The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I was up at a farm on the North End recently and a couple of us homesteaders got to swapping chicken stories. Roosters, mostly. You think maybe chickens are silly little cacklers scratching up worms and grubs for dinner or they’re benign little birds dropping eggs for your breakfast, you haven’t been properly introduced to the male of the species.

Maybe you’ve heard the expression Cock of the Walk? That’s these bad boys. Vicious attackers of the unwary. Aggressive, fearless birds that come at you with beak and spurs. They’ll open you up before you can say chicken cacciatore. And you’ll never turn your back on one again, trust me.

Well, we swapped a few whoppers before Professor Bob mentioned he’d been up to Darrington for the cockfights awhile back, a couple hundred Tarheels betting their moonshine earnings on birds bred for vicious violence. When I first came to Camano Island, the cops were busy busting cockfighting rings in Stanwood and Gomorrah. I know what you’re thinking: didn’t this sort of bloodsport die out in the 1800’s? And the answer is apparently NO. Down south where I grew up, they fight dogs in Dixie. Yeah, it seems barbaric. But … we still got boxing and now we got kickboxing. And if you want mayhem, tune in some Sunday to NFL football. They’ll study us someday like we were Romans, professional gladiators. Only real difference is we figured how to make it profitable.

Maybe the cockfighters need to sell television rights. Line up some advertisers. Sell beer and hotdogs. Make it respectable for more than the Tarheels and a few UW professors. On the other hand, maybe it wouldn’t generate a mass audience. After all, we got politics now 24/7 if you like your violence vicious. Course, maybe they should sell beer and peanuts and advertising rights. Monday Night Congressional Cockfights. Probably take a few months to balance the budget with the profits. Think about it is all I’m asking.

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I must’ve been about 10 years old one April Fool’s Day back around 1960 when I came downstairs for my bowl of tasty and non-nutritious cereal. My mom waited til all us boys were face deep in our General Mills products before she announced she’d just heard on the radio that school was canceled today. You want your cereal to snap crackle and pop, this is how you do it. No school! Free at last, free at last, an entire day to spend on our own mischief. Hallelujah!

Needless to say we were jubilant, hopping on one foot then the other, clapping hands, laughing like baboons. Until finally she couldn’t help herself, she’d been waiting for the precise moment when she could pop our happy balloon, hollering April Fools! Call it sadism, call it cruel — we weren’t amused at our childish gullibility but you best believe our dear mom laughed herself nearly sick. People need psychotherapy for less trauma than this. Years after even.

Doesn’t seem like April Fool’s Day holds the same place in our modern culture. Maybe moms still jerk their kids’ chain, I don’t know, but I suspect we’re more reluctant to pull rugs out from under one another. We got the internet to do that. Social media. Biased news. Now even Artificial Intelligence. Every damn day is April Fool’s. And you ain’t seen nothin yet!!

Wait’ll you get the coming political ads, realistic animation of an opponent speaking in his own voice, all plausible, all looking and sounding exactly what you’d expect … but all bogus, all created to deceive you. And it will — at first. Every day, like the boy who cried wolf. Until you won’t believe anything, you won’t trust your own eyes or your own ears, you’ll just finally believe whatever you want to believe, why not? And the funny part — the machines will be the ones who get the last laugh. April Fool, Human!

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