The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The world isn’t just growing smaller, it’s positively moving lock stock and crackerbarrel into the South End.  It’s one thing to have shirt tail relatives moving in with us, but I’m discovering perfect strangers roaming the nettle trails out back.  Who ARE these Kardashian people?  Why am I supposed to care enough to find out?  Some quarterback from Notre Dame has an internet imaginary girlfriend who died — he’s in the driveway explaining this??  Oprah is interviewing some lying bicycle junkie down in the studio.  I don’t give a doper’s damn;  I just want them out of my studio so I can work.

I got You-Tube nonsense e-mailed to me, I got Yahoo News flashes on famous people’s fashion faux pas, there’s blog sites and twets and facebook and up-to-the-nano-second updates on what total strangers are doing.  Our computers and cellphones and I-pads and televisions are sending silicone tentacles into our plumbing, our electrical, our phone lines and our synapses.  We got the world crammed into a two bedroom house.  Believe me, I need more closet space.

What I really need is to turn the computer OFF.  Radio too.  TV — I need to shoot the one I got.  Shoot it, burn it and bury it.  I have friends who never turn it off.  They watch anything.  Judge Judy, game shows, soaps, potty training poodles of the stars …. anything.  WITH commercials.  And don’t even get me started on advertisers.

We must be the most bored generation since those long winter nights in Cro-Magnon caves before fire was discovered.  Nothing to do, nothing to create, nothing to fire an imagination, nothing to give us joy, nothing to make us wonder, nothing — absolutely nothing — of interest in our barren lives.  The entire world at our fingertips and we can hear nothing but the babble, a white noise always on, a tinny tinnitus of the mind.

The Kardashian clan is living on the South End now and apparently we’re expected to feed them.  Where in hell did they come from?  And more importantly, how do we get rid of them?

Hits: 23

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/export-coal-for-the-tubercular.mp3[/podcast]export — coal for the tubercular

Hits: 21

We had a Coal Car meeting down at the Grange the other night.  Folks could weigh in pro or con whether they wanted coal shipped by rail from Wyoming to Bellingham, then loaded on boats for China.  This same week on TV you could see the pollution in Beijing, something so dangerous to breathe, they didn’t have a number on their toxicity scale.  150 is plenty poisonous.  Theirs was over their top number of 500.  Way more….  You could see for yourself they need more coal.

I had a friend who sat down awhile back and decided to drink himself to death.  Suicide by bottle.  If he’d asked us to pick him up a sackful of booze every day — and offered to pay us really well to do it — maybe we could’ve had some meetings at the Grange to decide if it was okay or not.   He was going to kill himself with or without us making a profit on his suicide.

I’m old and more than a little cynical.  I figure the coal is coming in.  Money talks.  But I once went to apublic hearing in Coupeville when the pipeline folks meant to come down from Alaska and go across the country.  This was back in, oh, the early 80’s.  The pipeline changed its proposed route, originally intended to go through Portland where opposition was mounting, to cut across Whidbey and Camano after coming up out of the Straits and Saratoga.  Smart move.  Caught all of us by surprise.

Me and my roommate Joe were the only folks who went to the public hearing.  The ONLY two other than the pipeline rep and his pretty wife and two cute kids.  Pause on that awhile.  Gov. Spellman eventually vetoed it, said the pipe was deeper than any ever laid, sunk in a seismic area, no less.   The Secretary of the Interior came out to speak to the Guv.  The Secretary of the Defense came out to twist his arm.  The President leaned on him.  It was a matter of national security, they said.  It meant jobs.  Money was at stake.

No doubt Governor Spellman read Joe and me’s incisive testimony and was swayed by two long-haired, unemployed citizens of his state who cared enough to drive clear over to our sister island and make our position crystal clear:  No Pipeline!

So I don’t know why I think the coal is coming sure as Santa comes to the Mall.  I don’t know why I’m so pessimistic.  Most of the folks at the Grange didn’t like the idea much so I wonder if the average Joe in China doesn’t either.  We didn’t lose much security when the pipeline didn’t get built and I suspect we can survive without the profits from 19th century energy sales.  I’m betting there’s a couple of unemployed Chinese guys living hell and gone from Shanghai who may think so too.  If the government doesn’t run a tank over them when they make their protest, maybe someday they’ll get a job and become productive members of society.  Like Joe and me….

Hits: 46

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/audio-floyd-norgaard-concert-invite1.mp3[/podcast]audio — floyd norgaard concert invite

Hits: 33

The Band’s been racking our collective brains for what we might do for this year’s Floyd Norgaard Cultural Center concert.  One year we had a South End Art Show, what you probably think of as oxymoronic.  One year we had a quilt show.  Real cold sleeping that year, I remember, all those missing quilts.  Another year we had a Back Road Tour of the South End slide show, sort of Rick Steves on a dollar-a-day budget.  Last one we had free beer and wine.  It’s hard — it’s REAL hard — to top that one.  Unless we brought in a keg of our heavy nettle beer and a few gallons of Erich’s moonshine merlot.  But hellfire, these are like family jewels.  We love you guyz but even love has a LIMIT….

Oh, we considered some wild options this year.  The South End MOVIE.  But none of us own a movie camera.  And we thought about bringing in a Farmer’s Market.  But it is winter.  I mean we really wracked our brains and we pooled our IQ’s  and well, damn!  I guess we just don’t have much new to bring to the table.  Probably just Creative Fatigue or Imaginative Dysfunction or maybe just tired blood.  We feel bad, we really do.  I suppose we could just pound out a few of our Greatest Hits, sign some autographs then head for the motel with some of you more ardent fans, but ….  I don’t know, that just seems so … inadequate for the occasion.

So we went back to the drawing board and we decided we would do the unvarnished, unadulterated, untold history of Stanwoodopolis.  After all, it IS the Historical Society putting this shindig on.  We figured it was high time the Losers wrote the history.  Maybe get to the truth and grit of the matter for once.  We’re digging through the closets and oh yeah, we’re dragging out the skeletons.  This is the history your granny wouldn’t tell ya on her dying day.  But we’re more than happy to.  Hopefully long before our dying day.

Hits: 34

Hits: 29

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

Hits: 29

I remember — vaguely now — telling folks I wasn’t going to learn how to use a *#@!!?>% computer until they evolved to a simplicity enough to coach me how to use them.  WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO, SKEETER? it would ask politely.  And I would say, oh, let’s check for airline reservations, or why don’t we send my old pard, Guitar Bob, an e-mail?  I’LL GET RIGHT ON THAT!!  BY THE WAY, DID I MENTION THAT I HAVE A NEW PROGRAM I COULD SHOW YOU … WHEN YOU HAVE THE TIME, MR. DADDLE.

Maybe a decade or so later I could see the mizzus’ computer wasn’t getting simpler.  In fact, from my arms’ length analysis, it looked way more complicated.  And I was being left farther and farther behind in its rear view mirror as it waved goodbye in its digital little way.  What in the hell were Billy Gates and Stevie Jobs doing if they weren’t making this easier for old goats like me and my Jurassic pals?

Looking back, it was like asking my socket wrenches to teach me how to repair a car engine.  Tool usage is still dependent on the intelligence of the hominid user.  And my computer, seemingly stupid, wasn’t about to run tutorials on raising my IQ.  Still won’t.  But it will get me to a site that will answer 90% of my questions —- so long as I don’t get philosophical.

My folks are in their 80’s.  They’re like me — reluctant newcomers to the Digital Age.  Virtually nothing is obvious … or intuitive… or remotely familiar from our previous world.   I watched a 2 year old kid with an interactive toy he had, part computer, part CD player.  He mastered it in, oh, 30 seconds.  He could turn our TV on, change channels, adjust the volume.  Two years old.  His brain is hardwired to silicon.  Mine is mostly plaque.

We will only be visitors to the next Era.  We’ve already been relegated to the past by the kids who are connected to a new hive, one that exists beyond our physical world.  The Pied Piper has come for the children.  We invited him, I guess.  Some of us will try to follow too, but we don’t hear the music the same way.  What we try to dance to, they simply breathe in.  This new music is their air.  Me, I’m feeling like I got emphysema.

Hits: 26

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/audio-losin-the-farm4.mp3[/podcast]audio — losin the farm

Hits: 23

I’m a great believer in the notion that by the time you reach MY ripe old age, we old dogs don’t need to learn new tricks.  We got most of it figured out.  So it undermines my South End cosmology when one of us goes off the tracks.  I’m gonna tell you about Randy the Handyman, but sadly, he’s not the only pal who’s veered into the bushes, asleep at the wheel.

Randy had his own company for years – South End Construction – where he started out as a general contractor, tore off roofs, added porches, built decks for the newcomers’ hot tubs, remodeled kitchens and bathrooms.  He learned the trade by doing it, then moved up to house building.  Specs, customs, the whole American Dream, until finally he was building million dollar homes . You might think — him coming up from humble beginnings and all, the whole bootstrap theory of success — he’d have it made in the shade, salt away some profits for when the rains wiped away the shade, plan for  a Lazy-Boy recliner old age.  But Randy, who believed religion was set up to allow him to pray to a God the way a kid goes to a department store Santa, figured money might not grow on trees, but it was in there somewhere next to the 2×6’s.  He made a small fortune, but like a lot of folks way richer than him, he spent an even bigger fortune.  Mortgaged the farm for four times what he paid for it,  right past the barn roof, and when the Recession Grande hit, nothing could save him.

The two previous lesser recessions hadn’t taught him much, except maybe how to navigate the bankruptcy laws, but the Big One had some lessons for him almost Biblical in nature.  Lost the farm, lost his wife, friends turned their backs,even the kids wouldn’t talk to him.  For a man who loved material things more than what matters, a stingey Santa will make him lose faith.

I see Randy once in awhile, tooling aimlessly around in his pickup, both on their last legs.  You could feel sorry for a man who worked hard and never quite had the dream or maybe lacked the reach.  But the man who had it made and only wanted more?  I tell you this, Santa’s a pisspoor substitute for God.

Hits: 12