the end of our ropes. If so, the poor souls consigned to the While-a-While probably wished they could have a do-over. But they were there, not to while awhile, they were doomed to quite awhile. With Milt as a neighbor.

“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” DJT

Hot damn! Finally, a President who understands that we don’t need a President, we need a Fuhrer! He gets his ear shot by a sniper and now he’s convinced God herself has anointed him our New Savior, why else would he be spared unless by heavenly intervention? Unquestionably, the boy is anointed. He’s been sent to save America!

I know I’m putting myself in the gunsights of future enemy lists, but geez, let’s put a couple feet on terra firma here. This is a guy who grew up with some serious issues, maybe not loved enough, maybe just wants some serious attention from the Old Money mob, the literati, the New York elite. I’m not a psychiatrist and I don’t play one on TV, but I doubt you need a medical degree to identify psychosis when it lays a trip on ya. C’mon, the fella has a thin skin and far too much money, gonna lay some leather on the people who offended him, plenty of those, from the impeachment folks to the judges who found him guilty of … well, plenty. Witch hunts! Political persecution! Weaponized judiciary! He’s gonna show you what that really looks like!!! He’s got the bully pulpit and the bully is in charge!

Sure, some folks are cheering him on, the man with the monkey wrench, mass firings of government employees, mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, investigations of anyone who had a part in his impeachments or his felony trials, denigration of former allies who may have slighted him in the past, primary revenge against his political enemies or any legislator that defies his will. They love it. Drain the swamp? No sir, blow it up with dynamite! Sweet revenge, right? Right?

The bull is in the china shop all right. Moving fast, breaking things. Not gonna matter to you, the voter. You aren’t a government slacker (employee, I mean). You haven’t hired an Hispanic lawn maintenance outfit or a construction crew to build your new house. You aren’t worried your kids’ school funding will diminish their education. You maybe weren’t planning to buy an electric vehicle. You weren’t planning a vacation to a National Park. You don’t live in a fire danger zone. No sweat off your brow.

But … maybe you are one of the one quarter of Americans who get Medicaid. Maybe you have kids and grandkids who will have to worry about global warming and those fires and hurricanes. Maybe you would like someone looking after the quality of your food, the cleanliness of your water or the purity of the air you breathe. If you’re a rural resident, you might not have considered that eliminating USAID meant all those food crops we sent to other countries was 40% what you grew. Those clinics and hospitals you thought were a long drive, well, better hope the price of gas goes down, they’ll be a lot farther when the ones you got now close.

I know, you really hated Covid lockdowns and those masks and the vaccines. You didn’t know any of the over one million people who died of that disease and probably don’t believe the statistics anyway. The other 5 or 6 million deaths overall, just foreigners…. So you probably are happy the guy running the health department doesn’t much believe in vaccines. Let’s hope the bird flu doesn’t mutate. Although … it has infected more than birds now and even a few humans. Yeah, okay, you’re mostly bothered by the price of eggs.

Maybe you voted your pocketbook. Price of eggs, price of gas. No affordable housing. No affordable rents. You wanted government off your back and you wanted a tax break. Maybe you even wanted the deficit reduced. The rich will get a big break, the deficit will take off. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a little back too, not much, count on that. You voted for a billionaire with his billionaire pals. You didn’t vote for a philanthropist. In fact, you really didn’t know who you voted for. Yet.

Yesterday we had a shootout at the freeway park and ride. Most of these are drive-by shootings, but this one, no siree, this one was a genuine wild wild west pull-your-six-shooters and blast away from close range in true vigilante justice, see who’s standing when the cylinders are empty. After this hail of bullets ended, one guy was shot four times and carried away to the nearest hospital where he’ll most likely live. The others, well, they had some serious explaining to do.

It seems one of these yahoos had his chainsaws stolen, so when he ran across an ad in Craigslist featuring the exact same saws, well, he decided to call the thief up and arrange a meeting to buy them. He got his son and a couple of buddies to come along to the meetup at the park and ride and then, just to be on the safe side, he called the sheriff’s department to meet them there too. So now we got the Earps, we got a posse, we got plenty of guns and we got a nice public spot.

The seller must not have suspected too much or else he never watched the Gunfight at the OK Corral, but he came alone, no gang, no family members, just him and a couple of chainsaws. When the Earps got tired of waiting for the Law, the buddies of the aggrieved theft victims decided to approached this guy’s truck, no doubt pretending to be the interested buyers of the saw, but in true comic fashion, they came with guns too. Drawn. And the seller, realizing something bad was afoot, produced his own weapon and commenced to firing. Chaos, of course, ensued.

These things get out of hand sometimes. Sure, they should’ve waited for the sheriff. Maybe they could’ve left the guns at home. All easy to imagine in hindsight. But a man’s chainsaw is his chainsaw and a rope is too good for the mangy dog that stole it. Or so it seemed. Until the purported thief, in interviews with the police, claimed he’d owned those saws for years and even identified marks and features that seemed to validate that claim. And the attackers did mention that they’d really only seen the photo in the ads and that, yeah, it might not have been their saws. Saws tend to look a lot alike since they do look a lot alike. And yeah, it might’ve been smart to wait for the sheriff.

No doubt there are some lessons to be learned here. But probably none gleaned by us South Enders. Me, I’ve started locking up my two chainsaws. I don’t want to have to duel it out for the time I have to get them back from a thief. Probably better just to bargain him down rather than shoot him. Especially if I found out later they weren’t my saws….

This past week I hauled up north to my dentist and had my teeth cleaned. For most of my life I’ve been told that flossing is next to godliness, that it’ll prevent plaque build-up and gum disease, that if I were to neglect it, I would probably be at risk for everything from halitosis to heart attacks. Today, the news told me and all my floss flagellating friends, this is scientifically unprovable. Flossing, according to the latest studies, makes no more difference to my dental health than if I gargled with holy water.

Great. A year or so ago I received the news that baby aspirin, forever touted as a hedge against plaque build-up in arteries and therefore heart attacks, was probably not much help. Might even be offset by increased incidents of stroke. So much for the wonder drug of aspirin. So much for listening to the advice of health professionals. You wonder why folks go down to the supplement store and spend fortunes on snake oil, maybe this is why. You might as well believe what you want, the so-called experts are just as phony.

One year whole milk is a killer, better drink skim, this year a study claims we need that kind of fat. Butter, might as well eat DDT, now it’s margarine that’s demonized. Sugar, holy moley, white sugar will eat you alive. Now the diet stuff, worse yet. What’s a poor boy to do???? I don’t know about you, but I like to believe — and science may contradict me tomorrow, then support me the next week, etc. — that we are creatures of the planet Earth, most of us, and we evolved with a diet of natural stuff. All those foods we made easier to cook or made from chemistry labs, well, I’m not saying they’ll give you cancer and make your hair fall out or your teeth rot, I’m just saying we didn’t really get exposed to those things in our climb from the ooze to the treetops.

Folks think science will bring them closer to immortality, and don’t get me wrong, I believe in science, but we’re really looking for magic bullets, pharmaceutical panaceas, artificial remedies, all those medical cures advertised to us old farts on TV every damn night. Just ignore the cautionary list of adverse effects, then go bug your doctor for a cure-all anyway.

I don’t know if I’ll keep on flossing or not now. I probably won’t lose sleep over it, but if I do, I’ll check with my pharmacist and take what he recommends. Just so long as one of the side effects isn’t gum rot.