The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Sure, she seems like the Great White Woman, billionaire artist, role model to millions, what’s not to admire? She’s even got a football hero boyfriend. Can you say Hetero Love? But trust me, the MAGA hate her … and for good reason! She’s not what she seems. She’s a menace dressed to kill, a Barbie with a brain that’s gone rogue, a femme fatale who plots to use the Super Bowl to bring America to its knees. She’s the Manchurian Candidate, a shill for the progressives hoping to invade the minds of her followers. She’s going to ask them … are you sitting down? … she’s going to ask them … to vote.

On the surface it sounds innocuous enough. Just go out and cast a vote, exert your American right to go to the ballot box, do the patriotic thing. But the MAGA know better. They always know better. She’s a wrecking ball in tights, a destroyer in sexy garb, a songwriter singing the death dance of democracy. They see through her little game. Riches aren’t enough for her, fame isn’t enough for her, a football star boyfriend isn’t enough for her. No, she wants Power. She wants what they want, control of America. But not for Good, not like their Chosen One, the One denied the last election when it was stolen from them. She wants to keep the Evil Man in the White House.

Today is Super Bowl Sunday. All eyes in America will turn to the duel in Las Vegas. If you think this is about football, take the blinders off! Will Taylor be in the stands? Will her boyfriend be on the winning side? Will they pass secret messages between themselves, messages that will decide the fate of this once proud country? Watch for yourselves but in the end MAGA will decipher the clues. MAGA will tell you who won. And more importantly, who lost. In any event it won’t be a football team. Football will be collateral damage. All part of her sinister plan. Enjoy your woke Bud Lite. If you can.

Maybe you’re one of the few people left who doesn’t listen to Taylor Swift’s meteoric music, just a person who reads about her and about her boyfriend, Travis Kelce,the Kansas City Chief’s star tight end. Music and the NFL. A mega pop star and a football hero, what could possibly be more American? What more, if you were a patriot, a true one, could you want for the Patriot Poster? Attractive kids, filthy rich, admired by millions, perfect smiles, perfect people. Who’d have thought they were out to destroy the country that loves them.

But they are doing just that! Well, not yet. Their insidious little scheme is still to be hatched, but don’t for one commie minute think they won’t set it into motion before the coming election this fall. If the Chiefs win the Super Bowl, bet your Grammy the pair will launch the most nefarious plot to take over the White House and possibly the Congress too. Trust the folks at Fox News, they see the conspiracy for what it is, nothing less than a brazen takedown of the government. Swift has shown her true colors in the past when she asked her fan base to register to vote. That fan base, unless you live in a colorless world devoid of social media, is huge, millions upon millions who would gladly obey her every command. And her command? To vote for Sleepy Joe. To vote to end democracy as we know it. To vote to destroy America! That’s what her command will be.

And the creepy part? They seem on the surface to be exactly what America idolizes, successful, clean cut, smart rich people. We all want to be them, don’t we? We all want what they want. We all want millions of fans, millions of dollars, millions of Instagram viewers. Don’t we? Of course we do. But don’t be fooled, don’t let those white tooth smiles deceive you. They want to destroy the very country that made them famous. That, my friends, is what is so terribly creepy.

Walter walked into the South End Diner last Friday morning carrying his Winchester 30-30 under his arm, a rifle meant primarily for hunting deer. He’s a card carrying NRA member and he takes his membership as seriously as a truck driving Teamster or an artist in the Camano Arts Association. Walter thinks the government wants to take his arsenal away from him and apparently, to protect his right to bear arms, he intends to bear them in the Diner.

Anita rolls her eyes from behind the cash register when he walks in with his unintentionally comic John Wayne swagger. “Whatcha got there, Pilgrim?” she asks. As owner of the café, she’s basically the sheriff, judge and jury in this one horse town. She makes the laws here and Walter, well … Walter’s not sure if the 2nd Amendment actually applies in the Diner with Anita at the City Limits, but by God, he intends to make a point and the Constitution should back him up and all the other Gun Toters in America and Anita, well, Anita can just shove it, he figures.

Like usual, Walter figures wrong. Anita holds a hand up like a traffic cop stopping cars. “We already killed the meat, Walter. Bacon, burgers, chicken, they’re dead. You want to be sure, order em well done. But … you aren’t hauling that gun in my restaurant, I don’t care if it’s loaded, empty or stuck up your keester, no way, no how. Comprende?”

Walter starts into quoting the Amendment but Anita’s out from behind the counter before he can hit the ‘right to’ and she’s got him by a twist of hair, turning him like a rusty screw toward the door and he’s yowling in pain so much she lets go. “Dammit, Walt, you give me indigestion, you really do. Give me the rifle and you can have it when you’ve finished your breakfast. But I can’t have the Wild West here with families and tourists. Take your protest to Stanwoodopolis, if you need to demonstrate. I got a business to run, probably into the ground, but I sure don’t need your help.”

In the end Walter’s politics took 2nd fiddle to eggs and bacon and his usual chicken fried steak. And Walter never brought his Winchester in the Diner again. But I don’t know about the Starbucks in town. Altho …there’s probably some enterprising entrepreneur who’s opened up a Barista Balllistic just to cater to the Walters of the world.

We were down at the Columbia Gorge trailhead last year, emptying bladders and filling water bottles. A woman emerged from the restroom and whispered to her companion in a conspiratorial voice, “There’s no flush.” Her friend shook her head in incomprehension. “Not working?” she asked. “No, there’s nothing but a hole.” “A hole?” her friend asked incredulously. “Just a hole in the ground and no flush.”

I felt like a Cro Magnon listening in on aliens from some advanced galaxy. How could they possibly understand my dependence on a polluting gas engine? Or something as totally primitive as a cellphone? These two debutantes had missed their exit, apparently, on the way to the Ritz. A pit toilet was incomprehensible and if it weren’t such a sordid subject matter, it would have made for the nucleus of many a future discussion over bridge and tea at the Country Club. “But where, Charlotte? where does it Go???”

Indeed. Not that our two ladies could answer that question in regard to the plumbing matrix from their Beverly Hills manse to the sewer system it connects to. What matters is that it be whisked away, out of sight, out of smell. We don’t know how things work anymore — but so long as they do, we don’t need to care. The world is less and less natural to us; it’s electrons and silicon, computerized and digitized, all packaged in Black Boxes that create the new universe.

The trouble is, Charlotte, we’re still of the natural world. Body functions, pheromones, appetites, all that genetic coding of mammalian evolution in a world that’s more and more alien to us. We’ll fix that eventually. We’ll adapt to the virtual world, the one we make not so much in our own image as a clever cyber image. The natural stuff will be obsolete soon and we’ll replace the old ‘parts’ with new and improved engineered ones. The robots aren’t going to take over us humans. Us humans are going to become cyborgs.

And Charlotte, the best part is you won’t need a flush. Or a toilet either.

You can tell volumes about South End history by examining our garbage evolution, sorta like counting rings on an old growth fir or the layer of ice deposits in a glacier. Science, a powerful tool. Well, for about half of us these days….

I still find old bottle dumps on our place — and back in the woods there are ravines that have entire cars, bedsteads, wringer washers, complete antique stores if this stuff wasn’t all rusted half away now. Back in the disco 70’s, we still drove our garbage up to Camano Hill where Frank guarded the official dump, pulling out future artifacts he brought home south of me, most of which are probably still there in a strata or two beneath the 21st century. Quite a few South Enders I know like to keep most everything they ever owned — usually just outside the back door where the nettles and blackberries claim it all. It’s an archeologist’s dream, for sure, someday centuries hence.

When the county closed the dump and sent Frank into an early retirement, we got a couple of coin operated dumpsters at our present location about 1980. Drive up, drop your quarters in, a lid lifted and a piston crunched what you tossed into an oozing pancake. Okay for a few trash bags, but not for, oh, roof shingles or construction debris. Pretty quick we got scales and semi-trailer size bins.

We even got primitive recycle. This was when you could sell aluminum and bottles back in town … and a lot of us penny pinchers did. At the dump you sorted your glass by color and watched out for yellowjackets drunk on stale beer and wine dregs. You had to tear the labels off all your cans, cut off the bottom and crush em first. The trash Nazis checked, believe me. A lot of work to throw away your bottles and cans back then…. Now it all goes into the Omni-Bin, paper, bottles, cans, boxes, all of it sorted out somewhere, somehow, by someone or something.

Most folks now have garbage pick-up, big green Waste Management trucks stop in once a week by the driveway, curbside service, E-Z payments. Me, I like hauling my own litter, oh, about every few months. Otherwise, how would I keep tabs on the island civilization? History, after all, is about half what we take to the dump. The other half is still back in the woods.