The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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As most of you careful readers know, political correctness down here on the partisan shores of the steamy equatorial South End is probably not one of our more valued virtues.  Maybe because we’re all trapped down at this skinny dead end backwash cul-de-sac, we’ve learned — the hard way usually —- that if we want to get along without civil war, we have to disagree without resorting to a full blown arms race.  And believe me, we disagree.  On most everything.  That’s why we all ended up down here at the end of a tilting island at the end of America on the edge of a continental shelf sliding herky-jerky under another tectonic plate.

This week the talk down at Jolene’s Beauty Salon and Boutique revolved exclusively around the passage of the same sex marriage bill.  Scissors and tongues snipped and clucked, but Jolene says no blood was spilled.  Ronald, her frothy new beautician, might have intentionally miscolored Mrs. Adeline’s silver perm a tad on the electric blue side when she made the comment that ‘gayness’, seemed to her, was a lifestyle choice, but mostly the banter was affable.

Rhonda Wilkins did wonder out loud if the bill’s passage meant she and her no-account husband Tom’s opposite sex marriage would be annulled now.  “That’s wistful thinking,” Wanda blurted from two chairs away in the middle of a henna touch-up on the minister’s mizzus who steadfastly refused to be drawn into a curling iron showdown, and if Rhonda hadn’t been curled herself and heat-lamped into her chair, she might have stormed out, but by the end of the drying cycle she was cooled down and still unhappily married to the love of her life whose zenith of ambition was to reach retirement before cirrhosis.

So Valentine’s Day on the metrosexual South End this year promises to be a cross between Mardi Gras and a Pink St. Patrick’s Day.  Maybe no parades by the Diner, but a lot of closets opened for an early spring cleaning.  Believe me, the South End could always stand a little more love….  And just in case Mrs. Adeline is right, some of us should think about renewing those old marriage vows.  On the outside chance there really might be a statute of limitation.

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The winds of change blow strange down here on the psychedelic South End.  Prohibition is coming to a close … once again… and this time it’s cannabis.  Legal pot.  Medical marijuana.  The dispensaries are gearing up down this way and half the population seems to need a doctor’s prescription for everything from Seasonal Affective Disorder to Shaky Bowels in hopes the palliative benefits of sinsemilla will alleviate the pain of living with little money and no jobs.

Course, most of the patients have been self-medicating half their lives.  With the upshot being that we don’t have much money and we don’t have jobs, what some would call a Vicious Cycle, but most of us call Easy Livin.   Nevertheless, change doesn’t come without costs.  There will be, no doubt about it, social upheaval.  Just as there was in the 30’s when alcohol was legal again, the bootleggers and rumrunners will have to adapt or die.  The Law of the Economic Jungle is harsh and many are those South End growers who will either ramp up production to compete with Twin City Food and Drug or they’ll wither on their halides.

Competition, once limited to Two Toke Tom’s bud or some outdoor farmer’s sporadic supplemental crops, is going to be vicious, all the little fish gobbled up through the food chain until the only suppliers will be revamped tobacco companies selling high potency marijuana rolled into menthol filtered doobies cut with 200 chemicals known only to their lab managers and the state of California.  The little dispensaries next to Elger Bay Market and Tyee Store will last about as long as it takes CostCo to run a multi-million dollar intitiative for exclusive distribution rights through their pharmacies.  No doubt cheaper prices.   But you’ll have to  buy bud by the two pack half pound containers with two hash pipes throw in.  Although …. I suspect no one down here will be complaining.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/audio-thanks-but-well-pass-on-the-new-years-resolutions-this-year.mp3[/podcast]audio — thanks, but we’ll pass on the new years resolutions this year

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/CLICK-TO-HEAR-colton-island.mp3[/podcast]CLICK TO HEAR —colton island

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The Colton Crime Capers go on week after week, month after month and year after year with reporters rolling down Camano Island from France, England, Brazil and every other country interested in international breaking news.  To say it’s a media frenzy is like saying the Gulf Spill will require some big sponges.

The South End Chamber of Little Commerce, our bastion of entrepreneurial endeavor, doesn’t really like talking to reporters about Colton, something akin to Forks denying that vampires walk their streets after dark.  I guess the realtors hate having to explain the intricacies of alarm system technologies to every prospective shack buyer.  It’s a difficult enough market as it is  … and if you were looking for property with a small airstrip behind the carriage house and a hangar for your Cessna, well, probably there are better places to retire.

Our tourism ad slogan — ‘the place to do nothing’ – always troubled us slackers down past Elger Bay Store.  We weren’t proud of unemployment and indolence.  We aren’t ashamed either, but hellfire, what kind of tourist promotion IS this?  Especially when we got the Mother of All Tourist Promotions going on for the past 3 or 4 years.  The Barefoot Burglar, the Camano Kid, the Flying Filcher, our very own international anti-hero.  The movies are being shot, the books are being written, the documentaries are being edited, the mom is hiring an entertainment lawyer, the deals are being made!  Rolling Stone has declared Camano officially the Cape Cod of the Pacific Northwest.  And we still want to be the place that does nada?  Maybe the Chamber  …. But the rest of us are ready to roll!  Tour buses, T-shirts, coffee mugs, souvenir shops:  we’re ready to cash in.  Camano, the island to do nothing?  We don’t need a new slogan, we need a new NAME.  Colton Island.  Nice ring to it.  Get off the hammock and call your commissioner today!

Paid for by the Committee to Rename Camano Island

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I saw a segment on CNN the other night for a poll that showed American’s approval of … God.  He got a spare 52% job approval score.  Probably up a few points since the flood during Noah’s time.  The President got a bit less.  They didn’t give ratings for the Devil, or Hitler, but let’s assume they would be lower, hopefully substantially lower.

Somehow it’s troubling that the Lord God Almighty gets rated at all, much less gets tepid scores in the most religious industrialized nation on earth.  He is, after all, the All Knowing, the Creator, the Whole Enchilada.  And we puny humans give him barely a thumbs up.

Some talking heads came on later to analyze the data. Tsunamis and starvations probably didn’t help the Lord’s ratings, they said.  Bad recession either.  If He can create the cosmos, why not some jobs?  Raise up those poll numbers, if nothing else.

Maybe God doesn’t worry about his approval ratings.  Hard to believe, I know.  Most of us seem busy fixing up our Facebook accounts so we’ll look interesting and exciting and sexy to all those network ‘friends’ we barely know but follow their every movie or book or grocery store escapade.  Mostly I think we must be supremely bored or insecure to care what people we barely know do or think about us.  Maybe we ought to get on with our lives and skip the vote for prom king or queen, move right on to adulthood, build a life worth living without giving a hoot in hell what the Facebook friends are buying or reading or recommending.

Course, here I am giving out probably unwanted advice.  Just what you want to hear, right?  Next I’ll be telling you what I read and my favorite recipes and where I went this morning.  Like you should care?

Oh, and God, if you’re listening with that omniscience of yours, could you maybe put the brakes on this 3-D movie craze?  I’m not saying it’ll ratchet up your approval ratings, but, hey, it couldn’t hurt.  You might even consider Facebook.  Think of it as a cheap computer church.  Just don’t take it personal when we don’t ‘friend’ you.  Kinda busy here….

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     I used to raise peacocks.  You ever seen peacocks strutting thru a South End shack yard, it’s sorta otherworldly.  They brought an elegance that’s indescribable to my backwash palace.  You ever HEARD one of these exotic creatures, you might reconsider classinG up the bottom land.  They got a scream like a child being tortured.  I guarantee the neighbors will wear out 911 with their calls of mayhem and madness at your place.      Course when I had the peacocks, we didn’t have neighbors.  No, they didn’t move away because of the noise, they just hadn’t Discovered the fabulous South End yet.

      My peacocks, no offense to you Bird Huggers out there – my peacocks had a head about the size of a big martini olive.  And inside that head they had a brain the size of, well, a pea.  My peacocks were not bright.  They made a chicken look like Albert Einstein.  They thought my Banty hen, who’d hatched their eggs, they thought she was not only Einstein, but their mama and God too.      Don’t ask me what I was thinking.  My brain isn’t real big either.  Although I’m pretty sure who my mama is but don’t ask me about Pop.  I’m like the peacocks – I just go on faith.

     I had the peacocks a few years until Mama Banty got picked off by a Wily Coyote.  They wouldn’t come back to the henhouse after that, so they roosted in the cedars every night.  Dumb or not, they figured out the climbing ability of a coyote.  Finally they decided to go looking for Ma.  The Police Blotter in the Stanwood Gazette – and this is the Gospel Truth – would report on their progress north.  Peacock sighting at Dahlman Road.  Peacocks seen gathering at Sunnyshore.  Eventually they found a chicken surrogate ma up by O-Zi-Ya.  O-Zi-Ya is Southendomish, meaning, I think, Ornithological Orphanage. 

Sometimes I miss those little pea-brains.  Although I can sleep longer w/o an alarm clock that sounds like a nightmare.  I wonder, though, if I’d kept em, if the South End mighta stayed, oh, I don’t know, less developed.  Maybe forced the new neighbors to move north instead.

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CLICK TO HEAR — peacock farming

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