The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/AUDIO-PLAYING-THE-ODDS.mp3[/podcast]AUDIO — PLAYING THE ODDS

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A lot of us this year are starting to realize we’re counted in with the 99%ers.  Always good to be a conformist, one of the crowd, I guess, but it sort of pulls the rug on the idea that we all have equal opportunity in the Land of the Brave.  I guess if we all got the same odds in the Lottery, we’re all equal.

We have plenty of 1%ers here on the South End, testament to Dot.com bubbles and good retirement packages.  Some of the boyz down at the Diner diss these folks, out of envy, I suppose, but we all share a nice slice of the American Pie here in paradise, so maybe we should be happier with what we have than unhappy with what we don’t.  Cause truth is, what we got is pretty much all we’ll be getting, and personally, it’s plenty.

But it’s been some rough years lately and some of us 99ers lost jobs, lost work, lost houses, lost everything, including hope.  I hear a lot of people angry at the ‘damn government’ but I never hear folks angry at the people whose insatiable greed brought this on.  Those 1%ers we all want so much to be, I guess.

South Enders are like most Americans.  We like to think we’re the Rough and Rugged pioneers, individuals, independent, tough as nails don’t-tread-on-me yahoos.  But the truth is we live in a mythology cobbled together from old movies and bad TV, John Wayne and Dirty Harry.  The boyz who run the show, they love that.  You think Shane is going to take on the Bank of America, you better adjust your meds, pardner.  That, or your hatband.  It isn’t in the cards.  And you’re not going to win the Lottery either, sorry to be the one to give you the Bad News.  Oh, and good luck getting to the 1%.  It’s called that for a pretty good reason.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/audio-cold-war-fallout.mp3[/podcast]audio — cold war fallout

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I’m like a lot of South Enders, I have to drive into Stanwoodopolis to do my weekly grocery shopping.  I used to get the essentials down at Tyee Grocery before it closed, but when I needed milk that wouldn’t spoil in two days or vegetables that weren’t hairy, I moseyed down to the big stores, you know, the chains, QFC, Haggens, Thrifty.  I used to like Thrifty myself.  Aisles looked like bowling alleys there were so few shoppers there by the end of its slow death spiral into grocery oblivion.  No amenities, no cute historical photos, no signs pointing to the restrooms where a bouquet of flowers might beckon a sensitive male shopper like myself.

No, it was spartan.  Sparse.  Practically primitive.  I didn’t waste time talking to other shoppers like I do in the other stores.  There weren’t any other shoppers.  Just me.  It was almost like they’d set out this smorgasbord of lefse and lutefisk and canned entrails just for my perusal.  I appreciated it.  Even if I didn’t buy it.

Sometimes there WERE other people in the store.  It was like a 24 hour store, really, and we were in there on break from our graveyard shift,  zombies on parade.   We’d drift by the macaroni and meet again by the fruit stand.  The fluorescent glare gave a wonderful green patina to everyone.  Ghoulish.  Night of the Living Zucchini.  My fellow shoppers at Thrifty were like myself: shopping challenged.  Xenophobes in search of an empty aisle.  It was a little like a suspense movie.  You know, you know as sure as Alfred Hitchcock is going to shock you,  that we were all going to meet at the checkout stand.  The ONE checkout stand.  No express.  No 10 items or less.  No Other Way Out.

Our carts bumped ominously.  The tabloids were chock-a-block with the latest on movie stars and their sorry sex lives.  Little books told me my astrological future.  My astrological future was this:  I will die in a checkout line waiting for the nice but senile lady in front of me to find all her coupons.  She won’t remember to get them out first.  No, she’ll remember them when the final amount has been tabulated.  She’ll want a lottery ticket.  A pack of cigarettes from the lockup six aisles away.  She wants a price check on the cereal she thought was 52 cents, but was really $5.20.  She’ll mention the spoiled milk she wants a refund on.  And finally she’ll change her mind from plastic to paper.

I don’t want to sound misogynistic, but it was always a lady.  Guys don’t care.  They would do anything to get out of here, not delay their departure.  This is hell to us.  Eternity.  No escape.  We would sell our worthless souls if we could just slip by this sweet senile lady in the fuzzy slippers and move on out to the sunlit parking lot with our pathetic bag of groceries. Pop that first beer right there in front of all the moms with their wide-eyed kids in tow and toss the empty through the rolled down window when we’re done.

It’s going to take awhile…..  I know that.  I’m prepared usually.  Mentally, physically, psychically.  I never learned, you see. Why is it people can’t have their checks ready?  Half filled out?  Why can’t they have their purses open?  Why do they have to search for the 3 pennies in the bottom somewhere so they won’t have to break a buck?  Why don’t they know about the debit/credit thing?  Why isn’t paper and plastic automatic, not a life or death quiz question? Why isn’t God doing something about this????

I remember reading in the 70’s about the Russians lining up to buy bread, lining up to buy meat, lining up to buy this, lining up to buy that, always another line at another store.  I remember thinking, those goofy communists, they must be the most stupid peasants on earth.  Can’t figure out the simplest things….

Some day soon the line would move again there in the DMZ of Thrifty.   And I would wonder who really won the Cold War….

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

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When I was a pimply teenage pup, I had a fantasy of living on an island.  Just me and my baby.  Robinson Crusoe and his sweetheart.  Like most fantasies, it skipped a lot of important details.  Like making a living.  Or needing a few skills.  You know, how to build a shack or repair a roof or pluck a chicken or grow a garden or fix a well pump.  Basic stuff like that.  I guess I believed the A.M. radio bubblegum songs:  Love will find a way.  Or all you really need is love.  Or love is the answer.  Love love love.  Oh baby oh baby oh baby.

Oh brother.  I’ll be the first to admit I daydreamed my way through school.  Stared out the window all day and missed, apparently, the crucial message education had for me.  Which was learn some skills, get a good paying job, conform and be happy.

You can learn life’s lessons the easy way or you can learn em the hard way.  Oh baby oh baby oh baby.  Abject poverty never intruded on my boyhood fantasies.  But it sure did on my adulthood dreams.  Or nightmares, really.  Still, I was knock-headed persistent.  Bought my shack and 7 acres on the South End and proceeded to the task at hand:  Hand to Mouth Survival.  Karen, my wife now of three decades, left a world of security for a vow of poverty.

The years passed and we tended our homestead, built a house, grew vegetable gardens and flower gardens galore, planted orchards and arbors, and like most folks in the Land of Plenty, we managed to survive.  I suspect each of us down here has an island dream, a fantasy that filled the sails of our imaginations,  that took us on a unique journey to this exotic archipelago in our minds.

We each learned how to live our lives here on the islands, even though we each could tell a different story…with an ending not yet written.  I think, though, and this is the hopeless romantic still staring out the schoolroom window – I think we all know it’s really, on some level, still a love story.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/audio-version-casting-the-first-stone1.mp3[/podcast]audio version —- casting the first stone

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On some of my more uppity days, I look down the road and my nose at my neighbors’ houses, most of them running 3000 square feet with garages the size of an airplane hangar.  And I think:  how much stuff do you need that it takes 5 bedrooms, his and her walk-in closets, 3 and a half baths, plus a 3 car garage that parks a 40 foot travel trailer big as a mobile home?  All this for a family whose kids have grown and left the South End.  And while I’m up on my High Horse, I start wondering why is America so hooked on material acquisition and always wants more and needs, apparently the new and improved version of everything from their riding lawnmower to their garbage disposal with the 50 tooth slicer-dicer and odor control setting.   I can get pretty damn smug.  I can rant and I can rave.  I will even vent about living in my dilapidated 800 square foot shack, poor as a church rat, and finally end up babbling about those humble beginnings, living modestly, close to the Land.

This past couple of weeks I went into spring cleaning mode — even though it’s August now.  Started out back in the woodshop.  Tools got dragged out and junked or donated, the place got cleaned and rearranged, a lot got burned.  I moved to my bike shed, hauled out everything non-bike, paneled the interior with cedar and now I had all my boat gear in the lawn.  So I remodeled my lawnmower shed, tossed decades old tools and dead chainsaws and mulching blades and rusty junk, moved a 1930’s wringer washer out and put it in the garden shed, then went at the garden shed.

Eventually I made it to the boatshed, then out to the kayak shelter and finally into the old shack itself, now a glass studio, the living testament to frugal living, a shrine to my oh so ascetic lifestyle.  Course now it’s bigger by double, a second house really, bedroom, bath, all the comforts of home even though we have one up top we built 20 years ago.  If you add them all up — and I did— my neighbors look like the folks who downsized, who cut their carbon footprints and who probably should apply for food stamps any day.

Our 16 buildings, yeah, I said 16, from the sauna to the boathouse, the bike shed to the wellhouse, the garden shed to the studio, woodshop to outhouse, rootcellar to garden shed, woodsheds to kayak shelter, well …. I guess they seem maybe a bit extravagant, if not deliriously deranged.  Maybe not a McMansion, just a McNuthouse.  I know this:  I’m gonna stop pointing accusatory fingers at the neighbors and their piddly little domiciles.  At least until I find out they’re depressing the property values here on the politically correct South End.

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