The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I have made a terrible mistake! I know what you’re thinking, and yeah, it seemed unlikely to me too. But it’s true, I’ve screwed up Big Time, one of those mistakes you may have to regret the rest of your sorry miserable life.

We have a woods in back, about 5 acres, which when we bought the place was completely covered in old growth nettles that grew to seven, even eight feet tall. Impenetrable jungle of the stinging beasts we had to beat a trail into just to get into our own woods. But one year I noticed that these little delicate bleeding heart plants had established their puny selves in and among those giant stinging nettles and seemed to supplant their network of roots. So for years I have been planting the bleeding hearts along the trail along with some myrtle starts, periwinkle maybe you call them, and over time they not only lined our trail, they spread into the woods. It was wonderful.

A few years back I decided, despite reading about the impossibility of eliminating my nettles, to attempt to do just that, kill the buggers. The first year I sickled them down, about three acres of them, and I noticed that the following year the new nettles were greatly diminished. Heartened, I whacked all five acres and I’ve been doing it now for three years. You walk back in our woods, you don’t see many nettles anymore and now trees we’ve planted have a chance to grow whereas before they died a sunless death under the nettle canopy. It’s almost a park back there.

But … awhile back I planted a little variegated vine, a lamium, commonly called the Yellow Archangel. It has a relative, you might be interested, called Dead Nettle. Dead Nettle, now, you know I’m going to bite on that. So I stuck a sprig here, a clump there and figured it would be a colorful addition to the bleeding hearts and the periwinkle. It was. For the first couple of years. But then it started to run. Then it galloped. And this year it went into warp drive, covering up the bleeding hearts, the myrtle, the ferns, dead logs, stray children, anything in its ravenous way. It is the kudzu of the north, invasive as Trump’s Syrian terrorists, and rapidly on its way to covering our entire woods. It is a nightmare. It is a scourge. It is a total mistake and now I have to try to correct it. To save not just my woods and the South End, but quite possibly the world.

I have begun whacking them. I have mowed them. I am now weedeating the jungle monsters. I have about half an acre to an acre of these creeping beasts and my theory is that if they never see daylight, like the nettles, their roots, I don’t care how many hundreds of miles of pulpy tendrils, they’ll die. You should wish me luck because your fate depends on me. If I fail, I am so so sorry. I plead benign ignorance even though I know that won’t help in the end. And yeah, I know, ignorance isn’t bliss.

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Hoo boy, you want to start a war, start bringing religion into the conversation, next thing you know you got folks beating each other over the skullcap with a Koran or a Bible. I grew up thinking America was founded on a concept called separation of church and state. What a gullible little goober I was. Give unto Caeser what is Caeser’s. When in Rome, etc. But that was then and this is today. Rome is a seat of religion, kind of got some serious ideas about what’s right, what’s not. But you don’t have to travel to Italy to get an Edict. Hell, take a vacation in Mississippi, unless of course you’re gay or a friend of a gay or a relative of a gay. Their collective religionists, mostly Christian, they got the Word of God that tells them gays are an aberrance, an abhorrence in the eyes of the Lord. Says so in their Bible.

You say you don’t read their Bible? Well, sir, you maybe didn’t know this country was a Christian country. Got IN GOD WE TRUST right there on your money, what more proof do you need?? You ask whose God you talking about? The God of Mississippi, my friend. The God of the Founders. The God maybe you don’t pray to or even believe in? The God who doesn’t want trans-genders in their bathrooms, ye of little faith. The God who doesn’t like Planned Parenthood. The God of the Old Testament, that’s who!!!

So you believe in tolerance? You believe in secular government? You give homosexuals equal rights to the God fearing, you better believe you got a war on your hands. If my religion thinks the non-whites are inferior, I got no choice but to live by my creed, the one the Creator passed down, the one translated from the Scrolls. My religion thinks women ought to serve us men, well, don’t expect me to respect any laws you pass that make it discrimination to treat them according to the Text. You want to wage war on my religion, you better get ready, pal.

You ask what if some other religion has different views, what about respecting their beliefs? Maybe you weren’t listening close. Their views are bogus. Our views are the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, the only truth. Can we make it any clearer???

So go ahead and make your laws, your secular commandments. Call us bigots. Call us homophobes. Call us the American Taliban. You want a culture war, you already got one….

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Back when the neighbors had dairy cows, we used to get our milk direct from the udder. Unpasteurized, no growth hormone, no antibiotic whole milk. Course, back then we were told by the FDA and the food scientists that this would increase our chances of heart disease and diabetes. But …! If we took a baby aspirin a day, we could lessen those chances. Sort of like driving over the speed limit but wearing a seat belt. You get in a wreck, you might survive.

You’re as old as me, you maybe remember 5th grade food pyramids. Meat and poultry up at the top, high in protein, fruits and vegetables down toward the middle, candy and pop taboo. In the 60’s we learned sugar was poison and alcohol too and so was red meat and ditto on salt. We started drinking skim milk, substituted saccharin for sugar and oleomargarine for butter. Skip the eggs, pass the fiber.

This week I read a study showing that people like myself who drink high fat milk have decreased heart disease and less risk for diabetes. Fats, it turns out, aren’t all bad. Aspirin a day, so they tell me now, isn’t maybe so good for you if you aren’t already at risk for a heart attack. Butter is better for you than margarine. And too little salt, well, you need salt. You want to live longer, drink a glass or two of wine every day. And even if you don’t live longer, you’ll be happier.

I got friends who won’t eat fruit unless it’s in a pop tart. Some others wouldn’t eat broccoli or cauliflower unless you waterboarded them first. My brother thinks 1% milk is cream and it would kill him in a week. I know folks who won’t go within a country mile of an egg, might as well be lobbing grenades to the heart. Food, I think more and more, is a faith based religion. Easier just to eat Cheetos and Snickers bars with a couple of vitamin supplements, all the nutrition you need right there in a pill.

Me, I always figured the fresher food was, the better. The more natural, the better. I like my food grown on a tree or coming up out of the ground. I like meat that grazed in a grassy pasture and I love fish that swam wild in a river and I’m crazy about seafood that wasn’t farmed. Hell, I like all kinds of food, at least the kind that isn’t dried out, chopped up, reprocessed and flavor enhanced with enough preservatives to last past a nuclear war. Is it good for me? I think maybe so. The doctors and the health specialists, the scientists and the FDA, well, some years yes, some years no. Hard to say for sure anymore. So I’ll just stick with the tried and true, food made by nature, not by labs. Call me old fashioned. Call me outdated. Call me past my expiration date. But … call me for dinner.

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Johnny Fever lives down the road from me in the house where he was born, a 1920’s cabin that’s been added onto multiple times and that he inherited when his mother died. Johnny’s about 50, going on 110, got some health issues and some serious mental ones that meds keep under control. Johnny, though, doesn’t like the mood stabilizers he takes to keep him from running without a governor on his engine. When he goes off his meds, he revs up to a high pitched scream, a condition he prefers to the blah moods his drugs maintain.

Johnny’s an old old friend, a brilliant guy who can be dumb as a box of rocks. Apparently he can’t tell the difference. And I’m having a harder and harder time myself. Bi-polarity has a way of blurring those lines. Johnny’s long suffering wife has basically thrown up her hands. She doesn’t even ask me now to try and talk him into taking his medications when he’s flying high — she just collects his credit cards and explains best as she can to their three kids, daddy’s gone bonkers again. Mr. Hyde is here now but Dr. Jekyll is coming back. The doctor, well, he’s not half as interesting, just watches a lot of TV all day long. You watch TV all day long, you’ll become pretty damn boring.

Johnny stopped by my place this morning. It was 4 AM and he’d called 911 when I didn’t get to the front door right away, informing the sheriff he had an emergency: his car needed a jump, dead battery. He had airline tickets at SeaTac in a few hours, non refundable. I cursed, I hollered at him, I even pushed him when he got 4 inches from my face, then I gave up and got my truck, grabbed the jumper cables and drove us to his car, the one he’d left his headlights on the night before.

“Where you headed, John?” I grumbled. “I’m getting the hell OUT of this place,” he shouted over both our engines, then laughed maniacally, not a laugh I much like. I could see heads looking down at us from the upstairs windows.

John’s on his way now, wherever he’s going. “Thanks for the jump, old buddy, old friend,” he’d hollered out the open window as he rolled out his drive, “see you in hell.” A friend in need isn’t necessarily a friend in deed. When he comes back, he’ll be in hell, all right, and I’ll be here too.

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Every once in awhile I get wind of another town that thinks it would be a good idea to arm the teachers in their schools. Having been a teacher for a very short career, I probably would’ve liked carrying a sidearm. Cut down on a lot of backtalk, for sure. And saved the cut-ups a long trip to the principal’s office. Course, when I think about it calmly, seems sort of harsh to inflict capital punishment from the front of a classroom. They are, after all, children.

I guess being Americans and all, the idea of a fully armed populace is appealing. You don’t hear many stories how some hijacker or bank robber met his match with a Dirty Harry packing heat, but that could change quick if we just advocated for universal ‘conceal carry’. Probably take some collateral damage, planes decompressing in a shoot-out at 30,000 feet, 7-11 customers caught with their Big Gulps in a withering crossfire. But it wouldn’t take long for us pacifists to realize we need to return fire ourselves, simple law of survival in the urban jungles of America.

We’ve maybe seen too many Westerns, all those cowboys with six shooters slapping leather on their hip and a Winchester in a scabbard beside the saddle. The folks down in Malheur rode in fully armed and they can’t understand why the Feds and the troopers and the sheriff won’t surrender. Or at least negotiate to give them the range land they say belongs to them, these folks up from Utah. Too many Westerns, like I said. Then, a month into their occupation, one dead and most under arrest, the remaining gang wanted amnesty before they left. Lucky for them the bureaucrats whose headquarters they liberated and whose jobs they disrupted didn’t take their own 2nd amendment rights as seriously. Be like letting the kids in my old classroom carry live ammo — for sure my odds would go way down.

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