The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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For the past 25 years or so the mizzus and me throw a big New Year’s Party here on the South End, partly so we don’t get to know the sheriff’s deputies any better than we do now, which is what we tell the neighbors, but the real reason is a bit more shrouded in the mists of lost memories. I got a call today from Brent, an old friend now in Alaska, and it triggered a couple of neurons into firing spasmodically once more and voila, I was back in, oh, 1985 down at the shack with just a few of us struggling mightily to make it to midnight so we could toast the new year and pass out in our bunks.
My brother was here with his wife Judy and we had Brent and Liz visiting from Portland. My brother is what you’d call a spark plug for party stuff. Meaning, when conversations lag, he springs into instant action. ‘Let’s go around the room,’ he says, ‘and tell what the best day of the year was for each of us.’ So Brent goes first and he relates a warm summer day when he and his collie were at the park and the sun was shining and the Frisbees were sailing and it was just a golden day, a boy and his pooch, fetching the Frisbee. Not maybe what my brother had in mind, I bet, but just a hippie dippy zen day that stood out for Brent more than some birthday or Christmas or the day he got a raise or the usual dopey stuff we trot out when you play Name Your Best Day.
I don’t remember what my favorite day was. I don’t remember Karen’s or my brother’s or my brother’s wife’s favorite day. But I remember Liz’s turn, Brent’s girlfriend who I’d know a long time. A real long time. A way too long a time. And as the clock ticked glacially toward 1986, gears needing oil, glasses waiting for that toast and then goodnight everybody, my brother sez, ‘Okay, Liz, what was your favorite day?’ And to this day I can remember Liz turning to Brent who was rubbing his collie’s head, probably still warm in his remembrance of a summer day in the park, and the clock’s hands stopping forever, the wood stove throwing a heat nothing like what she was focusing on poor Brent with a laser look that would burn through titanium like it was cheap plastic, and our glasses with champagne broke in the sudden stillness before she said, ‘My favorite day …. (and the ‘my’ was a small caliber bullet) My favorite day was the day we got back together, Brent.’
Maybe you’ve had a New Year’s ‘Party’ like that. The room emptying of air and sound and mirth, as if a stopper had been pulled from the tub of our happiness and no matter how hard you try, and Brent desperately tried, that stopper won’t go back in and all the merriment drains out by your feet and deep down in your cold curling guts you know, you know absolutely this is not the way you wanted to ring in the next year. You know what they mean by ill-omened now and all the months to come you will dread the next New Years’ Eve the way you would dread death itself. And of course Liz and Brent broke up and Brent moved to the furthest corner of the earth and my brother admitted maybe that wasn’t the best holiday icebreaker of all time and we decided either to forsake New Year’s altogether or bring so many people in we couldn’t possibly go around the room and play parlor games like Stab Your Lover.
And that is how the South End got its gala New Year’s Extravaganza Potluck and BYOB Party. And of course, you’re invited! Unless you got some serious issues with your girlfriend or boyfriend, lover or husband, wife or mistress. Then I think you got a new parlor game for you and a few select friends. Happy New Year anyway.

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Some of the boys down here on the South End were deep into a night of nog over at the Marina’s Pilot House when the subject of New Year’s Resolutions reared its ugly head. We’d pretty much solved most of the burning issues of the day that Congress can’t or won’t address, and with world peace close at hand and a solution for global economic recovery looming in our fevered LED’s, we naturally turned to self-improvement, the final obstacle to Nirvana.

Self-improvement, in case you’ve never met a dyed-in-the-alpaca-wool South Ender, isn’t high on his Honey-Do List. If it’s on the list at all….. I’m not saying we don’t think we could use some polishing, but all those so-called vices other folks resolve every January One to curb or cut back on or eradicate completely, are those very traits we hold in high esteem. We sure aren’t in any hurry to canonize ourselves. We aren’t aiming for perfection. Okay, maybe we could stand a bit of sprucing up, but we all know what a slippery slope that is. Mabana Mike quit the bottle for 13 weeks two New Years ago and by the 3rd week he was an insufferable convert not only to Sobriety but worse, Piety. Every day was like an AA meeting with Mike and he might as well have started his own church, passed out nicotine patches and offered up 3 more cups of decaf coffee to the gods of abstinence.

No, we decided long ago it’s better to accept our little blemishes and move on the best we can. You live in a Shangri-La-La like we do, you don’t want many more monks claiming blissful enlightenment. Next thing you know hordes of tourists seeking Truth, Wisdom and the South End Way will be clogging our backwash blacktop. Plus, the Pilot House isn’t legally zoned for monasteries or temples. We’ll probably just save everyone the grief and skip the resolutions again this New Year. Good luck, though, to the rest of you….

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I gassed up the pickup yesterday. $2.19 a gallon. Whoo-hoo! The price at the pump is going down faster than a horny snake courting a garden hose. Russia, who was courting crony capitalism, is doomed, dependent as they are on oil exports. Ditto Venezuala and Iran. Folks maybe wanted a military solution to the Crimea and Ukraine take-over, they can skip the shooting part, except where the Russkies shot themselves in the foot.

We’re awash in oil now. Might not even want to fight wars in the Middle East anymore, just frack our way to energy independence. Dig a shaft in every backyard and shoot down some chemicals we aren’t allowed to know what they are, probably benign, right?, just a secret is all. Like Coca-Cola’s formula. Might even taste good in your well water, but don’t light a match by the faucet if the concentration gets too high.

They aren’t fracking on the South End. Not yet. But we sure use gasoline like it was going the way of coal. Takes a tank just to commute to work. Those of us unemployables are obviously Unsung Heroes, low carbon footprinters. No need to thank us. Sloth, sometimes, is its own reward. Historians will no doubt re-evaluate our rightful place in society and we’re willing to wait. Part of those low gas prices is low demand. Yup, us again!

Pretty soon gas should be cheaper than water. Well water, I mean. It’s always been cheaper than the bottled stuff and nobody’s complaining about the price of bottled water. When fracking is done, well water might very well reach concentrations that work in an internal combustion engine. That mandatory health care folks have been complaining about might make a lot more sense then. Drink up … and drive safe! Or drink safe and stop driving. The way we do down here.

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We’re about to head out before Christmas hits its Big Finale, Santa sets his GPS and leaves all his elves waiting for that fat bonus which is as likely as a Peking Pension Plan. Just shut the door behind us, leave the island and motor past the malls jammed with desperate folks on their last frenzied Push, credit cards and stress maxed, feeling like Jimmy Stewart when the bank run ends. Only without the Norman Rockwell town to back him up with community support….

I remember the Old Christmas. The one where we were poor as churchmice and all those gifts to friends and family felt like one more weight on the anchor dragging us below the surface. The folks who make minimum wage or who are unemployed or who pick our crops for next to nothing — Christmas isn’t A Wonderful Life, let me tell ya.

I know, we say the same thing every year. Christmas. Too commercial. Too materialistic. Too phony baloney. A month or two of seriously clichéd songs, TV specials, movie reruns. Scrooge, the Grinch, Tiny Tim, Christmas Future, Miracle on 34th St., all to sell cars, perfume, watches, toys, baubles and bullshit. I’m as sentimental as the next he-man, but C”MON!! It’s a tad excessive. It’s pretty close to obscene. I’m sorry, Virginia, but Santa is an executive at Wal-Mart, hate to be the one to break it to you.

I could tell you we go away to some dark hollow to escape all this … but the truth is, we leave so we don’t dampen the neighbors’ spirits here on the cynical South End. No need to thank us. It’s our gift. And as always, it’s really the thought that used to count.

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