The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The Southendomish Casino celebrated its Grand Opening last week. The ‘Big Hearted Little Casino” advertised itself as the gambling emporium with the most generous slots in Puget Sound. Unfortunately, a typo in the Gazette brought unwanted scrutiny from the Sheriff’s department and the gambling commissioner, but the next issue’s correction cleared the air. SLOTS. Probably a lot of disappointed johns … but it IS a gambling joint, not a brothel.

Even so a small group from the Little Chapel in the Ravine, led by Pastor Paul, picketed noisily in the parking lot until Casino Security asked them to protest somewhere NOT on their private property. Trudy Hawkins and her husband Bobby lobbied to stand their ground against the Devil’s Playground, but Pastor Paul argued for setting up at the highway where their placards would be just as effective where cars turned in to the casino’s fresh blacktop entry. WOULD JESUS GAMBLE HIS PAYCHECK??? DON’T BET AGAINST HELL! An hour of marching in circles on the shoulder, Trudy needed to use a restroom and so did Wanda Jenkins, but damned if they were going to go into the casino to relieve themselves. Pastor Paul, always the mediator, reckoned they’d made their point anyway so the little band of righteous warriors broke for a potty stop. By then the Casino parking lot was crammed with their neighbors and friends hoping to cash in on generous slots and inexpensive bar specials.

The South End doesn’t have a patent on Sin, but we sure welcomed a place to house it. At least the first few days….. Generous or not, the casino always won over time, although plenty of folks happily tell me they’re lucky at the tables. The Laws of Probability don’t apply apparently, or else their bookkeeping is sloppy. I don’t think the Southendomish are going to get rich, not so far from the freeway. But I’m betting they’ll do okay even WITH the folks who never lose.

Just this week a researcher looking for a substitute antibiotic found a thousand year old recipe for eye balm, no doubt one of Merlin the Magician’s potions passed down witch to witch. The formula for this consisted of garlic and herbals and bile from the belly of a cow. I think eye of newt was optional. The whole concoction was aged in a brass or copper vessel for exactly 9 days, full moon or not. Our intrepid researcher followed directions precisely and at the end of 9 days, applied the ointment to petri dishes of various strains of disease-causing bacteria. To her surprise, the stuff killed MERSA, the staph infection nothing we have in our medical arsenal can touch. Killed it 90% dead. If we can keep from adding it to chicken and livestock feed, or prescribing it to every patient with a runny nose or a mild headache, maybe we can stop MERSA for a few years until it develops immunity to fermented cow bile.

Down here on the pharma-centric South End, our labs will soon be scouring medieval manuscripts, Egyptian hieroglyphs, shaman’s diairies, sorceror’s journals and Sumerian tablets for the lost cures of our less advanced civilizations. Jimmy the Pestil is working out in his detached garage with puddle water growing strains of fungus gathered from his clogged gutters. He claims it kills lots of things, but nothing like SARS or E-bola. His cat nearly died drinking some nasty vetch with floating fungus, but that didn’t stop his neighbor’s wife Sarah from ordering up the recipe in hopes it would, in small but regular doses, cure her husband Hal’s erectile dysfunction if she added it discreetly to his coffee every morning.

Why not? If our scientists have to resort to alchemy and the potions of wizards back in King Arthur’s time, what have we got to lose? Bubble bubble, boil and trouble, put a fire under the iron kettle and start stirring in nettles and the saliva of wild rabbits, let it age a few days, take notes and give it to the neighbors for their ills. Every night on the Boomer News, the pharmacies are offering their own remedies for everything from twitchy toe syndrome to roving eye disorder, then they spend a minute or two warning us of the side effects, everything from psychotic episodes to jaundice to death. If ever the cure was worse than the disease, half of these are. Let’s face it, Jimmy the Pestil’s potions couldn’t be half as bad. Plus, with a little blind faith, the placebo effect should cure most of what ails us. I know Sarah thinks so, judging by her smile lately, and that’s good enough for me. The rest of you, go ahead and consult a physician. Or your local sorcerer.

Some of the boyz down at the Marina got to talking about that Ma Day Studio Art Tour that’s been building steam since before the turn of the century, hauling traffic in for 25 years and now has expanded not just to 3 days instead of the original 2, but 2 weekends instead of 1. Before long, Cap’n Jack worried, it’ll become the Mother’s Day to Father’s Day Art Tour, an entire month of traffic backed up from the South End Diner to the Stanwoodopolis freeway exit, all those art lovers and their U-Hauls for carrying back their purchases to Bellevue, Seattle and beyond. They remember when the Tulip Festival was just a small bulb in the imagination of the growers …. before cars eventually outnumbered the flowers. And it makes em nervous.

It should! The South End Economic Development Council holds secret meetings at ReFlux Realty, scheming to sell properties to art aficionados who, in turn, will become artists themselves in the primordial paint soup of the South End, buy easels and brushes, learn raku, break glass and build stained glass panels, sculpt auto wreckage and ultimately double, triple, who knows, the size of the Tour. It’s a self-replicating Beast. And when they all begin to starve through overpopulation, they’ll still need to pay those mortgages on their dream studios. The only other ‘jobs’ here, of course, are real estate agents. So the vicious circle completes itself. More artists, more art, more wannabees, more starvation, more real estate agents, more sales, prices rise, properties subdivide, underwater mortgages swell …. and so the bubble becomes bigger than the egoes of the artists who planned this Tour back in the 90’s.

Some of the Marina layabouts wanted to stop this in its tracks before there was no turning back. Keep the missuz from going studio to studio Mother’s Day weekend. Course, the Tour was planned from the Get-Go to be their default escape from marital duties. Let Ma go traipsing through the art while they’d watch some ballgames. And now, 25 years later, they’re only starting to realize the true price of their mistake. Too late, guyz!! Way too late now!

The old adage — when life gives you lemons, make lemonade — is certainly true on the South End despite the fact that citrus is in short supply in our Banana Belt of Global Warming. Won’t be long, but in the meantime we have an overabundance of nettles. Stinging nettles! Stalks that reach 7 feet high by late May. We got a jungle full of the monsters.

So every spring when the fresh stalks reach a foot high or so, we garb up with gloves and go harvesting. We eat the greens the way we’d eat steamed spinach, but what we’re really after is that lemonade. Without the lemons. I’m talking, of course, about our infamous spring tonic: Nettle Beer. Folks accustomed to our exaggerations naturally think we’re pulling their leg yet again. Nothing could be further from the truth this side of political e-mails. We brew the stuff, we age it and oh yeah, we quaff it too. Probably goes a long way toward explaining our artistic propensities down here. Reality, whether it’s brewing or job avoidance, definitely skews away from the top of the bellcurve. It may even be true that the consumption of nettle ales cures a lot of what ails us, but the studies of South End longevity vs the Chablis drinkers of the polar North End , while statistically significant over the short term, are still out on the long term.

Anecdotal evidence certainly bears scrutiny if Old Lady Kirby is any example. She makes a concoction that resembles nettle beer in name only, its primary ingredients having neither malts or hops. She calls it Tonic. I got other descriptors for it, but then I’m a confirmed Believer in the Barley and adjuncts like mango and ginger and lemongrass tea leave me scratching without the nettles. Nevertheless, I will say for a woman of her advanced age, she’s a spry old gal. I’ve seen her and the mizzus two-stepping up a storm a few nights at the Hotel to some band a third their ages. Oh, I know, it could just be the clean living of the South End, but … I suspect those nettle beverages clean out more than the cobwebs.

The other day I heard a New Yawk chef rhapsodically praising battered fried cicadas. Crispy, subtle tongue tones, environmentally woke. He could scarcely contain his newfound enthusiasm and now that we’re about to experience cicadageddon with a double hatch on the east coast, well, what better time to introduce a new menu item? Sure, he said, some folks have a natural aversion to the alien-looking critter, but, he said, we eat lobsters and shrimp, fellow arthropods and consider them exquisite delicacies. As a Dungeness crab connoisseur myself, I couldn’t agree more.

But … we have plenty of guests who wouldn’t anymore stick a morsel of claw meat in their face than they would a spider, another fellow arthropod, I don’t care how much seasoning or beer batter you fry them with, just not gonna do it. Too creepy, too disgusting. Give them a pink slime hamburger any day, greasier the better, the meat aged to just shy of putrefaction. McDonalds sells em by the billions.

Course I got plenty of friends who won’t eat most vegetables. Couldn’t get them to eat a Brussell sprout without threatening them with a gun. And some who eschew fruit, forget chewing on an apple. But something with 20 additives, you bet, the sweeter and saltier and fattier the better. There’s just no accounting for taste. Kinda makes you wonder why half of us are obese and diabetic.

I’m betting those cicada crisps are actually tasty, plus high in protein, all natural, no GMO’s, no transfats and gluten and nut free. If General Mills or Frito Lay could figure out a way to rebrand these insects, something more appetizing than Crispy Cooties, you know, more on the line of Nature’s Nuggets, they’d have a shot at cornering the market for bugs. But you and I know they wouldn’t be able to leave it alone. Add the salt and xanthan gum, monosodium glutamate, plenty of artificial coloring, high fructose corn sugar and enough preservatives to keep it all fresh for a decade, package it in a Styrofoam box, advertise it on kids’ tv programs then sit back and watch the profits roll in. Those cicadas are gonna wish they’d stayed hibernated another 17 years.

The Monk was uptown last week making his once a week shopping trip. You live down on the South End, you schedule your trips to town as infrequently as possible unless you’re driving a Prius or you’re one of the new folks who couldn’t tell you WHAT the price of gas is and couldn’t care less. The Monk drives a beat-up Ford 150 pickup that gets about ten miles to a gallon of gasoline, about two gallons to town. It runs, barely, and if he could afford something better on his Social Security, he’d gladly own a hybrid, buy better food and probably become a howling environmentalist.

He was squeezing melons over in the produce section. No, not organic melons. Did I mention he was scraping by on Social Security? The Monk buys what’s on sale. The Monk eats on the cheap. The Monk — I’ll give him this — cooks his meals from scratch. The only Hamburger Helper he’d dream of is himself. He’s not much for boxed anything, he doesn’t care how long the preservatives will keep it edible. He makes his own spaghetti sauce, his own salad dressings, eats mostly fresh. He’s not exactly the poster child for Good Health and Living, but he tries. “You are what you eat,” he tells me. The Monk is about half broccoli.

He was squeezing that melon, I think I mentioned, when this guy comes by him with a parrot on his shoulder. The Monk stops squeezing his melon and holds a hand up to Long John Silver and his bird. The Monk, maybe I haven’t mentioned, is not exactly Live and Let Live. He’s ornery and he’s opinionated and he doesn’t suffer fools with parrots lightly. “What the hell, Bluebeard?” he asks the man with the bird. “That some kind of Service Animal?”

“It’s a parrot,” Sinbad replies, smiling, probably pleased his antics haven’t gone unnoticed. “I KNOW what it is,” the Monk says. “It’s a damn disease carrying bird in my food store. You need it to locate the crackers for Polly here?” Well, one thing led to another, the manager finally came down to the produce section and the Monk demanded this pirate wannabee goofball get that flu-bearing bird away from his chard and his tomatoes. The manager, noticing Cap’n Hook didn’t even have a basket, much less a cart, sided with the Monk and asked if he could leave his bird back in his car. Or his schooner.

“You believe that shit?” the Monk asked me when I dropped by when he was unloading his groceries from the truck. “These are tough times, Monk. Them that died be the lucky ones. The rest of us, well, who’s to judge?”

He gave me a dark look from over the melons. “The Monk, that’s who.”

The South End Slammers are the local Roller Derby queens, mean mamas on ball bearings, elbows sharp as their tongues. Jammin Janice, by day a demure office secretary down at Windy Rear Realty’s south office, captain’s the squad with an attitude like an unfed piranha. The Slammers are a no-holds barred bunch of bruisers with a volcano of pent-up aggression they unleash on their opponents as they hurtle around the maple track that’s canted for increased speeds on an oval circuit. Cheryl is a teller at the local branch of Coastal Bank 5 days a week, but weekends she’s the spearhead for the Slammmer’s feared Flying Wedge, a vicious phalanx of boiling estrogen mowing down any and all opposing skaters too slow or witless to get out of the way. Elbows hammer chests, bodies slam bodies, skates are used the way a mallet is used to tenderize meat.

Paula is the point getter, small and wiry and able to stoop low and slide under or around the opponents’ blockade. She’s their best Jammer, lapping with graceful strides on her custom made skates like a dancer on bearings. Paula waitresses at the Diner part-time and if some of the patrons mistake her quiet demeanor for mousey modesty, she has a tongue fast as her trademark passing maneuvers. You want a refill on that coffee, mister, you learn to say please. And you better try a thank you when you get it.

The Slammers are ranked #1 this season. For good reason. I ran into Betty, the team’s burly Blocker, the other night. Not many Jammers get by Betty. And if they do, they’ll pay for it next time around. She was at the Pilot House Lounge ordering her 3rd whiskey on the rocks. “Nice shiner,” I remarked, sliding onto the adjoining stool. Her eye was swollen half shut and she had a bandage over her right eyebrow. The whiskey was probably half painkiller. Betty laughed. “You should’ve seen the other skater when I got back up and caught her on the next rotation. She’ll think twice next time she elbows this mother.”

“Betty,” I said, “that’s true of ALL of us.” The Slammers, like I might’ve mentioned, aren’t to be trifled with on the rink or off the rink.

Jihad Jimmy, last time any of us South End yahoos talked to him, was holding court at the Thursday AA meeting a month ago. Jimmy had kicked his drinking problem but now he had a religion problem, maybe not to him, but for the rest of the assembled abstainers, for sure. Jimmy had grabbed the first lifesaver that floated by when he was hopelessly adrift in a gin-filled sea and I suppose it could’ve been music or woodworking or yoga …. But no, Jimmy found four nicely dressed folks at his door one inebriated afternoon who asked if he’d care to discuss Scripture.

Good timing! Brenda, his long suffering wife and breadwinner the past two years, had left him the day before and in his drunken despair, Jimmy had sense enough to reach out for proferred help. Always nice to find a Sign or an Omen when you’re free-falling over the cliff of your imagination and believe me, Jimmy was expecting the Bottom.

Addiction, whether it’s alcohol or Heaven, makes True Believers of us. I’m not saying they’re equal, especially when you see Jimmy clean himself up, dust himself off and return to the world of the living. Course now J.J. is talking Rapture. Revelations. End Times. Sign of the Beast. He finds Signs everywhere now. He’s a prophet, although he never claims it. He just Sees what’s obvious, just wants to share it with us Lost Souls.

Just for once, I’d like a religion that loves THIS world. That doesn’t think the Next World is gonna be better. Maybe Jimmy’s going door-to-door with 3 other Jimmy’s, knocking on broken hearts, broken dreams, broken hopes. Maybe they’re saving lives, hell if I know….

Brenda’s doing some clerical work for Windy Rear Realty. It’s okay, she says. Twenty hours a week, not too stressful. She told me he’d stopped by her house a week ago. Wanted her to leave with him and start over. He’d changed, he said. He was sorry. He asked forgiveness before it was too late. “Too late?” she asked. “Too late for what?” “The Rapture,” he told her. “You’ll be left behind.”

Left behind?? “Jimmy,” she says to him, “that sounds exactly like heaven to me.”

A few days ago four zebras escaped from the truck they were being transported in just east of Seattle off Interstate 90 near North Bend. I guess they just didn’t care to move to a new home. Or being hauled in a trailer. Three were rounded up pretty quick with the help of a passing retired rodeo clown and no, I didn’t make this up. But the fourth one is still on the lam, surprising, since a zebra is about the most recognizable animal on earth.

Needless to say, this was the top story on the evening news and even made the New York Times. Trump, Gaza, Stormy Daniels — all of em took a backseat to the missing mammal loose on the interstate savannahs up toward the Cascades. No amber alerts for the black and white striped renegade. Probably more needed in the future. But so far our escapee has eluded capture days later.

I suspect the TikTokkers have already started streaming. Zebra influencers galore. And the Go Fund Me folks are collecting donations to save little Zeebo. African trackers will be flown in, the national press will fly in too. Call it a media circus and you’d be spot, or stripe on. Nevertheless it’s a welcome diversion from the old media circus and I for one thank this creature for taking the spotlight and running with it.

For a few memorable years we had the Barefoot Bandit, a neighbor kid who outsmarted and out ran the local cops, the State Patrol and the FBI. He became our local hero although there were neighbors here who proclaimed publicly they wanted him caught or killed. Most of us South Enders were rooting for the Kid. He never hurt anyone, mostly just stole food and supplies and, well, okay, an airplane or three. You sort of have to root for the underdog in an age of cellphone tracking, credit card locating, security cameras, Amber Alerts and the ubiquitous government surveillance. C’mon, he was our Jesse James, our Robin Hood, our Billy the Kid — you always gonna root for the Powerful?

I’m rooting for Zeebo! At least he’ll get a few days of freedom. And maybe some fellow sympathizer will find him grazing the flower garden and give him sanctuary. We got a shed ready just in case he finds his way down here. We can always use another Legend….

I was minding my own business in the Pilot House Lounge and Bar — or at least tending to my beer and scribbling away in a notebook I always carry — when a guy I didn’t know parked at the table next to me with a cup of coffee. Army fatigue jacket, butch crewcut, aviator sunglasses hanging from a strap. Probably ex-CIA or retired corrections officer. He had his back to the ballgame on the bigscreen TV over the bar, apparently more interested in my antics. I tried to avoid eye contact, watched a bunt down the first base line, but he didn’t need a cue.

“Whatcha think of that drilling ban in the Arctic?” he finally asked. I looked up from my great American novel, took a slow sip of suds and studied him for motives. He didn’t offer anything obvious. Just a guy in a bar, a student of politics, no doubt.

“Okay with me,” I said non-commitedly. And waited. “You rather have nuclear?” he countered. His coffee sat untouched. I sighed. Here we go …. “Okay with me,” I said again. Cap’n. Klink nodded.

“How about those Muslim terrorists, you okay with that?” I put my pen down. Slid my notebook to the edge of the table. Took a slow sip of beer whose taste seemed metallic now. Why me, Lord, why me? We were alone except for Jerry wiping down the bar that didn’t need wiping. The batter took a called strike. I looked at my inquisitor, some bridge troll out for a holiday.

“We don’t get too many down my way on the South End,” I finally said. “So you aren’t bothered?” he sneered.

“Oh, I’m bothered,” I said, feeling the blood rising. “I’m bothered right now.” He finally sipped his coffee and smiled. Now he was getting there. Strike two to the batter on the TV. I smiled back, hoping to cut off his air supply. It did — he dropped the phony grin. “Whatcha think of us white males turned into second class citizens?” he fairly snarled. I laughed out loud this time. Jerry looked up. Behind him a baseball landed in the outfield stands. I left my beer half finished and stood up to go.

“Try not to be a victim, friend. Especially if you’re white and male. Doesn’t leave much for those terrorists to take from you.” Jerry waved so long and gave me a quizzical arched eyebrow. The pitcher put a baseball in the manager’s hands and headed for the showers. Me too.