The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Back awhile ago I bought a new truck, the first and only new one I ever had. Being the proud owner of a brand spanking new Toyota Tacoma, I decided to stick with the oil maintenance schedule and let the dealer put genuine Toyota filters on and good synthetics in. The first oil changes were free, but once I’d had a couple, they charged me. As I recall, about 45 bucks. Even washed the rig for free. Little by little, of course, the cost started inching up, five more bucks at first, then a jump of 20. Inflation. Maybe that supply chain issue around Covid. Who knows, I just paid the dealer.

At around 50,000 miles my nice service lady took me aside to let me know my water pump was going out. Really? I asked. I haven’t noticed any fluid leaking or funny noises. She assured me that yes, really, but they could schedule a replacement for a bit over 600 dollars. I said thanks but I’ll handle this myself. You’d think, I said ruefully, that a brand new truck would get more mileage out of a water pump. Says something about Toyota, I guess. My service lady didn’t really care for this line of talk.

I have driven Toyotas practically my entire adult life. And the reason I buy them, used, new, battered or pristine is that they seldom break down, even up to a quarter of a million miles. One that had about 170K on it, I actually had to replace the water pump. So it wasn’t like I expected the things to last my lifetime. But this one, on inspection once I got home, was fine. At 120K it still is. Needless to say, my trust in my dealer plummeted.

I had my oil changed by my scamming dealership yesterday. The last one had cost me 80 dollars, but a few months later it had ratcheted up to 105. I guess that supply chain problem never really got fixed. Or maybe too many people refused to have their perfectly good water pumps repaired for them to clear their terribly slim profit margin. When I paid, the dour woman who has been scowling at her desk for as long as I’ve owned my truck told me my credit card would be charged an extra 3%. Piddly, I know, but … just another notch down on my opinion of the place. The free coffee was so watery, I had had to throw it down the drain, and trust me, I’m not fussy about coffee when I’m on the road.

I paid my 105 plus the 3 plus surcharge. When I got to my truck at the far end of the service parking area, I saw that the free wash job was apparently no longer part of their goodwill package. The little sticker they usually affix to my windshield, the one that is supposed to remind if the Needs Service light on my dashboard somehow burns out, was tossed on the dash where it almost went down into Area 51. The usual mileage they want me back is 5000 miles before the next oil change, but when I looked up the lifespan of synthetic oils, the consensus is 10,000. Can’t be too careful, I suspect my service lady would say. When I stuck the reminder sticker on my windshield myself, I happened to notice that the next recommended service was only 4000 miles, probably just a typo, right? I’m wondering if the service light was downsized too to pop on at 4000.

Geez, if you can’t trust a car dealer in these tough economic times, who can you trust? My next oil change I’ll probably do myself. Right after a good cup of my own coffee.

I was having coffee at an old friend’s house yesterday. Doreen and I go back to when we both drove school buses on the island some 35 years ago. Doreen’s husband and she divorced years ago so it’s okay to visit now that the paranoid yahoo’s out of the picture, good riddance, we both agreed over our mugs. Doreen had the TV on when I arrived and left it on while we sat at the kitchen counter, some morning talk show with folks I didn’t know interviewing folks I didn’t know about personal subjects it was impossible to imagine anyone caring two cents about.

Doreen had aged since our Bluebird bus days. Not that I look like a high school yearbook photo, but she looked particularly haggard. Too many years of two pack a day cigarettes, hard liquor and hard living. Life on the South End isn’t a bed of lilacs for all of us, hate to be the one to crack the idyllic image. “So how’s things?” I asked anyway, wishing I’d declined her invitation at the grocery parking lot, old friends or not.

Doreen’s house leans back into the woods of the island’s interior, skirting gone green with gutter-splash mold, curtains drawn in the daytime, and it gave me a whiff of depression before I rang the doorbell. “Making do, Skeeter,” she answered. “Just hanging on day to day.” Lives of quiet desperation, I guess. We clinked cups. The coffee was bitter but drinkable.

Out in the livingroom the TV was laughing, things were good, folks were happy. Not a single painting hung on Doreen’s walls, just empty drywall, a dull pallor in lamplight. Her bookshelf was nearly empty, just a couple of paperbacks standing sentinel, a Library for the Uninterested. The sink was full of yesterday’s dishes, pots and pans crusted, glasses unemptied. An ashtray sat on the counter, full of butts. She dumped it in the garbage when she got our second cup. By then we’d exhausted our shared memories, the colleagues who had died, some still around but lost to us now after three and a half decades.

“Good to see you again, Doreen,” I said. “Anytime, Skeeter,” she answered. Both of us knew we’d settle for parking lot hellos here on out, but I was probably the only one who felt bad about it.

Back when the neighbors had dairy cows, we used to get our milk direct from the udder. Unpasteurized, no growth hormone, no antibiotic whole milk. Course, back then we were told by the FDA and the food scientists that this would increase our chances of heart disease and diabetes. But …! If we took a baby aspirin a day, we could lessen those chances. Sort of like driving over the speed limit but wearing a seat belt. You get in a wreck, you might survive.

You’re as old as me, you maybe remember 5th grade food pyramids. Meat and poultry up at the top, high in protein, fruits and vegetables down toward the middle, candy and pop taboo. In the 60’s we learned sugar was poison and alcohol too and so was red meat and ditto on salt. We started drinking skim milk, substituted saccharin for sugar and oleomargarine for butter. Skip the eggs, pass the fiber.

This week I read a study showing that people like myself who drink high fat milk have decreased heart disease and less risk for diabetes. Fats, it turns out, aren’t all bad. Aspirin a day, so they tell me now, isn’t maybe so good for you if you aren’t already at risk for a heart attack. Butter is better for you than margarine. And too little salt, well, you need salt. You want to live longer, drink a glass or two of wine every day. And even if you don’t live longer, you’ll be happier.

I got friends who won’t eat fruit unless it’s in a pop tart. Some others wouldn’t eat broccoli or cauliflower unless you waterboarded them first. My brother thinks 1% milk is cream and it would kill him in a week. I know folks who won’t go within a country mile of an egg, might as well be lobbing grenades to the heart. Food, I think more and more, is a faith based religion. Easier just to eat Cheetos and Snickers bars with a couple of vitamin supplements, all the nutrition you need right there in a pill.

Me, I always figured the fresher food was, the better. The more natural, the better. I like my food grown on a tree or coming up out of the ground. I like meat that grazed in a grassy pasture and I love fish that swam wild in a river and I’m crazy about seafood that wasn’t farmed. Hell, I like all kinds of food, at least the kind that isn’t dried out, chopped up, reprocessed and flavor enhanced with enough preservatives to last past a nuclear war. Is it good for me? I think maybe so. The doctors and the health specialists, the scientists and the FDA, well, some years yes, some years no. Hard to say for sure anymore. So I’ll just stick with the tried and true, food made by nature, not by labs. Call me old fashioned. Call me outdated. Call me past my expiration date. But … call me for dinner.

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.

Let’s state rightchere at the beginning, the internet world is a dangerous place. Hackers, scam artists, digital thieves, fake ads, phishing expediters, you name it, the sharks are in the kiddie pool, all ready to clean out your bank accounts, your stock portfolio, your retirement funds. You really can’t be too careful.

Or can you? Nearly every site you use now wants to verify your good self. If you want to log on to your account for, say, making a ferry reservation, you need to prove you’re you. For your protection, dummy! You want to check your mail on Yahoo, they need proof you’re not some nosey relative. Sure, it takes a few more minutes to log on to about anything, but hey, the corporations and the government want you safe. They care about you and your privacy. They really do. Sure….

Me, I’m not so sure. When I try to log on to some account and my friends in the suites of New York ask for a second verification, either on my cellphone or my email, that works when I’m hanging around home. On the road, not so much. I don’t have a cellphone so Option 1 is useless. Half the time I’m trying to log on to my email so naturally the corporate CEO’s of Yahoo aren’t going to fall for my trick of sending it to the account I’m trying to access, they’re not stupid. So for my protection, I’m locked out. At least until I go home. Something of an inconvenience for this traveler.

The protectors of my identity usually want even more. They want to make certain I’m a human being. They have a box which actually asks me to state that I’m not a Robot. Then, just to be 100% accurate, they want me to identify with human eyes the boxes they’ve created which might have a car or a bus or a CEO in them. If I answer correctly, I’m allowed into the inner sanctum of my own site. If not, up pops another matrix of boxes, name the ones with a person committing suicide, say, one who’s given up hope of ever accessing that all important Home Depot website without the necessary clearance. Of course, by then, it’s probably too late. If you’re like me and you try to retrieve information from the government agency that tracks suicide related multiple verification deaths, good luck, chances are you’ll wind up another statistic before they let you in.

Denny the Dealer and I were hunkered down in a watering hole up north and the waitress had just brought us our beers. Denny, always on the lookout for an ‘angle’, held up his hand and said, “Wait a minute. Is that what I ordered? “ The waitress didn’t know Denny, at least not yet, and she said, “Didn’t you order an IPA?” There was just enough uncertainty in her voice that Denny pronounced that no, he had definitely ordered an ESB.

You maybe never have known a boy like Denny the Dealer. He doesn’t believe in paying full price for anything. He thinks you should buy him dinner, I guess for the pleasure of his company. He will take a broken tool back to the hardware store, possibly not even the one he bought it from, and demand they replace it or give him a discount on the new one. Or on something else he wants to buy. He has a scam for everything from mailed packages to airline tickets. If you dropped him in a bazaar in Constantinople or a tourist shop in Tijuana, he’d make them sweat for any puny profit they might make off him.

He has a business that he pays virtually no taxes on. I asked him how that was even possible, naïve about the nature of corporate tax laws, and he spent half an hour describing various offshore corporations he’d created, multiple bank accounts that shifted money from one to the next so that they never showed more than $10K at some magic time for the IRS. He has money in another person’s name, underage and therefore beyond the revenuers reach. I assume he spends more time in fiduciary sleight of hand than he does in his business enterprise. You want to see capitalism in action, you need to drink with me and Denny.

I’m going to assume, for the sake of friendship, most of what Denny does is legal in a strictly tax law sense. Moral, I think we can safely say moral doesn’t weigh in on Denny’s calculus. Money, they say, is the root of all evil and maybe so, but what I know from watching folks who think money is pretty near Everything is that it usually doesn’t buy them happiness. Easy living, yeah, but it’s hard to be happy when you’re always worried someone is going to get the upper hand in your deal.

Our waitress was obviously flustered, what with screwing up Denny’s order, so she reached for his glass to take it back, dump it and get his ESB. Denny didn’t hesitate, he just offered to take the IPA and pay half price, fair is fair, he said. The waitress was considering it. At least until I said, “He’s pulling your leg. He does this everyplace we go. He ordered the IPA. He thinks it’s funny to horse around.”

When our relieved but somewhat puzzled waitress left, Denny shook his head. “I try to teach you a few tricks and what do you do? You’ll pay full price for everything, Skeeter, and lemme tell you, that’s not how the real world works. Full price is for suckers like you.” I took a long sip of my own beer. Which, being the first of the day, tasted like liquid pleasure. “Worth every penny,” I said, already knowing what Denny would say in reply.

We just bought a Vizio 43 inch Smart TV. If you’re like my other layabout pals, you’re asking why in the name of digital technology did I buy a television so small. And the answer is because the mizzus will not, no way, allow a drive-in theater size screen to dominate the livingroom and probably our lives. The new set replaces the 34 inch one, a compromise that may or may not save a marriage, but hopefully that answers my cronies’ question. The other question they all asked was where in holy hell did I even find one that small. And in full disclosure I did have trouble locating any that were smaller than the 55 inchers on display at three or four outlets I searched before going online.

But I digress. Forget the size, forget the internet search, forget about my friends with their high def giant screens capable no doubt of streaming I-Max. My issue is trying to set my Lilliputian TV up. I took photos of the old cables on the teensy weensy old telly just in case. In case of what, I’m not sure, just in case. The gizmo remote that came with the TV had icons for Netflix, Prime, Crackle, weird channels I will never watch, but evidently Vizio makes money on including them. Once I plugged the thing in, up popped a voice that declared I was good to go on setting up my entertainment world and then prompted me to answer if I minded that Google monitored my viewing habits. For better service. For the good of my entertainment potential. I said I would prefer not to have better service. This resulted in a long admonition that my decision would prove that to be true. Might even instigate some sort of retaliatory programming.

When I got past the veiled threats, I encountered the need for passwords into our Netflix account. So … this required waiting for the mizzus, my tech wizard, to get home. Jump forward with me. We now have two heads better than one dumb one working to set up our smart TV. Having gotten past the password roadblock, we were assaulted by a very loud, very rapidly talking ethereal voice that gave utterance to every keystroke and instruction, repeating when we hesitated. An internet search of how to turn off Little Miss Obnoxious determined that we needed to go to MENU, then …. Our remote has no MENU. Meaning, a great deal of the set-up isn’t really possible without that. Why we have a diminutive remote, god only knows. And possibly the internet seller.

I have ordered the appropriate remote, again online, and in a few days should have it delivered. Meanwhile, once again, if I needed to be reminded, it is obvious I live in the wrong century. If we had a six year old handy, no doubt in my mind at all, the little wizard would have figured out, even with a remote missing icons and functions, how to set up this stupid smart TV. But it’s a little late in the game for us to think seriously of child rearing at our age. Maybe adoption if the coming remote is beyond our skill levels….

The Upcreekomish, once a proud nation feasting on the yearly salmon runs, wanted for nothing.  Their hunting and fishing prowess was known up and down the coast, their art was envied, their canoes admired.  They traded with the coastal clans, but for the most part they kept to themselves upriver.  When the whites settled nearby, trapping and mining, the Upcreekomish shook their collective heads but maintained peaceful relations.  Who knew they would lose everything to these men with shovels and saws?

The Otter Creek Trading Post — at least according to Three Finger Bill, a hapless logger who made it back out of the woods before he started whittling away toes and feet with his 40 inch chainsaw — claims the Post was the old Grabbinrun Mining Company’s general store back in the late 1880’s.  The Upcreekomish traded furs for canned food, salmon for bad hooch and various totem carvings for tobacco.  Was it a bad trade?  Three Finger will tell you he’s got a cedar chest ornamented with a beaver totem the professors down at the University offered 6 figures for, about the number of his fingers still usable.  Bill tells me he doesn’t need the money and besides, he uses the box to keep his bad hooch, cigarettes and canned Spaghetti-O’s in.  Sometimes life comes full circle.

Bill’s uncle Walter ran the store after the mines closed and the company script ended.  A few salty dogs kept panning, built small cabins and settled in for an early Depression.  The store survived, but like the miners and the Upcreekomish, just barely and not much to recommend the life.  Tourism brought a few fishermen and backpackers through, and the store, ever adaptable, supplied them with high priced rods, reels, fishing supplies and the ever popular corn dog and microwaveable burrito.  Mostly the store makes its profit on tobacco and alcohol, plus Lotto.

I guess you could say the locals are still getting the short end of the stick, but if you crave Spaghetti-O’s, maybe you don’t mind.

Back when the neighbors had dairy cows, we used to get our milk direct from the udder. Unpasteurized, no growth hormone, no antibiotic whole milk. Course, back then we were told by the FDA and the food scientists that this would increase our chances of heart disease and diabetes. But …! If we took a baby aspirin a day, we could lessen those chances. Sort of like driving over the speed limit but wearing a seat belt. You get in a wreck, you might survive.

You’re as old as me, you maybe remember 5th grade food pyramids. Meat and poultry up at the top, high in protein, fruits and vegetables down toward the middle, candy and pop taboo. In the 60’s we learned sugar was poison and alcohol too and so was red meat and ditto on salt. We started drinking skim milk, substituted saccharin for sugar and oleomargarine for butter. Skip the eggs, pass the fiber.

This week I read a study showing that people like myself who drink high fat milk have decreased heart disease and less risk for diabetes. Fats, it turns out, aren’t all bad. Aspirin a day, so they tell me now, isn’t maybe so good for you if you aren’t already at risk for a heart attack. Butter is better for you than margarine. And too little salt, well, you need salt. You want to live longer, drink a glass or two of wine every day. And even if you don’t live longer, you’ll be happier.

I got friends who won’t eat fruit unless it’s in a pop tart. Some others wouldn’t eat broccoli or cauliflower unless you waterboarded them first. My brother thinks 1% milk is cream and it would kill him in a week. I know folks who won’t go within a country mile of an egg, might as well be lobbing grenades to the heart. Food, I think more and more, is a faith based religion. Easier just to eat Cheetos and Snickers bars with a couple of vitamin supplements, all the nutrition you need right there in a pill.

Me, I always figured the fresher food was, the better. The more natural, the better. I like my food grown on a tree or coming up out of the ground. I like meat that grazed in a grassy pasture and I love fish that swam wild in a river and I’m crazy about seafood that wasn’t farmed. Hell, I like all kinds of food, at least the kind that isn’t dried out, chopped up, reprocessed and flavor enhanced with enough preservatives to last past a nuclear war. Is it good for me? I think maybe so. The doctors and the health specialists, the scientists and the FDA, well, some years yes, some years no. Hard to say for sure anymore. So I’ll just stick with the tried and true, food made by nature, not by labs. Call me old fashioned. Call me outdated. Call me past my expiration date. But … call me for dinner.

Malcolm was practically ranting down at the Diner the other morning at breakfast for the Flatheads, nothing too out of the ordinary for the car guyz but still … he was positively hair-on-fire. “Hundred, maybe thousands of em! All over New Jersey, what the hell?? UFO’s, drones, nobody knows, nobody cares!”

Fairlane Fred put down his forkful of scrambled and asked “What are you talking about, Malcolm?”

“I’m talking about an invasion, Freddie. I’m talking about … see, this is what I’m talking about. You guys don’t even know what I’m talking about. It’s kept under wraps, under the damn radar. We’re being kept in the dark!”

Little Jimmy said, unperturbed by the pre-dawn outburst, “Well, it IS almost the shortest day of the year, ya know.” Which send Malcolm into another spasm of outburst. The breakfast crowd, seasoned socket wrenchers all, accepted Brenda’s refills, probably hoping she wouldn’t ask Malcom, no need to induce a coronary before the boys had finished their chicken fried steaks, hashbrowns and sides of white toast heavily buttered and slathered with jam from those little plastic coffins.

“Can’t you see?” Malcolm asked. “It’s a conspiracy to hide the truth.” Little Jimmy, back to his eggs, asked “what’s the truth, Malcolm?” “I don’t know. None of us know. That’s the goddamn point!”

From my perch at the corner table, a not so innocent bystander over these many years, it seems like we’ve entered the Age of Anxiety. Climate change, immigration, inflation, Trump, the Deep State, nano-plastic poisoning, the coming Plagues, pick a subject, everything is a conspiracy. Lights over New Jersey, UFO’s in Oregon, nano-trackers in the vaccines. All politics are toxic. The enemy is everywhere except us.

Malcolm finally settled into his biscuits and gravy after sputtering to a stop. He probably figured Big Larry on the grill had doctored it. Who knows, maybe he had ….