The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

So okay, we got these folks who set up shop outside the Stanwoodopolis Post Office and prop up posters of the Prez with an Adolph Hitler moustache and wait for hostile reactions.  They’re not Nazis or Republicans and they sure aren’t Democrats unless they’re monumentally disappointed.  I’ve got pals who became so infuriated with this deplorable mockery, they jumped right into the fray, sounding off and ending up at High Decibel.

All I can figure is this is the reaction they’re hoping for.  Kind of the political equivalent of the church that goes around the country protesting at the funerals of fallen soldiers with signs saying GOD HATES FAGS  and BURN IN HELL SINNER.

Bring in the clowns.  Hire some serious psychiatrists.  Consult the Talking Heads on PBS and Fox.  But this seems like Goofball Inchoate Rage to me.  Go down to the sea and rifle ping pong balls into the wind with messages like Your Mama Isn’t!!  or The Chinese Are Still Inscrutable!!  Or Doctors Are Torturers!!  Let the current take them to all the beaches of the world.  The new message in the bottle is this:  IF YOU FIND THIS, MAIL IT TO THE UNITED NATIONS.  EXPECT BLACK HELICOPTERS TO FIND YOU.

I’m no paragon of sanity myself, I’ll grant you.  I believe we all skate on a thin layer of reality that can crack and shatter any time, plunging us who knows where into what dark depths.  But I try not to encourage my fellow travelers to venture out into the unsolid middle.

There seems to be a vicious perversity afoot, a loathing that wants all of us to pitch into chaos, flail and fight with ourselves.  The goblins are among us.  If I had an antidote, believe me, I’d offer it.  My only advice is turn the other way.  Don’t make eye contact.  Fall down and play dead if necessary.  Short of that, avoid mailing letters down at the Post Office….

We got a Grange Hall on the South End.  Still got members even.  Okay, not many, just a few Die-Hards holding on by a toenail, trying to keep the place from sinking into the tideflats or falling into the hands of some fast buck developer bent on high rise condos that face the Sound.  The South End String Band threw in with these Grangers back in ’04, sold $5 tickets that got you a dinner and an aural onslaught by an 11 member ensemble.  Made nearly 4 grand and kept the place open another decade.

But …. Times being what they are, the good folks at the South Grange need a little help once again.  So the Band, now as downsized as the Grange is, decided to throw in once more.  After all, these are the folks who organized and built Camano State Park with 1000 volunteers from the island and Stanwoodopolis back in 1949.  And they did it in one day!

We’d like to make this an annual event, tie it in with the Harvest Jubilee and keep Tradition moving into the 21st Century.  Come on down Saturday Sept. 22nd and listen to the South End String Band regale you with a night of Camano backwash roots music and plenty of tall tales, exaggerations and outright lies.  Where else you gonna get that outside of a political rally?  And all for a $5 suggested donation.  Good cause, good people, good band (we warned you there’d be bald-faced lies) plus we’ll be offering a full meal deal of beer and wine plus snacks and dessert offerings.

Mosey down and help us out.  The South Grange — still standing.  Just like us.

Saturday Sept. 22nd  6 pm to when the cows come home.  2227 South Camano Drive (just south of Elger Bay Store) Shoes and shirt not necessary.

www. southendstringband.com

It’s harvest time on the old South End!  Big doings, oh yeah.  The whole Harvest Jubilee weekend is going to build to a Grand Finale and you KNOW where we’ll be having it —- that’s correcto, amigo — at the South Camano Grange.  After you’ve toured the farms and listened to the speeches, after you’ve petted goats and ogled alpacas, after you’ve tasted Smokey Point butter squash and tried to spell arugula, after you’ve driven all those miles on not-so-sustainable gasoline, after all the nettles are harvested and the free range crabs are rounded up, there’s only one last stop, one final jubilation, one Monster Party you should NOT miss.

The South End String Band is cranking up the volume, serving adult beverages and offering up a foot stomping, toe-tapping, barn burning, old fashioned SOUTH END HOEDOWN.  We’re going to help the Grange with your $5 suggested donation and we’re going to show you what Sustainable Partying is all about.

We’re going back – way back – to when the Grange rocked, when the entire community hauled on down and shook the moss off the roof.  We’ll have snacks for sale and we’ll offer up some moonshine wit and wet powder wisdom for anyone wondering why the South End is the Shangri-La-La of the Western World.  You show up, we’ll make you a certified (or certifiable) citizen of the South End.  No ID necessary.  And no credit check required.  It isn’t called Harvest Jubilee for nothing. SOUTH GRANGE HOEDOWN 6PM – to when the cows come home Satuday Sept. 22nd South Camano Grange 2227 S Camano Dr. (just south of Elger Bay Store) “Where the Past isn’t Prologue, It’s just Prolonged….”

One of the hazards of scribbling nonsense in these 21st Century blog sites along with about one billion other yahoos is that there are folks out there who really – and I don’t mean maybe – REALLY don’t like what they read in Skeeter’s pantheon of purpled prose.  Maybe some search engine sends em by mistake, hooks on a key word, next thing you know, instead of a self-help forum, they got some chucklenut waxing profane about a subject they couldn’t care less about.  And now, instead of Helpful Tips from Tom on how to turn their unhappy life into something swallowable, they got precious time wasted scrolling down South End Babble and boy howdy, somebody needs to reimburse them!

So they write to me in the anonymity of the internet.  Which is the digital highway equivalent of road rage on the interstate.  Flip me off, swerve into my lane,  jam the brakes.  They’ll show me who’s who and what’s what.  And the best part: they’re untrackable, anonymous as drive-by shooters.  Splatter my windshield with shotgun pellets and don’t look back, just speed away to the next unlucky target.

These are some very Very ANGRY! people out there with us.  More than you think.  Way more.  I suppose we’re lucky they shoot from the lip, not the hip, but if you ever made the mistake of commenting on a forum or some issue that meant enough to you that you weighed in, then you probably learned firsthand what I’m talking about.  Civility is most definitely not a valued trait in Cyberville.

I’d like to see the volume and vitriol dialed back a bit.  I know, probably won’t happen, probably get ratcheted UP even more if anything,  But personally, I’m weary of the ranting, the hysteria, the apoplexy.  And hey, you, the guy who sells antiques and read the blog by mistake on cleaning out my storage shacks, maybe hoping for bargains:  I’m sorry you thought this offered no insights for living your life.  And I’m doubly sorry if you thought I was so self- centered I used the blog to make myself look attractive.  I guess we won’t be dating.

I don’t have anything to sell, pal.  Not the junk I cleaned out, not the ideas in my head.  And .. .sadly…. it sounds like we’re all a little late to offer you tips on living.  Let’s both just figure it out on our own.

I got a friend whose granddad came over from Norway to America in 1901.  Bought some land on Camano Island between the Stilly River and Utsalady Bay, built a 12 foot by 12 foot cabin that still stands and lived in it until he built his house, about 2 or 3 times bigger, and it still stands with an addition that made it a 750 square foot palace.  This, for all us newcomers, makes him a bona fide North End homesteader.

To get to his farm he had to be ferried across from Stanwoodopolis, then hike the 2 or 3 miles up Land’s Hill and across the hogback we all use now, although we got a road these days.  Shopping was a bit more strenuous than it is for us Late Arrivals.  You can bet he was like a lot of us South Enders are today  —  he only went in to town when he had to.

My buddy still lives there in the ‘modern’ house his father built.  He’s added lots of acreage over the years, kept the farm going, the chickens, the gardens, the cattle herd.  It would be easy to imagine him being pretty proud and possibly smug about carrying on the American tradition of hard work, a veritable Captain of His Own Destiny.  We all like to think our lives were the result of our sweat, our smarts and our individual Can-Do attitude.  But my friend would disagree.  He says none of this would have been possible without the bridge being built finally and the roads laid down, the electric lines strung, the whole infrastructure that supports us all.

We aren’t Laplanders, you know.  And we don’t exist in a wilderness.  Even if, as we pioneers down here like to believe, we’re far from the oversight of Rome over there on the ‘other’ island with its seat of power centered in Coupeville, about a 2 day drive far far from home through multiple counties and over various bridges.  It’s fine to take pride in our Emersonian self-reliance, to build a house or a business or a life.  Just give some credit to the many unseen hands that paved the way.  Believe me, nobody’s going to think any less of you.

So I had a leak in my shack’s only working faucet, a drip I couldn’t stop by twisting as hard as I possibly could without breaking off the rusty handle.  Big Deal, I decided, I could live with a dribble or three, the motto of a seasoned procrastinator, a truly lazy man, a complete South Ender.  Never fix today what you can repair tomorrow.  And, if you can follow the inescapable logic of this maxim, tomorrow is ALWAYS later on.  NOT today.  Calculus, for you math majors, is built on this notion.  In other words, the South End is beyond most of our comprehensions.

Drip drip drip, day after day, and tomorrow never quite arriving…..   Of course, though, the Piper finally does arrive.  Sure as sunset follows sunrise.  Yesterday — and oh yeah, yesterdays pile up — I came down to find the sink full.  Slopping water on to the floor.  Great.  Just great.

I grabbed my trusty plunger, gave it a few robust shoves and voila, down she gurgled.  Next day, I repeated the process.  And the next.  And … well, all those tomorrows were showing up with teeth and claws and I suppose I could’ve continued until the shack itself rotted under its own sheer entropic weight and collapsed into the waiting nettles, sparing me my Sisyphean ordeal.  But then the toilet finally wouldn’t flush.  This, fair reader, is what Plumbing Hell looks like: dominoes all leading to further breakage, more repairs, endless hardware trips, gnashing of teeth, busted knuckles, demented curses, fear and finally loathing…. The Gods of Plumbing are cruel and implacable.  They do not care one spigot about your puny plight.

I am now three days into this.  My back porch deck has been deconstructed.  A hole has been dug large enough to bury King Kong in.  Cedar roots the size of Kong’s leg have been chopped and mangled and removed.  A mountain of dirt is rising like Babel in the backyard.   A cast iron pipe has been located.  It oozes black stinking slime a drip at a time through a tangled mat of roots and dirt and … let me spare you the rest.  My back is aching and  my wrists feel nearly broken as the pipe 5 feet down in the trench.

We take our indoor plumbing for granted, I guess.  But I’m seriously considering a return to simpler, more agrarian times.  I’m talking, of course, Outhouse.  No pipes, no plumbing, no plugged drains.  Course, there is that problem of what to do when it fills up.  But, as you know, that is a problem for tomorrow….

When we go off on our occasional vacations, we pack up most everything we own and then, either in Stanwoodopolis or out by the freeway, we go right or left, north or south, then head where our noses point us.  I guess some folks would say we’re Planning Averse.  And really, I admit it, we are.  This trip, however, we threw a dart beforehand and hit British Columbia’s east side.  So we looked at the map and picked a place called Winlaw high above the Washington/Idaho border.  Folks asked what was there we were interested in and we said we’ll have to tell you when we get back.

I got friends where half the fun is planning the trip, getting reservations, collecting guidebooks, studying the geography and geology of the place they’re going, building up the excitement to fever pitch months before they go.  If they have time, they learn a bit of the native language; you know, Eastern Montanan or Boston brogue, Canadian backwoods, eh?  Obviously, that is not our style.  And okay, for the record, we’ve gone down some bad roads, although I won’t go so far as to say they made for a bad vacation.  A vacation to us is a get-away.  To anywhere, any way, any time.  It isn’t home.  It isn’t routine.  It isn’t scheduled.  It’s a surprise every day.  It’s somewhere ELSE, not just physically, but mentally.  Why on earth would we want to plan it, review it, fact check it, practice it, create expectations and then go repeat it all.  Probably be disappointed if it wasn’t all that we thought it would be.  Or bored if it was.  Let’s just go home.  Practically seen it and done it thirteen times already.

Our traveling, I think, is the detour to all that.  Turn off the highway and try the dirt road.  Sure the tires might go flat, but we got a spare.  Usually.  If nothing else, we get more interesting stories to tell.  And the places we go aren’t half as crowded as Disneyland or some disease plagued cruise boat.  At least not yet ….

I know most of you are worried about this immigration issue as much as I am.  The state built a new bridge onto the island and we might as well have put a digital signboard overhead scrolling day and night:  BRING US YOUR HUDDLED MASSES.  Now they’re raising the roadbed and building another bridge just westward, probably a drawbridge for the newcomer’s boats to pass underneath.

There’s no guard station, no visa checks, no customs for regulating the flow of goods and contraband.  The border is wide open and all those yearning to breathe free are rolling in like radioactive tsunami debris.  Homeland Security is nowhere to be seen.  Already it may be too late.  The barn door’s been open a bit too long.  They come here with their odd customs and cuisines.  They live in enclaves with their own kind.  And little by little they grow in population until eventually they’ll outnumber us.  Up north it’s already happening.  They got gates and they got walls.  They got private streets and private security services.   Now it’s US who are kept on the outside.

Okay, I know what you’re thinking:  we’re ALL immigrants really.  Or maybe you’re one of those who figure we NEED folks to do the chores we won’t stoop to doing any more.  But these newcomers aren’t working.  They’re retired.  They check their stocks and bonds half the livelong day.  They sail in their yachts or vacation in their 40 foot travel trailers.  They have no interest in our way of life other than to hire US for yardwork or appliance repair or vehicle maintenance.  Oh, sure, they’re superficially friendly.  But use the service entrance, will ya?  And take yer shoes off, we just had the new hardwood floor laid.

I’m not saying we should close the bridge.  I’m just saying let’s get a quota on these immigrants.  One dot.com millionaire a year maybe and nobody who has more money than the rest of the South End combined.  We got a culture worth preserving here.  Let’s don’t dilute it with cold hard cash.  That’s not the South End Way.

Now I shouldn’t have to tell you folks out there that these stories I tell here are really, at most, half truths.  As a certifiable Half Wit, I’m not required to offer up the usual admonition that The People and Events Depicted Here Are Not Based on Any Person Living or Dead or Returned as Zombie or a Zumba.  The opinions and viewpoints expressed here are not those of the editorial board or anyone else with one ounce of common sense or the least bit of sobriety.  READ AT YOUR OWN RISK.

But … I have learned that more than a few of you out there are Literalists.  A literalist is not a political viewpoint so don’t get hot under the collar right off if I call you one.  A Literalist is a person who believes what they read as absolute gospel.  They do not dream yahoos like myself would look at the world satirically.  Not burdened with ones themselves, they might not realize some people have metastasized funny bones instead of the more normal cortical grey matter.  Guyz like me not only don’t write the truth, we don’t believe in truth.  We’re just here to deliver the punch lines.  Fox News understands this explicitly.

I make posters for the South End String Band and warp reality using a computer program called PhotoShop.  The fun, of course, is that a lot of folks still believe what they see, same as what they read.  Magic works exactly the same way.  We want to believe what our 2 eyes are telling us is real.

Get over it!  Fair warning.  You live among jokesters, pranksters, con artists, politicians and the pirates of reality.  Even art itself is a kind of subterfuge.  Artifice, right?  Playing around with your comfortable world, pulling out foundation supports one at a time until your house is floating on the air of imagination, reality becomes untethered and everything is possible.  I offer this not in the way of apology, but as a small caution.  Read these at your own risk!  On the South End, at least my end, we don’t take much of anything at face value.  Or the other anatomical end either.

This was the year Coca-Cola reintroduced cocaine in the secret recipe:  Coke Classic XX market shares went through the roof.  The FDA certified their products ‘safe’ so PepsiCo countered with a Viagra additive, Diet Priapic.  Sales in the over 40 demographic shot past Coke in the first month after introduction.  The race was on….   Coca-Cola began an internet campaign aimed at the teen market:  HOT COLA, a caffeine and pheromone enhanced super high fructose sugar concoction the FDA instigated investigations after 200 incidents of what the media reported as ‘date rape Coke’, but soon exonerated the company, declaring ‘the evidence of pheromone overdose has been greatly over-estimated.’  Sales of HOT COLA exceeded market expectation by 300%.

PepsiCo launched their own version, touting an anti-zit acne treatment ingredient.  Unfortunately, it caused sterility in males.  Pepsi altered its ad campaign to appeal to consumers as the ‘birth control of pop.’  Initially considered a stock market catastrophe, Pepsi-IUD soon rallied as the poster child for product Re-Branding.  Sales skyrocketed in opposite proportion to teen age pregnancies.  Coke attempted damage control with its Coke-Fertility Zero Diet drink, but soon pulled ads and product after studies showed heavy drinkers exhibited pronounced embryonic abnormalities.  Coca-Cola denied culpability but quietly paid huge damaged claims to teenage girls with encephalitic twins and triplets and worse.  Stocks tumbled despite non-disclosure agreements.

Pepsi stood pat.  Coke introduced Coke Classic 4X, using a secret Merck artificial cocaine reformulated to evade FDA objections.  Meth sales in the United States plummeted and a new industry, Coke Distillery, started up and flourished briefly until Glaxo Pharmaceuticals began selling a pure form of the Coke additive they called KRANK.  Coca-Cola sued successfully to halt production, but an underground market continued.  Once again Coca-Cola stocks tumbled, this time by 25%.  Glaxo Pharma doubled in 3 months, then doubled again, despite SEC investigations into their underground operations.

As of this writing, the government, under President Palin, instructed the FDA chairman Scott Walker (former CEO of Phizer) to fast track future approval of soda formulas in order to keep ahead of the Chinese who entered the market with their own brands of lead-based colas that had lowered the IQ of American children 16 points in the 5 years since their introduction.  Pepsi and Coke stocks briefly doubled.