The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The Belgian-Brazilian conglomerate that owns Budweiser brewing announced that they would now call this country’s best selling beer America. America the Beer, not the beautiful. Actually the best selling brew in the United States is Bud Lite. Somehow America Lite doesn’t have the same panache, although judging by this year’s political campaign, America Lite sounds about right. Less filling, fewer calories, but drink enough and your head will swim.

Now … I’m a cynical person. But naming your alcoholic beverage our country, well, even a cynic winces at this. Of course all the patriots will flock to the new red white and blue watering hole in a can while profits flow overseas in a global tsunami of misplaced jingoism. I know, it’s just dog eat dog capitalism, but for the luvva Abe Lincoln and Tom Jefferson, are there no limits to the crassness of advertising?

I think we can assume the floodgates of branding are now wide open. Get ready for Jesus, the SUV made by Honda. Gets 23 mpg highway and comes with GPS showing shortest routes to Heaven. United States, a low tar cigarette both filter and menthol. God, the new moniker for the GOP, only need to change one little letter and virtually no content appeal . Land of the Brave, the real estate company formerly known as Century 21, already an old and tired brand but once was forward leaning. You know, back in the dead 20th.

Naturally there will be some confusion. When the presidential candidates refer to America, which one do they mean? ‘We will make America great again?’ Is the candidate suggesting Budweiser wasn’t? Can he be sued for slander? Has he got Trump Beer coming out and this was always a marketing ploy to undermine his competitor? Or did he buy stock in a foreign corporation, to make it great once more as an offshore dodge, and now he doesn’t want to show his tax returns?

I don’t know about the rest of my fellow Americans, but I want the name changed back. Either that or we change the country’s name.
O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
Budweiser! Budweiser! God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

I know, kind of a nice ring to it.

Some of the boyz down at the Marina got to talking about that Ma Day Studio Art Tour that’s been building steam since before the turn of the century, hauling traffic in for 19 years and now has expanded not just to 3 days instead of the original 2, but 2 weekends instead of 1. Before long, Cap’n Jack worried, it’ll become the Mother’s Day to Father’s Day Art Tour, an entire month of traffic backed up from the South End Diner to the Stanwoodopolis freeway exit, all those art lovers and their U-Hauls for carrying back their purchases to Bellevue, Seattle and beyond. They remember when the Tulip Festival was just a small bulb in the imagination of the growers …. before cars eventually outnumbered the flowers. And it makes em nervous.
It should! The South End Economic Development Council holds secret meetings at ReFlux Realty, scheming to sell properties to art aficionados who, in turn, will become artists themselves in the primordial paint soup of the South End, buy easels and brushes, learn raku, break glass and build stained glass panels, sculpt auto wreckage and ultimately double, triple, who knows, the size of the Tour. It’s a self-replicating Beast. And when they all begin to starve through overpopulation, they’ll still need to pay those mortgages on their dream studios. The only other ‘jobs’ here, of course, are real estate agents. So the vicious circle completes itself. More artists, more art, more wannabees, more starvation, more real estate agents, more sales, prices rise, properties subdivide, underwater mortgages swell …. and so the bubble becomes bigger than the egoes of the artists who planned this Tour back in the 90’s.
Some of the Marina layabouts wanted to stop this in its tracks before there was no turning back. Keep the missuz from going studio to studio Mother’s Day weekend. Course, the Tour was planned from the Get-Go to be their default escape from marital duties. Let Ma go traipsing through the art while they’d watch some ballgames. And now, 19 years later, they’re only starting to realize the true price of their mistake. Too late, guyz!! Way too late now!

If you’re like me, you’ve just finished doing your taxes. You’ve grumbled, you’ve broken a few pencils, you’ve cursed the IRS for making these forms hard to use without a certified public accountant, you’ve exhausted your deductions and your patience both and now you have to write that check to the Department of Revenue. Ted Cruz campaigns on a platform to eliminate the IRS and you think that sounds about perfect. No taxes, no government, no headache next April 15th. Why not? A couple more beers and Ted’s got your vote.

No taxes for corporations ought to bring prices down to rockbottom, right? You hear every day how American companies have to move overseas or offshore to spare them the 35% tax on businesses. Zero taxes ought to keep them here. Course, 27 of the Fortune 500 don’t pay anything now so it won’t help them much. And we haven’t factored in the gov’t. subsidies and the local tax breaks and all the rest of corporate welfare … or incentives, if you prefer. For every dollar they spend on lobbyists, they average about $1400 in tax breaks. Not bad. Maybe next year you should hire a lobbyist.

Or a CPA… Boeing, that shining example of corporate job creators, got half a billion dollars over the past two years to stick around and make more jobs. Course, it didn’t quite work out that way. Too bad for us Washingtonians, but hey, we didn’t make them promise to keep their word. Kind of in too big a hurry to get the bill passed before they moved to Carolina.

Some of us Job Creators on the South End are considering making that same threat to the Legislature. Move our art studios and marijuana growing operations to Idaho, see what deals we can get to stick around and fuel the island economy. Wouldn’t take a quarter billion per year, maybe a tenth of that would do it. Course, once we get our corporate welfare check, not guaranteeing I’ll be making any more art. And if this blogsite suddenly goes dark, you’ll know the deal went down and my check made early retirement inevitable. Can you blame me any more than Boeing? If nothing else, you can rest assured I’ve created jobs for a virtual army of accountants to manage my affairs.

Dr. Gonzo

We got a lot of folks on the South End making a living the hard way, meaning, they don’t work. In the pioneer days when I first scratched out a meager existence in these played out nettle farms, people survived on piece work here, odd jobs there, some bartering, some horsetrading, the usual indolent country skills. But the new folks, they do some of that, but mostly, due to some serious drug maintenance problems, they got more pressing issues. You want to maintain a heroin addiction, you probably aren’t going to commute to McDonalds and take a job as fry cook. No, it’s easier if you just steal what the neighbors got.

This is more or less what I left the city to escape. No, not jobs or employment. Neighbors stealing from neighbors. What was really sad back then was how the poor folks stole from the poor folks. Easier, I admit, to slip down the alley and come in a nearby backdoor than to drive up to the white folks’ suburbs even though the pickings would have made it more than worth the effort. Course then you have security alarms and motion sensitive cameras and a police force that patrols those tonier neighborhoods. Me, I had Dr. Gonzo.

Dr. Gonzo was a refugee of the Humane Society, part boxer, part hound of Baskerville, a fearless brute of a dog who had been abused by its previous owner who was, judging by her reaction to men, male. If you happened to be a black male, she ratcheted up her snarls about double the decibels. And if you were a fat male, she was nearly unmanageable. Frighteningly so. But if you were a black and fat male, she wanted to hurt you. She probably wanted to kill you. My assumption is her abuser might have fit that exact description and it might explain why she ended up at the pound. Her tormentor probably realized he wasn’t going to cow her and one of them had to go.

She was well known to my neighborhood. It was also well known my house wasn’t usually locked. Not with Dr. Gonzo inside. You wanted to walk in, maybe see if my TV was worth stealing, have at it and good luck. Men knocked on my door and I’d say, kicking a snarling growling Gonzo back behind me, come on in, why dontcha? “Naw man, let’s talk on the porch here,” they invariably replied. And invariably they would want to know if I’d consider selling Gonzo to them. “Maybe you’d like to get to know her better,” I’d suggest, opening the door a crack to let them see Gonzo trying to get her snapping jaws through and I’d say it doesn’t look as if she likes you, man. “How about you breed her, sell me the pups?” And I’d shake my head sadly, naw man, she’s been spayed.

I didn’t have much trouble in that high crime neighborhood even with the 10 units next door that were nothing but a breeding ground for drugs, gunrunning, sex trafficking and fencing. Still, it seemed, I don’t know, a corrosive atmosphere, a breeding ground for cynicism, a hard place to practice peaceful meditation. For both Gonzo and me. So we packed it in, bought a 1910 shack up here on the South End and made a new start, both of us. She died some years back, broke my heart. But at least she never lived so long she had to see the ghetto boys living next door once again.

You maybe haven’t heard the news yet — Colton Harris Moore, our very own Barefoot Bandit — started a jailhouse fundraiser for saving his mom who has terminal cancer. He’s concerned he won’t be released from prison in time to see her one last reunion, his dear old mom, the woman who made him what he is today. She always said he was smarter than Einstein and now he’s hit on an ingenious solution to what might seem to us ordinary folks, an unsolvable problem.

He wants to freeze her. Something a lot of us wanted to do a long time ago. But with the fervent hope that the magic of cryogenics would allow her to remain in suspended animation until we figure out how to bring her back to her vivacious self down the road. I hate to sound cynical or mean spirited toward a woman dying of lung cancer, and at the risk of appearing un-Christian, I just think maybe we should let Pam go quietly to her reward in the afterlife. Even if flash frozen humans became a possibility.

I can think of a few more eligible candidates for reanimation after death than Colt’s mom. And trust me, I’m not one of them. Some of us South Enders, more skeptical even than myself, think the Barefoot Burglar is really after the money he might raise. Well, I tried, Mom, but it wasn’t quite enough for 50 years of freezer burn storage, and so I used the donations to go to Harvard to get my degree in aviation technology. Personally, I kind of like that scenario. Not enough to donate money to the fund, but maybe the internet followers of Colton’s daring exploits would throw some coinage his way. Why not? The Kid was the first hero of the internet, a 21st century Jesse James.

If you, like me, aren’t anxious to help out with some spare change, I totally understand. But maybe here on the South End, the Kid’s stomping ground and lair, someone will step forward with at least a Frigidaire they aren’t using. Mine is sort of full.

I got a lot of cronies down here on the digitally divided South End who do not own a computer much less know how to use one. Granted, some of us misanthropes think we can reach the grave before it matters that we’re hopelessly out of touch with the 21st century. Who needs e-mail when we can call up a friend on his rotary telephone, eh? Now that we got private phones and not the party line we once had, why not enjoy it a few more years?

The mizzus got a computer back when Compaq was still a fresh face, not an old grave. She loves all things technical and so she was pretty much in the forefront of home computer technology. If not for her, no way would I own a computer. I still push lawnmowers, not ride em. I still chop wood, not turn a thermostat. I still got a 3 speed transmission, not an automatic. I waited a long time before hitchhiking on the digital highway, figuring for years I’d just wait til Apple came out with a machine that would talk me through all the introductory stuff.

But my pals without marital tutors, they’re still waiting. Three year olds are more savvy than half of us down here in the 20th Century. Course, that was sort of true back in the 20th Century too so maybe nothing much has changed. But the speed of the advances over the past couple decades is a little frightening, especially for anyone thinking they might wait a little longer then catch up once they buy a machine and figure how to turn it on. Or fix it when it glitches. Or set up programs, e-mail accounts, twitter feeds, all that stuff they’ve heard about but never wanted to learn.

I know I wouldn’t want to be starting out now that far behind. Maybe okay if you have a 3 year old to show you the ropes, but if not, fat chance, good luck. I assume most of these poor geezers will have to wait to buy their first Mac or PC when Netflix announces it will stop sending DVD movies and goes exclusively to streaming. When that day comes, trust me, I’ll be buying stocks in Apple and Dell. The last holdouts will have no choice.

Awhile back some nut shot up a Planned Parenthood clinic. A few weeks ago 3 nuts shot, so far, 14 people to death down in San Berdoo. Congress is up in arms – no pun intended – about Syrian terrorists slipping in with refugees. This same fearful crop of legislators refuses to put regulations on guns. They voted down No Fly – No Buy, the bill to keep anyone who’s on the TSA No Fly list from buying a gun, figuring, oddly enough, they might be a potential terrorist.

The boys who voted it down said there might be mistakes on the list and they didn’t want to deprive an honest citizen his God-given right to bear arms. Oh, right. How about the folks denied the right to vote when their names are confused on voter registries??

Down here on the Don’t Tread on Me South End, we got our fair share of firearms. I got a shotgun myself, although I confess, I’m not sure if it still shoots. We’ve all grown up with too many westerns, too much Dirty Harry and way too much video violence. Somehow we think guns are the solution. But let me tell you a story. My pal Freddie was thinking he might buy himself a ‘piece’, put it maybe in his nightstand loaded. With the safety ON, of course. What for? I asked and he said, you know, burglars. You got crime out your way? I asked and he said you never know, best to be prepared.

A month ago his daughter from a college 300 miles away came home unannounced. Let herself in the front door at 3 A.M. and clattered around a minute or two then walked into her parents’ bedroom. She was distraught, depressed, upset. Drove all night, just wanting to crawl in with Mom and Dad like when she was a kid with nightmares, crawl in for comfort, for love, for reassurances the world wasn’t as scary as it seemed right then.

Fred told me he thanked God he didn’t have a revolver in that nightstand because when he heard the front door open, then footsteps coming down the hall headed right to his bedroom, he seriously wanted that gun.

“I don’t know, Skeeter,” he told me, shaking his head. “I could’ve shot my own kid. 3 in the damn morning. What was she thinking?” I suspect more family members are killed than burglars with guns. Freddie, you better believe, won’t be thinking about arming himself now. Last I heard he was thinking about a large guard dog. Even though he’s never had a dog before.

I have made a terrible mistake! I know what you’re thinking, and yeah, it seemed unlikely to me too. But it’s true, I’ve screwed up Big Time, one of those mistakes you may have to regret the rest of your sorry miserable life.

We have a woods in back, about 5 acres, which when we bought the place was completely covered in old growth nettles that grew to seven, even eight feet tall. Impenetrable jungle of the stinging beasts we had to beat a trail into just to get into our own woods. But one year I noticed that these little delicate bleeding heart plants had established their puny selves in and among those giant stinging nettles and seemed to supplant their network of roots. So for years I have been planting the bleeding hearts along the trail along with some myrtle starts, periwinkle maybe you call them, and over time they not only lined our trail, they spread into the woods. It was wonderful.

A few years back I decided, despite reading about the impossibility of eliminating my nettles, to attempt to do just that, kill the buggers. The first year I sickled them down, about three acres of them, and I noticed that the following year the new nettles were greatly diminished. Heartened, I whacked all five acres and I’ve been doing it now for three years. You walk back in our woods, you don’t see many nettles anymore and now trees we’ve planted have a chance to grow whereas before they died a sunless death under the nettle canopy. It’s almost a park back there.

But … awhile back I planted a little variegated vine, a lamium, commonly called the Yellow Archangel. It has a relative, you might be interested, called Dead Nettle. Dead Nettle, now, you know I’m going to bite on that. So I stuck a sprig here, a clump there and figured it would be a colorful addition to the bleeding hearts and the periwinkle. It was. For the first couple of years. But then it started to run. Then it galloped. And this year it went into warp drive, covering up the bleeding hearts, the myrtle, the ferns, dead logs, stray children, anything in its ravenous way. It is the kudzu of the north, invasive as Trump’s Syrian terrorists, and rapidly on its way to covering our entire woods. It is a nightmare. It is a scourge. It is a total mistake and now I have to try to correct it. To save not just my woods and the South End, but quite possibly the world.

I have begun whacking them. I have mowed them. I am now weedeating the jungle monsters. I have about half an acre to an acre of these creeping beasts and my theory is that if they never see daylight, like the nettles, their roots, I don’t care how many hundreds of miles of pulpy tendrils, they’ll die. You should wish me luck because your fate depends on me. If I fail, I am so so sorry. I plead benign ignorance even though I know that won’t help in the end. And yeah, I know, ignorance isn’t bliss.

Hoo boy, you want to start a war, start bringing religion into the conversation, next thing you know you got folks beating each other over the skullcap with a Koran or a Bible. I grew up thinking America was founded on a concept called separation of church and state. What a gullible little goober I was. Give unto Caeser what is Caeser’s. When in Rome, etc. But that was then and this is today. Rome is a seat of religion, kind of got some serious ideas about what’s right, what’s not. But you don’t have to travel to Italy to get an Edict. Hell, take a vacation in Mississippi, unless of course you’re gay or a friend of a gay or a relative of a gay. Their collective religionists, mostly Christian, they got the Word of God that tells them gays are an aberrance, an abhorrence in the eyes of the Lord. Says so in their Bible.

You say you don’t read their Bible? Well, sir, you maybe didn’t know this country was a Christian country. Got IN GOD WE TRUST right there on your money, what more proof do you need?? You ask whose God you talking about? The God of Mississippi, my friend. The God of the Founders. The God maybe you don’t pray to or even believe in? The God who doesn’t want trans-genders in their bathrooms, ye of little faith. The God who doesn’t like Planned Parenthood. The God of the Old Testament, that’s who!!!

So you believe in tolerance? You believe in secular government? You give homosexuals equal rights to the God fearing, you better believe you got a war on your hands. If my religion thinks the non-whites are inferior, I got no choice but to live by my creed, the one the Creator passed down, the one translated from the Scrolls. My religion thinks women ought to serve us men, well, don’t expect me to respect any laws you pass that make it discrimination to treat them according to the Text. You want to wage war on my religion, you better get ready, pal.

You ask what if some other religion has different views, what about respecting their beliefs? Maybe you weren’t listening close. Their views are bogus. Our views are the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, the only truth. Can we make it any clearer???

So go ahead and make your laws, your secular commandments. Call us bigots. Call us homophobes. Call us the American Taliban. You want a culture war, you already got one….