The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The year of the American Bicentennial I was a bit adrift. Marriage was gone to hell, jobs weren’t what I might have hoped for, the future didn’t look bright. I decided to take a Road Trip, maybe figure stuff out, maybe get myself a Plan, maybe not. I was 24 years old.

My old pickup, a rusty Army castoff, was my chariot to the Deep South, parts of which I had never been to, so I headed down through Illinois, Arkansas, Louisiana, headed, I had no doubt, for New Orleans. Around Little Rock I picked up a hitchhiker. My intention was to pick everybody with a thumb stuck out, take them where they were going, not as if it would be out of my way. The road was wide open, my nose was my GPS. And yeah, I know, kind of a hippie way of looking at things, but hey, when you think you’ve hit rock bottom, not that I really had, most directions look like Up. My hitcher was about my age, a little down on his luck too if I didn’t miss my guess.

“Where ya going?” I asked the guy who was my very first act of Good Samaritanship. “Goin to Little Rock,” he said, “to kill my no good bastard brother-in-law.” Now, I’m used to guy talk, rough around the edges, but just talk. Blowing off steam, nothing much more. But my rider wasn’t blowing off steam, at least not til he got to Little Rock where, he made it abundantly clear, even vivid, how he was going to dispatch his bastard brother-in-law.

Since I was just a sojourner on the road myself, both of us kind of lost souls, I gave him some half-assed advice that basically amounted to don’t kill the guy, bad karma, jail time, the usual pablum you yourself would give to the potential murderer riding shotgun in your pickup. I have no idea whether he killed that no good brother in law, but I had the feeling, by the time we reached Little Rock, he was reconsidering. I did what I could, right? Everything except call the Law.

My next hitchhiker was a 30 year old black guy standing next to a battered suitcase outside New Orleans. He was, he told me, just out of prison and the sheriff in his redneck Texas town told him he had 24 hours to get out … or else. He had a pretty good idea what that or else might be so he hit the road and here he was, on his way to Leesburg, Florida where some kin were. So yeah, we talked about the murder he committed, some white guy who was threatening a kid he was with supposedly, a white kid even, got 10 years, finally got out. Time for a New Start. You know, somewhere else.

He rode with me for a full day. For a murderer he seemed like an okay guy. Not knowing any other killers, I may not have been the best judge, but at least he wasn’t on his way to murder anybody like my last rider. Counts for something. When I pulled over to pick up two guys at a filling station, he grew extremely agitated. “No way, man, don’t give these guys a ride.” I asked why and he said “can’t you see they’re no good, man. They’re bad dudes, you don’t want to pick them up.” Maybe I was being harsh but I said “you killed a guy and you’re worried about these two?”

Well, in the end I drove past these bad dudes and felt a little bad that already I was violating my vow, my karmic duty. Looking back now some 40 odd years later, I think he was right. He knew people a whole lot better than me. You think maybe things can’t get much worse, you’re as big a fool as I was. I took my rehabilitated murderer all the way to Tallahassee, gave him an old sleeping bag since he wanted to wait til morning to go into town, wished him luck. He wished me the same. My luck eventually turned. I have a nagging suspicion that his maybe didn’t. I hope this time I’m wrong.

I’m sitting in the local barbershop that just opened up in town humming that song ‘Almost Cut My Hair’, but apparently I’m not going to let my freak flag fly even one more day. I got mixed feelings. My hair was down to my shoulders, first time since back in about 1980 when I moved out here and drove school bus for the little felons I transported. Don’t ask me why but I got this wild hair to let it grow, see if it brought back hippie memories.

It didn’t. Just an old geezer growing his hair long in the modern era of ‘50’s crewcuts, some kind of rebel statement, not sure for who. Whom. Whatever. Shampoo bill hitting the ceiling and drying time about two days. Longer hair than the mizzus, probably confusing sexual identities, why not?

The two guyz in front of me look like they get a trim about every two weeks. My last haircut was two years ago. Probably saved me about $400. Or quite a few gallons worth of shampoo. Without possessing any superhuman strength, I still seem to have a Sampson/Delilah complex. But growing my hair long didn’t make me any stronger either. Warmer in winter, about all.

Most of my adult life, a haircut meant I was on my way to some kind of interview. Jobs, art committees, anything where I worried I might lessen my odds looking like a refugee from the 60’s. As I got older and greyer in the beard, I figured the length of my hair was the least of my worries, considering I showed up in jeans, goodwill shirts and a battered cowboy hat so soiled I might have been an Okie lost in the exodus from the Dust Bowl. Artist chic, I liked to tell myself. Right.

The thing about haircuts is that invariably I regret getting them. The upside is that hair tends to grow back, not like an irreversible decision. Another two or three years, I’ll probably be back here in the chair. Maybe for a trim….

My recent request for a visa to emigrate to my old country, my place of birth, was turned down yesterday, no reason given, but I suspect it’s due to the fact no one knows where that country is these days. It’s been moved or it’s become invisible, you tell me. I’ve had a love/hate relationship with my old nation most of my life, probably because I reached so-called adulthood during the Viet Nam War, the Kennedy assassinations, the Martin Luther King murder, the Chicago convention riots orchestrated by Mayor Daley, the Gulf of Tonkin and Tricky Dick. J. Edgar Hoover was head of the secret police and Watergate was about to unfold. It was hard for me to send Valentine cards to my place of birth back then.

But age has mellowed me. Or at least it’s made me more senile, more forgetful, maybe even more forgiving. Oh sure, there was that military mop-up in Panama, Grenada, the first Gulf War. Kind of brought back those bad memories of the 60’s and early 70’s. I guess I’d sort of dropped out for a few decades, moved to the edge of the continent, crossed onto the island and didn’t look back. Literally burned my TV, didn’t read newspapers, internet hadn’t been invented, life was, to use an overworked phrase, idyllic. The future looked okay, but I was mostly living in the present, not a bad place to live if you got a few acres, a roof, a part time job that pays the mortgage and covers the groceries, not bad at all.

You keep your nose to the ground, grow a garden, plant an orchard, build a house, you don’t spend as much time watching politics. Oh sure, there was that Iran/Contra war Reagan illegally funded with arms sales, covert for awhile. Clinton got himself impeached for chronic dickmanship, then Bush Junior invaded Iraq again after the Twin Trade Towers were toppled by bin Laden, a bad piece of intervention that will cost us and cost us and cost us again. Okay, I was starting to pay attention to national and world events, even voting, even got asked to run for county commissioner, that’s how above ground I stuck my head. You start to give a damn, you’re asking for trouble, real trouble.

Obama got himself elected right when the Great Recession started, the one where the banks and Wall Street gambled heavily with our money and lost, but even so, I got caught up in that Hope thingy of his, maybe America, if it could vote for a black guy, a half black guy anyway, as President, well, the future looked bright. Real bright. I guess I shoulda bought shades….

Well, somebody pulled the shades on that bright future anyway and his name was Trump. They’ve impeached him but no way are they gonna find him guilty with this sycophant Senate. Without a doubt the little huckster might win another four years in office and if so, he’ll want four or eight after that. My country is gone. And for some odd reason, not clear to me now, I want it back. The question I have, the one I have yet to answer, is why.

I’ve been upgrading my carpentry skills lately, helping a buddy build a chicken coop for a good friend of ours who had a deadline to get it done since she had inherited some show birds from folks who needed to get them gone, (a long story I’ll spare you). Every now and then I get a wild hair to raise the rascally little fellows myself for the eggs, but then I remember my first experience with chicken husbandry, a story I will repeat here as a cautionary tale for myself. It goes something like this rightchere….
Now the South End’s got its own economics. Being’s how there’s no work, no industry, no banks and no investment firms, we’ve had to resort to alternative fiduciary strategies. Course I’m talking about bartering. You know, good old fashioned horse trading. Bartering’s an age-old tradition on the South End. It’s a cousin of stealing and an uncle of lying. When it’s working right, both ends of the trade feel like they cheated the other guy blind.

I got my first banjo in a swap for a .22 Remington rifle I didn’t want any more. Most of my illegal building structures are erected from bartered lumber, doors, windows and the like. I’ve traded boats and cars and pickups. Hell, I’d probably swap the muzzus if I weren’t so fretful she’d get the short end of the stick….

Course on the South End you’ll run into fellas who know the horse-trading game a whole lot better’n you. And I don’t mean just the artists. I was trading an old boy for some chickens when I first arrived and I was putting together my barnyard petting zoo. Chickens and a rear end for my Chevy half ton. He lived up some holler in a one room tarpaper house and lived completely off what he gleaned from the old dump. He had a TV showroom set up out in the drive: black and whites, color, consoles, cabinets, with or without hi-fi, whole entertainment centers. The chickens were there too, watching sixteen of their fav-o-rite programs. I said I’d take a dozen if they were good layers. He said, hoo boy, get ready for an omelette and we commenced to chasing chickens from CBS to the outhouse, from NBC to the barn. Stuffed em cackling and flapping in a burlap sack.

We counted em out at the end and this old boy says LOOKEE here and damned if he doesn’t pull two eggs out. Them’s real layers, he says with half his teeth missing. Course I was real pleased with this trade right from the get-go. Oldest trick in the book. Guess I never read the book. You all know, I suspect, I never got another egg and those old banty hens, being one hundred years old, was way too tough to eat. After awhile I just let em watch TV.

So I’m okay with letting someone else raise chickens for my eggs. And if I have to help to build the coop, that’s all right too. Sometimes in this harsh world, you still have to do some bartering. What an old geezer like me has learned is who you ought to barter with….

Some of you gentle readers may not realize that when you open up a blogsite like this one here, you open yourself up to all manner of incoming enemy fire too. Occasionally one of you will respond on the Comment section, which is fine and dandy, but 99% of the time what Skeeter gets is SPAM. Not even ordinary spam, but some alien mangled English non syntactical version that invariably leaves him scratching his head. What is it they’re after? What kind of advertising ploy is it when the message is indecipherable?

Here’s the latest example: Aсtually whеn someοne doesn’t know after that its up to other users that they will help, so here it happens.

????????????????????????????!!!! I’m no genius, but c’mon, what is this trying to say? And what are they trying to sell? Am I supposed to click on the website to find out? It’s like running into Crazy Mary down by the library, the woman who mumbles to herself and becomes irrationally angry at a moment’s notice. You sort of learn to cross the street and avoid eye contact unless you’re looking for a morning wake-up confrontation. And most of us aren’t. You certainly aren’t going to ask her if she’d care for a cup of coffee, see what’s really bugging her. That’s why we pay mental health professionals the big bucks. Well, that’s why we used to pay mental health professionals, even if it was fairly minimal. Now we let Mary wander the streets until she hurts herself or someone else.

I guess these spammers aren’t really hurting Skeeter. Being a former English teacher, they do hurt me. I see better language skills on my made-in- China product’s assembly directions. It IS worrisome that there seem to be a lot of Crazy Mary’s out there hustling god only knows what on the internet. That, or Skeeter is a whack-magnet who hasn’t got sense enough to cross the digital highway.

I know this, it gives a fine American meat by-product a really bad name. Actually, if when someone who does know after opening this can its up to other eaters that they can chew helpfully, so yes, here it happens. Give that to the dog and see if it prefers dry.

Like a lot of places, the South End is far more discerning of the oddities of others than themselves. The Avant-Gardeners’ hippie commune was the most prevalent gossip for years down here. Were they communists? Were they polygamists? Were they drug addicts? Were they pagans? There was no end to the rumors, no matter how fantastic — and, of course, the Gardeners themselves fed the flames with their fantastic behavior. Not just their colorful gypsy attire or their unorthodox social behavior, but Grand Experiments involving ship building and dome construction, all gone horribly awry, yet never diminishing their unbounded optimism or their total lack of fear of failure. They were pioneers, not just in breaking ground for their greenhouses and their livestock sheds, but in how they viewed the world. And the rest of us South Enders.

So we shunned them, most of us. Made them Outsiders in a place already Outside. Oh, a few of us bought their eggs and raw goat milk. I traded bread for those and vegetables, even got to know a few of the menfolk. The women mostly held back, kids peeking from behind their long granny dresses. Although I did teach Betsy, the most gregarious of the whole troupe, how to make stained glass. She would walk to my shack and glean scraps from the throwaway pile, then make the most beautiful suncatchers and small windows, far surpassing her teacher in no time flat.

After a few seasons I showed them where the wily Dungeness could be caught by hand and where to dig for free range clams. I took a few of the boys out in the S.S. Pterodactyl, my little sailboat, and we fished for true cod and bottomfish before they were gone, both the fish and the boys. Because one day the FOR SALE signs went up and the farm was abandoned as fast as it had arrived.

I bought a couple of their goats and some laying hens, took some greenhouse glass panels, accepted some macramé and pottery gifts, then waved adios as their gypsy caravan exited the South End one misty, fog filled autumn day. I guess they were as mysterious to me as they were to my neighbors, the only difference being I never minded their hippie presence. But I still remember that day when the Flower Children headed off island, north into the cruel ‘70’s, waving goodbye as I stood by my blue mailbox in a slow drizzle, wishing they would never leave. For me at least, that was the day, looking back, the 60’s really ended.

Maybe you think it’s too early to declare the Death of Reason. Maybe you thought science and rationality would prove to be mankind’s salvation. Maybe you thought the Dark Ages were long gone and Enlightenment was here to stay. But now you must be growing, like myself, a bit uncertain about the long arc of history curving upward. There’s a certain irony in watching the internet undermine all those convictions, that techno trick of algorithmic miracles, bringing us an encyclopedic knowledge in a nano-second. We didn’t bargain for its dark twin, did we? We didn’t see that all the phony bullshit would wash over us in a tsunami of epic proportions, bots, fake news, tampered videos, photo-shopped propaganda, a tidal wave of misinformation by foreign countries, partisan politicos, greedy bloggers and cynical journalists.

The tribes are gathered around their campfires now and superstition reigns once more. There are a thousand Taliban sects, from the evangelicals to the Sunni, the Hindus to the GOP, Moslems to Prosperity Preachers, all with the truth, small T. No one needs Truth now, Truth is merely what you want to believe. Truth is what Breitbart spews, what Fox News repeats, what Rush Limbaugh quotes from both. Truth is what my old man sends me in emails, photos of Obama shaking hands with terrorists Obama’s never met, photos doctored and photo-shopped and obviously faked … unless you’re my old man and his pals who think a picture is worth a lot more than a thousand puny words.

Our leaders lie to us now with impunity. Without fear of fact-check or consequence. Without worry that history will judge them. History is right Now, it has no future relevance if facts mean nothing, if ends justify means, if the internet can warp proof into pretzel. Around the campfire we tell fables to our fellow tribesmen that create a new mythology, one that predicts the future, the Right Now. Our enemies tell the opposite stories. We can’t both be right. One religion must be the Only One. Ours.

But woe be you and woe be me, for we no longer have a religion. Banished to the jungle, we can only watch from the darkness the flickering of fires in the long endless night. The hunters will be coming at dawn.

I’m not what you would call a sports fan. I don’t frequent bars with 10 TV sets the size of drive-in theater screens surrounding their patrons who would be willing to watch everything from high school ping pong tournaments to cage kickboxing. I’m not interested in my old alma mater games and I cringe when I see people wearing a jersey or ballcap for some sports team they pledge allegiance to. If you offered me free subscriptions to ESPN I’d turn you down. The fact that our cities will build mega-stadiums to put on these Roman tournaments and then make the excuse they don’t have money for the arts tells me all I need to know about the American Civilization.

But … a few years back the Seattle Seahawks won the Super Bowl with a bunch of misfits who didn’t mind one bit mouthing off about politics or whatever else was on their mind. They were let loose by their coach, no Vince Lombardi Nazi drill instructor, just a guy who let them play the way they wanted. They were a hoot to watch. They were irreverent, they were liberal, they supported Kaepernick when he took a knee every National Anthem, some wouldn’t talk to the press, some couldn’t shut up.

So this year I watched every damn game and yesterday when they played the Green Bay Packers, a team owned not by some rich guy but a team owned by the people of Wisconsin, I was stoked for some playoff action between two teams I actually like, let the best one win. Now, I admit, I don’t actually know the names of half the people playing, but hey, I told you, I’m not what you would call a sports fan. A fair weather fan is what I am.

What I didn’t know was that the mizzus — who is decidedly and adamantly NOT a sports fan — had invited A guest over for dinner. Also not a sports enthusiast, just a fellow artist. And dinner was when the Big Game was going to be played. Sure, I could have taken my plate into the other room and watched by myself while those two ate their meal without me. But I am not that kind of man. I wish sometimes I were that kind of man, but my mama didn’t raise me to be rude without real cause.

So I missed the final game of the season. I’m sure it was an exciting game. I’m sure it went down, like always for the Seahawks, to the final two minutes, and yeah, I’m real sure after reading about it in the newspaper a day later, the Seahawks lost and the Packers won. Here’s what I learned, and no, it has nothing to do with hiring a divorce attorney. It is, after all, just a ball game. No, what I learned is next year I’m going to find something else to do on Sunday afternoons besides watch football. Macrame or croquet or lonely walks in the woods or who the hell really cares. Because if you can’t watch the LAST game of the season, WHAT WAS THE POINT OF WATCHING THE OTHER 15 ??????

Just when the news couldn’t get much worse – or so you thought – along comes the finishing blow. Impeachment hearings, a billion animals burned alive in Australia, the Middle East set in turmoil, the revelation that the government has known for years that Afghanistan was unwinnable, the North Korean push toward nuclear weapons, our precipitous evacuation of Syria then the return to ‘protect our oil’, sure, these were heavy lifts for those of us who need a methadone program for news addiction.

How much worse can things get, we asked ourselves, knowing, of course, that climate change is not only here, it’s accelerating. Unless you’re one of those who think burning more coal is a great way to get re-elected (and I think the prime minister of Australia may be re-evaluating that premise now that the public is asking for his head), you know the coming decades are going to be hotter. And wetter. And wilder. And possibly, in every sense of an overworked word, existential. If not for you, then for your kids and certainly their kids. You maybe even thought: it can’t possibly get any worse.

Things can always, always, write this in stone and sleep with it under your pillow even if it induces nightmares, things can always get worse.

So this week the cruelest blow arrived across the banner headlines of the internet and the dying print media. Meghan and Prince Harry are leaving the royalty. Roasted koalas were pushed to page 3. Starving polar bears didn’t make the comic page. Jetliners shot down in Iran, c’mon, who cares when the tragedy of the prince and duchess vacating their rightful place in aristocracy takes up all the oxygen of a planet stuffed with carbon dioxide. Where, in the name of all that’s holy, is a Shakespeare to lift our spirits from absolute despair to something akin to art?? Must we take the blow in isolation when a seam has been torn in the fabric of social stratification? Can we endure the suffering without some slight, if tenuous, hope for rectification? Will Harry and Meghan regret their decision? Will the Queen’s heart break in this, her 90th decade? O England! The sun is setting on your colonies! And those poor dear anglophiles, can they endure another Masterpiece Four Season anthology of Harry and Meg? Because I certainly cannot. I did my husbandly duty with that idiotic Downton Abby to the point that I wanted to force the mizzus to subscribe to ESPN and leave the channel on to whatever crapola sporting event was commercialized for the entertainment of aging high school jocks, see how she likes that! Enough is enough. And Meg, you too Harry, best of luck making a living on your own. You only got 5 million, Meg, and Harry, last I heard (and I do hope it’s the LAST), you have to make a go of things with a mere 40 plus million. I suspect you both will do just fine. If things go south, hey, buy a small country and declare yourself king and queen. Just leave the rest of us out of it.

Mama said there’d be days like this. What she didn’t tell me is the days would become weeks and the weeks months and the months years. Welcome to the Trump Era. You might have noticed that lately I’ve steered away from politics. Not that I’m not paying attention to the nasty little tweetstorms, the mounting evidence of impeachable offenses, the constant and blatant lying and bullying, all those now familiar attributes of this petty little man. What more can you find to say about him? What more can you find to say about his Republican apologists? What more do you want to say to half your fellow Americans who think the guy is making the country great. Again. The facts are in, the jury has already made up its mind, the President might have acted in an unseemly manner, but hey, nothing impeachable. So far.

What I suspect, deep down in my roiling bowels, is this is how it feels to be black in the USA. Oh sure, we emancipated y’all, but hey, don’t start getting uppity now. Don’t figure on voting or getting paid equally. Freedom won’t make you free, boy. Or, maybe this is how it feels to be a woman. Virginia just flipped blue and ratified the equal rights amendment which provides the last state needed to certify that women are equal under federal law. Course, the Justice Department claims the statute of limitations has expired and now all those 38 states need to start over. And some of them have already voted to keep women unequal. Equality isn’t always equal, girl. Some of us are more equal than others. Or maybe this is how it feels to be a Moslem in 21st century America, the country supposedly founded on religious freedom. You know, if your religion is Protestant. If the God of some folks isn’t the God of the majority, well, can you say Heathen? Maybe if you’re an immigrant you got a first hand dose of the Welcome Wagon. Work for us, get paid peanuts, live in the shadows. . Maybe the First People know how it feels, right from the get-go, everything they had taken away, stolen, no apologies, to the victor belongs the spoils, all that claptrap. And quite possibly this is how the country feels to the LGBT community. Or to any minority. Or to the poor. Or to the Japanese interns in the POW camps. Or to any people who think different, look different, talk different.

We the People, the preamble states, but it doesn’t make it clear who We are or who the People are. Lately, a lot of us are learning it isn’t us. What we ought to learn is plenty of folks have known this all their lives. Maybe Trump and his apologists and sycophants are teaching the rest of us a valuable lesson. We the People, maybe it’s time to include everyone.