The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

“No Way! No Way!” Techno Tim was hollering to any and all down at the South End Bait Shop and Marina where he was checking his 25 foot Arima parked in its berth. Both Tim and the fishing boat were rocking wildly, buffeted by storms real and imagined. A few of us boyz were hustling along the dock, tightening lines, securing bumpers, trying in vain to avoid Tim’s rant, especially when we all ended up trapped inside after the front of the squall sent waves lapping over the wharf and rain sent us all scurrying indoors, soaked in 15 seconds.

Cap’n Phil didn’t even wait before drawing our favorite beers from the cooler. And neither did we, grabbing beer rags and towels and bottles in one choreographed movement, drying off and wetting down simultaneously to Tim crying “No Way can this country afford raising minimum wage!!!”

“You’re a small businessman, Skipper, tell em what’ll happen when you can’t afford to hire help at 20 bucks an hour.” Cap’n Phil slid back behind the counter, half defensive, half official, half hidden, mostly none of the above. “You sorta answered your own question, Tim,” he dodged.

“Damn right! Nobody can stay afloat paying high wages,” Techno shouted, proud of his meteorological metaphor in the very teeth of the storm lashing the Pilot House that served as informal bar for the Marina. Miserable already, I decided my 2 cents wouldn’t make much difference. “Techno, you gotta put yourself in their place, the ones working full time and can’t make a Go of it.” “Their place?” T.T. spluttered, sparying foam over his storm battered lips. “Their place? Get a better job, I say. Get some ambition! Get an education! Quit looking for handouts.”

“Seems a little cold hearted, Tim,” Gyppo John threw in, a towel draped over his head. He looked like a post-fight boxer. That, or a demented Yasser Arafat. “Cold hearted? Hell yes! It’s dog eat dog in the jungle of capitalism. Wake up and smell the money, John! The losers deserve what they get!”

“Pretty much nothing,” I answered. Techno Tim always did rock my boat.

“Serves em right,” he cried happily and threw down half his Bud Light in one victorious gulp, then slammed the bottle triumphantly on the formica … before noticing the bow line on his Arima had wrenched loose and his boat was bashing against the neighbors. Howling, he headed for the door. “You guys gonna help?” he asked mournfully, pausing at the door.

Gyppo said, “Dog eat dog, Tim Boy.” Cap’n Phil said he was feeling cold hearted all of a sudden. I asked, slouched comfortably in my seat, “What’re you paying. I sure don’t work minimum.”

T.T. cursed us one and all , then scrambled into the squall. We waited a judicious minute, grins all around, then finally went out to help. Fun is fun, but in the end we’re all in this together.

There comes a time in every man’s life, even a South Ender’s, when a living has to be earned, not made.  Filthy lucre, root of all evil, the spoils of Mammon, etc etc.  But you can only barter your unsalable art for so long, you can only eat the scrawny leftover beans in the garden until not even the snails and the slugs have much to pick over, you can only scavenge the mussels and the free range clams so long before they’re on the local endangered species list … but the time will come when a homesteader worth his salt has to throw down the hoe and accept defeat at self sufficiency.

That time, I’m not happy to report, has come knocking.  The fat sassy days of an indolent summer are gone and now the rains are here driven by the storms that drive them.  The time has come to pursue the greenback of dollar, not moss.  So … for a few days old Skeeter has to put his tail firmly between his legs and mosey up to moose country where, rumor has it, there may be a job waiting if everything works out right.  Last time, things didn’t work out right, but … ever the infernal optimist, I’m going back.  Wish me luck, take a few days to go cold turkey on this blog site, expect some chilly arctic stories when I get back.  Maybe we all need a break ….

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/audio-Welkommen-Wagon.mp3[/podcast]audio — Welkommen Wagon

I meet folks all the time who have jobs, careers, full employment, financial security, the whole economic enchilada …. but who don’t really like what they do. My parents called that ‘Reality’. Lucky for one of their rebellious kids, at least. I had a buddy’s kid tell me recently – at age 12 – he wanted to be an osteopathic surgeon. ARE YOU KIDDING ME??? At age 12 I wanted to be a cowboy.

I mean, where’s the romance here? The adolescent will toward some kind of schoolkid passion? Some ideal of a calling untethered to adult notions of a proper career. Where’s the deep seated urge to … I don’t know, just do something fun, something for the helluvit? Mom, Dad, I got an announcement to make. I’ve been thinking pretty hard lately about what I want to do with my life. I’ve been turning it over and over in my head, you know, between updating Facebook and worrying about my acne, and I’ve finally come to a decision. Osteopathic Surgeon. Whaddaya think?

My folks might’ve been relieved I no longer aspired to Cattle Punching, but somehow I suspect they would’ve rolled their eyes and said, wait a few years, why don’tcha? You’ll find something you love. Course, trouble was, I did. I went through a number of career explorations. Restauranteur. Metro bus driver. Teacher. Substitute teacher. Dog pound kennel worker. Hospital orderly. Furniture stripper. School bus driver. Stained glass artist.

Oops. Stop the film. Rewind to stained glass artist. This is a career? This is what you went to college for? This is what you want to do? And expect to make a living??? Have you considered, oh, osteopathic surgery maybe. Or dentistry?

You could’ve knocked me over with a feather too. Sometimes life’s detours become an interstate. Occasionally passion will override the sensible and the safe and the sane. I know my friends who have impressionable children don’t want the kids near me for fear of contact contamination, but … I know this: life is way more fun, way more meaningful, way more worth living —- if you pick the life you love, the wife you love, the job you love, than if you choose the route that’s most lucrative.

Although …. I think those routes ARE the most lucrative — even if they don’t make much money. My folks might not agree, but at least they can rest easy knowing I didn’t become a cowboy. At least not a real one.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/audio-magic-wands.mp3[/podcast]audio — magic wands

Every now and then the Past comes calling. We have old friends who, like family, invite themselves, their kids, their kids’ kids and now grandkids, dogs, other friends, the whole menagerie, all looking for a South End Get-Away from their humdrum, their psychotraumas, their own Present. I’m not sure what they see in our Shangri-La-La here, but they’ve watched it for over 30 years grow from a blackberry and nettle menaced world of shacks and varmint to whatever it’s become now. They came then and they come now….

I’m a nostalgic S.O.B. if you want to know the truth. The South End for me is really the place I came to in 1977 as a lost soul, an unemployed bum, a failed writer, a boy just divorced. As bleak as my old shack looked in the dreary winter I came, it was a salvation, a safe harbor, a new beginning. Maybe we always get second chances, but I didn’t think that was necessarily so back then. I thought if I could just have one more chance…. If I could just learn from my many mistakes, if I could just re-start, if I could just sit down and put the pieces back together in a better way….

My old friends remember the old me. They bring that mirror along with the fine wines and specialty chesses, the hundreds of stories of our wild days they see as their mythology. They moved on to careers and family. Me, I moved here. I dug further into the wild. I suspect I remind them of their youth, even though we all have grown old. But the real truth is, we are the kids we were then, grown along different paths. We hold mirrors to these others and imagine different destinies.

If we did it right, we’re glad we’re not them. They’re old friends. They’re our past and of course our present too. We’ve grown older than we wished and maybe not so wise as we’d hoped. We’re like the roots of ancient trees wrapped into one another, those trees all pushing toward the light above, all leaning on each other.

We’re an odd little woods.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/audio-a-day-late-for-valentines.mp3[/podcast]audio — a day late for valentine’s

The Band’s been racking our collective brains for what we might do for this year’s Floyd Norgaard Cultural Center concert.  One year we had a South End Art Show, what you probably think of as oxymoronic.  One year we had a quilt show.  Real cold sleeping that year, I remember, all those missing quilts.  Another year we had a Back Road Tour of the South End slide show, sort of Rick Steves on a dollar-a-day budget.  Last one we had free beer and wine.  It’s hard — it’s REAL hard — to top that one.  Unless we brought in a keg of our heavy nettle beer and a few gallons of Erich’s moonshine merlot.  But hellfire, these are like family jewels.  We love you guyz but even love has a LIMIT….

Oh, we considered some wild options this year.  The South End MOVIE.  But none of us own a movie camera.  And we thought about bringing in a Farmer’s Market.  But it is winter.  I mean we really wracked our brains and we pooled our IQ’s  and well, damn!  I guess we just don’t have much new to bring to the table.  Probably just Creative Fatigue or Imaginative Dysfunction or maybe just tired blood.  We feel bad, we really do.  I suppose we could just pound out a few of our Greatest Hits, sign some autographs then head for the motel with some of you more ardent fans, but ….  I don’t know, that just seems so … inadequate for the occasion.

So we went back to the drawing board and we decided we would do the unvarnished, unadulterated, untold history of Stanwoodopolis.  After all, it IS the Historical Society putting this shindig on.  We figured it was high time the Losers wrote the history.  Maybe get to the truth and grit of the matter for once.  We’re digging through the closets and oh yeah, we’re dragging out the skeletons.  This is the history your granny wouldn’t tell ya on her dying day.  But we’re more than happy to.  Hopefully long before our dying day.