The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The burning topic down at the Diner this week was bathrooms. Mississippi and North Carolina had passed legislation to the effect that women’s bathrooms were only for women born women and men’s bathrooms were … well, you can deduce the rest. The bathroom in the Diner is for both since they only have one restroom. Which is a step up from the Tyee Store. The Store has an outhouse. Concrete block with plumbing, even got a sink. Unisex too just like the Diner’s.

I guess the folks in Ol Miss and the Tarheel State got their important issues resolved, now they can turn their attentions to public bathrooms. Pastor Paul preaches down at the Little Church in the Ravine that homosexuals and the deviants who change sex are the root cause of the moral decline on the South End. Me, I’m not so sure. Heroin addiction ranks pretty high on my list of problems. Maybe wife abuse too. Even crab poaching seems more a problem than where folks tinkle.

Walter was making the argument at the Diner’s corner table that men would be able to use women’s toilets and rapes would skyrocket. Brenda, pouring the table’s third round of refills, laughed out loud. “Walter, you are a crack-up.” Walter stopped in mid-rant and asked her what she meant. She said, “I mean, think about it. A guy who’s changed sex from a woman to a man is going to use the men’s room. A man who’s switched to a woman is going to use a stall now. In the women’s restroom. “

“That’s right, that’s the whole point. Now you got a natural born guy in with the women.” “Yeah, but Walter, if you make the woman who’s changed into a man use the woman’s room, you got a guy with the parts a rapist needs in with the women. How does that help your argument?”

Walter thought about it a half minute. Finally he said it just wasn’t right. It just wasn’t natural. It just ought to be illegal. “Men should just stay men, for the luvva God. And use their own damn bathroom.”

As usual, we didn’t resolve the issue that morning. But when Walt got up to relieve himself of four cups of coffee, Little Jimmy called back to him to be sure and lock the door. “Don’t want any mishaps, Walt.” “And leave the seat down,” Harry hollered. “Some of us girls might be using it next.”

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Every blue moon I get this masochistic urge to read the Comment section below a news story, you know, see what my fellow citizens are thinking. Maybe it’s because I don’t have a cellphone with text messaging capabilities so I get the digital equivalent of cabin fever, some kind of isolationist feeling that needs assuaging with input from total strangers. I suppose I could go hang out at the mall, but the mall is 40 miles away and I don’t need anything else from a few dozen stores under one roof.

Me and the mizzus watched the ‘Motorcycle Diaries’ last night, the account of Che Guevara before he became a Marxist revolutionary, just a med student who hops aboard a buddy’s Norton motorcycle in 1952 and heads north from Argentina to Peru, pretty much penniless, pretty much at the mercy of the kindness of strangers. So today I wondered what I could find out about Che after this trip. Kerouac headed into the mountains to sit fire watch in the Forest Service towers in the North Cascades. Che went into Cuba and was instrumental in overthrowing Batista.

I found another article after the first bios whose point was that Guevara was a cold blooded commie killer. Fair enough. Maybe a little biased, but hey, free country and all. So then I decided to see what the peanut gallery thought of this article and you can maybe guess, it being political hunting season these days, the decibel level ratcheted right up to eardrum damage levels. Folks have a lot of built up bile is all I can say. Only took a few comments before we got to anti-Obama and Bush-bashing, then the personal attacks on the commenters and finally I thought maybe I’d had enough for the morning.

My father, who usually sends me Tea Party e-mails still questioning birth certificate authenticity and Muslim affiliations, sent me instead a nice group of photos, mostly of cute animals, tulip fields in bloom, artistic shots of dancers, mostly nice fluffy stuff. Not really my cup of herbal tea, but better than the usual vitriol he passes on to ruin my day.

Curious how the Comments would go on beautiful photos, expecting only sappy enthusiasm for the beauty of the shots, imagine my surprise to find the same trolls blasting away at everything from animal abuse to anti-sunset sentiments. Here’s one, I guess in response to some ice skaters in formation: “at the rate the migrants are arriving, in ten years the Italian skating team will be all black.” Nice, attack the refugees and throw in some racism too. Here’s one after the cute picture of the tiger cub: “ I am disturbed and sickened by the photo of the tiger cub in his cage. HOW DISGUSTING THAT YAHOO WOULD POST THIS PHOTO AS JUST A CUTESY PHOTO OF A LITTLE CUB IS ALL THE MORE VILE!!!” Well, it was a picture of a circus animal….
Or this in response to who knows what: “Silly little tart, should have broke her neck.” And: “I’ll bet he’s even worse in bed!” Okay, I don’t have a clue really about what either of these are referencing, but they’re pissed, I get that. What I do know is I’m going to have to ask my old man to quit sending me these cutesy photos. I think I prefer the vitriolic poisonous e-mails. At least they come without further comments.

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The South End Assembly of the Profligates is fighting the Good Fight for their religious freedom, hallelujah! The infidels are at the gate and by God, they aren’t taking secular attacks sitting down, not on your life!! Their old time religion, based on texts transcribed from the original German of Claus Wermuth’s Nostradamus prophecies, serves as their guide to all things worldly. And now the government demands they violate their fundamentals, their creed, their belief system.

“This will not stand!” Preacher Ezekiel declared the day the Supreme Court ruled homosexuals could not be discriminated against. “The blasphemers will be smited!” he roared and the congregation stamped their feet in joyous approval. Amen!

The Assembly of the Profligates has more than gay issues to fight. Their religion relegates women to helpmates and persons not Caucasian to second class status. They ban all forms of music, even muzak, and the banjo is reviled above all other infernal noise-makers as the Bark of the Beast. This does not bode well for the South End String Band, apparently purveyors of filth and depravity whose members include women and people of mixed heritage.

Now personally I like religions about equally. Which I thought made me non-discriminatory, but might only be non-discriminating. When the mizzus dropped in at the Island Cupcake Emporium next to Reflux Realty’s South End satellite branch to order a special birthday cake for me in the shape of a 5 string banjo, my chosen instrument of destruction, well, all hell broke loose. Jennifer, who owns the bakery and, it turns out, is a devotee of the Assembly of the Profligates and their All-Seeing Premonitions, well Jennifer told her she could take her sick request to Stanwood and Gomorrah, no way was she going to bake a Bark of the Beast birthday cake. “Take your disease to the Erotic Bakery,” she howled. “If they’ll make penis cakes, they’ll bake you a banjo. But I don’t make either!!”

Well, I guess we could’ve filed a civil rights lawsuit, we could hire a good attorney, go to court, make our point and probably end up with a saliva-filled banjo birthday cake on my 75th. The mizzus compromised instead. I sure won’t foget that phallic German chocolate 3 layer birthday cake any time soon. Maybe, Lord willing, I’ll get a banjo cake next year. Amen to that.

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Yesterday a rocket landed on a platform floating out at sea about the size of my shack. Landed nose up, thrusters down. Buck Rogers to earth, Buck Rogers to earth, come in earth… The future, as we seldom say down here in the savannahs of the South End, is here. Dick Tracy videos on our watches, robots building cars that drive themselves, computers designing the next generation of computers, space stations and satellites orbiting overhead, drones delivering bombs and Amazon packages, probes that have left our solar system and out into the galaxy beyond — this has all happened in half my lifetime.

Me, I’m still burning wood for heat. I know, you’re surprised I’m not hunting mastodons for meat. Maybe in a few years, you know, after they clone a few and re-introduce them into the swamps here. We got cell towers dotting the landscape now even though I don’t own a cellphone. Or a smarty one either. The dumb one I have seems somehow more apropos for my Neanderthal lifestyle. My techno pals say it’s time to move into the 21st Century so they can text message where to meet me for a cold one at the nearest tavern. A woman in a huge black SUV drove across her lane right at me yesterday and at the last moment swerved to avoid killing us both. I could see the phone resting on her steering wheel where a message coming in or going out meant more than suicide by text.

I know if I can live long enough without becoming a traffic statistic, I might not miss some more of this science fiction coming true, but as you can tell I’m kind of a pessimist when it comes to the future I see ahead. I wouldn’t trust a robot for one nano-second, not when they get smarter than us. If there’s life in outer space, I figure we’ll be a food source. The aliens won’t think that Chuck Berry soundtrack we sent them is going to save the human race. Wars aren’t going to get better because we fight them with drones, c’mon, who’s kidding who? The kids growing up today in the digital world aren’t going to care much about the real one. Global warming? We’ll dither until it’s too late. Maybe we’ll adapt. Although … if I’m any role model for that, good luck to the rest of ya.

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I went in for my bi-yearly haircut today. In the old days I’d haul in to Stanwoodopolis at Carl’s Barber Shop for a clipping and gossip and heated debates. Sadly, those days are long gone and Carl’s retired from his long tonsorial career. Back then I didn’t mind waiting for a turn in the leather swivel chair, mostly an excuse to put a finger into the political winds.

Now I’m forced to go to the chain haircut joints. Salons, I guess they call em. They’re quick, painless and anonymous. They take your phone and name, but not for socializing, strictly for data-mining, frequency of visits, favorite hair gel maybe. At the door of Great Clips I was asked even before I took my hat off if I’d made an Online Appointment. No, I said, do I need one? Not at all, I was told.

But … a couple of folks who had made an online appointment but who hadn’t arrived just yet, were before me. Be about 20 minutes. “Do you have a cellphone,” my would be stylist asked, telling me next visit I could be one of the favored few. Wouldn’t have to wait 20 minutes next time. Mrs. Jenkins, my first grade teacher, used to make her point to us ignoramuses in the exact same sing-song voice. I didn’t like it then and I sure as gel didn’t care for it 60 years later. Call me irascible, but I’m not sitting in the chrome and mirror sterility of a chain haircutting factory more than 20 seconds. Twenty minutes is inconceivable. I mean, look at the magazine rack. Us and People? Kill me with a scissors now!

I headed for the exit, heads newly coiffed turning to ogle this ogre. “Will you be coming back in 20 minutes?” my headhunter asked, sensing customer dissatisfaction. I said no. “It’s only 20 minutes,” she explained, obviously figuring since I’d waited 6 months for the next haircut already, 20 minutes was a blink in my tonsorial universe. “Come back and see us again,” she said, half a question. “I will,” I said, “soon as I get a cellphone.” She knew — and I knew too — I’d have hair down to my toenails by them.

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