The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Those were some good times in the plantation mansions of Dixie before the War ruined everything. Manners, gentility, mint juleps, ballgowns flowing, pickaninnies cavorting, cotton harvested, banjos playing with cicadas thrumming accompaniment and happy Negroes dancing. What’s not to love? What’s not to feel nostalgia for? Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben in the summer kitchen, preparing dinners for Massa, I know it makes my pea pickin heart yearn for the antebellum paradise lost after those Yankee invaders burned Atlanta and most of the rest of the Deep South.

And now they want to take down the statues of fallen heroes, ban the movie with Vivian and Clark, purge the sweet potato memories of good old boys from Georgia to Virginny. Oh, the horror, the horror! They even want to remove that last vestige of the Confederacy from the flag of the great state of Mississippi! Is there no shame, you carpetbaggers, you Union jackals, is there no limit to the perfidy of you and these protesters and their pals?

You never really surrendered, did you? You never gave up the dream of owning other people, maybe not outright, but as sharecroppers, indentured servants, minimum wage earners. You never believed those Africans were people like you were, just folks beneath you, beneath your bootheel. You didn’t believe they should be emancipated much less given the right to vote. You don’t want your kids going to school with their kids, you don’t want them living in your suburb, you don’t really want them living in your country. When one of them, a half black man, was elected President of your conquerors’ United States, you didn’t accept that any more than you accepted Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. You still believe in the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, the Posse Comitatus. If the police kill an unarmed black man, no big deal, just cops protecting your property rights, right? Black Lives Matter? You don’t think so, you never did.

So now the country is finally waking up to you, finally staring at the redneck face of racism. Hell if I know where they’ve been, watching too much TV maybe, binging on internet, too busy to notice that you never really gave up, just kept suppressing votes, kept fighting against segregation and civil rights, kept going to your pretty steepled churches. But they seem to be paying attention now and they want your statues taken down, your flags relegated to the moths, your Jim Crow sent packing. And oh my, how you wail, how you cry. Well, frankly, my dears, we don’t give a damn.

“The president does read,” (Press Secretary)McEnany responded. “And he also consumes intelligence verbally. This president, I’ll tell you, is the most informed person on planet earth when it comes to the threats that we face.”

Earth to Kayleigh, Earth to Kayleigh, please check your GPS, you have the wrong planet. I live on planet Earth. I was born on planet Earth. And you, obviously, have never visited planet Earth. What celestial body you are talking about, the one where Donald Trump is literate, the one where he receives intelligence reports and is more informed about threats to his minions, may not even exist in this solar system, possibly not even this galaxy? If you mean the planet Trump Tower, okay, that we might believe. Smarter than Jared and Ivanka, Don Jr., that other mouth-breathing kid of his, sure… Probably not the doorman, though.

We all watch these press conferences, whether it’s Kayleigh or Mike the Veep, and the embarrassment factor is off the charts. Reporters develop skin rashes just being in that kind of proximity to idiocy. The most informed person on the planet? Seriously? The man who won’t wear a plague mask? The guy who can’t read an intel briefing report, the goof who prefers Fox and Friends to Cabinet meetings, the dope who thinks the coronavirus can be eliminated with ingested hand sanitizer and ultraviolet probes? C’mon, Ms. McNinny, this is one of the most clueless, ignorant, narcissistic chuckleheads from here to Alpha Centuri. It isn’t that the Emperor is missing his clothes, it’s that he’s missing a brain that functions. Even his admirers are catching on to the ruse lately.

We don’t necessarily need Einstein as President, Kayleigh. But we need someone who can listen, read, process information, gather advice, analyze, reflect, then make a decision based on, oh, more than what he feels in his gut. Decisions based on Big Macs and fries? Not gonna cut it. All those adults in the room are gone now, fired or quit. The Daycare only has tots in cribs now. The man is impervious to facts, reason, clear thinking, intelligence reports and just about anything approaching rationality. He orbits the gravitational field of Fox, listens to the advice of Sean Hannity over his generals or his advisors or his Cabinet. He left the atmosphere of Planet Earth long long ago. And pretty obviously he’s not planning to return. Godspeed Donald Trump, please go where no man has gone before….

Two Toke Tom asked me the other day why in holy hell do I write these stories. “Live in the moment, Skeeter,” he advised. “Let the past be the past.” Two Toke is a disciple of Be Here Now, living in the Eternal Moment. I could make the argument — and I do — that I’m just allowing the Past to live alongside the Present, but T.T. isn’t buying. To him, the past isn’t prologue, it’s just prolonged, at least by guyz like me.

He’s got a point, but I long ago stopped looking for Enlightenment. The world is a mystery to me and so be it. I guess I have a fondness, though, for what came before. I keep my old shack, I preserve my old stories. I figure nobody much cares, but history means something to me. The newcomers to the South End see the mizzus and me now as Old Timers, anachronistic pioneers on an island where the pioneers vanished long ago. Who cares who lived in the old Nesje house? Who cares if the little building south of us was the Bucklin Store? Who gives a damn if Bernie Road was named after Bernie Dallman and Dallman Road was too. The man is dead and gone and so what if his kinfolks are still here? It’s not like he was a famous war hero. Just a name on some roadsigns to the newcomers.

But there are ghosts among us. There are, I tell Two Toke after the 3rd or 4th, ripples in the continuum. Toss a stone in the pond and it eventually comes back. Tom smiles his Cheshire Cat smile and chuckles from across his kitchen table. We go back a long ways, Tom and me. We go back to when we both first came to the South End, two drifters looking for a future. I guess Tom found the present … and me, I found that too. Time is the great Trickster is what I think, but Tom and I both found what we were looking for, we just took different paths to getting there.

Two Toke says, late in another evening, “I do read your stories, man.”

I give him MY Cheshire grin. “I know you do, Tom. I write em for you. So you won’t forget.”

Tom’s eyes twinkle, they’ve grown so moist, and the light from them is like stars light years away, no telling how long ago, just a sparkle that arrives right now. “You’re a crackup,” he says in a voice I’ve heard before, a voice not so very far away.

The Vice President came out yesterday for a national update from his Covid Crisis Center, the one his president used to give every day until the blowback got too wild for his hairspray to handle so he just declared the war on coronavirus a victory, told us to go back to work, go to church, go celebrate in a bar, fuggetabout wearing a plague mask. We did. Well, Republican states did. Course they’re now in full backtrack, their contagion statistics approaching total panic, 9000 yesterday in Florida, 16,000 the past three days in Texas, 40,000 sea to shining sea, hospital units approaching overload. Trump sat this update out, let his #2 come out to give faint praise.

I’m all for sunny optimism. Give a pep talk to the troops, offer hope, offer prayers, offer stimulus money, all fine and candy. But sunny optimism when you’re standing in a rainstorm that’s about to become a flood? Ignorance is bliss to some, but when I see all these folks down at the grocery store declaring their freedom, their god-given independence, by refusing to wear a mask because their fearless leader won’t wear one, it makes me wonder what brand kool-aid or light beer I need to avoid. Like the plague. Pence commended his boss multiple times. Things would have been so much worse without his valiant leadership. The sadness of watching a moron praise an even bigger moron is beyond words.

The kids are testing positive for the virus and the kids don’t die as easily as us old coots. That, said the perpetually smiling Mr. Pence, was real progress. Forget about these youngsters spreading it far and wide. Forget that the deaths in the Land of the Slave, Home of the Screed are the highest in the world. By far. Forget that the simplest of preventions, wearing a mask and avoiding close contact, would make all the difference in the world but these yahoos ignore scientific evidence and hope that shutting their eyes and saying I Wish It Were would restore a free-falling economy back to pre-pandemic levels. Stupid is as stupid does.

They tell me an election is at hand. A referendum on leadership. Now that our President has defeated the virus, he has turned to themes of Law and Order, Illegal Immigration, Voter Fraud, all those divisive tactics that landed him in the White House in the first place. Folks were so tired of government, or what they were told was government incompetence or government conspiracy, they rolled the dice on a huckster who said he would drain the swamp, little knowing he would just fill his swimming pool. It’s raining in America and this guy has made sure the government is hampered and constrained. No umbrellas for you! He wants ratings. He wants you to love him. He wants all those without doing one damn thing for you. Asked what his agenda would be for a second term, he doesn’t have a single item on a non-existent list.

What he said was ‘experience’ is an important word, a very important word. Almost as important as ‘talent’. Both very important, maybe impossible to tell which is more important. He sure couldn’t. And he sure couldn’t tell you why he wanted a second term. Here’s a word, a very important word he does understand, maybe more understanding than you can believe. FIRED. This apprenticeship was a bust. Go home, loser.

Now that the South End Diner has reopened with its tables separated the mandated distance and its customers wearing masks —well, half of them wearing masks — the usual debate society has taken up their coffee mugs to parse the intricacies of this plague and now the protests. Big Walter the other morning weighed in on what he thought we ought to do with those folks down in Seattle and Gomorrah who had taken over a police precinct station and set up barriers for what they declared were police free zones.

“Take em out!” he hollered. “Hose em down. Gas em, club em, drag em out of there. Who do they think they are, anyway?” Walter is an NRA guy. His real solution is to shoot the whole lot of them. Whoever ‘them’ is. He thinks they’re antifa anarchists, cruising the Capitol Hill area with assault rifles and sawed off shotguns. Walter knows how to handle those types, he’s told us many a morning, maskless and spitting in fury. Even his pals sit as far away from Walt as possible.

Two tables away Jerry declares that this is America, dammit, and people have the right to protest without being tear gassed or shot with rubber bullets. Walter, predictably, said he wouldn’t use rubber bullets. Jerry rolled his eyes, shook his head and set his coffee mug down with a bang, sloshing java onto the formica. He pulled his mask back up and muttered “You should have been a cop, Walter.” Which pleased Walter immensely, judging by the smirk on his face.

Two Toke and I exchanged eyeballs, impossible to judge expressions through these plague masks, maybe the worst part of wearing the damn things, but I saw his eyebrows lift slightly, a sign he was about to enter the fray, stir the pot as he liked to say. “I hate to do this, but I gotta agree with Walter, Jerry.” Walt stopped chewing his eggs, wary of T.T. since they agreed on nothing, ever. Jerry looked shocked too. He pulled his mask down to drink his coffee and waited for Two Toke to make his point.

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for protests. Been to a few myself. Been tear gassed and pepper sprayed, all part of the fun. But taking over police stations and setting up your own little government, I don’t think so.” Jerry argued, “It’ll wake the city up. And it’ll show them the People can govern themselves if the city fathers can’t do it right.” Walter choked on his mouthful, waved a fork at Jerry and tried to talk and chew at the same time before T.T. beat him to the punch.

“Picture this: instead of the Black Lives Matter folks taking over Capitol Hill, it was the Proud Boys. Or the Aryan Nation. Posse Comitatus. Folks with guns and attitude. Not your attitude. Walter’s maybe. Not yours, not mine. How would you like it then? I wouldn’t. Not one bit.”

Jerry didn’t want to relinquish his point. Walter wanted to see this new side of the argument. He liked that notion of vigilantes with guns controlling a few blocks of a too liberal city. “Suppose tomorrow we came to the café and the Flatheads declared this a new car free zone. Nobody but the car guyz allowed. Barred the door and set up a roadblock down the road, vintage cars lined up across the highway. Nobody gets in but the Flatheads.” A couple of the vintage car guyz at a table by the door hooted their approval. T.T. said “See what I mean?”

And so normality was restored at the Diner, plague or no plague, mask or no mask, logic or no logic. We all would agree it was good to be back.

I got a buddy across the island here, Techno Tom, who bought himself a 3-D printer this year. Awhile back he’d helped me retrieve all the information off a computer of mine that died the black screen death. A dead computer is a lot like having your house burn down with all your records, photos, writings, letters, all your memorabilia, so when he managed to worm his way into the guts of that carcass and resurrect the information, it was like a fireman digging through ashes and hauling out photo albums of my life. He even tried to rebuild that house, I mean that computer. And Tom had the relays, the mother boards, the circuits, the sensors and the fuses to do it, an entire room full of gizmos and silicon. But there are limits, even for a genius.

He keeps two servers in his garage. Most of us, myself included, hear the word server and nothing comes up on our cranial screen other than the guy who says, I’m Juan, I’ll be your server. He keeps one dedicated to operating the well for his community’s water system, tracks the tides, the water usage of all the neighbors on that well, the chlorine injection, lab tests, probably every toilet flush up and down the line. It goes without saying he programmed the entire thing, a bunch of black boxes stacked six feet high, a science fiction brain flickering with colored lights over in the corner where some folks might park a car.

A few days ago he showed me his hummingbird feeders, cute plastic things hanging from a tree outside, that he’d made with his 3-D printer. The top screws into the bottom, the feeding spouts project out along the tray, cute flowers adorn the sides. Every bit of it had to be programmed into the computer that runs the machine, then the printer injects molten plastic in a line back and forth for about eight hours to build the feeder. It hurts my head to think of this, the exact distance and curvature of the male thread into the female coil, nothing my brain would handle, not in the years I have left, not maybe ever.

Another friend told me Techno had manufactured a part he needed for his mizzus’ boat’s windshield wiper. Why not? Just plunk down at a keyboard and calculate diameters, distances, whatever it needs, feed it to the machine and voila, there’s the part no longer available in the aftermarket. I was afraid to ask Tom if he’d started buying amino acids, DNA, protein packages and various serums. He just smiled, but when I need a new ear or a better thumb, I know who I’m gonna call.

This week’s police blotter in the Stanwoodopolis Gazette, as usual, was filled with the heinous crimes going on all around the island. Frightening stuff! One woman called 9-1-1 to report a cat that had clawed her car’s exterior. And if that didn’t send you to the cellar to hide from the ongoing crime wave, here’s one that should shiver yer timbers. Rabbits! Rabbits eating a garden! Yes, hard as it is to comprehend in these civilized times, these offenses happen all too frequently. Bunnies chomping on our lettuce, snacking on our peas, lurking in the bean vines.

What is a citizen to do??? Well, this woman called the police. I can only hope every squad car on the island responded to this cry for help. You know, if they weren’t already occupied with speeders down at the 35 mile per hour zone by the country club. ‘All units, we have a rabbit intrusion in Mrs. Cramer’s vegetable garden! Respond with all possible haste! The lettuce is nearly gone and reports of pea nibbling are coming in now! All units! We have a bunny robbery in progress!!’

I myself have rabbits infesting my vegetable patch. It is no laughing matter!! I have double fences, wire within wire, surveillance cameras, scarecrows, everything but Elmer Fudd and his wabbit gun. The bastards eat everything from peas to donuts. They are a menace, I don’t care how cute those bunnies are, they’re destroying my garden! But … somehow, don’t ask me why, I’ve never thought to call the sheriff. I know they’re not really all that busy, mostly traffic violations, speeding tickets, petty drugs, but nevertheless, I guess I just never thought they would take care of my rabbit problem. Silly me!

I’m not really sure if they arrested those pesky wabbits up at my neighbor’s or not. I kinda doubt it. My wabbits aren’t easily rounded up. If they were, I wouldn’t have a problem, now would I? I’m not really sure if garden larceny by small mammals is illegal, although I would hope it is. I have a family of raccoons who could use a few months in the hoosegow or at the very least an ankle bracelet. And don’t get me going on the squirrels, those rats with furry tails. The cops should set up surveillance on those varmints!

Truth is, I’ve obviously been a varmint vigilante. Next time I find Bugs nibbling on my bean stalks, I should call 9-1-1, not take the law into my own dirty hands. This year my vermin are snails. Eating every sprout as soon as it comes up for air. I tried the beer tactic, but that just made it Happy Hour for slugs. And I have more uses for beer than contributing to the delinquency of a slug minor, trust me on that. Still, about one more day of slimy destruction, I may have to call the sheriff’s deputies. Hopefully they’ve been trained in alternatives to violent confrontation. I don’t need my pea patch riddled with bullet holes from trigger happy cops.

You know your day is going to go downhill when the first words you hear are “I have some bad news.” You worry just HOW bad that news will be, illness in the family, disaster down the road, any number of fears jumping out of the closet you try to keep them in. So when it turns out to be the washing machine, you think, well, nobody’s hurt. How bad can a busted washer be?

I have dealt with busted washers in my brief time as a Maytag repairman. And I can attest that, no, lives were not lost, but … in some cases I wish mine was after a day or two disassembling machines that were obviously not meant to be repaired by do-it-yourselfers, simple things, but encased behind everything else. The repair bill for something like a catch filter, usually easily accessed, but in our washer requiring door removal and major disassembly, would be astronomical. And probably justified.

Today, though, the door hinge broke. I smiled inwardly, happy in the knowledge that I would not be required to do a washer colonoscopy to repair this thing. On the other hand I’m no longer naïve enough to think any plumbing repair will be a piece of cake, those days are long gone. The plumbing gods, inscrutable and malevolent, exact terrible tolls for those who think they can travel their pipes with impunity. The real question is how high the price? How great the pain? How tentative your sanity?

The door came off without much ado. The hinge was hidden beneath two sections, inner and outer door, but fine, just locate the odd tools that fit the screw heads, a trick the manufacturer plays to frustrate us do-it-ourselfers. I got it out, didn’t even lose some of the screws that fell under the machine, to discover the pins that the hinge rotated on had both broken, top and bottom, no doubt high quality pig iron, something Whirlpool must have saved a nickel or 6 cents using inferior metal. My hope that I could repair or substitute the pins was a pipedream. The entire unit was one piece and I wisely decided not to try to glue the pins back to the hinge, no dummy me. I went online instead.

Where, after some searching for model numbers, I located my part. Whirlpool no longer makes that part, or so my first search stated confidently, probably the worst news I could get. For want of a cheap-ass hinge, the war was lost and a new washer would be required? Really? I went on Ebay looking for a used hinge. No dice. I looked for an entire door assembly. No luck. Finally I went back to looking for the part online and after some time found one. $117. Roll that number back and forth on your tongue, then consider the machine, new, cost about $600. That’s 20% of the cost of a new Whirlpool front load washer. In what universe does this make any sense whatsoever? I will tell you what universe, the one that exalts capitalism, the one that claims competition drives prices down, the one that believes in the fine print that obsolescence is necessary for a vibrant economy, the one that outsourced washing machines to China, that one.

My part is now on order. I reassembled the old door. Backwards of course the first time, the third time was a charm. Good practice for when the part arrives in a week. If I’d wanted it next day, only 40 dollars more. Ten to get it in a week. You know, and I do too, when that part comes, 50-50 it will be the wrong part. This is not pessimism, this is plumbing.

Now, a lot of us South Enders look a little dubiously at Dad’s Day. It sounds suspiciously like one of those STING operations for deadbeat dads delinquent on child support payments. Get us all down here, then throw the net. We can already see the headlines in the Conway Chronicler: South Enders nabbed in Paternity Sting.

NOT that I’m saying I’m a deadbeat dad. I know being an artist and a banjo picker sort of doesn’t help the image, but we all been down on our luck. Little Jimmy understands that. His mom’s a little less forgiving, but when the CD sales start rolling in and the big art commissions, she’ll change her tune.

What with all these studies proving that more than a quarter of men in this country aren’t the genetic fathers of their children, Fatherhood on the South End has taken on a whole new meaning in these modern times we live in. DNA tests take all the romance out of relationships, you ask me. The old family tree’s got some extra branches now. And I guess that’s good, but it sure takes some of the mystery away from sparking and courting. Personally I don’t care to find out half the South End String Band is related.

But it IS father’s day coming up. Won’t be long before dear old dad is just a Test Tube in some sterile lab. Sample # 74 Double X, blue eyes, dark hair, long fingers for the banjo. I like to think I got more to offer than a Petri dish. Although, Little Jimmy’s mom might not agree.

The Band was thinking of maybe lobbying for Father’s Day being a day of amnesty. You know: Give a Dad a Break Day. Or even a whole month. NOT that I’m saying the boys down here are looking for a way to skip the June payments. We were just thinking a little breathing room ….. you know, til the CD sales pick up.

I got a lot of friends who are O.C.D., obsessive compulsive disorder folks, what we on the South End call Anal. Harsh word, anal, so for our purposes here we’ll stick with OCD. Don’t want to offend anyone, but linguistics can be a two edged knife. My pals suffering from OCD are mostly engineers, but they don’t see their symptoms as suffering. Or a disorder even. In fact, they would argue that the orderliness they demand of themselves is quite possibly the panacea for the problems the rest of us have. Course, they don’t factor in the fact that the problem I have is mostly them.

But let’s be fair. The new psychiatric diagnostic description for myself is: S.L.O.B. Seriously Lacking Obsessive Behavior. Poor toilet training as a kid, I guess. I don’t have to wash my truck every damn week. I don’t wash it every year some years. I accept that the universe is falling apart, what we call entropy down here in the South End Scientific Community. It’s just how things work. They go to hell in a handbasket and if you want to spend your life pushing rocks up a hill like Sisyphus, be my guest. They’re going to make a nice rock wall for yahoos like me when they end up down my way at the bottom.

I don’t make my bed. I don’t clean my windows. I don’t dust my shelves. I don’t edge my lawn. I don’t stack my firewood in nice rows. I don’t organize my files. I don’t follow directions. I don’t even look at the damn directions. I don’t follow a recipe or write one down either. I mean, why? The next batch of bread or homebrew or the next meal will be different, maybe better, maybe worse. C’est la vie, amigo! Routine is the killer, lists are for someone closer to death, order is for the delusional, life is chaos and the sooner you accept it, the better off you’ll be. So yeah, I’m SLOB.

I’m sure there’s a pharmacological cure for my ailment. But hey, I’ve got a pharmacological cure for lots of my ailments, why add one that might have side-effects for the others? In the final analysis, I suppose there’s a nice equilibrium between me and my OCD cronies. They draw in the lines, I draw the rest. When it works, we got a great little homeostatic community. When it doesn’t, well … we’ll find out what happens when gravity hits anti-gravity. Probably sounds like my banjo…..