The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I’ve been vacationing recently to various mental illness get-aways. Some on the South End, some further afield. For some reason, unfathomable to the rock solid foundations of my own worrisome mind, I’m helping friends and relatives deal with sisters and brothers who have journeyed past the signposts, not only of normality, but possibly even the Twilight Zone — and I don’t mean Forks, WA. Maybe it’s the recession or maybe it’s the intensity of solar flares or, well, who really knows? These folks aren’t sure and if they were, you wouldn’t believe them anyway.

As I write this I’m in the Brown County Courthouse in Green Bay, Wisconsin where my brother’s brother-in-law is trying to get released to personal recognizance if he will agree to drug monitoring and many other requirements in return for a guilty plea to reckless endangerment and resisting arrest for destroying eight automobiles and leading the Green Bay Packer Police Dep’t on a 120 mph chase through downtown 3 months ago. Like the Blues Brothers he was on a ‘mission from God’ to root out Satan. Lots to do, not much time to do it, apparently. Now fully medicated, he is way less evangelical and far more contrite. In a day or so we’ll see if the judge agrees.

Being a South Ender, I witness mental instability on a near daily basis, even discounting my bathroom mirror. Art may very well be a 2nd cousin of incipient insanity in my case, but I suspect we all have an artistic streak or two and none of us is more than a warm day or two from going through the thinning ice of what we blithely refer to as reality. Or normality. Or sanctioned behavior. Beaver Cleaver never lived in anything firmer than the warm fiction of an electronic TV womb. June Cleaver took to her bed when Ward lost his job in the recessions of those days and Wally died in a Viet Nam rice paddy from friendly fire. If the Beave lost his moorings a few blocks from a perfect Norman Rockwell suburban two story Cape Cod, we might hope for a touch of compassion from an enlightened justice system. After all, we are our brother’s keeper in a world where reality may not be what it’s cracked up to be.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/audio-4th-of-july-on-the-south-end.mp3[/podcast]

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Just a quick note to leave on the back door here as we motor down to the aerodrome and off to see family back in beleaguered Wisconsin.  Fortunately we avoided the recall election.  Unfortunately they’ll still be stewing about it.  The weather isn’t the only thing that will be hot there.

So old Skeeter will be off-line for awhile.  About a week.  Kind of the spiritual equivalent of a kid who stops texting for, oh, five minutes or so.  Almost forever in digital time.

I know some of you are going to suggest I’m leaving because I’m disgusted we live in the only place in the country that isn’t having the warmest spring on record.  Or that we’re sick and tired of picking moss out from under our toenails every morning.  Admittedly I’d have more luck growing seaweed in my garden than bibb lettuce.  I mean, if we’re going to have global warming, let’s include everybody.

Meanwhile, enjoy the peace and quiet of this website.  Watch a sunset and count the stars as they pop out from the strato-cumulus. Listen to the cicadas chirping.  Wait, that might be your hard drive going to hell.  Anyway, no need to thank me for the respite.  But come back later and sit a spell on the back porch.  I’ll promise to fix the leaks in its roof.   Not that I think it’ll still be raining….

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4^th of July on the South End

We got our fair share of veterans down here, heroes of the wars, past and present, maybe too many wars, you ask me, but nothing anybody should voice too loudly any particular night at the VFW Hall.  Patriotism means a lot of things to every person, but most of the veterans I know pretty much believe they got the patent on it.  Maybe they do.  After all, they marched into the fray and a lot of their buddies didn’t march back out.  You don’t question the loyalty of these vets, not ever, and you don’t doubt their patriotism.

The other night some of the boyz were waxing nostalgic over a bottle of some privatized CostCo single malt Baghdad Bill had brought to the Marina and Bait Shop for the usual Friday night poker game.  Two Toke was there, and Big Larry too after closing up the grill at the Diner, plus me and a few other draft dodging, student deferred, anti-war types, and what with the 4^th rolling right up and the fireworks stands about to set up red white and blue bunting to sell incendiaries legally, we naturally gravitated to holiday talk and that led to Independence Day, not just here but for Iraqis and Egyptians and Afghan women, and that got us going on wars, good and bad, won and lost.  Two Toke was about one toke — or at least one shot glass — over the line when he started musing about Viet Nam.  Two Toke was there during the Tet Offensive.  He lost most of his unit and a part of a knee there.  He doesn’t have one good word to say about that war, and really, none about any since.  I guess he earned the right.  Bill was in Iraq.  He argues with T.T., but it’s like arguing with a Stanwoodopolite whether they’d like to be annexed into Camano Island.  You’re just asking for some vicious yelling.

Big Larry served in Korea, meaning, we got about all the wars covered since WWII.  Except maybe Granada.  Okay, Panama and Bosnia too.  Some nights we even have Jimmy Z sit in for a hand or two and he was in on the tail end of the Big One, kind of the grand old soldier, and when Jimmy’s sitting in, not even Two Toke questions the point of the latest wars.  Jimmy, though, doesn’t talk much about his two years in the Pacific theater, which took him through Iwo Jima and some nasty business on the beach and then back in the jungle.

Two Toke was wondering aloud if the Revolutionary War was fought so we could just march back over to some foreign country and make life hell for somebody else while Big Larry and Bill were starting to take swigs with every one of Tom’s verbal shots.  I might’ve let them duke it out if it wasn’t for the fact that I had 3 kings over a couple of jacks and the pot was by far the fattest it had been all night.

Boyz boyz boyz, I said, trying to sound like the cool head I never am.  Let’s agree to, you know, not agree.  But hellfire, we’re all in this together, aren’t we?  We got food to eat, a bottle to finish, we got friends and family, some of us got jobs, we got the great good luck to be born here and not in Smokey Point, let’s just be a little thankful, shall we?  4^th of July is coming and we can all at least be glad we’re sitting here in the Land of the Brave Home of the Free.

Course, that set Larry off, fuming over mangled quotations, and before I could get my bets down, the Marina was its own 4^th of July, fireworks ablaze.  I don’t know who won the argument by the end.  I know this: one of us lost a plump pot while he held a winning hand.  Poker, I guess, is a little too much like war.  But we’ll all be at the table next Friday night.  Probably fight about privatizing liquor.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/south-end-blues.mp3[/podcast]south end blues

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Mama said there’d be days like this — dark, monsoonal, rivers-over-the-gutter- raindaze. No going outside without full slickers, no possibility of sunbreaks, no phone calls with good news, just a joyless unremittingly bleak nimboculumulus parked on the brainstem. Pull the covers up, go back to sleep, wait it out…. Otherwise you risk taunting the Fates. And do NOT think things can’t get worse. They can always get worse.

These are the days you don’t check your e-mail, you don’t answer those spine-trembling rings, you don’t look at caller ID, you don’t dash for the mailbox. If you get a knock at the door, for all that’s holy and sane, leave by the back door and don’t bother shutting it. Whoever — whatever — is scratching for entry, you don’t want to know. It isn’t Knowledge that’s bliss, pal. Not that bliss is in the forecast. Steady pain is. Intermittent pain. Painstorms followed by pain showers. And forget the umbrellas.

I’m not going to explore the chemical/ hormonal/ meteorological foundations for these days — wouldn’t help anyway and might give you reason for misguided optimism. What you need is the will just to hang on. Think of a splintered board floating by after the ship goes down. Straddle it and go where it takes you — unless it’s DOWN. If you’re a drinker, start early. If you’re employed, take sick leave (it’s no lie!). If you’re religious, beseech your gods. But don’t expect miracles, not today. Today the meek will not inherit the earth. Trust me, they’re the lucky ones…..

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/audio-where-we-are.mp3[/podcast]audio — where we are

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A lot of folks ask me just exactly where the hell is this South End you keep carping about? I suppose that’s a fair question –IF you’re one of those people who uses a recipe, or reads the directions first or who actually owns a roadmap – but I can tell right off you aren’t going to find the South End that way, I don’t care if you got two of those On Board Computer GPS navigating gizmos, one with the map and the other giving directions out loud.

Someone asked me if the South End is south of the Dump Road or south of the Country Club or south of the State Park. Is it south of the Plaza or south of the Elger Bay Store. I tell em yes, it is and leave it at that.

I don’t really know how to tell you where the South End is. I tell most folks coming down our way to just relax – if you’re following someone, take the first turn he doesn’t. If you aren’t following somebody, you’re doing fine, keep on coming, you’ll get here shortly.

Folks are always asking how far it is to Boeing or Microsoft or Weyerhauser. They think they’d maybe like to Re-locate to where the Living is Good and how far is it to drive to work?? Pitiful. Just pitiful. I don’t have the heart to tell em the truth: you can’t commute from the South End. We’re the end of the line, the last stop, the final destination, the dead end, the Point of No Return.

This isn’t some bus stop, it isn’t a retirement home, it isn’t some Tourist Destination, and it SURE isn’t a bedroom community between office hours, no sir. Commute?? Damnation! Why’d we go to the trouble to build Smokey Point in the first place, I ask you….

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/audio-time-capsule-in-a-closet.mp3[/podcast]audio — time capsule in a closet

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