The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/audio-cola-wars.mp3[/podcast]audio — cola wars

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This was the year Coca-Cola reintroduced cocaine in the secret recipe:  Coke Classic XX market shares went through the roof.  The FDA certified their products ‘safe’ so PepsiCo countered with a Viagra additive, Diet Priapic.  Sales in the over 40 demographic shot past Coke in the first month after introduction.  The race was on….   Coca-Cola began an internet campaign aimed at the teen market:  HOT COLA, a caffeine and pheromone enhanced super high fructose sugar concoction the FDA instigated investigations after 200 incidents of what the media reported as ‘date rape Coke’, but soon exonerated the company, declaring ‘the evidence of pheromone overdose has been greatly over-estimated.’  Sales of HOT COLA exceeded market expectation by 300%.

PepsiCo launched their own version, touting an anti-zit acne treatment ingredient.  Unfortunately, it caused sterility in males.  Pepsi altered its ad campaign to appeal to consumers as the ‘birth control of pop.’  Initially considered a stock market catastrophe, Pepsi-IUD soon rallied as the poster child for product Re-Branding.  Sales skyrocketed in opposite proportion to teen age pregnancies.  Coke attempted damage control with its Coke-Fertility Zero Diet drink, but soon pulled ads and product after studies showed heavy drinkers exhibited pronounced embryonic abnormalities.  Coca-Cola denied culpability but quietly paid huge damaged claims to teenage girls with encephalitic twins and triplets and worse.  Stocks tumbled despite non-disclosure agreements.

Pepsi stood pat.  Coke introduced Coke Classic 4X, using a secret Merck artificial cocaine reformulated to evade FDA objections.  Meth sales in the United States plummeted and a new industry, Coke Distillery, started up and flourished briefly until Glaxo Pharmaceuticals began selling a pure form of the Coke additive they called KRANK.  Coca-Cola sued successfully to halt production, but an underground market continued.  Once again Coca-Cola stocks tumbled, this time by 25%.  Glaxo Pharma doubled in 3 months, then doubled again, despite SEC investigations into their underground operations.

As of this writing, the government, under President Palin, instructed the FDA chairman Scott Walker (former CEO of Phizer) to fast track future approval of soda formulas in order to keep ahead of the Chinese who entered the market with their own brands of lead-based colas that had lowered the IQ of American children 16 points in the 5 years since their introduction.  Pepsi and Coke stocks briefly doubled.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/audio-trout-fishing-in-america.mp3[/podcast]audio — trout fishing in america

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About 1980 I picked up two good old boys hitching into Tyee Grocery, which was Ted and Ellen Snowdens’ back then.  Part store, part junkyard, part tow truck outfit, part well drilling, part gas station.  Looked like an Ozark shopping mall run by Ma and Pa Kettle.  These two gentlemen were hitch-hiking in the middle of nowhere, drunk as purple skunks in the afternoon, so naturally I was curious where they’d come from, them being neighbors and all,  so I offered to take them back home after they’d purchased their groceries for supper.

Supper, it turned out, was some crackers and a big can of tomato juice they’d mistook for tomato soup.  And a couple quarts of their fortified favorite wine, Thunderbird, their drink of choice.  I kindly declined their dinner invitation, but I WAS interested in seeing where they lived, which was back in the boonies I’d never been, a nice little cabin they’d trashed up nicely sitting on a half acre trout pond like you’d see on a picture postcard.  Turned out they netted the trout and smoked the fish and sold them down at the Pike Street Market for a small fortune.

Well, finally they got to arguing about the ruined dinner menu, what with the big can of soup being juice, and who was to blame –so I said I got to go now, boys.  They said stop by any time and fish all you want and I said thank you kindly, I might just do that.

Course it being the only fishing hole on the entire South End, I was back there, pole in hand, two days later as soon as I knew they’d gone back home to Seattle and Gomorrah.  Had three two pounders in no time flat, dinner for Ma and me.  For awhile I thought I had a gold mine.

But I kept noticing nasty notes on the door of their cabin from creditors and ex-spouses and aggrieved parties and folks who just plain didn’t like the trout ranchers, folks who’d come all the way to the hollers of the South End looking for money or revenge or Lord knows what from these boys, and one day I noticed somebody had stuffed garbage in the wood smoker and let it rot, not a good sign for making flavorful smoked fish.  And that was when the fish were gone, netted up, I figure, on one last drunken weekend.

Every once in awhile I’d go back, hoping the trout might reappear, but of course, like a lot of our fishing around here, it never rebounded.  Still, I can say with some pride, I’m the only fisherman you’ll meet who ever caught a trout on the South End.

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Well, it’s that time again.  No, not the semi-eternal elections….  Skeeter’s  going to take a break from American politics and head up into the Great White North, see for himself how you can live life without a 24/7 intravenous infusion of news centered around innuendo and bombast.  Oh, I know I’ll return a week behind the curve ball, dazed and confused as a Rip Van Winkle stumbling out of the Canadian tundra into the electron glare of instant news reports.  But with any luck I’ll have a newfound distance from the candidates’ latest Twitter feed.  And I can always count on you left-behinders to fill me in on important developments.  That, or I’ll mosey into the Diner for a cup of their signature coffee, the one that tastes like the dregs of last night’s pot reheated and simmered to perfection.  You won’t hurry through a cup of that syrupy concoction.  And you won’t need refills.  Unless you’re a hopeless caffeine addict like the rest of us down there, the kind who would spoon up instant dried coffee and wash it down with a glass of water.

So enjoy the break from the caffeinated musings of a man who always says too much, too often.  Or, as a critic pointed out recently in a moment of alcoholic honesty at a recent art gallery opening, comparing these so-called comic sketches to another artist’s growing list of novels :  you’re too hard to read.

A lesser man might have taken this as a slight or even as a slam.  But Skeeter, of course, took in stride.  If necessary, he said, read em twice.  Course, with this Canadian hiatus, she’ll have a golden opportunity.

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We got a lot of wildlife still left down here on the Wild and Wooly South End.  And I don’t just mean the artists and musicians and their late night bacchanalias.  I just got done chasing a doe and her fawn out of the garden.  For years we put wire fence around every young fruit tree, dozens of cages.  For about a decade we had a botanical Gitmo going on down here and the complaints from plant rights groups reached such a din and roar, we finally set the apple trees free and let the cherries loose with strict warning not to leave the orchard.  The Asian pears, we had to strap leg surveillance monitors on — couldn’t really trust them to stay In-Country.  The deer pretty much keep the lower limbs denuded.

We got the usual varmints.  Squirrels and raccoons, possums and rats, mice and snakes, rabbits and hawks, feral cats and otter snacking in the pond.  The neighbors’ expensive koi help keep our pond safe, at least until the eagles and herons and kingfishers found it.  Coyotes roam the backwoods where Colton Harris- Moore used to.  They got some of our chickens a some baby peacocks and even our poor geriatric cat, too old to smell or hear them sneaking up.  She forgot, I guess, that despite the neighborhood gentrification, it’s still a jungle out there.

Down at the beach we got everything from skates to seals, sea lions to killer whales, octopus to shark.  It’s all just beyond the tideline, a watery world we mostly only catch glimpses of, shadows right below the keel if you’re of a nautical bent.  Davy Jones’ Locker is teeming.

I don’t really mind sharing with our wilder  neighbors.  At least so long as they stay outdoors.  We got enough problems with the homo sapiens, and I sure don’t need half the woods watching Fox News and ordering Netflix online, drinking our homebrew and wanting to vote.  We got brains twice their size and it hasn’t helped one iota.  Might be that we’d ALL be better off living in the woods.  Return to being two legged instead of sitting on our tail….

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/audio-the-south-end-abhors-a-vacuum.mp3[/podcast]audio — the south end abhors a vacuum

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If you haven’t heard the rumor by now, you either haven’t left the trailer in a month or you live too close to the city limits of metropolitan Stanwoodopolis.  Tyee Store is going to re-open.  New life in an old bottle, as we homebrewers like to say.  Now, I know some folks will be disappointed the WalMart surveys for South End viability came up short and they decided not to place their next Super Store down here.  They know what they’re doing, obviously, and just as obviously, we don’t.

And there will be folks just as disappointed another Mom and Pop One Stop Shop isn’t stepping into the alcohol and nicotine vacuum that’s practically a gravitational Black Hole pulling beer and cigarettes into its ugly maw.  Elger Bay Store thinks the missing merchandise is just youthful shoplifters  —  little do they guess the defunct and empty Tyee Store is a virtual Hoover of a neutron star, growing denser every month, warping time and space and the very geography of the South End.

We all had our wishlist for the Tyee Store replacement.  Jack Gunter’s History of the World Part 16 Art Gallery, not contented with franchises in Port Angeles and half of Stanwoodopolis’ vacant storefronts, saw an opportunity next door for territorial expansion.  Jolene’s Beauty Salon and Boutique thought about a South Satellite, but got the recessionary shakes and wisely opted out.  WindyRear Realty imagined a gold mine for awhile, but they’d recently closed Rocky Point and if money couldn’t be made up in the high rent district, what were the odds mobile home sales down here would pan out?

In the end Risk Entrepreneurism won out.  As it always does on the Roll-the-Dice South End.  Two Toke Tom had been prepped and ready for his grand entry into high finance.  He has the inventory, he has customers — meaning patients — and he has the big green neon sign :  SOUTH END GREENWORKS.  Let’s just say Tyee Store has moved beyond cigarettes and booze, gateway drugs now.  It’s now officially the Medical Marijuana Dispensary for the island.  Two Toke says the Grand Opening is still a closely guarded secret, but check your grapevine.  Happy Daze are here again!

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