The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Trump’s personal secretary, Madeleine Westerhout, in regard to an unfortunate leak of the Donald’s burdensome work schedule, tweeted, “This POTUS is working harder for the American people than anyone in recent history.”
If you don’t believe it, check that grueling schedule. Most days, Trump has nothing official to do before 11:00 am, according to the daily guidance given to the media by the press office. Eleven a.m. is when he receives his daily intelligence briefing, condensed for the attention span of a 7 year old holding an X-box. According to detailed private schedules published by Axios, things don’t get much more hectic after that.
Sixty percent of the president’s work life is categorized as “executive time,” meaning what some call unstructured time but I think most of us would call playtime to make phone calls, read newspapers, tweet and watch television. Lots of television. Lots of Fox and Friends. No wonder he doesn’t pay attention to those intelligence briefings, he gets the facts from Fox. And maybe Captain Squarepants although you know and I know we’re not talking about Mike Pence. He’s the original Spongebob.

And don’t forget those countless hours strategizing with his lawyers. How he can cram those into his workday, well, nobody knows. I assume that accounts for the remaining 40% not covered in the ‘executive time’ category.

I don’t know how ‘hard’ Obama and Bush and Clinton and the Bush dad worked. Maybe what is ‘hard’ for Donald wasn’t all that tough for the others. You ever tried writing with crayons? Not easy! You send out a zillion tweets a day? Hard! You ever played golf every other weekend? Before you criticize the POTUS for being lazy, walk a mile in his golf shoes, why don’tcha? No, ‘hard’ is a relative adverb. One man’s hard is another’s very long coffee break. Or sick leave. Or vacation. Or what folks used to call ‘featherbedding.’

But now I understand why so many candidates are throwing their hats into the ring for this next election. Great pay, huuge benefits, minimal hours with a paid staff of bodyguards and chefs and secretaries and mistresses. Plenty of vacation leave too! No experience necessary or even desired. You asked me, it’s as close to a rich guy’s welfare as we can get. Did I mention the pension plan?

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I was out in the Back 40 this morning, chain sawing up some trees that blew down in the last few storms, what will, when I’m done bucking and splitting and hauling and stacking them, become our heat two years from now. Hard work, sometimes even dangerous, but part of the life I chose for myself back when I decided, as Joni Mitchell sang on Woodstock, to get back to the land and set my soul free. Nevertheless, as I approach my 70’s, I wonder when I’ll succumb to the temptation of a thermostat and gas heat.

Old age, so they tell me, is a state of mind. I wish my body felt the same way, but it wants to have a say in the debate too. We burn a carbon footprint of about 15 cord of wood a year, no doubt something the next generation will look back as fondly at as a Buick Roadmaster burning 10 miles per gallon. I guess I could argue that gas heat or electric heat have their downsides as well, but like I said, I’m nearly 70 and unless I want to move into a cave, chances are I’ve done my share of contributing to global warming already, no pardons or reprieves will be given.

Barring some unforeseen accident, I figure the day I put the chainsaw away in the shed one final time, foregoing woodcutting that year, that’s when I will consign myself to Old Age, no quibble. Just can’t do it anymore. I remember when my old man hung it up. He was in his mid-80’s and no, he didn’t heat his whole house with wood, just the fireplace. He quit heating his house back when he was about 75 when he moved into town from his lake place. He was a forester by trade and had worked in the Maine woods when he was a young man so woodcutting for him came naturally. I’m sure I’ve out cut him ten times over with a few close calls to make me glad I made it this long. Be nice to outlive him too, since he’s 95 and going fairly strong yet.

But the day will come, we both know, when age will catch up and I will call it quits too. A wise man, like my father, will know when that day arrives and accept it. Me, I’m not so sure. I’ll let you know when I am. Wise, I mean. I think old age is already rolled in.

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I love a good holiday as much as the next yahoo … but c’mon, this Groundhog’s Day business, let’s be honest, the Chamber of Commerce out there in Pullmyleg, Pennsylvania has pulled a fast one on those of us who take meteorologic prediction seriously. Down here on the convergence zoned South End, No Way is a groundhog going to see his shadow on Feb. 2nd. Even if we had groundhogs! This thing just gives Science a bad name. And lately, the last thing it needs in these superstitious, Mayan Calendar, end-of-the-world times is a black eye over some mammalian hairball on the East Coast seeing its hairball shadow (or not) and then extrapolating that to El Nino or asteroid strikes on Wall Street or global warming.
Which is precisely why some of the more empirically minded boyz down at the Mabana Body Shop have been searching, in a deductive sort of methodology, an alternative Predictor of winter longevity. Hellfire, if winter’s just going to last until April, we figure there’s no point in fighting serious incentive-reducing Inevitability. We’ll just pull the covers up, collect unemployment and wait for spring. This is how civilizations thrive: they figure out tides and seasons for planting schedules and harvest times and happy hours.
The model the boyz constructed over the past decade or so is a local paradigm that utilizes a 5 gallon polyethylene bucket of fresh caught Dungeness crabs —- I KNOW you’re going to point out they’re illegal this time of season, but listen, we’re putting em back when the data is collected. Spirit of the Law, if not the Letter and that, in a clamshell is the very essence of the South End Way. —- So you got a pail of clacking claws and now you bring out a dog, any dog, any breed, random sampling, see? And you let the pooch check out the crustaceans. No shadows, no hibernating drowsy marmots. And if the crab gets a lock on Snoopy’s snout, voila, studies have shown that is a true omen of an early spring. The dog schnozz slips the noose, 6 more weeks of sleeping in.
Simple. Like Einstein says, the more elegant the theory, the higher the probability it’s correct. And the boyz down at the body shop will tell you, the accuracy here is in the 90 percentile range, statistically astounding. We’re not claiming, like those unabashed self -promoters in Pennsylvania, that this will predict spring for the entire country, but for all us Left Coasters, rest assured, Feb 2nd now has science as its bedrock foundation. We’ll leave it to the South End Chamber of Commerce how they want to capitalize on it. Crab Dog Day. Nice profitable ring to it, don’t you think, kind of like a cash register. If we can keep PETA at bay….

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