The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

My buddy Sam lives in a dilapidated house down by the newly opened Katmandu Kite Shop and no, it isn’t a kite store, it’s a recreational marijuana outlet. Sam’s place sits back in the nettled interior, down a dead end dirt road near the old trout pond that once held trout but got dredged back in the early ‘80’s on one debauched weekend that ended my trout fishing on the South End.

Sam’s been living the bachelor life since his wife left him. She’d grown weary of the power being turned off for non-payment and the back taxes on the place reaching critical mass and since neither of them were willing to work, they played ‘chicken’ with each other, hoping the other would swerve first back into the job market. No way was Sam going back to wage slavery so ultimately Bobbie packed her things, left a short and not-so-sweet note and headed back down to an old boyfriend in Eugene, Oregon who at least worked part-time driving schoolbus.

Sam says he never saw it coming. I believe him, not because all the signs weren’t pointing inexorably toward a dissolution, but because Sam doesn’t have peripheral vision. He would have to hit a sign head-on. In fact, he didn’t find Bobbie’s kiss-off letter until four days after she left. Which isn’t as myopic as you might think. Sam is a Hoarder. His house is like one of those ant farms I had as a kid, nothing but tunnels, stuff stacked along the paths head high, trails leading to the bed or the bathroom or through the kitchen to the stove on one side, the fridge down a different path.

Bobbie kept the piles slightly more passable, but now that she’s gone, the tunnels have narrowed. Nothing much gets thrown away, but stuff apparently is coming in constantly, at least by my observation after not seeing Sam for a few months. The folks who dreamed up ‘planned obsolescence’ never counted on the Sams who keep the broken crap and live in their own midden. Another year, I figure he’ll run out of room completely. I don’t know how many Sams are out there, but I have to wonder if this isn’t why Sears, after a century, is going broke.

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audio — bring back april fools day

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I remember as a kid coming down to my sad breakfast of gruel and grits and our mom asking me and my brothers if we’d heard? “Heard what?” we’d ask groggily. “School was canceled today,” she’d say. “All right!” we’d yelled, visions of morning shows on TV and neighborhood ball games in the afternoon filling our dumb little heads. School’s out, school’s out, Teacher wore her ruler out! A surprise free holiday, oh boy!

And then at the height of our Cheerio euphoria, she’d drop the hammer. April Fool!!!! If there’s a special holiday for sadists to prey on the weak and the gullible, this is it. Cruelty as comedy. Our mother would laugh until she had to sit down, then when the Old Man stumbled to the table, she’d regale him with our sad stupidity and we were humiliated all over again. You know, before we had to go to our school that was still holding classes for boneheads like us.

By the next year we’d have forgotten what April first was — and so fell once more into our mother’s traps. She had plenty. I think she worked 364 days to get the next one ready. Nowadays, it’s April Fool 365 days, no days off. Viral e-mails, the internet, Fox and MSNBC, all 24/7. If you know what’s fact and what’s fiction, good work! Just don’t send me the news on my e-mail anymore. I’m not 6 years old and I don’t believe a word my mother says now, which are mostly pronouncements from Fox News.

We live in the Digital Age where ‘facts’ are cherry-picked by the unseen hand of a computer algorithm. If we believe everything we read now, it’s because we only read what we want to hear. What fun is it if we fool all of us who’ve fooled ourselves all of the time? This May 15th the FCC is going to shut down the internet for 24 hours for a much needed de-bugging for malware. I know we won’t, but maybe we could turn off the TV too for a little Cranial Cleaning. Maybe next year we’d have a chance to reinstall an authentic April Fools Day again. That, or add an app to our newly virus-scrubbed computer, a Prank Alert.

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I spend a lot of time behind the wheel of a grocery shopping cart. Since I don’t own a cellphone to check with the mizzus what size or brand of mayo or dressing she prefers this particular afternoon or to chat it up with some friend or relative to while away the lonely hours on Aisle 6, I find my entertainment studying the purchasing patterns of my fellow South End shoppers.

I was behind Ginny Sprague this morning. Ginny’s a mom of 3, 4 if you count her husband Morty who’s been unemployed since before the Great Recession. Her cart was a veritable shrine to General Mills, Frito-Lay and Coca-Cola. Now, I grew up on morning cereal, but I was a teenager before Kelloggs and their corporate adulterers began to hook us kids on Count Chocula or Cap’n Crunch with mostly sugar additives. That’s why we have moms, I figure, but Ginny either got addicted too or else the kids rule the trailer at mealtimes. Box pizzas, candy bars, diet Coke, canned Spaghetti-O’s, white bread, processed meat. Maybe her root cellar is still stocked with vegetables and fruit which would explain their absence in the cart, but … I’m betting the children and Morty hate broccoli and apples.

Her pile of groceries wasn’t a lot different than half the shoppers bumper to bumper at check-out, I know. We’re the wealthiest folks on earth and we eat like it’s Halloween every day. Ginny’s kids are little blubberballs at age 7,8 and 10. Ginny’s no toothpick herself and yeah, I know, it’s none of my damn business. I’ll be dead of malnutrition before they glut the health care system with diabetes and poor circulation and hopeless obesity. Not my problem, I spoze, but when I hear Ralph next door bitching about the ‘nanny state’ intruding on his freedom when schools serve nutritious food instead of a slice of pizza and a Coke, I think, hey, I’m paying for their lunch with my taxes too.

But arguing with Ralph is a proven form of masochism. I just nod in agreement. “Let them eat cake, Ralph,” I say. “And wash it down with a supersize soda.” Ralph’s just glad we can finally agree on something.

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Jihad Jack was parked in his usual spot at the beer-stained bar in the Pilot House, the South End Marina’s answer to marriage counseling. Any divorce attorney worth his margarita salt would drink nightly down there and write off his bar tab as a legitimate business expense. Jack was twirling his plastic trident in a concoction he’d gotten Brad, the usual bartender during Happy Hour, to ‘create’ for him, something with multiple boozes, eye of newt and a dash of habanero sauce. Jihad called it his Fox News Cocktail since he always watched it on the big screen directly in front of his customary stool.

“There it is,” he hollered so every manjack of us would halt our own conversation for his. “Measles!” he cried. “First E-bola and now it’s measles! You tellin me it’s a coincidence?”

As usual us assembled drinkers began to choose sides, sort of touch football without a football, just fire a pass out over the seating area and see who wouold risk catching the hot potato. “What’s your point, Jack?” Jesse asked, as if he didn’t guess. “You think the government brought this here?”

“Damn right they brought it here,” Jack replied, “just like AIDS.”

Pete set his beer aside and asked, grinning, “What would be their strategy, Jack?”

“They want to inoculate us, can’t you see?? They want to make you bring your kids in and shoot them full of vaccines and autism. Who knows what’s in those shots?”

Dave, two stools downriver, who’s a Physician’s Assistant at the South End Clinic, took his glasses off to study this guy Jack. “You kidding me?” he finally asked. “We got measles cured. We vaccinated kids and it worked. That’s all you have to do. Vaccinate the population. It’s like polio. There’s a cure!”

Jihad Jack smirked. “Yeah, and you want to fluoridate the water too, I bet! The government’s got no right — NONE! — to tell me what to do.” Dave shook his head. “It’s like living in the Dark Ages, that attitude,” he muttered and returned to his beer.

“At least they didn’t have to study propaganda as history, Doc.” Dave half finished his glass and headed for the door. The Pilot House, most nights, is pretty rudderless. Trouble is, it’s the only watering hole for a long ways.

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