The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I just saw a survey that showed where 30% of kids under the age of 4 years old have a TV in their room. Granted that Mom and Dad want their child not to feel deprived. No one, not even kidless me, wants a maladaptive, potentially hostile punk menacing his or her fellow pre-schoolers because of a deliberately imposed TV deficiency. Plus, it’s a great solution for a 2 year old’s fear of the dark. Boogieman under the bed? Believe me, he’ll pale in comparison to the nightly news.

I remember sitting in front of our first TV – a small box on metal legs with a rabbit ear antenna on top – waiting for Howdy Doody to come on down in the pre-dawn livingroom while we stared at the Indian chief test signal. TV didn’t program 24/7. No, it had the decency to Sign Off at 11 or midnight, let your brain de-fuzz awhile. Us kids would sneak a flashlight under the covers and read a book. At least until the Old Man came in and told us to go to sleep….

Obviously 30% of you don’t find anything wrong with parking a TV in the nursery. But I do. It feels like the scene in Invasion of the Body Snatchers where the parents — who’ve been snatched already — put the space pod under their kids’ beds. Somehow I doubt the tots are watching PBS. More likely they’re tuning in to 30 commercials an hour, making mental notes for what cereal to whine for or what candy bar or toy or the car they’ll want at 16. Might as well join us adults in the Consumer Nation. Plus it’s a great babysitter. Don’t worry about attention deficiency when they reach 6. They’ll have a computer by then.

Tomorrow I’ll probably see the study that 50% of kids under 7 have their own credit card. Just order up what they want with their I-phone and have it delivered overnight. Call now — our advertisers are standing by.

The other day I bought a bag of Frito-Lay potato chips and as is my wont from my early reading days as an 8 year old studying cereal boxes, I read the packaging. These potatoes, I was informed in a tidy paragraph written by public relations specialists who had no doubt conducted extensive customer surveys, were FARM-RAISED. Imagine! I’m guessing grown right in the ground. Tractors, fields, insecticides, migrant labor: farm raised. BOLD TYPE. Major advertising feature. The oils used were ‘natural’ too and this was worth trumpeting.

Holy cow manure, Batman, what’s the NEXT big thing in the food biz? Cheetos raised hydroponically? Personally I’m not sure consumers are really ready for food grown in the wild. Bugs, fungus, bacteria, all that creepy stuff a farmer is ill-equipped to handle outside a laboratory or a petri dish. We can grow meat without legs now, protein on a rope, and rumor has it the burger chains are nearing a breakthrough on cloning buns, with or without sesame seeds, directly on to the meat patty grown in secret underground hermetically sealed bunkers of Monsanto and Dow Chemical. You think they’re going to stick a filthy leaf of lettuce or a listeria riddled tomato on their antiseptically pure chemoWhopper? Get real. Not….

This whole Slow Food movement just flies in the face of 21st century culinary logic. We invented TV dinners so we’d have the time to watch more TV instead of wasting countless hours messing with the cooking of raw potentially contaminated food. These purveyors of old school eating call themselves environmentalists, but what about the damage from a bazillion cookbooks printed on paper from slaughtered trees? Next thing you know, they’ll advocate recipes for bark. A backlash is coming, count on that, the next step beyond vegetarianism. Stop eating plants. Stop the killing of carrots. It’s not only cruel, it’s filthy with germs and dirt. So Frito-Lay, nice try. But I’m afraid the world isn’t ready — we’ve turned the corner on 19th century farm products. Work on

We all got such short little spans of attention these days, we’re like deer in the median strip of the 6 lane digital highway. Used to be we prized skills like concentration, stick-to-it-ness, focus, diligence, all those traits that are long lost to anyone unlucky enough to own a television or a computer. Now we admire Multi-Taskers, jugglers of e-mail, news crawls, Facebook, text messages and a cellphone conversation while whipping up a dinner for the family between commercials during Fox news. Call me Old School, put a dunce hat on me and make me sit in a corner, but I don’t buy this multi-tasking one little bit. I taught school awhile before I took an early retirement and I’ve tried to teach attention deficit kids whose sole operational mode was switching from one thought to six others in the space of a minute. Trust me —this is a prescription for not learning much of anything, plenty of little.

Deep thinking seems to be a Lost Art. Down at the South End even Shallow Thinking has taken a hike. We got computers, TV, You-Tube, Linked-In, all that stuff like you-all, meaning, we got 3 minute max attention spans. My pals can’t listen to a whole CD — they hit random play and make a radio station out of their CD players.

The world is on constant Channel Surf, snippets of one crummy show, check out the ball scores, click to the news crawlers, bounce through 37 channels of Nature/Food/CNN/chopped liver then start over. The internet should be banned unless we’re on Ritalin. I just hope there are people, few though they may be, living on some remote island of the Digital World, maybe its south tail end, who can still Concentrate, who can plan and build — from start to finish without checking their stock quotations — a nuclear reactor or a Boeing 747 or a skyscraper or a cure for brain cancer.

I had hoped to end this on some pithy, humorous, neatly bundled conclusion — I really had. But … damn if I can remember where we started. Something about crummy memory, I think. All I can say is Alzheimer’s should hold no fear for most of us. We’ve already programmed ourselves for it…..

Merry Christmas, Everyone! I guess it’s okay to say Christmas, but if you find that offensive, Happy Holidays! This has been a great year for the Daddle family and as we do every year, we like to share our glad tidings. Daughter Brenda went back to community college after her degree from Swarthmore proved less than marketable. She is taking Business Accounting and expects to find much better prospects after graduation. We told her English Renaissance History narrowed her career chances, but you know kids these days. A year working for Burger King as an ‘essential worker’ convinced her to change her major. Even with the minimum wage increase that’s coming.

Son #1 Jeremiah served his 9 months and two weeks at the Snohomish County Jail for some breaking and entering. Drugs! You think you’ve warned them about the consequences but they think we’re just old fogies. Jerry should be fine after his Narcotics Anonymous regimen. For the time being he’s comfortable in the basement apartment Linda and I set up. Sure, I miss the pool table, but family always comes first! And it’s great to have him home again, even if we have to lock up our valuables and continually need to quarantine when he exposes us to the Covid his friends seem to always bring to the party.

Son #2 has joined a religious commune down near Santa Cruz. Brian is not supposed to contact his earthly family so we haven’t got much news to report. Occasionally he writes for money and we are happy to help out. Well, Linda is, I confess it irks me no end to send that little twerp anything beyond a message to Wake Up! But these things too shall pass, isn’t that what they say?

Linda is doing much better this year. As you might remember she struggled with some mild depression. Empty nest syndrome is what I thought it was, nothing she wouldn’t pass through soon. Boy, was I ever wrong this time! But her doctor has her on some very effective medications and her crying has greatly lessened. Jerry has been a great help. Sometimes he even makes his own lunches.

Retirement, as a friend of mine likes to say, is greatly underrated. Oh, I struggled a little with boredom at first. Like everyone. But right after my heart attack in February (not to worry, I’m okay, just a couple of stents) I started walking more. You know I never really liked exercise of any sort, but that ticker-tweet kicked me in the butt to get up off the couch and get outdoors. I’ve been walking every day. Truthfully, I walk almost all day. Linda says I’m obsessed, but I say a walk a day keeps the cardiologist away. I tried to talk Linda into walking with me, but she says 20 miles is too much for her. Ha ha. Her sense of humor is coming back!

We did make a couple of trips this year. One to Santa Cruz to see Son #2 at his Seeing Orb Commune, but we were told at the security gate no one was allowed inside, not even parents. Admittedly things got slightly out of hand and the sheriff’s office had to intervene, but in the end I settled down — without some damn mantra — and we drove to the coast and stayed at a very nicely restored auto court overlooking the beach before driving back home.

We also attended a Trump rally in October up at Lynden. The man can connect with an audience, I’ll say that, and we were happily surprised when he won again this year for another four year stint. He’s making America great again and even though I know some of you didn’t vote for Mr. Trump, I think you must to be pleasantly surprised. The business of America is business and this is a billionaire businessman. Okay, enough politics….

Hope you and your family have a warm holiday. We in the Daddle household are going to make Christmas Great Again. It will be Yuge, as Donald says. Ha ha! I mean Ho Ho! Love at ya! Linda and Jeremiah and Skeeter

Jihad Jack was parked in his usual spot at the beer-stained bar in the Pilot House, the South End Marina’s answer to marriage counseling. Any divorce attorney worth his margarita salt would drink nightly down there and write off his bar tab as a legitimate business expense. Jack was twirling his plastic trident in a concoction he’d gotten Brad, the usual bartender during Happy Hour, to ‘create’ for him, something with multiple boozes, eye of newt and a dash of habanero sauce. Jihad called it his Fox News Cocktail since he always watched it on the big screen directly in front of his customary stool.

“There it is,” he hollered so every manjack of us would halt our own conversation for his. “Cornavirus” he cried. “First E-bola and now it’s Covid! You tellin me it’s a coincidence?”

As usual us assembled drinkers began to choose sides, sort of touch football without a football, just fire a pass out over the seating area and see who wouold risk catching the hot potato. “What’s your point, Jack?” Jesse asked, as if he didn’t guess. “You think the government brought this here?”

“Damn right they brought it here,” Jack replied, “just like AIDS.”

Pete set his beer aside and asked, grinning, “What would be their strategy, Jack?”

“They want to inoculate us, can’t you see?? They want to make you bring your kids in and shoot them full of vaccines and autism. Who knows what’s in those shots?”

Dave, two stools downriver, who’s a Physician’s Assistant at the South End Clinic, took his glasses off to study this guy Jack. “You kidding me?” he finally asked. “We got measles cured. We vaccinated kids and it worked. That’s all you have to do. Vaccinate the population. It’s like polio. There’s a cure!”

Jihad Jack smirked. “Yeah, and you want to fluoridate the water too, I bet! The government’s got no right — NONE! — to tell me what to do.” Dave shook his head. “It’s like living in the Dark Ages, that attitude,” he muttered and returned to his beer.

“At least they didn’t have to study propaganda as history, Doc.” Dave half finished his glass and headed for the door. The Pilot House, most nights, is pretty rudderless. Trouble is, it’s the only watering hole for a long ways.

So okay, let’s say you’re in charge of who gets the first doses of the vaccines for coronavirus. Wait, let’s say I get to decide who goes to the top of the line. Nothing against you, but the whole point of this exercise is determining who makes these decisions. Rumor has it there’s a bunker somewhere under the Appalachian Mountains, a safe house, for bio ethicists brought in from who knows where to make the call who goes first, decide who waits while the pandemic keeps on killing. Life and death, who plays God?

The government, that’s who. The same government half of us think is a Deep State conspiracy, the government who created this phony baloney epidemic hoax so they could force us to wear plague masks and then probably find some excuse to take our guns. That government! But … for the time being, let’s agree that I am going to decide who gets the vaccine first, who gets it next, who gets it last. Skeeter the Beneficent, All Knowing, All Seeing, All the Damn Time! Hear me, Minions!

Okay okay, never mind, just go along with this a bit. I have to decree who gets the shots first when the vaccines are shipped in containers chilled to nearly 90 degrees below zero to the various states. First off, I may pull a Trump and deny the Red States much of the first batches. They didn’t believe this pandemic was real. They don’t wear a mask. They want to party in crowded bars and go to church and attend weddings and funerals even if the funeral will eventually be their own. But … being beneficent, I will relent and divvy up the pie equally. Based on population. Unless the Red States have undocumented immigrants they didn’t want to count in the ongoing census. We’ll go along with that, send them only based on what they wanted to count. Fair is fair and Skeeter the All Seeing is nothing, if not fair.

The bio ethicists, whoever they are and wherever they came from, want to give the first batches to the first responders, the hospital personnel, the nursing homes. Okay by me, seems obvious. Wouldn’t hardly need an ethicist to make that call. The next folks in line are the older folks, probably with underlying conditions. If I can figure out my underlying condition, I’m good with that. The old farts without underlying conditions, I assume, are next with sleeves rolled up. Probably me so I’m gonna go with this choice too. Because, as you’ve already seen, I’m fair. Maybe even the fairest of the fair.

Essential workers? You bet. Personally I might put them ahead of the elderly who smoked themselves onto a ventilator, but let’s be magnanimous here, they drove buses, checked out us customers at grocery stores, put themselves at risk same as first responders. Seems only fair they get protected right away. But you know and I do too, they’ll be at the back of the line. Minimum wage earners, essential to the rest of us with money enough to spend during the pandemic. Sorry, but you folks are young mostly. Gotta save the vaccine for us geriatrics.

Hard call, but somebody’s got to make it, right? Half of us probably won’t even take the vaccine if it’s offered. Who knows what’s in that stuff? Who knows what the long term side effects are? Who knows if it’ll even work longer than a month or two? Not that it matters. The government decided not to buy extra vaccine when they had the chance and now we’re at the back of the line for more. Sure glad they’re the ones making all the decisions, not me. If you don’t trust them, well, maybe there’ll be enough vaccine for old Skeeter.

Biker Billy was leaned up against the chrome of Johnny Banshee’s old Hudson showing the boys from the Flatheads, our vintage car club, his newest tattoo. Most of the boys don’t sport body art, figuring, I guess, customizing an old automobile is artistic expression enough. Billy had some heart with the knife in it, dripping drops of blood, and under that the words BORN TO OOZE. “Kind of Old School, isn’t it?” Ronnie asked, risking Billy’s ire which, trust me, no one wants to do. Billy isn’t in an Outlaw Club now, but once a biker, always a biker.

Billy grinned, showing his two missing teeth which none of us ever asked how they got missing. He looked like a pirate gone to seed prematurely. I helped Bill and his girlfriend who was an old bus driver friend of mine from our city days build their cabin too many years ago to count. I like Billy okay, at least when he ran solo or he was sober or he was rehabbing. I didn’t like him much when a few of his biker buddies rolled in with bottles of cheap wine and six packs of beer they’d swill down in record time. Wouldn’t take long until you were the odd man out in their gang and if they were looking for a victim, they didn’t have to draw straws.

Billy’s a tattoo parlor’s wet dream. He went for the clichéd stuff and the Needleman could do skulls and crossbones, snarling dogs and the business end of .38’s in his sleep. Billy was practically covered and running out of room. Once I asked him why he didn’t get a tattoo that was, oh, more artsy fartsy. He glared at me like I was some idiot making fun of his Harley. “Just a thought,” I mumbled and dropped the subject.

I never got the attraction for body art. For one thing, it seems like tourist shop art to me. Butterflies and dragons, Celtic crosses and rainbows, sappy slogans and cornball cartoonery. I figured if I had to look at something dyed onto my skin for the rest of my natural life, I’d want something interesting, something arty, something that maybe I didn’t get sick of in about six months. But then, I’m an old geezer now and that explains a lot.

I had a pal, Norm, who walked up to my artist buddy Prof. Jim one summer day when Jim’s tats were exposed out of his short sleeves and asked him, thinking he was being funny, how drunk was he? This was back in the ‘70’s, before tattoos were all the rage. Jim gave Norm the stink-eye and asked what he meant. “The tattoos. You must’ve been drunk on your ass, right?”

Jim pretty much gave Norm an education that day and I learned not to ask much about folks’ body art. It’s their body, as the women’s rights advocates say, to do with as they please. And if you’re thinking of questioning guys like Billy, he’ll do what he wants with yours too. Beauty, worst case, is in the blackeye of the beholder.

Scientists down here at the nationally renowned E-Coli Institute, a South End lab and headquarters for research in viral diseases, recently discovered a new symptom for those infected with Covid-19. Besides loss of taste and smell, researchers found that 90% of new cases of positive coronavirus reported loss of humor. ‘Not surprising,’ claimed Dr. Laffsky, famed virologist from the Mabana Center of Immunology, ‘given the recent election with not one but two winners for the office of President of the United States.’

Obviously Doc Laffsky wasn’t suffering himself from the virus. But the findings point up a problem with the Institute’s etiology. Is loss of humor a symptom of the plague or is it more a corollary symptom of the political pandemic we’ve been experiencing for years, prior even to the outbreak of Covid. Could it be that political stress has weakened our immune systems to the degree that the coronavirus had easy access to our population. When asked, Dr. Laffsky considered the notion. ‘That would be like saying Donald Trump is an auto-immune disease on the body politic. It would be unheard of. A first in the history of viral epidemiology. If it were true, and I’m not saying it is, it would be a breakthrough in medicine the equivalent of Louis Pasteur’s discoveries.’

The good doctor paused in our interview, jotted down some quick notes and said it could essentially be Nobel prize-worthy before hurrying to his laboratory to make a call he said he’d forgotten. ‘But what about the loss of humor?’ this reporter yelled to him as he retreated down the antiseptic halls of the Institute.
‘Knock knock,’ Doc Laffsky called back. ‘Who’s there?’ I replied, playing his game. ‘Funny bone,’ he said, turning the corner out of sight. I thought I heard him, but barely, answer himself, ‘Funny bone you should ask.’

I decided then and there to get myself tested as soon as possible.

I was out in the outbacks of Stanwoodopolis today, down a dirt road I’d never traveled, one no doubt soon to be paved and developed, but for now 35 acres off the highway, down a dead end, where a buddy was clearing out a recently deceased friend’s shop, house and outbuildings to the highest bidders. Actually, to anyone who would take the stuff, pay the daughters of the deceased what you thought was fair.

First time through I rummaged around, took some maple and walnut lumber, shielded my eyes from the siren call of power tools I really don’t need any more of, and was about to take my leave when the old parlor stove caught my eye back in the far corner of a crammed shop. Now … for those who think a thermostat, the kind with a dial and a graduated temperature setting, is an antique compared to the new digital, individual areas with timed on and offs controlled by a smart phone … for those of us who have avoided moving into the late 20th Century, a wood parlor stove is a tempting item. And … if you have a 1930’s stove that heats your woodshop with a gaping crack in the cast iron body, you better believe a 1900 intact, fully functional, nickel top stove would be hard to resist as the perfect replacement in your shop. Which explains why it’s in the back end of my truck waiting until daylight to unload the beast, drag it into its proper place on the throne and keep me warm these cold damp days. With style!

I guess I live an antique life, I know that. And as the world accelerates exponentially, I realize I’m falling farther and farther back, an object no longer closer than it seems in the rearview. Even these — these scribbles on a page written by hand in the upstairs of my old shack — are old school anachronistic musings few people will read and no one will remember. And why would they? This particular past in the digital future will look as obsolete and irrelevant as, oh, I don’t know, heating with wood cut and split and stacked and burned by some old fart in a stove you might see in a museum. You know, if we still had museums by then.

Thanksgiving came and went a few days ago. We usually invite a few friends and neighbors in for turkey and dressing, cranberries and sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie and plenty of libation … but not this year. Just us chickens, Ma and me, plus a turkey, smallest one I could find, too much for two people by double.

These are the dark days of Northwest winter, rain and wind, the dreary beginning of months of northern latitude, early sunsets and late sunrises. The urge to hibernate beckons seductively from under the quilts. Like it does every year. Add to that Covid, be nice to sleep until the vaccines are ready.

But, in all honesty, the holidays find us healthy, still here on the remote South End, busy with our projects, retired or not. Our Thanksgiving was a nostalgic flashback to those first years down here when we knew virtually nobody and nobody knew us. Anonymity, thy name is bliss. We had each other after losing that for a few years, so to reunite was a small miracle and one to be thankful for, not just those early years, but every year. So to spend a Thanksgiving by ourselves during the plague, well, we’ve learned how to celebrate that long long ago. The only difference, I suspect, is we have so incredibly much more to be thankful for.

Sometimes life surprises you with lucky rolls of the dice. We’ve had more than our fair share. But none, if you ask this old codger, as lucky as the year we got back together, two broke kids holed up in a shack at the end of America, on an island far from anywhere, just the two of us and a future we hadn’t yet dreamed.

What more could anyone ask for?