[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/AUDIO-SENILE-CENTER-SURROGATE.mp3[/podcast]AUDIO — SENILE CENTER SURROGATE
Hits: 27
We don’t really have a Senior Center on the South End. The Diner is sort of a substitute, but you need to at least buy a cup of coffee before you park in a booth or belly up to the counter for the daily gossip specials. The vintage car guyz, the Flatheads, fill the joint Wednesday morning. Tuesdays the Bible study crowd rolls in and most of the regulars roll out. It’s not that they’re religious averse, but like Freddy the Freeloader sez, Sunday’s plenty. Freddy gets his disability checks first of every month. He’s a busted up stump jumper chain choker from the days when logging was man’s work all right but good luck living to be an old man. If he had his druthers, the Diner would be church a-plenty.
The AA used to congregate on Fridays, but Brenda, the Diner’s owner since 1987, finally asked them to find another meeting place. She was losing money on their endless coffee refills and the parking lot out front looked like Pittsburg in Carnegie’s day, the smoke from their unfiltered Camels hanging heavy on air inversions. Plus, she and Big Larry, the grillman, had quit drinking years ago and the new AA members’ determined but usually hopeless drought between benders or DUI’s depressed them mightily. Half them ended up in Bible study anyway so AA didn’t complain very vocally, just moved it on up to the toxic mold blue Camano Center the County rents cheap and never cleans up.
Thursdays now the Zumba crowd pulls in after an hour of aerobics at the nearby South Grange, mostly post-Mom women desperately fighting the midriff bulges and Michelin Man thighs. After a morning workout they replaced the calories lost with Brenda’s Blue Plate Specials, burger baskets with fries and slaw and fountain Coke they could get refills on for free, sort of a zero sum gain. But without the guilt. They earned every calorie!
We been thinking about maybe fundraising for a Senile Center. Lot of work. Lot of money. Something ever happened to the Diner, maybe we’d motivate. Meanwhile, the coffee’s cheap and the gossip’s free. You ask me, we got the best of both worlds. Without the Book of Revelations or the 12 step program.
Hits: 28
[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/audio-boom-city-prognosticatian.mp3[/podcast]audio — boom city prognostication
Hits: 29
Now I know there are a lot of economic indices the government uses to track the ups and downs of this recession we’re in, everything from unemployment figures to manufacturing exports to consumer confidence statistics to balance of trade ratios. If nothing else, it creates employment for unemployed economists and down-on-their-luck statisticians so I guess it’s a small step forward toward ending the current recession.
Down here on the collateralized and leveraged South End, we got our own tried and true methodologies, tested over many years and virtually foolproof, which, if you know many of us South Enders, is a priority if not a Must. What we do is sort of skip the Dow Jones rise or fall and just get right to the Meat of the Matter. Forget adjusting for inflation or what the euro is doing against the dollar —- it’s just fiscal mumbo jumbo and if the Smart Boyz were so damn smart, why are we in a recession in the first place? Which, if you stop and think about it —like we do — you just answered the question.
Our economic analysis is pretty straightforward. What we do once a year on the 4th of July is grab a few adult beverages, a cooler full is best, and head down to any convenient bulkhead toward dark. We sit there and watch the neighbors’ firework displays. And Whidbey’s. And Mukilteo’s. All those bombs bursting in air. This year the neighbors spent the approximate GDP of Slovenia and Slovakia combined, way more than last year and far more than the couple of previous ones. You got money — discretionary income — to blow on spinning bees and kamikaze komets and screaming banshees or magnum bangums, don’t tell us what the price of gas at the pump is or how many housing starts this month or what the bankruptcy filings or bank defaults are. We can see with our own two eyes and hear with our own two ears the economic recovery in full kaleidoscopic Technicolor view.
Three years ago these poor waterfront patriots were reduced to pathetic hand held sparklers and shot a few fizzy Roman Candles. It was a sordid show of pessimistic patriotism, even by South End standards. This year, Whoo-EEE, the gated communities cleaned out Boom City and the Chapel Fireworks Stand too. Blew em off well into July 5th. It looked like Baghdad that first aerial saturation bombing back in the days when America had more money than it knew what to do with. You want to know if the recession is really over — take a whiff of the cordite wafting up your bluff. That’s the smell of new money, buddy.
Hits: 14
Hits: 26
[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/audio-galapagos-north.mp3[/podcast]audio — galapagos north
Hits: 22
Being’s how we South Enders are naturally indisposed to work — and work is pretty much non-existent down here anyway — we have a lot of neighbors who turn to alternative means of employment. Meaning, they become, in the parlance of the day, ENTREPRENEURS, a fancy French word for I’ll-be-my-own-boss-thank-you.
The artists pretty much have that trademarked. Get up before noon, putter around in their bathrobes with a cup of cappuccino, wait for the flash of inspiration to strike, then paint another watercolor sunset they can add to the wallspaces of the islands’ retailers with a handwritten FOR SALE tag, usually no more than 5 times the going rate. But the artists, with a bit of overbreeding, have pretty much saturated the area. We can’t all be artists, I suppose, although some years it sure seems that way. The creationists would have a field day with the evolutionists, since obviously Darwinian selection doesn’t seem to apply to artists here. Course, neither does intelligent design, you ask me. And I know you didn’t.
What Darwin does apply to are all our would-be animal entrepreneurs who pound a couple of corner stakes out back, fence off a piece of nettle acreage and commence to raising llamas or alpacas or show dogs or ostriches. For awhile the South End looked like a zoo for the insane. With the animals, I mean. My neighbor raised thousands of quail to sell to the Hawaiian market he imagined existed. Quail of the Nile, he called his ranch, to give it that international mystique. A year and $10,000 of bird feed later, he was broke and despondent and drunk as a goose so he let them all go. Coyote smorgasbord for awhile down here. The Mexican restaurant in Stanwoodopolis carried ostrich meat on the menu for a couple of years from O-Zi-Ya Ostrich Farms, not exactly authentic Hispanic cuisine, and anyway supply always exceeded demand, something Quail of the Nile might have revealed if we had an Ag College down these parts. Llamas ran their course a few years later —- looked like Machu Picchu for awhile. And now we got alpacas. Cute little buggers, but not much meat when you see one recently shorn.
Pygmy goats showed up in the Fog Farm fields last year. And for a time we had Vietnamese pygmy pigs. What most of these entrepreneurs figure is they’ll sell the newborns to other entrepreneurs, kind of a kennel dream, breed yourself to success. What they never figure out is the pyramid scheme it actually is, a Ponzi for pygmy pigs, until the feed bills mount and the poop filled fields look like muddy tarpits and finally they give up. And take up oil painting or driftwood sculpture.
Meanwhile we got a woods down here that’s home to every weird creature on the planet. You entrepreneurs out there might consider starting tours of Galapagos North. Easy money, but I recommend you jump on it before some damn fool brings in a breeding pair of Bengal tigers.
Hits: 50
Down at the Camano Cut and Curl, Sheila was opining last week how the weather seemed to be getting preternaturally colder and wetter this so-called summer. “I’ve burned a cord of wood,” she said, “since April. And here it is almost July and we’re down to twigs and kindling.” Mrs. Flatterowski, vice-president of the women’s fire auxiliary, the Flame-Ons, put down her mirror for a pause in scrutinizing her freshly tinted blue curls to say, “Well, if there’s so much Global Warming going on, where is it? I want to know.”
Sheila, diplomatic as always, recognized a political turn to the conversation and tried to divert what would inevitably lead to a potential loss of customer base. “All I’m saying is, where’s my summer? My garden won’t even grow peas this year. The slugs are wearing tea cozees, for heaven’s sake. The corn is frost bit and the mosquitoes are starving for anything warm blooded, which sure isn’t me!”
Mrs. Flatterowski, not be detoured so easily and expecting full service for her $30 perm, muscled through the chemical fog of Cut and Curl to give full throated polemic on everything from polar bear extinction to glacial recession. “Who cares about an albino bear anyway?” she challenged. And Sheila, making brief but meaningful eye contact with Rhonda, the owner of C&C, sighed and admitted she didn’t know what was going on, but whatever it was, how about a little summer?
Rhonda shook her head before finishing Alice Norad’s henna highlight, spinning the chair toward the backbar mirror so Alice could examine the results. Alice touched a finger to her bangs and nodded a curt okay. “You ask me,” she said, addressing Mrs. Flatterowski now, “I don’t like my weather to be so political. Fred and I have a family reunion this weekend and if it’s hot, I’m not going to blame it on greenhouse gases. If it rains, I’m going to cook indoors. God Almighty, I’d like to have one silly weekend where I can eat a hamburger without debating the ethics of meat or what I should do about Eskimoes or raise money to save an igloo. My kids and their husbands and wives, they want to solve the world’s problems, go ahead. But not this weekend.”
Sheila spun Mrs. F to the mirror too, maybe to kaibosh a retort, but Mrs. Flatterowski was up, plastic gown shedding blue curls. “The polar bears are screwed,” she said sadly, “and I’ve never even seen one.” At the counter, paying her bill and adding a more than generous tip, she met Alice’s sideways glance. “I hope you have a sunny day for your family’s reunion.”
“Thank you,” Alice said. “The polar bears will have to make it without our help, I guess.”
Hits: 48
[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/audio-independence-days.mp3[/podcast]audio — independence days
Hits: 31