The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Down at the Diner normality is slowly returning. Well, the New Normality, I guess. After being shut down briefly for non-compliance with plague masking, the café began to adhere to the governor’s edict that masks must be worn by customer and staff alike. As soon as some of the quarantines lifted, the Diner was first in line to rip those N-95’s off their ears and breathe free once again. Eager to recoup the winter’s lost revenues, they built a makeshift beer garden out by the parking lot next to the building, fenced it off and offered tourists and residents adult beverages near the gas pumps. Even brought in music, small groups and a night of open mic.

Course, they had forgotten about checking with the Liquor Board for permits for a beer garden, or if they had checked, went ahead without them. So for a time the music by the pumps and the open mics went on hiatus until the snafu was corrected. Damn government regulations! Last week I drove up to hear what the open mic folks might have to offer, maybe catch a beer and sit in the sun. And while it’s not Margaritaville or a sunset rich view of the Puget Sound, it’s pleasant enough. Unless you happen to be sitting next to the air return for the café’s HVAC system, 95 degree breezes fluttering your hat, although, to be fair, there are a few more seats further from the desert breeze.

I lasted one cold beer, at least until the guy with the saxophone stepped up to the microphone and butchered Duke Ellington. I was in 5th grade band classes with kids who could play like this, but I’m not in 5th grade anymore and I honestly believe before you perform in public, you ought to learn to halfway play your instrument. Just saying….

Saturday night the mizzus and me went to hear a very good fiddler play old time music, solo and then with friends. It was indoors after the only rain of the summer soaked the beer garden, all very convivial for a small super spreader event, the beer was good, the place was packed. After a dozen songs or so a 30 something woman parked next to me who started yelling in my right ear GET CLOSER TO THE MICROPHONE!! or YOU NEED TO TURN UP THE AMP!! or SING LOUDER!! until finally I got up and moved away from her. She immediately charged over to ask AM I ANNOYING YOU??

Now, a bigger man, a more mature man, a man mellowed by the South End laid back lifestyle might have said, no, ma’am, I just had my right ass cheek going dead so I thought I would move to a different seating position, nothing at all to do with the new tinnitus in my right ear … but, of course, that would be a different man than myself. When she took umbrage to my telling her hell yes you’re annoying me, you’re screaming in my ear louder than the damn band, she seemed suddenly enraged for some reason. To which she spluttered and told me YOU NEED A NEW HAT!!

I didn’t have the heart to tell her it was a new hat, figuring it probably wouldn’t lower the volume. I started to tell her she needed a …. stopped myself, then said, aw, let’s quit here, why don’t we? When the song ended, I grabbed The mizzus from across the room and left. Good times at the diner, obviously, are back.

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Let me say right off the Get-Go, I’m no spring chicken, although my behavior might lead folks to think I’m in late-stage adolescence. I never went through a mid-life crisis, never left the mizzus for a college intern, didn’t buy a sports car and never thought I should’ve gotten a career … or even a job. In other words, I feel young.

Or at least did until these past few months, and no, it wasn’t Covid that made my bones feel brittle and my mind sort of squishy, it was all the folks around me who have cancers and aneurisms and busted appendixes and chronic back pains and diabetes and bi-polar disorders. For the first time in my 71 years on this planet, folks I know are dying, some younger than me, most through no fault of their own, just bad luck, crummy genes, who knows? Something in the water, toxins in the house, crap in the air, don’t ask me, I’m not a doctor and you couldn’t pay me to play one on TV.

But … mortality sits perched on my shoulder these past few months, a black crow or a shadow of one, a dark daily companion right out of Poe, hard to shake, impossible to ignore.

I just put my 98 year old father into an assisted living complex. Hard to feel bad for a guy who’s about to hit the century mark … unless you’re one of those who want to live forever. All I can say is be careful what you wish for. Quality of life diminishes a bit for the Methuselahs of this world. Volunteer at one of these places and see if you still want extended longevity when you piss 200 times a day and you eat more meds than food. Me, I’ll pack it in when the check-out time arrives and the maid needs to change the bedding for the next guest.

Not to sound morose, mind you, just that we all have a Best By date and I’m okay with that. But dammit, these early birds leaving lately, well, it’s a phase of life, apparently, that’s here to stay. Maybe I should consider that sports car after all….

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I got a message a few days ago from a friend’s wife that my buddy was in the hospital and not doing very well, maybe I ought to hustle down there before it was too late. So I dropped what I was doing, jumped in the jalopy and headed south to the hospital where I worked graveyard shift weekends for ten long years back in the 80’s. If you want to hop a time machine, this is one way to do it. That Pain Motel was small back when I started, had an ER with maybe 4 or 5 rooms that burned up in a fire about 1982, then had one with about 10 but now sports 70 or so. Big city hospital.

I parked in the multi-story garage, got my temperature checked at the front door, followed signage to one of the two 8 story towers that now engulf my old haunts, took an elevator up to what they euphemistically called the End of Life Wing, got my buddy’s room number at the nurses’ station and went to the end of the hall to see him. His son was coming out of his room and we introduced ourselves. He said he had to step out a few minutes, that Dad was in a coma, had been for the past two days, but go on in, he might wake up any moment. Disappointed that I got there too late to find my pal conscious, I went in and sat down. After a few long minutes where I never saw a muscle twitch or a nostril hair ruffle, I finally put my hand on his forehead to check for temperature.

Now, I’m no doctor and I don’t play one on TV, but I did work in that hospital for 10 years so when I tell you he was dead, you can be pretty sure he was. There were no monitors attached to see if it had gone flatline, but this was, after all, the End of Life Wing. I stayed awhile longer, said my piece just in case and headed out. His son was exiting the elevator as I was entering. ‘You leaving already?’ he asked. ‘Yeah, kind of a poor conversation,’ I said. ‘Stick around, he might wake up any minute.’

I’m not entirely immune to the idea of a miracle. Like I said, I worked there ten years and saw plenty of death and dying and okay, once in a blue moon someone come back to life in one of our Code Red drills in the ER. You get inured to pain, blood, horror, suffering and death working there. You see people who should have died but didn’t and you see folks who died when they shouldn’t have. My friend’s dying was no surprise, just a bit early and unannounced. I didn’t say to his kid his dad was gone and he ain’t coming back. Hope isn’t a fool’s errand, but then again, there always came a time when we stopped CPR and quit putting the paddles to the patient. The doc sometimes would ask us assembled in the room if anyone had any ideas. We never did. And no one ever said, let’s stick around, the patient might wake up any minute. Then again, the patient was never our father.

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Okay, let’s stop the wishy-washy denials from the Radical Left, those poor saps who think Trump was a latter day Fuhrer bent on destroying American democracy. C’mon, the man was an exemplar of the Ayn Rand homage to capitalist captains of industry and commerce. He built the Trump Tower, after all, and it stood up to the 9-11 attack on the other towers. You think God didn’t have a hand in all of that? Of course he did! That’s why Donald J. Trump is the Chosen One!!!!

Maybe you didn’t notice the last four years or so most of the churches, the white churches anyway, supported Mr. Trump. If they didn’t believe the man was a serial porn star adulterer who cheated on his wonderful wife Melania, why would you? And they didn’t think he was a tax cheat, not for one Leviticus minute, no sir, he was doing what any of us with a few billion dollars would do, hire the best tax attorneys and take every deduction this corrupt Congress offered. When you’re rich — and everyone in America has the same opportunity to be rich — you’ll change your tune. And trust me on this, God wants you to be rich. He is, after all, on the dollar bill. So forget about trusting me, trust Him. Like Donald J. Trump, he wants you to be wealthy. And no, he doesn’t want your taxes wasted on welfare cheats, immigrants or alternative energy. Give me a break, if God wants to change the climate, there’s nothing you can do to stop that.

Anyone with half a brain knows that the End Times are upon us. You may not want to admit it, but deep down in your snowflake heart you can hear the drumbeats picking up. Global warming? That’s just the furnace of Hell getting closer. At least for you. For those of us who’ve been expecting the Second Coming, President Trump was the answer to our prayers. He moved the capital of Israel back to Jerusalem, didn’t he? Prophesies, partner, Apocalypse Now, baby!
Just like the Good Book predicted and it’s no coincidence Donald J. Trump’s favorite book was the Bible. Old and New both! Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth! Oh, he was sent here all right. To do the Lord’s bidding! You unbelievers, all you libtard politically correct crybabies, hard times are coming for you, hot times like nothing you can imagine.

No, God is a Republican. And vengeance is His, He saith. Tremble before His might, His terrible sword is coming down, His wrath will be like nothing you’ve ever witnessed and Congress will be returned to the GOP. Let it be written. Let it be done. Thank God for God!

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It’s been over six months since Pelosi’s storm troopers, aka the Capitol Police, assassinated the patriot Ashli Babbitt in the midst of a quiet protest of Trump’s stolen election. Hysteria seems to have consumed the Democrats who claim the protest was a riot, or worse, an insurrection perpetrated by the President himself to prevent Congress from ratifying a fraudulent election when anyone could see for himself the citizens of this great country were merely protesting peacefully in the hallowed halls of their own legislature.

The time has come to make that day, not a day of infamy, not a shameful attack on our democracy, but quite the opposite, a day to celebrate patriotism. Bastille Day in America, a day when the populace rose up to oppose tyranny. Ashli Babbitt was a martyr to the cause, a woman who loved her country and her president, who refused to sit home while the Democrats destroyed any semblance of democratic values by ratifying a pretender to the throne, the evil Biden. A statue should be commissioned for the Capitol rotunda for all future peaceful visitors as a reminder of the price of our freedom. Let her name ring throughout history. Patriot Day. January 6th.

Oh, I know the Democrats will block the idea. They’d rather drag the American flag through the dirt with their Jan. 6 commission, hoping us citizens will be convinced the tourists who gathered peacefully outside their chambers were really revolutionaries bent on overturning a legitimate election. What a bald-faced distortion of the truth! They will try to convince us that many of the Senators and Representatives decried the President on that day, even those in his own party, even McConnell and McCarthy, but as we know, they have walked back those unfortunate accusations when the facts became clearer.

We should, as many have suggested, investigate Nancy Pelosi for failure to prepare the Capitol police for peaceful tourists minding their own business. And the thug who assassinated Ashli Babbitt when she was merely coming through the broken window of the assembly where the legislators were huddled in misguided fear should be charged with first degree murder. Democrats will try to confuse the facts by suggesting she had re-tweeted a few hours prior to her killing that Vice President Pence should resign and be tried for treason and that Chief Justice Roberts was being blackmailed in a scheme to rape and kill innocent children. Rather than investigate her claims, they would prefer to make her the villain, not the true victim.

But truth, as always, will find a way to the surface. Today is August first and President Trump has assured us he will be reinstated in the White House on this day. Let freedom ring, my fellow Americans, and what better bell to toll than the one on January 6th, the future Patriot’s Day. Keep the Dream alive. Write to Pelosi and tell her to resign and she too be tried for treason. May God have mercy on their souls!

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