The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

[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.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/audio-egotopia1.mp3[/podcast]audio —- egotopia

Some of us layabouts at the Poker Parlor were trying to think up something special for an upcoming 4th of July celebration.  We figured we got so many Vets down this way the Diner might as well declare itself a VFW South End Auxilliary.  And since most of them are vintage car guyz too, they could hold their own annual Independence Day Parade from Camano Head to the Elger Bay Store.  I, of course, wanted to just use these militiamen as an excuse to secede from the Island, but cooler heads prevailed.  As usual.

Two Toke Tom served in Viet Nam and now is pretty much anti- every war.  Jimmy Z, who’s old enough to be Tom’s old man, fought the Japanese in WW2.  Tom thinks Jimmy’s still fighting em and maybe so, but I notice Jimmy driving a Toyota pickup now even though he swore for 60 years he’d never buy a ‘Jap Car’.  Baghdad Bill fought in the second Iraq War and Big Larry just got back two years ago from Afghanistan.  Jerry spent a year in Korea and frostbit a couple of fingers he wishes he had back, but he still can play a mean guitar.  We even got Crazy Eddie who ‘liberated’ Grenada.  We’re missing Somalia and Panama and Bosnia, but with all the newcomers rolling in, we may cover those too eventually.

Sometimes the boyz argue among themselves about those wars and sacrifice and what patriotism really means at the Friday night poker game we’ve been running since 1986 down at the Marina and Bait Shop.  Two dollar limit on bets, no limit on alcohol.  The pots don’t do much damage, but single nettle Daddle Distillery moonshine sometimes does.  I sit in with these war-hardened patriots most Fridays and serve as their patsy and their sometime referee, the one who never served even in peacetime.  Or what Two Toke calls a draft dodging, student deferred, flag burning, Summer of Love hippie protester.  He takes great joy in telling me I would’ve loved the smell of napalm in the morning over there on the Delta.  Jimmy Z chimes in how his platoon could’ve won Viet Nam single-handed although Jimmy never once has told us one iota the hell that must have been Iwo Jima.  But he’s the one who puts a liver spotted hand on Bill’s arm whenever Bill gets overwhelmed by memories of buddies lost in the HumVee he was driving when it was blown off the road to the airport in Baghdad.

We’ve fought too many wars, I think, before realizing I’ve said it out loud.  I see by their pinched lips and averted eyes I won’t get an argument tonight.  Patriotism comes in all uniforms, even no uniform at all.  Big Larry finally breaks the swelling silence, pushes a handful of quarters into the pot and says, real quiet, “I’m willing to spend a couple bucks, Skeeter, to see if you got more than bluff in this hand.”  Grateful to change the subject, I say, “Name of the game, Big.  Read em and weep.”

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/audio-throwing-the-book-at-myself2.mp3[/podcast]audio — throwing the book at myself

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/audio-where-we-are.mp3[/podcast]audio — where we are