The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Lately I’ve been reading the letters to the editor of the local paper down in Everett.  If you thought the impasse in Congress over the Debt Ceiling was turning ugly, you maybe should avoid the Herald’s comment page since they took out one of their comic strips without asking readers first.  You’d think the paper was burning babies or calling for Spanish Only in America.
One lady wrote in to say she ONLY read their stupid newspaper for its comics and this particular strip was her all time favorite.  She was thinking of not reading the paper at all now.  I mean, who can blame her?  Sorta like not watching TV because her favorite advertiser quit advertising.
But now we got a war of reader writers weighing in on what comics are stupid and what ones aren’t funny and which ones are so offensive to their family values they can’t let their kids half a mile near a newspaper.  Which explains a lot of things, you ask me.  Even ‘Peanuts’ took a hard shellacking.
Course, I got my own opinion of the comic section.  Not enough of one to write in to the editor about, but I figure I can skip a couple of strips without feeling gypped on my subscription rates.  And anyway, now I got the Letters to the Editor page to make up for any lost belly laughs.  You got a gripe with Congressional deadlock, check out who voted them in.  You’ll laugh til you cry.

How about these Occupy Wall Street protestors, huh?  The gall of these people!  Here they are, 99%’ers, screaming for a larger share of profits, of pensions, of the wealth of the country.  Seems to me like 99 bullies on a playground ganging up on one skinny guy.  So okay, the skinny dude drives a Maserati and owns a yacht with a helicopter on deck.  Still one against 99.  UnAmerican, you ask me.
Here’s this Captain of Industry steering through the treacherous seas of Economic Instability, trying his damnedest to keep wages low and profits high, and along come the very people who wish they had his job, his very tough job, demanding that his hard earned money gets divvied up among folks who didn’t struggle through Yale or Harvard Business Schools, who have no idea of the cost or the sacrifice these Titans have made, the years driving second hand Lexuses or living in gated communities with no club memberships or privileges.
You hear a lot of wailing and moaning that they’ve bought off Congress.  What did they expect, being outvoted 99 to 1?  The CEO’s just want a level playing field, simple as that.  These protestors whine that the Supreme Court has given corporations the same freedom of speech as they have.  They’re anti-freedom, plain as the nose on your face.  They blubber on about executive bonuses and golden parachutes and 100 million dollar retirement packages when it’s their own underfunded pension funds that are dragging the company bottom line down.  Class warfare is what these cry-babies want.  Communism is their end.  The End of America is what they’ll get.
Turn on a TV, you 99’ers.  American Idol, Million Dollar Jackpot, I Married a Millionaire, the Lottery ads  — hey, this the American Dream, pal, the one you can believe in.  1%, Brother.  We can’t all be Bill Gates.  So shut up and be glad you live in a country where you can dream of his riches.  And know this:  you helped get him there, all 99 of you.  That pyramid scheme is what makes America great, dummy.  You didn’t think it was Democracy, did you?

Most of us in this mean old world are searching for something.  We’re looking for food and shelter.  We’re looking for love.  For family and tribe.  We’re seeking peace of mind.  We’re looking for answers, maybe, to the cosmic riddles — you know, do we have some purpose, do we get a Do-Over when we die, is there a Creator, all that stuff folks have asked since they managed to learn words and string em together to make ideas and then the ideas start to torture em with questions.  Thinking, it seems safe to say, is at the very Root of the Problem.
Something about us humans is always searching for spiritual nourishment.  We drink, we do drugs, we watch TV.  We play video games, we go to the ball parks.  Except on the South End, it’s rarely enough.  We’ve lost some kind of cosmic connection, some spiritual bridge, some hoped for salvation.  We feel alienated in our own skin, strangers in a strange land.
Folks cry out in their wilderness, cry out for redemption, for life everlasting, for peace of mind, cry out for forgiveness, for acceptance, for love.  They join communes, they check genealogies, they follow the prophets, they sign up for the Chamber of Commerce, they worship any religion you can dream up.  They just want to Believe in Something, be a Part of Something, Belong heart and soul to Something.  Anything. You got a man who says a Comet is Coming next year to pick up the true believers, he’ll have no trouble finding plenty of volunteers.  It’s just the way of the world.
Down by me we got Bubbhism.  For us Bubbas there’s just too little time for so damn many questions.  We don’t claim to have any answers.  We just hoe our gardens, wrassle up our crabs and clams, brew up our potions, raise our families and accept this life for exactly what it is.  If there’s more, well, write back to us from the hereafter, why don’tcha.  If we wanted more, well, that would be the start of a guaranteed misery.  As grandpa Daddle used to say: “For those fellas who don’t ask questions, there ain’t no mysteries.”  Bubbhism in a nutshell.  You want answers, good luck to ya.

I got a little job to do recently in Arkansas.  West Arkansas, in the hills of the Ouchita Range which is sort of the Ozarks but is cut off from it by Arkansas River.  I rented a little hunting cabin halfway between the town of Hatfield (pop. 402) and the Oklahoma border a few miles from here.  You ever want to get away from the Rat Race, this works.  Just the coyotes and the deer and an occasional armadillo.  My cabin had a porch with a rocking chair and I had a banjo I’d made awhile back.  If I’d had a corncob pipe and a jug of razorback moonshine, I might never have left.
I damn near didn’t.  I blew a tire right off getting up to my place and so I put on the little baby tire the rental company calls a spare, drove it to the nearest town up the road from Hatfield and ordered a real tire since the old one was beyond repair.  Couple of screw-ups later, I’m still waiting and so I hunkered down at the cabin here, hiked the hills, waded the creek, watched vultures in the thermals and sort of drifted myself back into a boyhood long lost in the Appalachians of my youth.
My job was to install some of my stained glass windows in a national chapel for the Christian Motorcycle Association before their international rally of world leadership descended on tiny Hatfield.  I’d given myself a week but we were finished in a couple of 90 degree days.  The conference was rolling in by the hundreds at first, then by the thousands.  My people wanted me to stay an extra day so they could put me on their Jumbotrons on the big stage they have in a meeting hall that’s over an acre under one roof, no posts, just huge girders carrying the load to the outside walls far from each other.  And have me stand there while they said thanks, maybe have me say a word or three about, oh, my inspiration for the designs, hopefully something religious, at least something spiritual.
Right now, writing this, a good wind is rippling the pond down below the cabin, the trees are rustling leaves starting to catch autumnal fire and the sun is setting so long shadows touch my bare feet.  No other human is anywhere near.  Would you stand up in front of thousands of pilgrims yearning for some reassurance my inspiration came from On High and tell them I hear Cripple Creek, not Jesus Christ; I feel the warmth of the wind, not the Lord, and I know the light that plays through this valley, an October light moving south, is the self-same spirit that animates their chapel glass?  Would you?
Not me.  The light will have to do all the talking for me this time.  And by then I’ll be long gone from this paradise.

I took a flight recently out of Stanwood International.  Being a citizen of the 21st century digital world, I got my boarding pass online and checked my bag.  $20 for the bag.   One way.  Nobody said things would get cheaper just because computers control the world now.  The baggage checklist asked if I was carrying explosives, firearms, flammables or radioactive material.  I answered NO and I bet the terrorists will too.   Honesty just isn’t high on the Values Chart for would-be mass murderers.
At the aerodrome I went through the cattle fence where shampoos are duly confiscated.  As are small penknives, fingernail clips, scissors, razor blades and any grenades we inadvertently slipped into our carry-on.  TSA agents are hired, primarily, I think, for their complete lack of any semblance of a sense of humor.  Not that most of us are laughing….    By the X-ray machine we are pretty much shoeless, beltless, hatless, walletless, keyless and clueless.  I doubt many of the Jews lined up for their shower at Dachau cracked wise either.  These are not joking matters.
My TSA guy, a middle eastern looking fellow who, if our positions were reversed, would have been profiled as TERRORIST: PROBABILITY HIGH, was pondering my pack.  In particular a harmonica I’d carried on.  “What is this?” he demanded, no doubt alerted by its multiple barrels for small caliber ammo.  I gave him a bad blues demonstration.  This made him smile.  Okay.  Music, the universal language of terrorists.
When I arrived home a week later, having repeated all of the above minus the blues harp investigation, I opened my suitcase and discovered a full box of 12 gauge shotgun shells.  Since I don’t own a 12 gauge, this was baffling.  The TSA had thoughtfully left a calling card that they’d opened and inspected my luggage.  And apparently added some explosives as an apology of some sort.  I know I sleep better knowing gunpowder and buckshot are being offered to nearly naked passengers.  That harmonica wasn’t a lot of protection — even if I could bring people to their knees squalling on it.  Next trip I’m hoping for a shiny new shotgun.   Security, it’s for our own good.

I know this is hard to believe, but Skeeter’s going to be AWOL for a week or so doing a stained glass installation in the razorback country of western Arkansas.  This may come as a shock to some of you readers, but Skeeter has a day job that occasionally — okay, rarely — requires him to leave his life of blissful sloth to join the legions of migrant workers who do work no self-respecting gringo American would do for anything that paid twice the prevailing wage which isn’t exactly the minimum.
So while the Daddler is slaving away in the fields of art out in the parched rainshadow of the Ozarks, trying to impose his cultural vision on the unsuspecting black powder denizens of the hill country, you might scroll down to the old rantings and ravings at the bottom of this blog, see if you missed anything real important.  If old Skeet makes it out of the heartland intact, or at least not too scarred, he’ll be back to his old tricks before you can say Lazy Son of a ……

The other day I bought a bag of Frito-Lay potato chips and as is my wont from my early reading days as an 8 year old studying cereal boxes, I read the packaging.  These potatoes, I was informed in a tidy paragraph written by public relations specialists who had no doubt conducted extensive customer surveys, were FARM-RAISED.  Imagine!  I’m guessing grown right in the ground.  Tractors, fields, insecticides, migrant labor:  farm raised.  BOLD TYPE.  Major advertising feature.  The oils used were ‘natural’ too and this was worth trumpeting.
Holy cow manure, Batman, what’s the NEXT big thing in the food biz?  Cheetos raised hydroponically?  Personally I’m not sure consumers are really ready for food grown in the wild.  Bugs, fungus, bacteria, all that creepy stuff a farmer is ill-equipped to handle outside a laboratory or a petri dish.  We can grow meat without legs now, protein on a rope, and rumor has it the burger chains are nearing a breakthrough on cloning buns, with or without sesame seeds, directly on to the meat patty grown in secret underground hermetically sealed bunkers of Monsanto and Dow Chemical.  You think they’re going to stick a filthy leaf of lettuce or a listeria riddled tomato on their antiseptically pure chemoWhopper?  Get real.  Not….
This whole Slow Food movement just flies in the face of 21st century culinary logic.  We invented TV dinners so we’d have the time to watch more TV instead of wasting countless hours messing with the cooking of raw potentially contaminated food.  These purveyors of old school eating call themselves environmentalists, but what about the damage from a bazillion cookbooks printed on paper from slaughtered trees?  Next thing you know, they’ll advocate recipes for bark.  A backlash is coming, count on that, the next step beyond vegetarianism.  Stop eating plants.  Stop the killing of carrots.  It’s not only cruel, it’s filthy with germs and dirt.  So Frito-Lay, nice try.  But I’m afraid the world isn’t ready — we’ve turned the corner on 19th century farm products.  Work on synthetic broccoli that tastes like Snickers if you want to stay profitable.  Hook the kids and you own the future.  Next time you need marketing advice, call me first.  Save yourself some embarrassment.

I noticed the other day that Rick Perry mentioned that the Lord had made it clear to him the He had chosen the Governor to be President of the United States.  Ordinarily I’d’ve said let’s just cancel the 2012 election and install Perry on the throne, no point going against the will of God unless you really want pestilence, floods and wildfires, all of which we got plenty of right now.  But the trouble is, Michelle Bachman got the same call to serve from, well, the same Summoner.
Bad reception maybe?  That, or the Lord is like me, a little more forgetful these days.  And He’s a tad older, so I can only imagine trying to keep it together when I’m, oh, 500 billion years older than I am now, on the precipice already of dementia.  But what are we going to do with a dead tie for Anointee in Waiting?  Flip a coin and let one be vice president?  Take turns the next 16 years?  Check the message machine and see if one of those calls was a prank, Obama having a little sport here?  The Lord works in mysterious ways, I know, but I suspect I’d hate to be Called On and then find out someone else had too.  Rick and Michelle got some hard head scratching, I imagine.  And let’s all hope Sarah is serious about not running, we sure don’t need call #3.
I admit I’m not the most religious guy on the South End.  Live and Let Live is about as much rule and commandment as I can abide.  So it worries me to have a couple of Believers who think they got the News, all right, straight from up above, but their reception may not be high speed DSL and something might be getting lost in translation.
We got GOP debates ongoing so maybe we can get this cleared up.  Meanwhile I’m going to figure maybe God doesn’t get involved in primaries.  That, or the Hindus got it right after all:  there’s plenty of gods to go around.  Maybe even one who roots for the other side.

The other day I was trailing behind a 40 foot RV trailer, sort of a McMansion on wheels, reading their bumper sticker that announced:  SPENDING OUR KIDS’ INHERITANCE.  Pretty hilarious stuff.  I bet the kids fall over laughing when the folks come rolling in for a month to visit.  $200,000 for the camper.  3-4 bucks a gallon times multiple crisscrossing of America.  Yah, I’d say the joke has some real mileage.  Great punchline.  Put another sticker on the SUV they’re towing, you got a bellybuster.
I know these people.  They think they’re taxed like a Roman peasant.  They think government is mostly the real enemy, spending their hard earned money on welfare and food stamps and mental health clinics and emergency relief and worse, wasting it through inefficiency and bureaucratic ineptness and just plain graft and greed.  They think minimum wage should be lowered and taxes eliminated.  They got theirs and good luck to the rest of you suckers.  The road they’re riding can crumble into blacktop sand after they sail by.
They know the country is in trouble, big debt, bad balance of trade, recession, all that economic mumbo jumbo.  But they’re not going to help get us out of the mess they helped put is in.  The bumper sticker they got, they could slap on the White House or Congress or any county courthouse.  They got the union jobs before unions were corrupt.  They worked for the government sector before government was evil, they fought for tax breaks for the rich once they were rich and if you missed out, tough luck.
I know these people.  They’re my friends and my neighbors and I can even see them in my own bathroom mirror.  They don’t believe in sacrifice … or the common good … or downsizing  … or that the American Dream is supposed to be for all of us.   It was for them.  The rest, the huddled and tired masses, the immigrants, the poor, the weak and the infirm  —- they got some hard news for you.  They’re spending your inheritance.  Ha ha ha, ho ho ho.  Get the joke?  Do ya, huh?  It’s on you!
My generation will maybe be remembered, not as the most selfish sonsofbitches on the planet, but as those whacky comedians at the End of the American Century.  By then, of course, nobody will be laughing.

I got a buddy who’s required to take a drug test before he’s hired on as a consultant for an oil consortium.  He worked ramrodding the construction site for the same oil companies for decades up at Prudeau Bay where part of his job was making sure the riggers stayed drug and alcohol free through long days and longer nights.  Sorta like Wyatt Earp asking the cowboys to stick with Coca-Cola Saturday nights, if they wouldn’t mind….
So now that he’s retired and going back for consulting, I guess the Big Boyz are worried he’s fallen into decadence and drugs along with the rest of us South Enders.  The required test is given in Bothell so my pal dutifully makes an appointment, navigates the I-5 bumper car gauntlet, arrives with a full bladder of freshly filtered latte which he desperately wants to unload ASAP, but, unsurprisingly, is told to wait.  Short time later, long past that anguished outcry of a Guernsey with 10 gallons of unpasteurized backed up past an udder while the farmer is out drinking with his Scandihoovien reprobate buddies, the secretary comes in with the bad news that the urinary nurse in charge of the drug testing doesn’t come in on Fridays.  Yah, shure, you guessed it — it’s Friday.  Can I leave you the sample? he asks through clenched teeth, bent over in pain and growing anger.  And … well, shure, you guessed right again and no, sir, that would be against the rules.
My buddy is almost 70 years old, drug free as a priest, a loyal employee and now he’s made to stand hunched over, practically peeing his adult diapers and trying to come to grips with What Is Wrong With This Picture?  Do they suspect him of Viagra dependency?  Do they merely want him to understand his real place in the corporate hierarchy?  Are they testing for latent homicidal urges, maybe see if he’ll snap in the lab offices where only a contract worker will be sacrificed, not a VP of operations?
All I can say is, my buddy must really want to avoid retirement to endure this kind of knee-jerk, low brow humiliation.  The rest of us on the South End … well, let’s just say the drug tests down here are only for quality control.