The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The mizzus asked me the other day When Was It the 5 and dime stores became Dollar Stores?  Now, I don’t know about you old codgers, but I barely remember Yesterday, much less the answer to some trick history question.     Ma, I said, my memory is a highway of cerebral roadkill.  No point turning the truck around – what’s back there is dead as a doornail – so I’m just gonna keep driving until I figure out where exactly I’m headed….

But it got me wondering:   when DID all these dollar stores take over the world?  I remember the Ben Franklins and Kresges —   all that cheap junk made in Japan.  They got eaten up by the K-Marts and Targets – all that cheap junk made in Taiwan.  Which got eaten up by Wal-Mart – all that cheap junk make in China.

We don’t have Dollar Stores down at the South End.  We got the Mom and Pop One Stop Shops where the only thing close to being under a buck is a potato or a newspaper or all their free gossip.    Could be they’re the Vanguard of the next big paradigm shift in Retail Marketing:  the 5 and 10 Dollar Store.  Once again Tyee Store is leading the charge.  Better be, cause you sure won’t have enough cash.

A lot of folks who don’t live down here ask me:   Skeeter, it’s hard to believe there’s really a place like the South End, kind of some Never Never Land, turn left at the first star by Terry’s Corner and keep on going until morning.  I admit, it does sound damn inviting.  A place where the law of physics and the law of Island County don’t hold much jurisdiction.  A place where jobs are not only scarce but that very fact is celebrated.   A place where maybe too many of us avoided adulthood but we don’t need daycare.

Oh, I suppose I could polish up the vision of the South End as a magical world,  shine it til it glowed like Aladdin’s Lamp that offered 3 wishes but you wouldn’t need more than 1 or 2.  But there is a dark side to paradise, one you might not notice in the brochures.  If I’m going to be the travel agency for Shagri-La-La, it’s only fair I give some warning.  If only to deflect future lawsuits….

Sure, we’re the Banana Belt of the island archipelago.  Judging by the uniqueness of the inhabitants, we’re really a Galapagos, cut off from the mainland and the mainstream.  You visit long enough and it won’t be long before you notice the distinctly odd genetic diversities.  I’m talking, of course, about our artist herds.     Turn over a rock or go down a laurel shrouded drive, you’ll find 200 subspecies of watercolorist, 50 oil painters, 25 sculptors and too many glass benders, fusers, blowers and breakers to shake a punt stick at.  They’re breeding in the nettle hollows, trading art among themselves, putting on studio shows, turning body shops and beauty parlors into ersatz galleries, filling up libraries and schools and fire stations with unsalable artwork, building art parks and sculpture gardens.  It’s as if the Garden of Eden had become an apple orchard, 500 varieties and new grafts every year.  There’s seemingly No End to it.  The inner child has been unleashed, unsupervised and is now unmanageable.

Some folks find an iguana-infested island interesting, I guess.  If you’re one of these, by all means, come and visit.  If the South End inspires you toward aesthetic ecstasy, fine —all we ask is that when you depart, take your inner child home with you.  We don’t need cross pollination from the outside world.  We’re having enough trouble with our native species as it is.  The day may be coming when a quarantine is required.  Not only to prevent contamination from the outside, but to prevent the contagion from spreading…..

The Little Church of the Ravine actually sits on a knoll above an old logging skid road ruled now by blackberries so thick an old Studebaker can be hidden most seasons, only occasionally glimpsed in winter.  The car looks like it was caught in a thorny web and try as it might, no earthly horsepower is going to set it free.  The reader sign out by the church entrance has revolving words of evangelical wisdom Shaky Jake changes when the words come down from on high, meaning when the Reverend asks him.

7DAYS WITHOUT PRAYER MAKES ONE WEAK.

HAVING TROUBLE SLEEPING — SERMONS R US

HONK IF YOU LOVE JESUS — TEXT WHILE DRIVING IF YOU WANT TO MEET HIM

Under the pithy weekly message it says:  REV. RALPH MEAKER and under that:

A NON-DENOMINATIONAL CHURCH

SUNDAY SERVICES 9 A.M.

We South Enders assume by non-denominational they have no money.  What they do have are plenty of sinners in search of salvation.  Well, in need of salvation.  Every Sunday they ring the bell that was stolen (or ‘rescued’ , depending on the teller) from the Mabana one room Schoolhouse which now houses the administrative offices of the Elger Bay School of Aesthetic Enlightenment.  The school has asked for the bell back, but essentially were told it tolls for thee.

The Little Church of the Ravine draws a fairly sizeable congregation, especially considering the Chapel up north’s gravitational pull, with its basketball courts and gyms, youth programs, daycare and state of the art sound systems, could easily drain the flock.  But the Little Church, despite its plain jane exterior, its lack of stained glass filled traceries, its metal folding chairs instead of pews, has saved souls since the early 60’s and stills sends missionary support to far flung infidel-filled places like Indonesia and Africa and Smokey Point.

Back in the 70’s they lost half their congregation over a fight to make a park down at the public Port of Mabana, once a pier hundreds of feet out into Saratoga Strait about 1920, now some amputated pilings exposed at minus tides.  The locals wanted to condemn some unused property to make parking possible and this pitted old family against old neighbors  until the acrimony got so bad not even Jesus Himself could make the peace and the Little Church split into two factions and finally only one stayed.  The private property wasn’t condemned.  Houses were hurriedly built.  Port Commissioners were sued and forced to resign.   The park never got anywhere and folks who’d been friends for generations stopped saying hello.      You can park now by the beach at the port, walk your dog or launch a small boat.  And you can attend services up the bluff at the church every Sunday.  9 AM.  The bell tolls.  The old Studebaker tries to drive on through, but like most things down here gone to rot and rust and ruin, salvation is hard to do.

Times are tough these days down at the South End Marina and Bait Shop.  A lot of barnacle-bottomed boats moored idle at the docks, their glory days of fishing now just a dry-rotted memory.  Occasionally you’ll see one of the skippers doing a little brightwork on some faded trim or turning over an engine just to clear the cobwebs from the lines and the tanks, but time and overfishing have taken heavy tolls.

Used to be the fleet was the pride of the island, running from Mabana to Bristol Bay in search of salmon openings and halitbut catches.  We maybe didn’t have the widows’ walks the Narragansett boys had for their lonely wives to gaze forlornly out to sea scanning horizons for men returned from hunting whale, but it was an event nonetheless when captains sailed into view with full cargo holds and tales of Alaskan storms.

Sadly, those catches dwindled and the fleet turned to lesser dreams.  For a time they chartered for the tourist fishermen,  CEO’s up from San Diego and Frisko, Portland and Seattle, in search of trophy gooeyducks and the elusive free range oyster, but even those became uncommon, then finally rare.  One by one the Captains Courageous were forced to sit idle, swapping tongue-worn tales of the Big Catch of ’78 or the killer storm of ’82, mostly lies now, but better than constant complaining.   And far better than hanging out in the unemployment office.

Some of the skippers sold their boats for what they could get, just pesos on the dollar.  Hazy Jake ran Canadian Bud for awhile through the islands until the borders tightened and his nerves frayed worse than his lines.  You see the last of them down at the bait shop most days, those Ahabs whose Mobys disappeared, hunkered down  over big chipped mugs of thick coffee from the self serve pot, predicting tide and weather, predicting  everything except the future, a place they rarely visit now.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/audio-crabdog-day.mp3[/podcast]audio —crabdog day

I love a good holiday as much as the next yahoo … but c’mon, this Groundhog’s Day business, let’s be honest, the Chamber of Commerce out there in Pullmyleg, Pennsylvania has pulled a fast one on those of us who take meteorologic prediction seriously.  Down here on the convergence zoned South End, No Way is a groundhog going to see his shadow on Feb. 2nd.  Even if we had groundhogs!  This thing just gives Science a bad name.  And lately, the last thing it needs in these superstitious, Mayan Calendar, end-of-the-world times is a black eye over some mammalian hairball on the East Coast seeing its hairball shadow (or not) and then extrapolating that to El Nino or asteroid strikes on Wall Street or global warming.

Which is precisely why some of the more empirically minded boyz down at the Mabana Body Shop have been searching, in a deductive sort of methodology, an alternative Predictor of winter longevity.  Hellfire, if winter’s just going to last until April, we figure there’s no point in fighting serious incentive-reducing Inevitability.  We’ll just pull the covers up, collect unemployment and wait for spring.  This is how civilizations thrive:  they figure out tides and seasons for planting schedules and harvest times and happy hours.

The model the boyz constructed over the past decade or so is a local paradigm that utilizes a 5 gallon polyethylene bucket of fresh caught Dungeness crabs  —- I KNOW you’re going to point out they’re illegal this time of season, but listen, we’re putting em back when the data is collected.  Spirit of the Law, if not the Letter and that, in a clamshell is the very essence of the South End Way. —- So you got a pail of clacking claws and now you bring out a dog, any dog, any breed, random sampling, see?  And you let the pooch check out the crustaceans.  No shadows, no hibernating drowsy marmots.  And if the crab gets a lock on Snoopy’s snout, voila, studies have shown that is a true omen of an early spring.  The dog schnozz slips the noose, 6 more weeks of sleeping in.

Simple.  Like Einstein says, the more elegant the theory, the higher the probability it’s correct.  And the boyz down at the body shop will tell you, the accuracy here is in the 90 percentile range, statistically astounding.  We’re not claiming, like those unabashed self promoters in Pennsylvania, that this will predict spring for the entire country, but for all us Left Coasters, rest assured, Feb 2nd now has science as its bedrock foundation.  We’ll leave it to the South End Chamber of Commerce how they want to capitalize on it.  Crab Dog Day.  Nice profitable ring to it, don’t you think, kind of like a cash register.  If we can keep PETA at bay….

As most of you careful readers know, political correctness down here on the partisan shores of the steamy equatorial South End is probably not one of our more valued virtues.  Maybe because we’re all trapped down at this skinny dead end backwash cul-de-sac, we’ve learned — the hard way usually —- that if we want to get along without civil war, we have to disagree without resorting to a full blown arms race.  And believe me, we disagree.  On most everything.  That’s why we all ended up down here at the end of a tilting island at the end of America on the edge of a continental shelf sliding herky-jerky under another tectonic plate.

This week the talk down at Jolene’s Beauty Salon and Boutique revolved exclusively around the passage of the same sex marriage bill.  Scissors and tongues snipped and clucked, but Jolene says no blood was spilled.  Ronald, her frothy new beautician, might have intentionally miscolored Mrs. Adeline’s silver perm a tad on the electric blue side when she made the comment that ‘gayness’, seemed to her, was a lifestyle choice, but mostly the banter was affable.

Rhonda Wilkins did wonder out loud if the bill’s passage meant she and her no-account husband Tom’s opposite sex marriage would be annulled now.  “That’s wistful thinking,” Wanda blurted from two chairs away in the middle of a henna touch-up on the minister’s mizzus who steadfastly refused to be drawn into a curling iron showdown, and if Rhonda hadn’t been curled herself and heat-lamped into her chair, she might have stormed out, but by the end of the drying cycle she was cooled down and still unhappily married to the love of her life whose zenith of ambition was to reach retirement before cirrhosis.

So Valentine’s Day on the metrosexual South End this year promises to be a cross between Mardi Gras and a Pink St. Patrick’s Day.  Maybe no parades by the Diner, but a lot of closets opened for an early spring cleaning.  Believe me, the South End could always stand a little more love….  And just in case Mrs. Adeline is right, some of us should think about renewing those old marriage vows.  On the outside chance there really might be a statute of limitation.

Now that the Sinsemilla Tsunami is rolling across the Land of the Free, Home of the Bud, some of the defenders of American Values are banning the legalization of medical marijuana.  Towns from Mt. Vernon to Everett are debating the pros and cons, weighing the consequences and scrutinizing consciences.  Even Smokey Point, with its perfect name for cannabis fame is balking at allowing doobie dispensaries.

Down on the green shores of the South End of Cannabis Island, we have no qualms about serving the medicinal needs of the area.  After all, we’ve risked arrest and public censure doing exactly that for 50 years.  We don’t like to brag, but hellfire, our pharmers, both indoors and outdoors, have provided psychic relief to the chronically unemployed, the seasonally insane and most of the serious artists of the area.

Decades of hydroponic experimentation, lighting strategies, agri-chemical balancing models, forced budding techniques, nettle cross-feritilization genetics and spiritual incantations have made South End Sinsemilla the envy of the cannabis connoisseur.  From ‘One Toke Smoke’ to the ‘Green Blitz’, our varietal selections provide a complete range of pharmaceutical panacea for all your medical needs in every price category.      Marital problems — try Marital Blitz.  Constipation — take a couple tokes of Canna-Colonic.  Insomnia — one puff of Sinsemilla Insensate should do the trick.  Employment Anxiety —  Welfare Wowee.

The South End Economic Development Council is fully on board with the idea that we can be the region’s Medical Miracle Mile, a lifeline to Nirvana and an emotional booster for the entire Puget Sound Basin.  We’re here to offer our euphoric expertise and our agricultural acumen.  Profits are merely a byproduct, of course.  But hey, Smokey Point, if you aren’t going to capitalize on that name, we’d be interested in purchasing the rights.  Save you any future embarrassment, if nothing else.  We’re here to help.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/audio-insta-foto-fence.mp3[/podcast]audio — insta foto fence

Neighbor, do you wake up mornings, look out your window over a cup of your favorite roasted coffee and discover the suburb you left behind two short years ago has followed you here to Paradise?  Does it seem like four of your next door neighbors are saluting you with their Starbuck’s coffee?  At night does it look like the sky is glowing an eerie electronic blue from 17 TV’s flickering out every living  room window?  During the day does it seem like every retiree from here to Elger Bay is mowing his weed and feed lawn on a precision close-order drill of riding John Deeres?   Do you find yourself daydreaming of a place in the country where you’re the only lucky fella in the subdivision?       Friend, stop thinking the grass is gonna be greener somewhere else… You know the chemical fertilizers aren’t any more effective there.

What you need is our newly patented, completely remodeled South End Insta-Foto Fence.  Installs in just minutes with household tools!  The Insta-Foto Fence not only repels stray dogs and unwanted neighbor kids, the life-like realistic scenes of rural retirement will lull you back into a reverie of country contemplation.

Lay back in your reclino-lounger with your favorite adult beverage and view scenes of rural bliss.  We offer a full catalogue of bucolic  photo options.  Maybe you want an ocean vista, waves gently rolling on to your immaculate yard.  Order ‘Sleepy Shores #17’.   If Pastoral Paradise (#3)  is more to your taste, a panorama of cattle grazing by far off trees on a gently undulating hillside will make you want put a straw in your mouth and a lemonade on the side table.  Maybe the long monsoon months of interminable winter have got you long in the mouth.  Try ‘Tropical Sunset foto-fence #6’ and forget those drizzly days of the past.  Prefer something more exotic?  Maybe a golf course scene in Hawaii is more your style with its happy duffers driving the fairways of your own backyard.  Just order ‘Pebble Beach Hole #9’ and imagine that drive between the sand bunkers hitting the green every time.    Twenty images to choose from, installed with no muss, no fuss.  So easy and affordably priced you’ll want to change fences often.

Instant Foto-Fence.  Because you deserve more than another man’s suburbs.  Now available in electric for maximum dog repellant protection.  Keeps out the deer too!!!