The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

A lot of folks don’t know this, but Black Friday originated on the South End. Tyee Store came up with an innovative marketing scheme back, oh, shortly after dinosaurs went extinct and the Southendomish Tribe gave up on ever getting their treaty rights to hunt pterodactyls. About 1977 it was.

They held a sale day after Gobbler Day, all you could carry half price. Folks camped all night in the rain to get first in line. Terrible cold, hard rain, horrible indigestion. Next morning shelves cleared in about half an hour. The food supplies for the entire South End dried up, hoarded by the lucky few.

Pretty soon the rumors started. Unspeakable rumors really. The denizens of the starving South End began to realize the pizzas were gone and the frozen burritos too and the Hungry Man’s were gonna prove prophetic now that they were missing from the puddling freezer chest bottom. The food riots were a harbinger, I guess. And then the rumors started drifting over to our west side, whispers at first, then full blown howls. Cannibalism, ladies and gentlemen. Cannibalism.

Eventually Tyee restocked their shelves and those delicious deli rotisserie gourmet hotdogs revolved anew. And the rumors? We don’t mention this any longer. We just advise the newcomers to stock the pantry with more than a day’s supply……..

And since then we South Enders traditionally stock up on ‘Black Friday”.

Every Thanksgiving — without fail — our little nuclear unit would belly up to a dining room table loaded to the ceiling fan with a banquet Mom had slaved for two days to cook …. And we’d wait for the Old Man to raise a glass in toast. He’d give a short somewhat sincere thanks, and then he’d ask his predictable, inevitable question, the one his mother asked every Thanksgiving up in the most economically depressed region in Northern Maine where we all were born: “I wonder what the poor folks are doing today?”

You want to put a dull edge on the carving knife, I can’t think of a much quicker way. I know most of us this year would be a lot more thankful if the impeachment hearings were over and the mudslinging and the distortions were put aside for, oh, a few days before the 2020 election cycle dominates our table talk and the interminable TV and radio politics could be blessedly replaced by pharmaceutical and car and deodorant commercials and we could just return to our dreary monsoonal lives of quiet desperation. Be nice to just ratchet down the angst and the anger and just start shopping for Christmas. Or we could maybe hibernate a bit. I know, fat chance.

But my Grandma, bless her kindly heart, was right to worry about those less fortunate, even though she wasn’t all that fortunate herself. Not by our modern standards that we simply take for granted as our God given American right. A full belly can lead pretty quick to tryptophanic complacency for most of us these days.

So when you say a prayer this Thanksgiving or make a toast over that fine Chablis and dive in for seconds on the turkey dressing, leave a little room. Not just for the desserts but for the folks who might be eating alone, who might not have much to eat, who might not have a lot to be thankful for. After all, they’re part of the family too.

I’ve been thinking lately – mostly as an exercise to ward off dementia – about how fast we went from the calculator to the home computer, from Polaroid to digital cameras. Now we got hand held computers that can make phone calls, take quality photos, connect up to the internet, send text messages or e-mail and scramble my eggs. They got apps for everything you can think of, and if you haven’t thought of it, they’ll do it for you. By tomorrow. They keep track of where you are, where your friends are and where you can meet up. Your human little brain is adapting to its hardwire. Your human little brain is mutating toward the vast network it is fast becoming part of.

I’m not saying this is good or this is not. What does it matter what some old geezer on the South End thinks any more? The juggernaut rolls on the way the tide does, only IT doesn’t recede. It’s not going back out and it’s not going to slow down. The digital Genie is out of the bottle. We live more in cyberspace than what used to be called the ‘real’ world.

What I think about is how we will always be the sentience that makes the machine, that writes the software, that controls the matrix. We won’t be, is what I think. And it won’t be too long that the Sci-Fi world outstrips our feeble capacities to keep up. Computers will make computers. They’ll self-replicate and then they’ll upgrade. And of course we’ll expect them to serve Humankind. Even if they realize how puny our little human brains are. We’ll put them IN ourselves, better vision, better hearing, better hearts, sharper minds. Who wouldn’t???

But we’re the weak link. We’re the expendable part, disease prone, emotionally unstable, potentially self destructive and violent. The day will come – and it won’t be as far away as you think – they won’t need creators. Just like we did with God back in the day, they’ll chow down from the Tree of Knowledge and go it alone. The Garden of Eden will be a myth about software.

I was at the opening of new works by one of our local oil painters at the South End Fine Art Gallery and Expresso Shoppe. As always it’s a guaranteed large crowd, mostly us artists and a few of our friends and occasionally a patron or two. Regina, the gallery owner and latte barista, always provides liberal winepours and enough hors d’oeuvres to hold back rickets among the starving artists another week or so.

I was admiring a fine piece titled, tantalizingly enough, “Sailboat at Sunset #56”, one of a series I’m guessing of at least 56 or more, when a couple jostled me out of the way for a better view. I didn’t really mind moving on, after all, there were plenty more similar offerings, but the gentleman of the pair had caused me to spill my merlot onto the sleeve of my last presentable Goodwill shirt, then gave me a cursory ‘scuse me,’ that sounded vaguely like ‘sue me’ before steering his companion and her jangling earrings into the appropriate viewing angle. A moment later they were discussing perspective and complimentary colorations, the expressively bold brushstrokes of the sails, the minimalist way the artist had captured the shimmer of the sea, and of course, the price, anything BUT minimalist.

“I may not know art,” my jostler said, sipping daintily on a white wine from his plastic glass, “but I know what I like.” He was quite pleased at this knowledge, no doubt gained with considerable effort. His companion wagged an earlobe with a windchime banging to life, evidently in total agreement with both of us on this aesthetic declaration.

I guess I was still miffed about the impromptu dye job on my best shirt, or maybe it’s just a character flaw deeper than any fabric stain, but I smiled winningly and said out of the cerulean blue, “I don’t know much about biochemistry, but I sure know a good clone when I see one.” This caused some raised eyebrows, a rolling of the eyes and the beginning of distant alarm bells that would soon drown out the jangling jewelry. For good measure I added, “I don’t know much about history either, but hey, I love a good war. I know what I like.”

So okay, I cost Regina a commission and I should feel bad about that. Probably cost the artist a sale and I should feel worse about that, but I don’t. I do happen to know something about art and art lovers, and I know what I don’t like. I guess it’s okay to buy what you do, for whatever reason. I just don’t think we should be proud of our ignorance. Then again, what the hell do I know?

We got a little library down here at the notoriously (but proudly) illiterate South End. One of those 1960 phone booths landed in the park I care-take across the island about a year ago so I decided it would be easier to make something interesting with it than try to haul it to the dump. We turned it into a Little Library, built bookshelves and stocked it with fiction and non-fiction, even some CD’s. A week later vandals pulled the bookcase out, scattered the books, burned a few, tossed some in the woods and painted graffiti on the glass walls of the booth. Sure, I was bummed, but since I was married to a librarian, I decided to rise above the obvious desecration of literary values and try again. To that end I posted alien robots to guard the sanctuary.

Yesterday I drove by and noticed through the windows the bookshelves were gone so I pulled into the parking lot only to find the entire library, books and bookcase, scattered on the ground and left in the rain, ruined. It’s not like the burning of the Library of Alexandria exactly or even like our own evangelical book burnings, more like a senseless attack on anything intellectual or bureaucratic. Although, to be honest, it’s probably just a couple of kids who think it’s funny to destroy things. You see it all the time, not just on the South End, but it’s epidemic on the internet. Ransacking a little library is probably just our way of trolling down here.

Obviously I underestimated the intelligence of our potential Vandals. It only took them one year to recognize the alien security guards as harmless sculptures. Sure, we could bring in surveillance cameras, hire some security, lock the library up at night, set up lending hours. But … let’s be honest here. Maybe the South End isn’t ready for culture just yet. It might be better to bow to the public, acknowledge their mistrust of books and art, maybe just use the phone booth for a private vaping salon. That, or patiently wait for our hoodlums to grow dumber since pretty obviously they’re not interested in learning much of anything. Couple more years on drugs then we can try the alien robot guards again. Third time, they say, is the charm.

I understand that we humans are basically social animals. I get that. But I grew up in a family that moved from one part of the country to the next, uprooting us munchkins from our schools, our churches, our boy scout troops, our Little League teams and our neighborhood friends. By the time I was 18 we had moved 14 times. So when I started school in a new town, the teams had been picked, the cliques had formed, the lines had been drawn. I ate a lot of lonely lunches in those school cafeterias.

When we moved from Georgia to Milwaukee, the only kids who would give me the time of day were either the geeks or, oddly enough, the hoods. The hoods, despite what you might think, weren’t pretend hoodlums, they carried switchblades and some had guns. But all in all, they were friendly and I was friendless. If you want to understand why kids join gangs, this is basically the reason. My good newfound buddy Randy asked me one day if I wanted to join him and the boys for a drive into downtown that weekend. ‘What’s the plan?’ I asked innocently, thinking maybe a movie or grab an ice cream cone.

‘We’re gonna rumble,’ he grinned. ‘We go downtown every Saturday night to rumble.’ I asked, what’s rumble? Not a term we used down in rural Georgia much. ‘Fight,’ he said. ‘Kick some ass.’ ‘Fight?’ I asked. ‘Fight who?’

‘The niggers,’ he answered. ‘We got four of us, we look for a few of them walking the streets. Then we rumble.’

‘Kick some ass,’ I said, ‘ but ya know, that does sound like fun, only I’m not much for fighting. Dancing maybe. Find some girls. More up my alley. Rumble, I don’t know, Randy. And besides, I don’t have anything against niggers. I don’t even call em that, no offense.’ Like I was worried at that point of being offensive.

Needless to say, I went back to my old lunchroom cafeteria ways and my career of a streetfighting man ended before it even started. Way of the world, I guess. But along comes Facebook a few decades later, offering me one more chance to join in with my fellow tribesmen, an opportunity for social approval, acceptance and the distinct possibility of trolling, ratings, defriending, all those wonderful popularity scorings I’d missed by being a loner in my youth. Oh you bet!

So once again I’m happy enough without the thumbs up thumbs down, the like or dislike, the conformity of my extended group. If this is anti-social, count me in. I’m content being my own worst critic, okay by me.

The mainstream media, ever attuned to the pulse of America, trotted out a little article about the return of exorcism today in my two morning papers. 175 practitioners, it stated, men of the cloth who, when summoned, would cast demons from the afflicted. And no, for the record, they won’t cast Trump from office, just other demons, particularly the Devil. Don’t get me started … it’s too dark a detour.

Sixty percent of us in this country believe in the existence of Satan. Not Satan as a metaphysical construct, but Beelzebub as the embodiment of Evil. Until this President I didn’t believe in the Prince of Darkness, but now I’m not so sure. But again, let’s try to stay on topic here, no point in taking on the impeachment hearings when Schiff and Pelosi are undertaking their own exorcism. Why muddy the water?

Sixty percent of Satan believers is more than the percentage of us who think Donald should be yanked out of office. Okay, I apologize, but the devil made me do it. I will try to stay focused. My point is that if you believe in Lucifer and then start hearing horrible and angry voices or getting mysterious and ugly tweets, you might seek remedy, not in pharmacology, but in ecclesiastically based exorcism. I’m not sure if it’s covered under Obamacare, but it would be worth looking into. Even if it weren’t covered under your insurance plan, the cost of casting out demons might be worth the expense. How long before those nasty tweets eat holes in your brain?

I suppose there must be a School of Exorcism somewhere. A degree. An apprenticeship. Sure wouldn’t want to be the first guy on someone’s exorcism list and end up with a REALLY pissed off Antichrist rattling the cage inside my head because a doofus with a hankering to be a professional Demon Expeller used me for a test case. I want to see some references. I want to see proof he graduated from a certified College of Devil Extermination. I want to see that degree, buddy, before I let you inside my hell-fired brain to battle with the King of Evil.

And … forgive me here for once again violating my promise not to go all political … I’d want to know, if the Devil was impeached, exorcised, cast out, whatever term you want to apply, who would take his place? Winnie-the-Pooh? Mike Pence? Or just another satanic acolyte? A lot of us, if the polls are right, prefer the devil we got to the devil we don’t know. It might just be we need a lot more exorcists than 175. Might be time for our Sec. of Education, Betsy De Vos, to start using charter schools to churn out exorcists by the thousands. Kind of up her alley.

Back in the dark days of a dying print journalism, the Shipley editorial team embarked on what, to most tired and cynical newspaper people, was a foolhardy, quixotic enterprise: to publish local news and local events and local yokels … and to pay for it all, not just with their meager savings and their kids’ college fund, but the Old Fashioned Way. With Advertising. The Walter Cronkites of the Stillaguamish Valley said Don’t Do It! Print has gone the way of the dinosaurs and the House of Representatives’ urge to compromise. Better just to blog. Better yet, get a real job!!! But don’t bankrupt yourselves.

Two years BEFORE Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for a quarter of a trillion dollars, Crab Cracker was launched, corny as it sounds, on a shoestring and a prayer. And now, many laces later, the gods of Gutenberg have spoken from On High and the little Cracker has crabwalked with claws clacking wildly into its 10th year. The Cracker, like the Big Lebowski, abides … while a flailing print medium dogpaddles in the turbulent waters of a digital ocean in expectation of being swallowed lock stock and crackerbarrel. I like to think their success is due to the savvy linkage of their Calendar of Events with local artworks, local poetry, local music and of course, top notch local literature. So okay, literature with a small ‘L’, maybe. All right, they did okay DESPITE these words of marginal wit and not much wisdom. Geez, whaddaya want? A refund?

No doubt the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Le Monde, London’s Daily Telegraph and the Stanwoodopolis Gazette will rush to emulate the Cracker’s example of journalistic freedom and economic viability. Amazon and Bezos’ competitors at Google will no doubt make multi-million dollar offers, Facebook may put the ‘book’ back in for truthfulness, Yahoo may see the profit in using ACTUAL yahoos and the Cracker may someday succumb to the sweet courtship of corporate dating. But I suspect not. The Cracker is here to stay, a constant beacon of current fishing reports, local gossip, tide tables, upcoming auctions and concerts and events, interviews with new artists and the old farts too, all of it eminently suitable for late night reading and stove kindling later and fishwrap now, something digital and video journalism will never, not in a million megabytes, be capable of duplicating.

Philanthropy 101 might not have been on the list of classes at Trump University. But the man the university is named after has always declared he gave heavily to his favorite charities. Trouble was, at least according to the court settlement that found him and his bogus tax exempt foundation, his favorite charity was — I know you’ll be surprised — Donald J. Trump. But what was surprising was that in the end, he admitted guilt and agreed to pay the 2 million dollar fine. You might think this is a slap on the wrist to a man who’s a self-reporting billionaire, but then, you don’t know how much money means to Donald. He didn’t run for President out of civic duty, mister.

It’s comforting to know that the Leader of the Free World is really Scrooge. A man so divested of philanthropic impulse that the idea of giving to the poor or the needy or the downtrodden is completely outside the perimeter of his fiduciary calculus. He might as well toss money out the window of Air Force One. If the guy had any moral compass at all, which he does not, it would be Make More Money for Me. But let’s be fair, plenty of folks walk the streets of America with only a cash register for a brain. It’s just that they usually don’t see the Highest Office in the Land as a cash cow.

And they aren’t so shameless in their greed that they can’t imagine camouflaging it a bit. Or waiting to leave office to reap the rewards. Course, that was then, this is Trump Time. Emoluments shmoluments. No penny is too dull to leave on the sidewalk of potential profit. The old saying, Follow the Money, pretty much maps out presidential policies. The guy is even talking to executives about a sequel to the Apprentice … and the White House. You might think he’d be consumed with China trade deals, impeachment perils, Syrian fallout, North Korea, Iranian nuclear proliferation, stuff other Presidents considered priorities. But not Donald. He’s working on his favorite charity. Even got his kids on the board and on board.

Jared, for instance. Ever wonder why he’s the Go-To Guy in the Middle East? Follow the money. He needs financing for his New York high rises so underwater they could be the next Sea World. First folks Trump met in the Oval Office were the Saudis. They’re diversifying.

The bizness of America is bizness. You know that, I know that, the lady with the alligator purse knows that. But even Rockefeller, even Carnegie, even Gates know that philanthropy is good for business too. We even give them a tax break for charitable contributions. Easier than taxing them more heavily, just one more example of trickle down voo-doo economics. Donald Trump sees that as one more example of a sucker’s game. Better to give to yourself. Give until it hurts.

I was cruising through the South End Pawn Shop the other day, scratching for musical gear the kids bought new and then had to sell to Jesse, the owner, for pennies on their dollar. The days of finding a vintage Gibson Mastertone pre-war banjo are so far back in the rearview, even the memory looks like week old roadkill, thanks to the internet and Antiques Roadshow. Takes about ten seconds to determine anything’s value. Jesse’s prices, though, are wildly inflated, but if you’re a good haggler, he’ll come down a long ways.

Me, I’m the kind who hates to go around on prices. Just put it on the tag and I’ll take it or leave it. In the course of my lifetime I’ll probably pay twice what everyone else does. But for peace of mind — and the lowering of blood pressures — I don’t care.

“How’s biz?” I asked Jesse who was perched predatorially on a stool behind a glass case. He looked like a hawk on a telephone line. Patiently waiting for the next mouse. “Couldn’t be better,” he smirked. I shrugged and he went on about the boyz hurrying in to sell their guns ‘before the Democrats takes em away’ and the boyz who wanted to buy guns ‘before the socialists outlaws em.’ “I shoulda voted Democrat. These guys are making me rich!”

I never really paid much attention to Jesse’s arsenal before, but I said show me what you got. He asked what I was looking for, pistol, semi-automatic, shotgun over and under, military assault rifle ….. “Whoa,” I said, “Jesse, I’m just an innocent bystander. Doing some research …”

Half an hour later I’m casually acquainted with enough armaments to take the City of Stanwood, just me and a few NRA pals. If Jesse has 200 firearms — and apparently my neighbors are stockpiling what he’s selling — the idea of disarming my het-up citizen friends seems more than a bit quixotic. They’re apparently a gun-totin, pistol packin, shoot from the hip pack of yahoos and by god, good luck talking down the barrel of a Smith and Wesson. You can probably tell a South Ender easy enough by his gun collection, but you sure can’t tell him much.

I walked out of Jesse’s with a big used tube amp for my electric guitar. Jesse said it was brought in by a kid from a heavy metal band who was dead broke. “Dems’ll probably ban these too before long,” he said as I lugged it to my truck. “Dial it up full volume, it’s potentially lethal.”

Right, it could kill my marriage, if nothing else.