The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Los Angeles is burning this week. I was at a neighbor’s yesterday and she was preparing plans to escape our island when the fires reach here, wanted to know if she should get her own boat or just hope to use another neighbor’s. I said we have a couple, probably have to charge plenty for a fiery evacuation, though. Okay, she didn’t find that funny. End of the World humor while Rome is burning doesn’t really cut it.

This is the Doom and Gloom era, global warming, glacial melts, sea level rise, Category 8 hurricanes, biblical floods, bird flu fears, pandemics, untreatable bacterial infections, Artificial Intelligence, overpopulation, glacial melting, religious wars, genetic manipulation and even the old nuclear jitters. The closet of midnight anxieties is overflowing and the boogieman is crawling out from under the bed. Sure, add Wildfire to the list. And did I mention earthquakes and tsunamis? Course, let’s not forget zombies. If our current infatuation with all things Undead is any indication, this might be the one to worry about.

Probably gonna take plenty of planning to survive the coming Apocalypse, I’m figuring. A year’s supply of food and water. Probably need a fallout shelter to store it in. Garlic and crosses to keep back the vampires. Might have been a bad move living on the end of an island with only one road off to the mainland. Or maybe … well, might just be the best place to be, far from the mayhem, cities ablaze, neuro-toxin missiles raining down, pestilence everywhere, robots taking over. Hard to say, flip a coin, luck of the draw.

Me, I’m glad to be at the far end of the continent, water lapping at our shore. Worst case I’ll rent or sell kayaks and rowboats to the evacuees. Not sure what I’ll do with the profits once civilization has collapsed but I might as well be the last Optimist. I can be the guy who turns out the lights when everyone else has left, if nothing else.

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I’m usually an optimistic guy. A chucklehead, really, but I was born a white male in America, as lucky a combination in this cruel world as I can think of. You want to talk about the 1% of the world, I’m in the club. But lately I’ve been troubled, my optimism has begun to seep away and dark thoughts crowd my horizon. Maybe you know what I mean, just an inchoate Dread starting to cloud your days. Climate change, Gaza, Trump, Ukraine, Artificial Intelligence, Trump, pandemics … did I mention Trump?

The past few years, the past few decades, they’re the hottest on record. Storms are worse, hurricanes form faster, the Arctic icepack is melting, the Siberian tundra is pumping out methane stored for millions of years. Sea levels are rising, ocean temperatures are off the chart, the world is heating up, just like our politics. Meteorological immigrants will destabilize the countries they move to, borders will close, walls will be built, nationalism will make us all xenophobes and racists.

Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars by sending transport spaceships each with one or two hundred pioneers. He plans to bio-engineer the next generations, humans more adaptable to life on another planet. With AI, who knows? The guy may actually pull it off. He says he wants to die on the Red Planet. I’m down with that, more room for me, more room for you. Just hope the Martians welcome immigrants.

I read today that the earth’s human population should peak at just under 11 billion of us in 50 years or so then start to decline. And that’s not counting all the Musk masses emigrating off planet. I’m not sure who does the calculations for half a century out but I won’t be here to fact check. 11 billion is a helluva lot of us, mostly crowded into coastal cities soon to be inundated by sea rise, high tides and storm surges. Kansas, get ready for urban refugees!

Today here it’s 85 degrees, the sun is warm, the mountains are hazy over a Puget Sound rippled by onshore winds, our garden is giving us dinner tonight, our insular little world seems like Paradise. What, me worry?

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Hurricane Dorian, packing winds over 200 mph and pushing a storm surge of up to 25 feet, is hammering the Bahamas right now. The Bahamas are almost all under 30 feet above sea level. Meaning, well, you get the picture. If you want to see what rising oceans mean for the future, this week will give us all a frightening sneak preview. The Trumpster was so concerned he canceled his trip to Poland, supposedly to take a hands-on approach to the incoming disaster, but actually to play 18 holes of golf. His handlers argued that he was paying close attention with advisors bringing frequent updates. Considering his warning that folks in Alabama should be prepared to evacuate, I’m guessing the updates came from his caddy.

What, him worry? Alfred E.’s got nothing on the Golfer-in-Chief, that’s for certain. But it is, after all, Labor Day and I’m sure you’ll agree that even the hard-working President of the Yew Ess Aye deserves a vacation. Trade wars are easy, he tells us, but c’mon, you and I know it’s actually hard. He just doesn’t want us worrying about him. Trump famously castigated Obama for taking time off from his job to play a few rounds of golf, but that was then, this is now and the job is harder, maybe the hardest it’s ever been in history. Why the man has played 229 days of golf in his first two and a half years on the job. GolfNewsNet, a must-read site for those who want to stay abreast of our duffing prez, states that he has played golf or spent time on his golf courses 22% of the time since being elected.

This, of course, is how billionaires conduct bizness. Off the tee. It’s where the deals are brokered and if the man cheats a bit, welcome to the world of high stakes finance. And sure, it costs a bit to fly to these golf courses with a full entourage of secret service folks, but would you rather have a stressed-up Leader of the Free World? No, I didn’t think so. Let’s be honest, he wasn’t going to stop Hurricane Dorian anyway. Not unless it was going to make landfall at Mar-a-Lago. In which case he’s got his hand on the nuclear button. Lose Mar-a-Lago and where would the next G-7 summit be held?

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