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.

Hits: 29

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/CLICK-TO-HEAR-occupy-your-head.mp3[/podcast]CLICK TO HEAR —- occupy your head

Hits: 28

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?

Hits: 25

Hits: 27

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/CLICK-TO-HEAR-BUBBHISM1.mp3[/podcast]CLICK TO HEAR — BUBBHISM

Hits: 23

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.

Hits: 45

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/click-to-hear-home-from-the-hills.mp3[/podcast]click to hear — home from the hills

Hits: 23

Hits: 22

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.

Hits: 25

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/CLICK-TO-HEAR-SOUTH-END-SECURITY.mp3[/podcast]CLICK TO HEAR — SOUTH END SECURITY

Hits: 18