The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/CLICK-TO-HEAR-FutureFarm.mp3[/podcast]CLICK TO HEAR —FutureFarm

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/CLICK-TO-HEAR-of-gods-and-politics.mp3[/podcast]CLICK TO HEAR —of gods and politics

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/CLICK-TO-HEAR-SPENDING-MY-KIDS-INHERITANCE.mp3[/podcast]CLICK TO HEAR — SPENDING MY KIDS’ INHERITANCE

When I was a hothead radical in the 60’s, I thought the government was killing Black Panthers, spying on civilians, letting industry and corporations foul our air and poison our water and lying to us about the war in Viet Nam.  Turns out most of that was true.  My old man said if I didn’t like it here, I could move to the Soviet Union.  Four decades later the Soviet Union is broken up and I still live here.  The government still lies about wars, still spies on civilians.  And my old man is now the one sputtering about the damn government, never mind that he worked all his life in the public sector for the U.S. Forest Service.  The Republicans, now in full battle cry, denounce the EPA, the Post Office, most all government agencies as evil incarnate.  I guess this is the American version of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.  Round up the bureaucrats and send them to Dakota to farm sunflowers.

Social Security is now called a Ponzi scheme.  Regulations on businesses are job killers.  Taxes are a pox on the body politic.  Politicians, except the GOP, are liberal bloodsuckers.  We have moved a long haul right of Richard M. Nixon.  And compromise, once the cornerstone of American democratic prinicples, has become a white flag of surrender to the anti-capitalist Democrats.
Hot talk radio, misinformation from the internet, corporate consolidation of the media — who the hell knows what is true or not anymore?  Demagoguery is winning.  Maybe it has already won.  I get my father’s e-mails of patently false vitriol, week after week, forwarded by his pals to millions.  They believe what they want to believe.  And they want to believe the president is a Muslim, is a terrorist, is a communist and a traitor and a foreigner.  They want to believe the government is responsible for their unhappy lives.  They want to drink their Kool-Aid, turn on and tune out.  The Times, they aren’t just  a’changin, they’ve reversed polarity.  Oh, and Dad, if you and your cronies don’t like it here, why don’t you move to China!

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/CLICK-TO-HEAR-spud-spirit.mp3[/podcast]CLICK TO HEAR — spud spirit

I know I don’t have very many fans judging by the sparcity of hits I get on the Skeeter Daddle blogsite,  but occasionally someone acknowledges they read something in the Crab Cracker and then usually they offer me ideas for my next so-called humor sketch.  I assume they figure, possibly a bit too accurately, that I’ve run out of my own ideas.

Recently a friend said I should write one about Zumba.  I don’t actually know jack about Zumba.  Course, I don’t know doodley about much of anything and that hasn’t stopped me, but my friend was kind enough not to mention that.  We got Zumba down at the South Grange.  Looks like a rock concert parking lot out there where they’re zumba-ing.  Without the drugs and drinking.  I got a buddy who goes so I asked, hey, Zorba, what’s the deal with this Zumba stuff?  And he looked at me the way Lance Armstrong would look at the jerk who asked him why he didn’t just buy himself a Harley.   To meet women, he said, what else?

Now, I’m not politically opposed to organized exercise.  You want to get in shape, I’m okay with it.   Really.  But there is something about group sweating I’ve never warmed up to, no doubt a personal failing, a flaw in my communal DNA, and probably the reason my career as quarterback in the NFL took a small detour.  I drive by a gym and see those panting bodies cycling maniacally with headphones strapped on next to dozens of other aerobiscists and I get the deja-vu of a high school locker room crammed with week old jock straps and the pheromones of pre-steroid sadists and I think to myself I’d rather have two teeth extracted without novacaine than join back in with the athletic crowd.

I chop wood and haul brush and clear land and build outbuildings and, well, all that old school exercise that wasn’t considered exercise, just an active lifestyle.  A study recently (and I KNOW we don’t believe science anymore) said exercise for folks who are basically sedentary really didn’t offset the deleterious effects of entire days spent in a cubicle or at a desk.  Not that you should give up and wait for that aortic stent….

Then again, maybe you should do like we do down at Nature’s own gym of the South End:  quit your job, go back to the land, find your natural aerobic center.  The life you save might just be your own.

Even down here in the bucolic nettle fields of the pastoral South End, our laid back, porch-rocking, garden hoeing pace is definitely picking up speed.  More and more satellites are whizzing through all that space junk overhead to bring us faster weather reports, more TV channels, instant text messaging and close-up photos of the rocker on the porch from Google Earth we don’t have so much time to sit in anymore.  Our attention spans now aren’t long enough to make it through the Stanwoodopolis Weekly Gazette so we check Yahoo headlines on the computer that rockets in on DSL.  If you’re younger than 30, you never looked at a newspaper in your whole life.  Why bother, you can get the only news you’re really interested in on Facebook, what your ‘friends’ are doing, news enough, I guess, these days.
Our old shack has its share of 21st century gizmoes.  Microwave oven, digital telephone answering machine, ma’s nano-pod, two computers (his and hers) and all the peripherals right down to a podcast microphone.  We got lazerized CD players, DVD players, a remote controlled TV antenna, digital alarm clocks, electric guitars.  We look like the Jetsons without the robot maid.  And that’s on back order from Amazon….
This is all the stuff advertised as Time-Saving Devices back when.  Help do your chores more efficiently.  Give you leisure time galore.  Free you to live your dream.  Be your True Self, not a slave to the menial tasking days.  Right…
Maybe I’m too old and too cynical.  Maybe Facebook updating IS your true self.  Maybe bad TV IS the dream.  Maybe what we wanted all along was something to keep us busy, keep us constantly entertained, keep us from sitting too long on the rocker contemplating the front yard that needs mowing.  The world is smaller and definitely accelerating.  The question I got, rocking to an older rhythm, is what the hell was the point of saving time if everything got speeded up so fast all our free time is gone?  Well, I could waste more time on this, but I have to hurry up and update this blogsite.

We been watching a new trend developing lately down here on the South End:  Biodiesel.  Taking farmlands and using them to grow fuel instead of food.   Now, I don’t know what YOUR rig gets per gallon, but I guess most of us Americans want a Bradley Fighting Vehicle to go shopping in war-torn Stanwoodopolis, don’t care WHAT it costs in gas so long as it’s cheaper per gallon than designer bottled water.

I hear a lot of complaining now that gas prices are at an all time high.  I guess we thought a democratic Iraq would be so grateful they’d give us free oil and we’d ALL be driving full size Hummers.  I even heard an oil company last week complaining they didn’t have the money for any more cleanup penalties from the Valdez spill.  Tough times for all of us, I guess.

So maybe it IS the right time to take food and turn it into fuel.  Gas stations’ll look more like a fast food drive-up.  Tomato diesel, hi octane fryer fat, corn on the cob unleaded, you want to supersize that fill-up, ma’am?

The burger chains are already teamed up with the gas stations on this.  Way ahead of us.  Pump the deep fat fryers into you AND your car.  A full service station means they got a health clinic in back to handle clogged arteries, get you back on the road in no time flat.

Cutting down on the driving or cutting down on the car size or cutting down on the calories just isn’t the South End way, I guess.  If it means cutting down our old growth nettle forests to make biodiesel, by god, we’re gonna do it.  Might as well —  we’ll need the acreage for the new autobahn into Stanwood.