The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/audio-blue-tuesdays.mp3[/podcast]audio — blue tuesdays

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One of the things we don’t talk about much down here on the sunny South End is depression.  I know, it’s hard to imagine.  Sort of a worm in the apple of the Garden of Eden — before God made the rule not to eat it.  But we got everything from Seasonal Affective Disorder to Monday Morning Blues that last until Friday to outright disabling pull-the-covers-over-our-head-and-wait-until-spring depression.

I was always of the school of thought that depression was a symptom of bad marriages or crappy jobs or poor life choices.  External stuff but something you could change.  I don’t believe that anymore.  I got friends who struggle, who wrestle, who go 10 rounds with this stuff and in the end, lose on a TKO by the first cup of coffee.  We all know folks who try all manner of self- medication.  Sort of leads to other problems which compound the original diagnosis, maybe like mistaking gasoline for water to fight a smoldering fire.  Next thing you know, you got a 3 alarm.

I know it’s hard to believe we could suffer severe bouts of depression, living as we do, in Shangri-La-La, but even Paradise has its ups and downs.  Don’t try to tell me Heaven is all sunshine and bliss — I know better.  God herself has more than a few Bad Days, at least judging by the state of the world out there.  You come home —All Alone — to the news that there’s more genocide, more torture, another couple of wars and a few new extinctions —- and that’s just on this planet, well, I bet She needs a few stiff drinks to get through the evening news.  Who wouldn’t?

I’m no psychiatrist so I don’t offer up panaceas any more.  Religion, drugs, self help advice:  might as well sing Sinatra to the wind.  I hear there are meds now, everything from Prozac to lithium, that may or may not help.  This world is hard enough without seeing it through a Blue Veil.  If you’re suffering through a cyclical bout, don’t think you’re alone.  I realize it doesn’t help much, but hang on.  Reality’s a slippery slope, but Hope is a ladder.  Even down here we always have to climb our way back up….

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/audio-nip-and-tuck.mp3[/podcast]audio — nip and tuck

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Well, you knew it was bound to happen.  Zumba has come to the South End.  It won’t be long before we’re overrun by personal trainers, Weight Watchers, fitness centers, nutritional supplement stores and eventually rampant steroid use.  For a long long while we seemed exempt from that national narcissism that needs a mirror on every wall and a scale in every room, monitoring for an hourly check on weight gain or wrinkle formation the way a Day Trader checks his stocks every  15 minutes.

I actually know one or two people who DON’T think they’re overweight or out of shape.  Course, they’re 80 plus years old and didn’t get brainwashed by TV commercials or fashion magazines, or … well, about everything that floods across the airwaves or through the mail or via the internet.

It’s a lot like living in Eternal High School where everyone is excluded from the Kool Kid Klub.  Too overweight, too out of shape, too much gray hair, too many varicose veins.  The pharmaceutical folks are making up non-caloric fats and artificial sweeteners.  The medical industry will offer us Botox treatments and plastic surgery.  There are 2500 diet plans known to the state of California … that work for 6 months.  You can get hair transplants and you can get dye for the plugs.

Old age is not something we accept gracefully.  And judging by every other ad in every media, old age starts at 30 or earlier.  Course the next ad will sell us potato chips, pop, beer and fast food — sort of like selling oxycontin then advertising the rehab clinic.

I guess we’re just not comfortable in our own skins.  Which are way too thin….  Unless you only see the fat.  Or the varicose veins.  If Zumba will toughen us up, okay then.  Throw away the bathroom scales and break the mirrors.  Go take a walk and read a book.  You’re not going to be the Prom Queen or the Star Quarterback.  It’s maybe time to really graduate from high school.  Oh, and when you’re contacting those long lost sweethearts on Facebook, show them your actual photo.  We all got a little older.  Naturally….

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/audio-glaciers-of-garbage.mp3[/podcast]audio —- glaciers of garbage

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About 20 years ago last century I started building our new house.  1992.  Took a couple years, but when it was finished, I walked everything up the hill from the shack we’d lived in since 1977.  I decided if I wasn’t willing to carry it up, it wasn’t worth keeping.  You want to downsize, this strategy can’t be beat.

I cheated a little on the clawfoot tub and the wood cook stove and used my truck and a buddy or two with beer bribes, but otherwise I spent a week moving ant-like up and down the hill with occasional breaks to haul the discard pile to the dump or the thrift stores.  By the time we took occupancy we were down to the bare essentials.  All that clutter and crap from the shack was gone.  And good riddance!

Fast forward a couple decades.  Not only has the dust collected up here at the hacienda, but so have boxes, knickyknacks, books, CD’s, clothes and all the rest of those possessions piling up slowly enough to avoid detection or set off hoarder alarms.  In a perfect world I suppose I’d build the next house back in the woods, then downsize again, taking only the necessities.  This seems like a nuclear option and anyway, I’m too decrepit and old to build another mansion.

So … I’m going to Option B.  I’m digging into every closet, every nook and most crannies, behind the stairs, up in the rafters, back in the crawlspaces.  I’m hunting junk, scraps, extra dishware, broken pottery, bad art, tattered books, drawers of cassette tapes, stacks of vinyl, unused camping gear, beat up shoes, torn coats, old tape decks and Beta machines, analog cameras, relatives who never left, lost puppies, missing children, Romney advisors, leftover lunches, tube TV’s and every computer we ever owned.  I want it out.  Gone.  Forgotten.  I want space.  I want Grand Vistas once again in the living room.  I want closets that aren’t sedimentary.  Pots and pans that aren’t archeological.  Art that isn’t historical.  I want my house back.

Seems like every twenty years or so this could hold back the glacier of garbage.  Course, it might take twenty to finish the job.   Check back in a year or so.  See if I’m okay.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/audio-south-end-health-care.mp3[/podcast]audio — south end health care

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Half the folks I know down here on the organic, antibiotic-free South Endzone are self-insured.  Meaning:  they don’t have health insurance, life insurance and possibly not even car insurance.  They count on clean living, herbal remedies and a whole lotta luck to get them to old age without accidents or bankruptcy.  When they DO get sick or their luck runs out, we collect donations and the bank calls in the mortgage.  This is the state of health insurance these days.  A half wit on meth could dream up a more sensible plan, it seems to me.  Course, I’m not on meth….

I’m on the catastrophic plan.  High monthly payments, high deductible, high probability my coverage will be denied anyway.  One time long ago I had health insurance through my employer — and yes, way back when I actually had a job.  Part time.  Low pay.  But it offered health insurance.  Hot damn!!  Since I’d never had coverage of any sort previously, I ran right out and bounced a double-bladed axe off a maple I was cutting down right into my leg about ankle high one 4th of July.  Deep gash right through the ligament, fireworks in my brain.  So I dropped the axe, tightened up a tourniquet and drove to the nearest emergency room which was 40 miles north.  The ER doc put about 15 stitches in the ligament, then another 15 in the leg and declared me good as new, maybe in a few months.  He declined any pain med prescription, fearing, I think, I might enjoy them.  “Stop on your way home and buy yourself a six pack of something strong,” he advised, no doubt remembering his Hypocritical Oath.  I asked would this wound hurt much and he assured me it would hurt like hell.  “Roll a fat doobie,” he added, “you’ll be fine.”  Medical marijuana four decades ahead of its time…. I wasn’t fine.  I spent the summer on crutches after a week of pain and pogo-sticking on one leg.  Which was bad enough, but then the other shoe dropped, metaphorically and literally, when my insurance policy refused to pay my ER bill, some clause that required my accident to have taken place NOT in the county of my residence.

Well, since 95% or more of accidents occur near home, this was a stroke of genius for my ‘insurers’.   Insured them from the possibility of payments, I guess.  Shortly after this, I left my place of employment and rejoined the ranks of my fellow South Enders.  Semi-retired, self-employed and very vaguely entrepreneurial.

So when I hear my neighbors whose companies pay their health premiums complain about my friends who don’t carry insurance at all, I tell em what my ER doc recommended:  just drink until the numbness hits.  You still think health care works,  roll a big fat one too.

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