The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Our president recently stated, when asked why he didn’t attend the G-7 conference on climate, that he was the most environmental president ever. Like most endeavors of the man, he is far and away the most competent. The others at the conference took up donations for a paltry few million to fight the Brazilian rainforest fires, something the Brazilian prez pooh-poohed unless Macron apologized personally to him for previous slights. While world leaders throw sand in their playmates’ faces in the sandbox of world politics, our Environmental President tackles issues mano y mano, no need for alliances, no need for spending much money, no need for petty squabbles among former allies. No, cut right to the chase.

Take these pesky hurricanes. Right now there’s a tropical storm bearing down on Puerto Rico, the second hit after Hurricane Maria that pretty much devastated the island nation. Oh sure, he could have spent billions helping our own citizens rebuild, but … why bother when another one is going to smack them anyway? Heartless, you say? Not really. Because the Enviro-Man has a Plan. Not just any ordinary garden variety plan, a really Yuge plan.

Nuke em! You heard right, Mr. Timid. Drop a nukie egg right down the eye of those storms, blast those winds to smithereens. If you think for one New Yawk minute there’s time for environmental studies or computer simulations of what might happen when we detonate an atomic bomb in a swirling wind of 100 plus miles per hour, you don’t know our President. He’s got NO time for fake science, buddy. He’s given it plenty of consideration, you can bet your Greenpeace membership card on that. Drop it and see what happens, a real time experiment.

And Puerto Rico might be a good first drop. Sure don’t want to wait til it hits the Mar-a-Lago resort, a lot of billionaire guests wouldn’t care to be irradiated, I don’t care if it does bring the winds to heel.

Albert Einstein wasn’t afraid to drop the first atomic bomb. Because his big brain had done the calculations! And Donald Trump isn’t afraid for exactly the same reason. He understands the atom is our friend. And if you want to defend hurricanes as Acts of God or simply the whim of Mother Nature, be my guest. Even so, the Emviro-Prez has your back. Remember that when you’re voting next fall. Tree huggers aren’t going to stop hurricanes. Put that on your liberal little bumper sticker, why don’tcha? Better yet, try NUKE THE ‘CANE!

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Yesterday I saw where the meat industry and the cattle rustlers had joined forces to lobby for legislation that would effectively prohibit the vegetarian crowd from labeling their garden fixins as ‘meat’. Impossible Burgers, Beyond Meat, etc, all made from peas and carrots, blended with secret spices and god only knows what else, to taste like hamburger would be banned from advertising as some sort of faux meat. Same tactic as the dairy industry going after soy ‘milk’ and almond ‘milk’ and polyester milk or any other goop not using a cow’s udder.

Now you ask me, and I know you wouldn’t dream of it, meat has been tampered with anyway. You think a Big Mac is pure meat? My milk has sugar and vitamins and who knows what else added. Is it still milk? Do I think soy milk is milk or are we consumers so addled by Trump that we just believe everything we’re told now? Beyond Meat sort of declares right out of the rodeo chute that it isn’t meat, it’s beyond that stuff. Impossible Burgers, same thing.

So just in case you did decide to come to me for nutritional advice, me being the Picture of Health, I volunteered to be the guinea pig for these new vegetarian products. Yep, I bought a package of Beyond Burgers and I also bought a package of ground sirloin, made a few patties and grilled them to South End perfection on the grill. I admit, I figured the faux meat would be like a tofu turkey dog or a boca-burger of mushrooms and soy pellets, not real tasty unless you were living in South Sudan, not the South End. But … lemme tell ya. I see now why the cattle industry and the meat packers are clamoring to put the skids on these burgers. They not only tasted as good as my sirloin hamburger, they tasted better.

And just to put the fear of Oscar Mayer on them, they even had the mouth feel of meat right down to something that simulated bits of gristle. You wouldn’t guess in a blind taste test, these weren’t meat. Peas mostly. Just like hamburger. Don’t ask me how they do it, maybe we wouldn’t even want to know any more than we want to watch sausage production. But yeah, the meat industry ought to be afraid, very afraid.

I mean, c’mon, wouldn’t half of us switch to something healthier than red meat if it tasted the same or better and was actually good for you? Wouldn’t the folks concerned about farting cows and global warming rush to the Impossible Burger in a stampede? You bet your colonoscopy they would! Where’s the beef now, Wendy?

Give it a try, is all I’m asking. And pay no attention to the pop-up ads on this blog site for similar product lines. Not my doing….

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Everyday, more Trump. Trump … Trump … Trump. A water torture of dripping tweets, outrageous declarations, petulant tantrums. Never ending. Constantly updated. And always more crazed. Yesterday he labeled the Danish Prime Minister a nasty woman for treating him badly by refusing to negotiate a real estate deal for Greenland. Then he canceled a state visit to the land of Hamlet. Kim Jong Un is busy across the Pacific testing intermediate missiles, but that’s no big deal, he tells the Japanese who are strangely troubled by their nuclear neighbor. The big deal was Greenland.

Now he’s calling himself the Chosen One in his dealings with China, the Lion of Judah and the King of Israel in the Middle East, the God-King here on earth. Let the nations of the planet tremble, he is the Second Coming. Irritate him and he will breathe fire on your people. Try to reason with him and he will raise your tariffs. If the entire world is plunged into a new recession, so be it. Mighty is his will and terrible is his wrath. He no longer has or needs advisors, so great is his intellect. He keeps an army of court jesters, mostly in cabinet posts, that he rages at, compliments, ignores and eventually fires. If and when he resorts to having them executed, his followers will cheer heartily.

These are the best of times, these are the worst of times, these are quintessentially Trump Times. Madness rules the Kingdom and all semblance of order has been banished. What does it matter if we are thrown into chaos, what we want, what we expect, what we seemingly demand are daily plot twists that hold our collective interests. Crazy? Not if it boosts the ratings. Insane? Not if every waking hour Trump holds our attention.

Some say we should invoke the 25th amendment. Remove the madman from office before he does more harm than what he has wrought already. You know and I do too, we’re the madmen, we’re the crazy, we’re the hopelessly insane. We tune in to this the way we hunger for a good catastrophe, TV cameras focused 24/7 on the dead, the victims, the carnage. And then we move on to the next mass killing, the next hurricane, the next flood, the next car pile-up, the coming pandemic, the future economic crash.

When life has become a reality show, you definitely need a good narrator.

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Johnny the Hammer runs Piranha Brothers Construction with his partner Crazy Eddie. They fight tooth and nail, but for a time in those halcyon years when most of Seattle and half of California were migrating north like spawn crazed humpies, they had enough work that they could run a house or more each and stay out of each other’s hair. Well, at least Johnny had hair. Under his baseball cap, Eddie was bald and pale as an ostrich egg, although not near as smooth. More than a couple of times he’d been coldcocked by beams coming down on his noggin in mishaps and the result was he had permanent lumps in that hard skull of his that never subsided.

Johnny says that’s what makes Eddie so damn stupid — all the sense he ever had got knocked out of him early. Still, he builds a better house than Johnny and even though Johnny hates to admit it, he calls Eddie when some blueprint gets overly complicated or a fancy roof design’s flashing gives him too long a pause. Besides a magnetic attraction to toppling 6×6’s, Eddie’s got a head for details and complexity. Can’t read well, but he visualizes every stud and roughout as if he had a photo developing in the darkroom of his brain.

Johnny must’ve told this story a hundred times of Eddie getting all excited about the new shop that opened on the South End. Nails and More. This was back in the days when the two still could call themselves friends, still worked on one house at a time. If they had one to work on…. Eddie had been arguing with the counterman at the Lumber Yard over some charge he had questioned and, by god, he was ticked off by the end of the argument and eager for a new vendor. Any vendor. Even if it meant driving off island and paying cash.

One morning he took off mid-hammer stroke on the McMansion the Crosby’s of Palo Alto were having Piranha Bros. build on the bluffs of the west side and drove his one ton old Ford up toward Elger Bay Store where the sign he’d noticed that morning had finally seduced him with its siren call: NAILS AND MORE GRAND OPENING

He was hoping a little too hard the ‘MORE’ was lumber and possibly even some electric and plumbing.

Maybe it was too little coffee. Maybe too much. When he got inside the door and before his eyes could adjust from full sunlight, Sherri, the new owner, greeted him with a Come right on in, I’m Sherri and you’re my first customer and I’m not going to charge you for this visit. On the house!

Hoo boy, Eddie couldn’t believe his ears. Visions of free shingles, siding, 2×6’s, bandoliers of nails for his pneumatic —- all floated up like a Christmas in Camaloch. When his eyes finally adjusted, he realized his mistake. Couldn’t come right out and admit it, naturally, so Eddie, indeed, unwittingly became Sherri’s first customer. Full nail trim and cuticle treatment, but he passed on the ‘More’. “Gotta get back on the job,” he mumbled and fled into the sunlight.

Eddie dated Sherri for awhile that year and it was remarked upon by all the Piranha Bros.’ crews how, despite the cuts and callouses, Eddie’s hands were as immaculately manicured as a golf course green. Course, never in his presence.

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When the Board of the South End Senior Center met last month at what was the old Tyee Grange Hall, now the SESC, members were caught off-guard when Brenda Bodice, the newly elected President, proposed changing the name. “We need to make this a Big Tent,” she argued strenuously in the face of what she assumed would be a recalcitrant Board. “We have to expand the Mission,” she cried, waving her half full paper Starbucks cup the way a general would hoist his sword atop his horse. In fact it looked as if Brenda might stand on her chair the more animated she became.

“Aw, Brenda,” Jim Swenson, newly elected Vice President and current highest volume realtor up at Windy Rear’s last remaining office on the island after closing satellite offices this past month, “we argue this chestnut every new President. New name, same game, you ask me. What’re you proposing we call it anyway, the Senile Center and hope we draw the dementia crowd?” From his perch near the back door, Jerry Cook guffawed. Maybe, he chortled, we could play Jeopardy with them, see who can remember the clue long enough to hit the buzzer.

Mandy Van Horne, whose mother had just been diagnosed with Alzheimers, scolded him. “Instead of making fun of the afflicted, Jerry, maybe you could button it up and give your humor a rest. I think it’s tired.” Jerry started to mouth off once more but thought better of it. Mandy was not a woman you want to offend. Her ex-husband Wally could tell you some terrifying stories if you needed proof.

“We need to draw a younger crowd,” Brenda forged forward. “Half our membership is dead or will be soon. Same as what happened to the Tyee Grange. You have to give the kids a reason to come down and they’re sure not coming down to a Senior Center for bingo night if they’re not seniors. Is that hard to understand?”

Elizabeth Aalmgren wondered what they would want to do with kids anyway. ‘We going to bring in rap bands?” she asked sarcastically. Brenda, not about to be dissuaded easily, said, “We can figure that out once we get a new name. I don’t know, Liz, maybe some music for the younger crowd isn’t a bad idea. They sure aren’t coming to hear the South End String Band play old time fiddle songs from two centuries ago, I know that.”

“What about calling us just The Center,” Jerry said. “Easy to remember.” Mandy threw him a glare and Jerry immediately threw up his hands. “I didn’t mean it to be funny, Mandy. Sorry, geez, don’t take it the wrong way.”

Phil from Whidbey Bank suggested Tyee Center. Donna from Albertson’s Funeral Home thought Community Center would be neutral enough. Jim Swenson declared he didn’t want to change the name at all, think of all those stationary changes, addresses, email accounts, “c’mon, it would be a total headache. Plus, think of the history. We been the South End Senior Center for twenty-five years. Why change it now?”

The meeting lasted an extra half hour until Phil said he needed to get home to watch the latest installment of some show he recommended to everyone, in its 3rd season and a little late to start. Jim wanted out too so he proposed renaming themselves the South End Center. Phil seconded it, Brenda grumbled, Elizabeth said let’s do it and Jerry voted yes too, motion passed, meeting adjourned. Brenda turned out the lights, locked the doors and walked to her car in the dark parking lot. Rap bands, she was thinking she’d have to look into that. Somebody down at the high school must know a few….

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