The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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.

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

You live in the country out here on the island, you find out the real population is not human (no offense to my Republican friends), it’s an ever expanding group of citizens who live underground (no offense to my artist friends, who burrow and bore (no, not borrow and bare, no offense to my indigent pals) and who seem to be building an entire infrastructure beneath our lawns without bothering to get building permits (no offense to our current commissioner).  I’m talking moles.  Interstate highways rolling just beneath the surface rhododendron to garden, the little buggers tirelessly  tunneling their way from grub to grub.  Who the hell knows what they’re doing?  And who really cares?  At least until they decide to come up for some air.  In the morning those beautifully manicured suburban lawns look like small mortars were exploded by Libyan insurgents.  Ugly piles of dirt and rock sit atop the weed-and-fed fescue and explode in gravelly shrapnel when the John Deere riders hit them.  You better believe this is war.
Moles, at least to me, are like mosquitoes, a plague to be borne, not warred on.  In the end the human race will die off and yes, Virginia, there will still be skeeters and there will always be moles.   Tell that to my neighbors!  They have incredibly complex military strategies plotted out, staged, implemented and studied when they fail.  One retired Seattle police sergeant sat in a lawn chair and simply waited with his service revolver.  When he heard them surfacing, he undid the safety.  When they poked their little pink nose up into his space, ka-boom.   Underground crime dropped 50% that year, but it wasn’t long before new recruits tore up his lawn.  They’ve tried traps and poison, they’ve stuck dried blackberry cane with one inch thorns poking into their sensitive little feet so they’d bleed to death in the hole, they’ve stuck high pressure hoses into the tunnel, they’ve hooked their muffler exhaust to the exits and revved the engine on old trucks to kill them silently.  And the neighbors with noise.   They’ve cursed and they’ve stomped, they’ve bought high frequency noise repellants, they’ve tried the power of prayer.   Nothing works.   They’ve even dumped raw gasoline into the caverns, let the fumes slowly move thru the network, then they’ve set a match to it.
Don’t try this at home!  It is extremely dangerous, not only to yourself, but to the neighbors too.  The moles, not so much.  I think they move quickly along when the odor of gasoline makes the tunnel obnoxious even to them.  They probably set up little lawn chairs over by the azaleas and watch when the whole thing detonates.  Nothing quite it like it, really, when the sod lifts suddenly from its mooring,  and smoke and debris pour out of the mole holes.  Probably loosens the soil nicely for further excavations, is what I figure.  Probably not so great for the perfectly manicured lawn.   At this point, of course, we aren’t thinking rationally, are we?,  we’re thinking revenge.
There are lessons here for all of us and I don’t just mean West Point strategic planning.  The truth is, when all the assaults have proven futile, when the inordinate time spent is ultimately not worth the goal, when the expense is beyond anything sane, sometimes you just have to learn to co-exist with the varmints you live next to.  The moles, I mean…..

CLICK TO HEAR — communism on the south end_