The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

When you realize that every morning you crawl out of the fartsack, haul down to the mailbox for the morning paper, grab that first cup of caffeine and settle down to an hour of news before starting your ‘real’ day, you might figure, like I did yesterday, enough is, well, enough. You might even, like I did, think to yourself, stop shooting up the news, stop acting like a political junkie, stop stealing time from your days.

Course, yesterday it came out that a whistleblower had reported our President had called up the Ukrainian president to demand repeatedly he investigate a company Biden’s son had worked at for improprieties his competitor’s boy might have committed, in exchange for a deal to send over 250 million dollars of weapons that country needed to fight the Russians. Yet another sad story of how we’ve seemingly lost our way, this country of ours run by a man who apparently has no idea or interest in constitutional limits on his behavior.

Meanwhile millions of kids and adults too were marching in the streets, clamoring for politicians to wake up before climate change was irrevocably ruining their future lives. The Saudi oil fields were bombed with drone warfare, the Iranians say it wasn’t them, the asylum seekers at our borders were being shipped to El Salvador which is a country you want to escape from not be returned to, the Koreans are testing missiles, the Canadian prime minister is wearing blackface and, well, enough is more than enough.

My father is 96 years old. He watches the news but doesn’t seem all that interested anymore. His favorite expression lately is ‘crazy world’, as if that assessment was about all anyone could come up with to explain the endless daily assault on our sensibilities. Crazy world. He was a right wing Republican most of his life but Trump escapes his logic. Horse’s Ass, he calls his president. He fought on a P.T. boat in World War 2, thought Viet Nam was a good idea, supported the Gulf Wars and doesn’t know what to think about Afghanistan. Crazy world indeed.

I’m going out to see him in a couple days. We won’t be talking politics and we won’t watch much news. I’m looking forward to a break from the addiction. We’ll go up to my brother’s cottage in Northern Wisconsin, listen to the loons and watch the autumn leaves turn color. We’ll spend a little time in a world that hasn’t gone crazy, just two old guyz idling awhile. I might even think of it as a vacation.

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