The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/audio-mother-tongue.mp3[/podcast]audio — mother tongue

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I got a buddy who lives in Shanghai.  For all you South Enders, Shanghai’s in China.  20 million people.  5000 buildings over 30 stories tall.  On the South End we don’t have 500 buildings — unless you count chicken sheds and outhouses too — and none of em are more than 2 stories, unless you count tall tales.

We forget sometimes how much the world off island is changing.  My buddy visited recently.  Brought his two teenage boys who must’ve thought they’d detoured to Mars.  Ma was in the garden when they came and I was bending nails whacking together a shed trying to bring the building total up to 450.  We sat around the house listening to stories of the New China.  Had some homebrew and watched the homemade bread rise while the boys talked about learning Chinese — 2000 characters in their alphabet.  For you South Enders, we got 26, even if some of you only use 20 or less.

They talked about pirated X-boxes, dollar DVD’s, the elaborate transportation system of Shanghai, the rural migration of the peasants into the cities which is larger by far than the Camano exodus into Stanwoodopolis.  And I thought:  we’re living in a backwash up a drying puddle at the end of a dead end road.  I thought we’re becoming Anachronisms.  For you South Enders, it means we’re living a drunkard’s dream.

Personally  …. It’s why I came here.  But I admit it’s jarring to realize how much the rest of the world has moved on and how, sooner or later the South End will be a fossil in the fading memories of all us old timers.  And how, when the population swells and the high rise condos number in the thousands and it’s an easy subway ride to Seattle and Gomorrah’s teeming masses, we’ll be nothing but legends in our own minds, ghosts in gardens long ago paved over.

Til then though, we got our own work to do.  Like wrestling with the language and maybe learning how to use all 26 characters.   That, or start working on pictographs for bread kneading and whiskey distilling.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/audio-frack-me.mp3[/podcast]audio — frack me

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I been thinking about this fracking stuff lately, digging wells down into sediment, then opening up fissures to get to the oil layers.  Down here on the South End we got wells at different levels of aquifer.  You pump too much water, you pull salt from the Sound.  If I’m on that aquifer, well, I get salt too.

My neighbors who have a water association decided they had some illegal hook-ups on their water system, despite my assertions that the original developer had taken the folks’ money for a watershare and deposited it in his account without registering it with the state, so naturally they closed a valve to their own homes, jacked up the pressure to the suspected water poachers and blew out their lines.   Not exactly  real friendly.

Not exactly real smart either, it turns out.  Unbeknownst to them, an underground supply line ruptured too, which meant a week or more of uninterrupted pumping until their water started to taste like the rim of a tequila glass.  I like to think it was Bad Karma, but they thought it was just Bad Luck.  The point is, we’re all in this together.  You screw it up, you screw it up for all of us.

This fracking, well, I figure you got thousands of wildcat drillers hungry for cash.  Probably safe, for the most part, although there are enough stories about water taps shooting flames that it would worry me to see fracking drill trucks come rolling in next door.  Course, I’m a natural born worrier.  Especially when the folks doing the reassuring are the same folks making the money.

My neighbors might be figuring a few fractures down below their basements might help them hit a new water vein.  One that doesn’t taste like my tears.  And if it doesn’t, maybe they’ll get enough money to pay for bottled water deliveries the rest of their lives.  Me, I’m going to sit pat.  My water isn’t on their aquifer and I sure don’t want a fracture putting us together.  To paraphrase Robert Frost:  good aquifers make good neighbors.  I’d like to keep a little distance between my drinking water and theirs.  Especially when they decide I might not be legally entitled….

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/audio-prying-my-guitar-out-of-my-cold-dead-hands2.mp3[/podcast]audio — prying my guitar out of my cold dead hands

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I was cruising through the South End Pawn Shop the other day, scratching for musical gear the kids bought new and then had to sell to Jesse, the owner, for pennies on their dollar.  The days of finding a vintage Gibson Mastertone pre-war banjo are so far back in the rearview, even the memory looks like week old roadkill, thanks to the internet and Antiques Roadshow.  Takes about ten seconds to determine anything’s value.  Jesse’s prices, though, are wildly inflated, but if you’re a good haggler, he’ll come down a long ways.

Me, I’m the kind who hates to go around on prices.  Just put it on the tag and I’ll take it or leave it.  In the course of my lifetime I’ll probably pay twice what everyone else does.  But for peace of mind — and the lowering of blood pressures — I don’t care.

“How’s biz?” I asked Jesse who was perched predatorially on a stool behind a glass case.  He looked like a hawk on a telephone line.  Patiently waiting for the next mouse.  “Couldn’t be better,” he smirked.  I shrugged and he went on about the boyz hurrying in to sell their guns ‘before Obama takes em away’ and the boyz who wanted to buy guns ‘before Obama outlaws em.’  “I shoulda voted Democrat.  The guy is making me rich!”

I never really paid much attention to Jesse’s arsenal before, but I said show me what you got.  He asked what I was looking for, pistol, semi-automatic, shotgun over and under, military assault rifle …..  “Whoa,”  I said, “Jesse, I’m just an innocent bystander.  Doing some research …”

Half an hour later I’m casually acquainted with enough armaments to take the City of Stanwood, just me and a few NRA pals.  If Jesse has 200 firearms — and apparently my neighbors are stockpiling what he’s selling — the idea of disarming my het-up citizen friends seems more than a bit quixotic.  They’re apparently a gun-totin, pistol packin, shoot from the hip pack of yahoos and by god, good luck talking down the barrel of a Smith and Wesson.  You can probably tell a South Ender easy enough by his gun collection, but you sure can’t tell him much.

I walked out of Jesse’s with a big used tube amp for my electric guitar.  Jesse said it was brought in by a kid from a heavy metal band who was dead broke.  “Obama’ll probably ban these too before long,” he said as I lugged it to my truck.  “Dial it up full volume, it’s potentially lethal.”

Right, it could kill my marriage, if nothing else.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/audio-rattling-the-coffee-cups.mp3[/podcast]audio — rattling the coffee cups

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Lately all the boyz at the Diner can talk about is guns.  Guns and ammo.  We got a new waitress, Anita, who keeps their coffee cups rimmed and what you got is a dangerous combination of testosterone and caffeine.  Expletives about gun control and the 2nd amendment ricochet off the back mirror and the grill hood like an AK-15 on the firing range.

“They’ll have to pry my gun outa my cold dead hand,” Walter likes to shout every time some ‘pablum pooping pacifist’ in a corner booth tries to make the case for maybe banning at least semi-automatics.  Walter worries he’ll need an arsenal when the government comes to take away his freedom, which, he’ll remind his target de jour, it’s doing Right Now.  “You gonna stop an army with a baseball bat when they come for you?”

Big Larry usually has to come out with a spatula dripping bacon grease to calm Walter down to a reasonable decibel level.  “Nobody’s coming for you til you finish breakfast, Walt, so eat up.  You’ll need your strength.”

Some of the boys have started to wear their NRA caps, I guess to show South End Solidarity.  Me, I’m not a big gun-toter, but since I own my grandpa’s old shotgun, I’m evidently no pablum pooping peacenik either, even if it hasn’t been fired since 1975.  And once upon a time, living in an old farmhouse in Northern Wisconsin, I got wind of a rumor that the Posse Comitatus, a redneck right wing anti-about-everything group of good ole boys, wanted me and my friends to move back to whatever hippie commune we’d crawled out of — or else!

I kept more than my gramp’s 18 guage rabbit gun then.  Kept 7 rifles loaded and ready .  Two were semi-automatic  .22’s, pull the trigger fast as you can go and watch the bark peel back, no point aiming through the sights.  Later my neighbor across the field told me he kept an arsenal too for the night they might come in half a dozen pickups.

It’s not the government I worry about.  It’s the Walters.  But I can’t live with that much paranoia.  Why I moved here.  Walter just likes to rattle the coffee cups, I know . But, there are places where they do more than that….

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/audio-who-ARE-these-kardashians2.mp3[/podcast]audio — who ARE these kardashians

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