The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Like so many of us South End men in this post-chauvinistic era, I was in the kitchen chopping up vegetables for a tasty dinner for when the mizzus got home from the mine. Every store-bought pepper had this itty bitty sticker with a scanner bar glued on semi-permanent so I had to dig at it to get it off. And it got me to wondering — what kind of glue sticks like this and does washing my pepper really get that stuff off and does it add anything savory to the tastebuds and is it known to the state of California to be carcinogenic???

Now let’s understand here, I’m not talking about the government getting involved. I’m not advocating the FDA look into whether my level of glue toxicity is above some approved threshold. No sir! We’re living in the day of Get-Government-Off-My-Back and the last thing us South Enders want to see is paying some federal employee to investigate this when we can just run some studies on our own, find out exactly WHAT that sticky substance is and set up a double blind experiment to find out, for ourselves, what kind of effects this glue has. All I know it might be good for us. Might grow hair back. Might cure erectile dysfunction. Might prevent cancer.

I mean, why can’t we just think positive? Why do we assume GMO foods are necessarily so bad we got to have labeling? Or irradiated foods? Milk that last months instead of weeks? Take that fracking we got going on. The oil companies don’t have to tell the damn government what they’re dumping in those wells. They got government off THEIR backs, but do we celebrate that? Do we declare victory over burdensome regulations? Hell no, we don’t!! We whine and we cry and we scare everybody with horror stories of funny tasting well water and water that catches fire. Here’s a tip: don’t drink flaming water. Duh.

You’re worried, get a test kit and have a go at it. Government can’t do everything for ya. And when you find out those chemicals kill 99% of the bacteria down your well, maybe consider a little thank you card to the oil companies. It IS called Better Living Through Chemistry.

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I ran into my old pal Junk Ranger Ralph today. He makes his living hauling folks’ junk to the dump. He’s got a 1960’s pickup that looks like he could leave the trash in the back and drive it right into the bin, the whole kit and caboodle, truck and all, good riddance, but of course he needs that truck. His hand painted sign JUNK RANGER is on half rotted plywood he’s attached so he can pile trash and junk and garbage clear to the sky. It’s a hard way to make a living, but then, what’s new? Most of us down here like to think there’s an Easy Way, but none of us ever found it.

Ranger Ralph saw me digging out front and pulled his Ford 150 halfway onto the shoulder where it could challenge the Sunday drivers out for a spin in the bucolic countryside. His emergency blinkers don’t work so he left it up to the Lord to protect the tourists. It usually turns out okay, at least so far.

Ralph and I went up to the house to catch up. Like I said, it’d been awhile. His big news was he’d found a ‘soul-mate’, which, when you stop and think, is big news for any of us. “The only problem,” he confided, “was she lives 300 miles away.” I guess soul-mates aren’t worried about the temporal world. I asked how he met her and of course it was on the internet. “I spoze it could’ve been worse, Ralph. At least she doesn’t live in Shanghai.”

They’ve met a couple of times, in person, I mean, and Ralph thinks it’ll work out, this distance thing. Me, I’m not so sure, but then we ARE talking about a soul-mate, not some chatroom hookup with an FBI undercover agent. At least I hope so.

It’s a New World out there and actually, I was surprised Ralph even had a computer to use to let his fingers do the walking. Maybe a recycled one from his dump hauls. All I can say is love blooms in the unlikeliest of places these days — and being an unrepentant romantic, I wish Ralph al the happiness in the world. Although, between you and me, I doubt his old truck can make too many trips 300 miles one way. With luck, maybe he’ll break down the last time in her driveway.

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Google cars came out with some statistics recently. Driverless cars don’t have accidents really … and the few they do have are cars with drivers running into them. Some of the boyz in the Flatheads, our vintage car club, were flabbergasted. They’re old school, guyz who revel in memories of souped up engines, backroad drag races, cue ball shifter knobs and dangling furry dice on the rearview. They love their rods, they love their memories and they go apoplectic to imagine a future of robot automobiles they can sit in the backseat and read a paper. They have fond memories of other uses for that backseat.

“The Age of the Automobile is coming to an end,” I made the mistake of saying to Two Toke Tom at the Diner where it was overheard by half the Flatheads at the breakfast pow-wow where they’d pushed half the tables together to make room for about a dozen car enthusiasts. Their Packards and Chargers and 88’s were lined up outside the plate glass like an outdoor Museum for Testosterone, right next to Tom’s beater with the cracked windshield and the missing front quarter panel, all gleaming with fresh wax and loving care. I might have been wiser announcing we ought to confiscate guns in an NRA meeting.

Freddie, the head honcho Flathead, jerked his head in the direction of my blasphemy. “What are you drinking, man???” he practically shouted. Brenda spilled coffee on Harry’s hand, missing his cup by a quarter mile. “Yeoww!” he hollered in pain. The whole café was now on Alert. “I only mean the day is coming when cars will drive themselves. They don’t have accidents, Fred, and if they don’t have accidents, guess what the insurance companies are going to demand? You want to drive your big Dodge, fine, but guess what they’ll charge your Charger for the privilege?”

“Over my dead fender, Skeeter.” Two Toke raised his cup. “Amen, brother Fred, Amen.”

“All I’m saying, Fred, is half the folks out there on the road these days aren’t driving anyway. They’re text messaging, they’re talking on the phone, they’re wobbling over the center line and they’re drifting onto the shoulder. They go from 60 mph to 30 mph. I don’t know what all they’re doing behind the wheel, but it sure isn’t driving. Might be okay with me if they let the computer do that for em so they can pay attention to their smartphone.”

Fred snorted and the assembled Flatheads snorted in agreement. Brenda mopped up Harry’s table and dried his hand. Harry would live, Two Toke would get a good laugh on me later and the Flatheads would all drive down Memory Lane with rumbling mufflers, KaHooga horns, mohaired upholstery, big fins and whitewall tires like mastodons crossing back over the Bering Strait to a garage somewhere in the Pleistocene.

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This last week Dutch Shell moored their gigantic oil rig down at Seattle and Gomorrah’s waterfront. A flotilla of kayakers — kayactivists — slapped their paddles in the harbor like angry beavers slapping tails at Godzilla. With similar success at scaring away intruders. The Raging Grannies shackled their rockers to the gated entrance at the wharf and were politely arrested. Tech Town, polite but not much interested in politics.

Some of the boyz in the Band at our last drinking session, I mean, practice session, suggested a solution to Seattle’s escalating ecological confrontation: bring that drilling rig up here! The South End has a legal port, the Port of Mabana. Three port commissioners are required to fill out 65 pages of paperwork for the state, same as Tacoma or Seattle. They’re volunteers, definitely part time, and they don’t want a full time clerical position so they’ve been considering dismantling the old landing of the Mosquito Fleet that docked there almost a hundred years ago with supplies and immigrants. The old dock was blown down long ago and the Port has pretty much existed as a historic relic ever since.

“Why not kill a couple of seagulls with one stone?” Mando Mike wondered aloud over his rotgut wine at our last practice. Don lifted his beer glass in accordance and I had to admit once again the South End String Band, marching to a demented drummer, was once again ahead of the curve. Not to mention the beat….

“What about protestors?” Monika asked and Erich mused that what we got around here are Tea Party protestors mostly, more worried about the heavy hand of Island County government than some transient oil rig destined for the Arctic Sea. I figured maybe WE could protest. Give us some free advertisement. The Raging String Slingers! We already sing stuff about the coal cars and coal mining. Got our very own War on Coal, I guess, why not weigh in on oil drilling? Paddle out in our dugouts and slap banjos on the water, why not? Great photo for the Stanwoodopolis Gazette and the New York Times, all those liberal commie media outlets!

Well, we didn’t get much practice in, not music anyway, but I think we got a good gameplan. Which one of us is gonna call Dutch Shell’s rep, I don’t know, but I left an urgent message for Fred at the Port of Mabana. He hasn’t called back yet, but we figure he’s on vacation, hopefully be home soon. Fred better be rested, all I can say, cause there’s serious work coming to the South End. Maybe even jobs, the paying kind. Be a first down here….

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