The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Little Jimmy was preaching at the South End Marina’s Pilot House Lounge the other night, carrying on about the upcoming elections. “It’s like we got two Halloweens,” he was orating to about 8 of us layabouts who weren’t quite ready to go home and face the music. “One with goblins and then the one we vote for spooks, no treats.”

“Yeah,” Biker Bob threw in, pounding his Bud bottle on the formica table, sending suds onto the pulpit. “And then you got 4 more years of Halloween every damn day.”

Some of the boyz, especially after more than a couple, don’t much believe in the democratic system we got. “Throw em all out, I say,” says Ralph from behind the bar where he’s filling in for Joey, the usual weeknight bartender and referee. Joey never takes a side in a political discussion, wouldn’t say Gerrymander with a mouthful, which explains why the place stays open in these partisan times we live in and the Stanwoodopolis Gazette isn’t half obituaries of patrons shot in the parking lot.

George next to me sits pensively peeling the label off his beer bottle before venturing, “You mean everybody but YOUR guy, don’tcha Ralph?”

“Oh, my guy’s okay,” Ralph agrees, wiping his hands on a dirty apron. “He voted to kill that Gun Bill this year.” Ralph’s a big NRA fan, something he usually espouses this side of the bar most nights until Joey tells him to pipe down. Ralph can get pretty agitated without much counter-argument even. Argue with him and he can get scary as Halloween in an Ebola isolation unit.

Half the place votes for their guy, it turns out. The other half are too disgusted or apathetic to even vote, especially mid-term. They’d vote if they could vote out the president, but nothing’s going to change, why bother? they think. So Ralph’s vote should count double, a fact that makes him happy. And me … I take the point about a prolonged Halloween in the Land of the Brave.

ROCKY HORROR STOCK MARKET SHOW

Like maybe a few of you, I’ve been watching the stock market in the aftermath of the worst economic meltdown in most of our memories. It looks like a jumping bean on steroids and meth both. Huge jumps, kamikaze dives. Nobody knows quite what to do with the money they got left after the 401-K’s were looted, bury it or invest it with the Wall Street crowd. It’s like the creepiest of horror movies where the dead keep getting back up and killed again.

The zombies, of course, are all those folks who preached unbridled capitalism. You remember them. The people who wanted to privatize Social Security. Why make a puny couple of percentage points interest when we could make some SERIOUS money in the Market? Why put the brakes on a wild ride to riches? Bubble? No sir, that was a balloon sailing to Eldorado, streets paved with gold…..

I will make you a prediction you can take to the bank: they’ll be back! They’ll dig up out of the hasty grave we threw them in and kicked dirt over. They’ll knock on our door some midnight dreary when our own fiscal wounds have started to heal and the memory of this nightmare has faded. They’ll be at the door grinning blood and money, offering impossible returns, easy loans, no interest, fast bucks.

Me, I’m resharpening my wooden stakes. I’m hanging credit cards wrapped in garlic by the porch. I’m looking for silver bullets, not silver linings.

So when the rollercoaster levels out and you know the extent of the damage finally, don’t let your guard down, don’t call your broker and don’t assume the worst is over. It isn’t. They’re clawing their way above ground even now.

And here’s a tip: when dawn finally comes and the ghouls in Brooks Brother suits slink back to their coffins, check your MasterCards. From now on, Leave Home Without It.

My old landlord was building a plane in his basement. We were renting the walk-up 2nd floor apartment above Sky Pilot Phil and his long suffering mizzus. I don’t know what Phil did for a living, but I’m fairly certain he wasn’t an airline pilot. When we first moved in, he took me down in the cellar to see his pride and joy. His pride and joy wasn’t his wife, I could tell that right off the bat. He treated her not much better than his cocker spaniel that filled the backyard with landmines we tried to avoid without much luck.

Maybe you’ve never built a small airplane. I sure hadn’t. But I can tell you, it wasn’t small crammed into that basement of his with all the stuff you usually find in a basement. Plus all the stuff Phil needed to assemble this contraption. “Wow!” I said. “How long you been AT this?” He told me he’d been working on this five years. It had a fuselage and I guess he had the motor or engine or whatever aviators call it, mounted on the front, but no propeller yet.

“Wow,” I said again, a little at a loss for words. All I could think was you couldn’t pay me enough to crawl in that flimsy mess, sit in the cockpit and take off to a certain death by gravity. “How much more you got to go, Phil?”

He was close. Real close. I thought of Icarus, maybe too close. “It’s really something,” I said lamely. Like a lot of places I lived during my roaring 20’s, I felt like I needed to move on. Phil’s family life was a wreck and I didn’t care to share it through the heating vents so the day came when I gave notice. “Sure hate to leave before you take her up,” I said, like I really wanted to be a witness to another Hindenburg.

Phil shook his head sadly. “I don’t know if I can get it out.” “Up, you mean….” I asked. “No, out. I didn’t think about getting it through the basement door. It’s a little too big, even disassembled. I may have to cut through a wall.”

We all have our dreams, I suppose. Some realize those dreams and some … well, some are like Phil. Just lucky. My suspicion is he’s still taking renters down in the cellar and still imagines a day, not too distant, of his own personal Kitty Hawk. I’ll give him this: he built a plane. And he lived to tell about it. His wife, I’m betting, probably has a better story.

In 1973 I worked at a dog pound in Madison, Wisconsin. What we called a Humane Society. We adopted 40 % of our mutts … meaning, we killed 60% of the animals, the correct euphemism being euthanized. The national average was 25% adopted so we patted ourselves on the back. My minimum wage job was to clean puppy cages and help kill critters. Let’s just say it’s a short career track unless you’re a practicing sadist, which I am not.

In fact, I adopted three dogs myself, maybe not a big deal if I lived on a country estate with acreage for the hounds to chase rabbits and deer for days on end, but I lived in a second story one bedroom apartment over a TV repair shop. Hard to believe now, looking back. No, not three dogs in a small apartment. That there used to be TV repair shops. When’s the last time you remember fixing a television rather than buy a new one?

One day at the pound they needed me to man the front desk, something I’d never done previously, something that might just lead me up a rung on the promotional ladder. I asked what was expected of me up here at the front door and was told I would direct folks to the kennels where could inspect their future pets. Beats shoveling shit, I thought.

My first encounter with the public was a woman bringing in her old dog and its 4 new puppies. “I can’t take care of these,” she said, pointing at the little wiggling pups in a cardboard box. I asked if maybe she might’ve considered spaying as an option. She shook her head. “Costs money,” she answered. “So you want to leave the mother too? Hasn’t she been with you awhile?” I asked. “Yeah, I’m tired of her too.” Oddly, this pissed me off.

I picked up the phone to our intercom. “Larry,” I said, “fire up the incinerator. We got five to torch.” My dog whisperer seemed suddenly alarmed. Shocked even. “You gonna just kill em?” she cried.

“Whadja think?” I said cruelly. “You think people are lined up for an old dog and her litter?”
About this time Larry emerged from the back, looked at the box of pups and asked, “These?” I nodded. Larry looked at the woman with measured contempt, picked up the box and went into the back where I knew he’d unload them into the puppy cages. He’d be back for the mother shortly. I started filling out the paperwork the way a guard at Dachau would, dispassionately. Name. Address. Reason for wanting your pet killed. Basic stuff.

I guess the woman called later to see if her dogs were toast because Mike, my supervisor, called me into his office. He explained — patiently — how our job was not to judge, our job was to take in unwanted animals so they weren’t drowned in pillowcases in the lake or shot behind the barn. “We want them to bring them to us,” he sighed, painfully aware I was unfit for further front desk duty.

I lasted a few more weeks. Larry lasted a month. There are, I’ve learned, some jobs that aren’t a good ‘fit’. My trouble, of course, was that was pretty much true of all jobs.

These are fast times we live in. You maybe remember when we talked about the Rat Race, that post-Eisenhower era when the corporations took over the South End and America too in a bloodless coup, ran a few efficiency studies, then busted the unions and paid us serfs paltry wages for long hours. The ‘modern’ citizen isn’t just in a rat race — we’re watching the information tsunami breaking over us, rocketing us forward on wave after wave of googled crap disguised as news or finance or sports, but is really a vehicle for advertising and a prescription for attention deficit when we’re tossed on the rocky beach of a fearful future.

You ask a friend or family member how their summer’s going, they say ‘crazy busy.’ We’re on our own treadmill now. Cellphones, laptops, text messaging, e-mails, sexting, online dating, online shopping, online everything. The truth is we’re not busy, we’re just half crazy, bored to death without a ‘device’ in our hands, constant stimulation but not anything with depth. Couple minutes max. Short text, quick internet search, got to move on to the next stimuli….

We don’t have time anymore for a walk on the beach, for reading a novel, for growing a garden, for learning new pursuits or new hobbies. No, we have to check our e-mails, messages, stock markets, ball scores and Facebook. We have to stay ‘connected’ and being ‘connected’ means keeping up with an accelerating digital glut. Not metaphorically — we’re rewiring physically. I guess you could say we’re evolving if you’re not a faith-based computer user, intelligent design if you are ….

I rowed out in my boat today, fighting wind and swells, to drop some crabpots. From far offshore I could see our house up in the trees back off the road, mostly obscured, but peeking out. I suspect my life is like that now, an anachronism peeking out from behind a woods no one ventures into anymore, a very long distance away as the waves pushed by a new wind crash up against my little dinghy and I’m in two places, but both are growing smaller and smaller, just specks on a receding horizon.

Zorba, a buddy of mine, stopped in today. I asked what’s new? and he opened up the tailgate to his truck and pulled out a metal attache case, snapped open the fancy clasps and lifted out a spidery looking gizmo with four propellers at each corner. Nestled beneath its insect body was a gimbaled camera. I was looking at my first real life drone.

Roll over H.G. Wells, give Beethoven the news. Zorba, whose real name is Mike, ran me through all the sci fi protocol, then showed me photos of where we were on the South End from hundreds of feet up, photos where I could see Port Susan lapping shore on the east and Saratoga Straits on the west. He ran this aerodynamic spy plane with his laptop. He said it could go up 500 feet and fly as far away as a mile and a half. I thought I heard a Time Machine land in my backyard.

This is indeed an age of miracles and wonders, a future we barely have to wait for. Zorba and I shook our heads, laughing. At least until he asked, “If we can buy this, what do you suppose the government has? How much more sophisticated is theirs?” We’ll all have one these before long. $300 now, they’ll put em in cereal boxes as prizes in a couple of years.

Well, I haven’t given enough thought to how I’d like to use mine yet. Course, I’d have to get a laptop first, maybe even a cellphone first, something to control the little hummer. Doesn’t seem likely. Once again I’ll be the last yahoo on the South End, miles behind the curve, watching the aerial acrobatics in the neighborhood, everybody taking photos from outer space while I’m earthbound. I know it’ll seem like techno-envy, but I may have to set up a No-Fly Zone over the shack, enforced not by laser beams maybe, but I still got Gramp’s old shotgun.

Ma and me got a sign down by the road that identifies us as a Backyard Habitat. I think folks who are official members are spozed to put up bird feeders and robin bubble baths. You need to have more than just a damn backyard with a bbq and lawn chairs is what they’re saying. But you don’t need a whole lot more….

I didn’t really want to join the Backyarders, but the mizzus insisted. The more backyards they got signed up, she argued, they could qualify as … I don’t know … a real woods or something. We got 7 acres of real woods and more woods next to that woods. Coyotes and deer and raccoons and squirrels and porcupines and all kinds of varmints who enjoy our backyard fruit and vegetables more than they do the sparse pickings back in the wilderness. I don’t want to get all snobby, but a backyard habitat isn’t going to fire up my tired blood. I didn’t come to the South End to feed squirrels from a bird feeder. They don’t need welfare, they need to be left alone. I’d much prefer they steal from me than wait for handouts.

This year we got a velvet horn buck who thinks maybe I’m the one stealing from him. He chomps on our plums and apples about 10 feet away from me and when I offer him a fresh one, damn if he doesn’t eat it right out of my hand like he expects to be served. He’ll be wanting a napkin next.

I guess all of us on the wild wild South End are more and more gentrified these days. That, or we all realize now that we’re being threatened with backyard confinement, we’d better learn to live together. Probably won’t be long before we put up bird feeders…. I just dread the day when they feed us.

I heard a guy on the radio, some Hot Talk jock, who said he was against not only minimum wage increases, he was against minimum wage completely. He argued that the largest growth spurt in U.S. history was when the corporations took off with little tax and with no regulations to prevent them from setting wages as low as the market would bear. Capitalism at its cut-throat best, unfettered, unregulated and unapologetic. The Roaring 20’s. I guess he didn’t read the next chapter in his 8th grade history book, the one titled The Great Depression.

Down here in the laissez faire South End, a lot of us don’t have minimum wage jobs cause we don’t even have jobs. The ones who do have minimum wage jobs don’t make enough to afford health insurance or to make the monthly nut on that double-wide they’ll never own outright. To make ends meet they’ll apply for food stamps or other supplemental programs. These are the folks my Hot Talk jock calls ‘Takers’. Or sometimes ‘Whiners’. And occasionally, when he’s feeling frisky, ‘Leeches’. And when he hears some candidate advocating for tax reform or health care or income equity, he screams ‘Class Warfare’.

The South End Food Bank barely keeps up these days. Moms with kids, fathers without jobs, folks who are disabled, people down on their luck. The Little Church in the Ravine helps the poor, I’ll give em that. Pastor Bob preaches the parable of the loaves and the fish, feeding the masses. I saw a bumper sticker on a BMW going into town: WINNING DOESN’T MEAN SOMEONE HAS TO LOSE. Or so he’d like to think….

Charity begins in the home, I’ll grant you, but sometimes we need to think of America as our home. Maybe you never needed a helping hand, but I suspect most of us got one except maybe that BMW driver. You maybe can’t legislate compassion, but you can sure legislate for fair play. You think folks living on the street or applying for food stamps or welfare are all Takers, turn off your radio and stand by the Food Bank half a day. It might just soften your heart.

A bunch of us yahoos went up to the Bud Hut yesterday, the island’s premier cannabis emporium, to have a little look around. After years of black marketeering on the Green South End, the boyz wanted to evaluate the ‘competition’. The staff checked our ID’s and criminal records, decided we were old enough and no outstanding warrants, then let us loose in the joint, no pun intended.

Two Toke Tom thought he’d died and gone to heaven. “Look at the inventory,” he whispered in a voice just this side of Reverential, and sure enough, there were glass cases filled with more strains of marijuana than Two Toke had tried in his entire 63 years on this earth. There were Indicas and Sativas, blends and hybrids, edibles and smokeables, oils and salves, balms and ointments, bongs and hookahs, pipes and vaporizers. The store offered everything an old pothead could’ve dreamed of if he’d ever dreamed one day the stuff would become legal. I thought Tom might weep.

All of us wandered the place for half an hour, asked the staff dopey questions and marveled at the assortment of bud and paraphernalia. We pinched ourselves. But when we left, we mostly left empty handed except for Two Toke who declared he needed to buy something legally just because he could.

Back in his ’65 VW bus, we were all silent for awhile. About halfway home, Tom broke the mood. “Boys,” he said, “I think we’ve seen the future. And it ain’t us. Someday they’ll make documentaries about the likes of us.” We all shook our collective heads. Prohibition was over and we moonshiners were driving into the fogbank of history. By the time we reached the South End we were pretty much gone.

If you’ve ever attended one of the free lectures at the Elger Bay Institute of Aesthetic Enlargement, you know that continuing education flourishes on the erudite South End. For those of you who have cable TV, you probably feel like you don’t need to take advantage of the Institute’s seminars, tutorials and lectures offered to the public, not when you can get every episode of every series made since Milton Berle brought enlightenment to America through the magic of television. But, of course, you’d be wrong and that’s why, no doubt, you read old Skeeter, make sure you aren’t missing anything of real and lasting importance.

Prof. Dimbulbsky spoke the other night to a packed audience in Macrame Hall. His topic was politics and specifically ‘Democracy Post Citizens United’. The good professor walked us through the Supreme Court case that opened up campaign financing to corporations and explained how freedom of speech for Big Business was as important as free speech for us South Enders. “Maybe more so,” Prof. Dimbulbsky said. “They represent all their employees, not just a Board of Directors. Why shouldn’t their votes be tied to profit?” he asked. “The more successful a company, the more votes they should be given.”

“In fact,” he stated, “I’ll go you one further. Why not peg the ballot to profit, not just for the corporation, but to the individual? We value success, do we not? Well then, doesn’t it make logical sense to give those at the top with proven track records more votes than the poor fellow scraping by at the bottom?”

Well, pandemonium nearly broke out in the Hall. Most of us in attendance could see we weren’t going to receive extra votes on the Dimbulbsky Democracy Chart. In fact, if we were following him correctly, he might recommend eliminating us from the voting roles altogether. Admittedly — and Jerry from the Marina did just that — half of us don’t bother voting anyway. And that’s in a presidential election. Off year, I suspect most of us don’t even know there is an election, although ballots come in the mail that maybe look like another credit card application.

Well, food for thought, I guess, the rich getting extra votes. Like the Professor said, they already buy the election with contributions, lobbyists and inside leverage, wouldn’t it just be better, more honest, more transparent, to just get it out in the open? Billy Farthmore, a bag boy at the Plaza making minimum wage, asked why the rich wouldn’t look out for their own interests if they had all the votes? Prof. Dimbulbsky shook his head sadly. “My dear boy, they do now. But who better to make policy than the Winners?” We all chuckled appreciatively. I don’t know if the Professor changed any minds, but worst case, we wouldn’t have to follow Presidential politics for years prior to every election. Out of our hands, out of our minds…. Better, I guess, than class warfare.