The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Rumor has it, once again, that Tyee Store is reopening. They evidently gave up on the dream of growing marijuana legally. Probably illegally too, I’m betting. Gonna just sell cigarettes and beer and wine and white bread, all the supplies we South Enders were waiting two years for. Two and a half, but let’s not quibble — let’s celebrate!

Me, I went out today with my trusty sickle and reopened my trail from the back 40 to the road just south of the store. About a mile last time I kept that trail. New folks have moved in back there. Fences have gone up. Blackberries have blocked the path. It’s been, after all, two plus years for the jungle to reclaim my trail, the one I made back in 1985. Although … that trail has moved the way a river alters course. Trees have come down, pastures have been fenced, two loggings have changed things drastically, barbed wire has fenced me out. So okay, change is inevitable. I’m a South Ender; I’m familiar with the notion.

But a few new neighbors forced me into the woods for some serious bushwhacking, mostly to avoid the appearance of trespassing. Okay, the actuality of trespassing. I know what the Amazonian explorers must’ve felt like, hacking into the wilderness, running into dead ends of insurmountable barriers, turning back and trying another route. I didn’t have a guide. Since the Barefoot Bandit left the scene, the interior is uncharted territory. In the end I cleared double the trail I eventually plan to use. Maybe the deer and the raccoons can use the rest.

It’s a pleasure, in case you wonder why I bother, to still be able to traverse the island west to east by moccasin. In the old days I’d slash my way across, buy a beer, jaw with the storefolks and the local yokels by the crackerbarrel, then wander back to the west side. Me and Marco Polo, Lewis and Clark, Livingston and Stanley. They got the fame, but I get a beer. Pretty good trade-off. And who knows? Maybe they’ll grow cannabis too eventually. Save us wasting all that garden space ….

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Skeeter’s headed for the hills…. That’s muy correcto, amigos, he’s vamoosing to the mountains of Rosylyn for the annual Beer Hunt, no license necessary. And no, we’re not going politically correct. Meaning, we do NOT catch and release. I know it sounds cruel to some, but sometimes tradition outweighs compassion. Ask a white southerner crying over their rebel flag. “My great grandpappy fought those damn Yankees so we could have states’ rights. I just want to honor his service.”

Sure, it’s a proud tradition, fighting for the right to keep human beings as slaves … or at least the right to keep them from voting now that the traitor Lincoln freed them. Traditions like that are, as Scarlet might say, gone with the wind. If they ban the Confederate flag, what’s next, a ban on swastikas??

Beer hunting. A whole different animal, trust me on this. We’re thinning the herds is what we’re doing. It’s not like we’re Nazis, killing them because we’re superior. It’s not some kind of foamy genocide. Jeez…. We respect the ales. We honor them if you want to know the truth. Someday, when beer hunting is deemed as uncivilized and immoral as slaveholding, our progeny will stand up for us, one last rebel yell!! “My grandpap fought those bottles to a standstill up there in the coal hills. If you want to take down that statue in the square of Skeeter standing mightily in front of two dozen dead ales, you’ll do it over my dead body.”

Course, Skeeter hasn’t got any grandkids….

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I was in the checkout line of the local pharmacy — and no, I don’t mean the Bud Hut — behind an older fella who had a joint remedy, some kind of modern snake oil guaranteed to alleviate arthritis, hair loss and lack of sexual desire. Wendy, the cashier, rang his cure-all up, something like $19.99, cheap, I guess, for a panacea. “My husband takes this too,” she told the geriatric gent. The customer nodded imperceptibly, swiped his credit card and waited for his receipt.

I’m always annoyed at folks who treat their checkout people the way they’d treat a store mannequin, just seems rude to me. The auto checkout was tailor made for these yahoos. So I asked, just to fill the awkward silence, “Well, did it work for him?” Our customer perked up at this; after all, this is close to a testimonial if not a full-fledged pharmaceutical double blind test. Wendy paused. “Jimmy says it does, so I guess it’s worth the money.” Her tone of voice suggested maybe Jimmy was BS’ing and the money was going down a rathole. “I hope that works miracles,” she said to the Arthritis Kid.

Exactly, I thought. We’re hoping for miracles at $19.99, why not throw the dice? I was over at a buddy’s house later on and asked him how his girlfriend’s broken arm was doing. You ask health questions at my age, you’re either desperate for conversation or you need counseling yourself. “Not great,” Billy said. “It isn’t healing up like it should. But … we’re taking Bone Broth.”

“Bone Broth?” I asked. “Yeah,” he answered, “lemme show ya.” Dr. Billy went to the fridge and extracted a quart jar of brown jello with lard on top. He gets bones from the local butcher, dumps them in a crockpot and boils em down for 3 days. Bone Broth!

“And you what?” I asked, “rub it on as a liniment?” “No, man,” Billy said, “you heat the liquid up and drink it.”

This, I guess, is homeopathic remedy writ strange. You got a broken bone, drink bone broth. You got hair loss, boil up some hair. Osteoporosis, well, bone broth again. Alzheimers, okay let’s not get into sweet meats. If you’re in pain, you’ll try most anything, if looks like, I get that. And maybe the placebo effect will actually kick in and work. What I don’t want to see are new ads from the pharmaceuticals for bone broth, replete with the warnings, may cause permanent rigidity, hardening of the spinal cord and permanent priapism. Course, they won’t call it bone broth, something pseudo-scientific like fibulagelomex or osteoglanulax. Or maybe just Elmer’s Glue.

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Homeless on Camano

The county just got the results in for their survey locating the homeless on Camano. Turns out they didn’t find any. None. Zero. Zilch. I guess they went from gate to gate in the gated communities, maybe looked behind the forsythia, then moved on. Nobody came down to the South End, that’s for sure.

Turns out Island County sent teams into the hinterlands to search out the homeless. Well, except not Camano Island. The housing resource coordinator was quoted in the Gazette, “We just didn’t have the time. But next year we hope to get more of a head start.” They did manage to send out some fliers on the transit buses asking the homeless, if they were indeed out there, if they would respond. No responses were forthcoming. The coordinator speculated that maybe the homeless just didn’t want to be identified as the homeless. You know, IF there were any homeless.

I suppose this could be a new paradigm for social services in America if Washington DC gets wind of this. Poverty? Post some placards on telephones asking the poor if they’re poor. Call us, we want to help. You a veteran not getting medical assistance? We put some fliers on the buses in your town. You maybe didn’t see them? You out of work, chronically unemployed? We posted a notice on Facebook. Maybe you need to buy a computer, get some DSL service, reach out to us. We want to help….

I ran a poll myself this week. Posted a notice on my blogsite asking anyone in county government if they were intelligent enough to be holding office. If so, please call in to southendbrainresearch.com and answer the brief questionnaire. Take about half a minute, just want to do a head count of the bright ones…. Surprisingly, nobody responded. All I can say, if I can use the county’s own methodology, there’s no intelligence over there in Whidbey Island government. Course, maybe they’re embarrassed to identify themselves as smart. Or they’re just being modest.

Next year we’ll maybe have some time to organize IQ search parties. This year we were just a little too busy. In the meantime hopefully all the homeless over here will find decent housing. You know, the folks who don’t exist here in paradise.

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The Island County sheriff’s office was holding a bipolar man for attempting to cash a $355 check, what we call identity theft. They brought him in and he promptly stuffed the toilet so that it overflowed his cell. The jail guards cleaned up the mess and decided to teach our boy a little lesson so they turned off his water. Turned the water off and left him for a couple of weeks without anything to drink. He died yesterday of dehydration.

Oh, I suppose some folks might consider this excessive. Medieval even. Cruel and unusual. The sheriff has been lobbying these past years for more money, what we thought might be used for additional deputies and staff, but now seems obvious will go toward racks and Iron Maidens and other torture devices since the jail is so bereft of funding all they can do is turn off a prisoner’s water. Until he dies. Maybe they just want to speed things up, I don’t know.

I do know Arizona’s got nothing on Island County for dealing with criminals in a firm manner. Abu Ghraib looks like a spa-resort in comparison. If they can execute a man for the high crime of attempting to cash someone else’s check for $355, you speeders better wise up, the full force of Island County law is going to come down on you like a nuclear bomb. Roadside justice! Maricopa Joe down there in Phoenix looks like a bleeding heart compared to our law enforcement officers. Swift and sure punishment, save the expense of a trial, not to mention the cost of food and water. These are hard fiscal times down at the cop shop and it takes a confident leader to make those calls.

This next few days should see the lawsuit for millions coming at the County. So much for that extra money for law enforcement. Or for social services. Or, well, for most everything. Maybe the folks down at the station haven’t been watching the news lately, maybe missed Baltimore and Ferguson and the others. Maybe they thought the public was too quick to blame the police in those deaths, they’d just knee-jerk some misplaced sympathy for the criminals. Shooting a suspect in the street is one thing, though. Killing him over two weeks is quite another. Where I come from, we call this murder in the first degree. And so far nobody’s been charged.

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