The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Me and the robins are picking pie cherries this week. All of us think the cherry trees belong to us, but … my thinking is I planted them so maybe I have more rights than the birds. Course, there’s no cherry court to adjudicate our claims so we are left with what all of us South Enders have for justice, Law of the Jungle. For the most part we all get a fair share. The deer and I split the apples. The raccoons and I divide up the corn. This wasn’t as true for the sweet cherries. The crows and the robins took most of them, leaving me sputtering with rage and revenge.

One year I found a recently dead crow and walked it around the orchard. Within minutes I had a dozen or more live relatives of the deceased cawing and screaming from every tree in the vicinity so I made a couple of circles just to make my point, then tied the dead boy in the branches of my favorite cherry tree trussed up wing to wing, a very dark and ominous corpse that the crows and the mizzus found more than a little troubling. Trust me, they left the cherries to the guy who was now their sworn enemy, but there are only so many dead crows you can scrounge up every harvest time and only so much marital criticism you can withstand so eventually they all outnumbered me.

I planted new cherry trees the last couple of years, the kind that don’t turn red, just a nice yellow so the birdbrains don’t think they’re ripe until I’ve picked them. We may find out the birdbrain is the one who wears the hat, but I’m willing to give this a shot. Admittedly I’m not too optimistic.

We had a grove of filbert trees awhile back, thousands of nuts on a few dozen trees. The jays and the squirrels took every one. Occasionally they’d leave me a solitary nut on the ground, I guess as a peace offering, but 100% of the time the nut was empty. They knew it was empty. All the 25 years we had those filberts we never got one single nut. This, I would argue in tree court, is unadulterated greed, pure and simple and unconscionable. Worse, the blue jays would sit in the branches and scream at us if we came near their trees. They are a beautiful shade of blue, but the screech of a jay isn’t something you can tolerate for long. No more than ten seconds in my case.

Like I say, I’m willing to share. Squirrels and blue jays, not so much. They’re like the rich, enough is not a word they understand. They want more, they want way more, they want yours too, they want it all. The poor? Tough luck. Grow wings and fly up to the top branches where the goodies are. If not, shut up and go home, Loser. If you even got a home….

The 1% might want to listen to the next part of this story. Us losers get fed up eventually. I took my chainsaw out to the filbert grove one autumn after another season of nut-grubbing greed and one by one I took down those nut trees, every single one of them. They were shading the garden and blocking my view of the Puget Sound anyway so it wasn’t a hard decision and now I’ve planted cherry and plum trees instead. Whatever predator comes in to supplant the jays, I can only hope they plan to share. Living in harmony with nature down on the wild wild South End isn’t the easiest thing to do. Right now they’re just lucky I’m not a hunter. But I wouldn’t count on it staying that way.

Hits: 17

Hits: 15

When I first moved to the Left Coast, I had a yearning to get myself a motorcycle, learn to ride, then set myself free on the byways of the Cascades. Being poor, I bought a used Honda 350 that hadn’t run in years, wouldn’t start and looked like it was ready for the crusher. I paid $100 for the piece of junk, hauled it back to my house in the ghetto and pushed it down the basement stairs where I could spend some quality time diagnosing why it wouldn’t start over the winter months.

By summer I had the problem solved and so, with the help of my roommates, I hauled it back up and out to the backyard, kick started it into an oily smoke idle and admired the thing in the full light of a Seattle sunny day. Now all I had to do was figure out how to ride it. I called the police and asked what kind of temporary license I would need to take it for some learning spins on their city streets and was told it was illegal, no temporary licenses were to be had. I said how am I spozed to learn how to ride. The sergeant said it wasn’t his problem.

So right from the start I became an outlaw biker, stalling my crappy bike on half the shifts, careening down the mean streets of my neighborhood, searching for large empty parking lots to practice sharp turns and fast starts. Trouble was, my clutch didn’t shift right and every so often the engine would shut off in mid-travel for no apparent reason that I could diagnose. On one of my ventures I came across a fellow biker working on his Harley at Seward Park, tools spread on the parking lot and so I thought why not ask an expert about my clutch problem. He was hard at it in his Joker leathers with his tattoos bulging as he strained to his work, a fellow outlaw. I interrupted him to ask about my clutch dilemma. He looked at my battered scooter and said — I can remember it clearly to this day 40 years later — ‘Get the fuck away from me, man.’ I took it to mean us real bikers fix our own bikes without outside help.

On the way back to my ghetto house I was idling at the red light on Jackson and 23rd when a menacing group of black gangbangers roared up beside me on both sides, about 15 or so, all revving their Harleys as we waited for the green so that I thought I was inside a Boeing 747 engine. I didn’t think this was an initiation test. And I didn’t think it would end well either. The light, after what seemed like an hour, turned green and we all popped our clutches, ready for a tire burning, wheel skidding jackrabbit start … and my bike died right then.

I suppose a lesser man, a man not accustomed to the outlaw biker life, might have been embarrassed. A lesser man might have thought the laughter and catcalls from the black Banditos was too much endure. A lesser man might have junked his prized Honda 350 and succumbed to the temptation to buy a Vincent Black Shadow and show these hooligans who really ruled these mean urban streets. But me, I pushed my spray painted motorcycle ten blocks back to the basement and sold it a month later. For $100. My easy riding days had come to an end. There was nothing more to prove, I guess.

Hits: 171

Hits: 19

Breakfast of Champions

My friend’s thirty-something daughter called today to ask her what was this Brexit thing anyway, some kind of new breakfast? I guess my friend and I assume kids, grownup kids anyway, keep abreast of things like international affairs and presidential elections. At least she didn’t ask her who this Donald Gump was. And I’m pretty sure she knew Brexit was the most important meal of the day.

The Donald was in Scotland today congratulating the kilted ones for voting to leave the E.U. while he was promoting his golf courses and hotels. Trouble was, the Scots didn’t vote to leave the E.U., they voted overwhelmingly to stay. Facts can be such damn nuisances. No wonder we’ve decided to go with our gut hunches on everything from politics to science. Easier. Less messy. Ends most arguments. Less filling and tastes great. Kind of like breakfast cereal. Kind of like chocolate covered Brexit. Since the currency there had devalued, our presidential candidate was happy the British pound had gone to its lowest level in three decades so foreign tourists would find it more inviting to golf at his new course. He was, as he said, a winner. The American stock market and folks with 401-K’s, not so much.

I can’t go to the grocery store now without scanning my fellow shoppers, 50% who say they will be voting for a reality TV show host who has attributes most folks once thought of as reprehensible, but now, through the miracle of erasing ‘political correctness’, they think of as okay. Racism, misogyny, bigotry, bullying, arrogance, ignorance and … well, the list goes on and on … it’s okay once again to say what they think. I don’t really mind them saying what’s on their mind, I just worry about what is on their mind.

I listen to a lot of Hot Talk radio. It drives me crazy, but it’s obviously driven a lot of folks crazier than me. They believe this stuff I find maddening. They feed on the venom and the anger. They think Obama is a secret Muslim and believe me, they hate all Muslims. They love America, but they hate the government, the president, the Congress, everything but the military. They love the Constitution but they want Muslims banned from this country, they want gays put back in their closet, they want profiling, they want God, the Christian God, put back in their classrooms. Their parents or grandparents or great grandparents came from somewhere else, but they want immigration ended. They want government off their back but they want government to stop abortions, to stop homosexuals, to stop atheists. They want to make America great again.

These folks want to lay off the Brexit and go back to Wheaties, Breakfast of Champions. You know, the one with Bruce Jenner on the box back when she was a he. Back when America was Numero Uno and men were men and women did what they were told, no backtalk. Back to the Good Old Boy Days.

I don’t want to suggest that a person who listens to Rush Limbaugh and is voting for Donald Trump is ignorant. That might fall under lack of political correctness.

Hits: 53

Hits: 20

Just when all those kooks who call in to late night radio talk shows about alien invasions and spacemen abductions were feeling maybe they should see a psychiatrist for their ‘condition’ in the face of a paucity of proofs for their unorthodox beliefs, along comes the latest revelation from the Egyptologists noodling endlessly with Tut, the boy king, and all the toys his minion priests buried with him. Today it was revealed that his dagger — a basic iron knife, not gold, not silver, iron! — was made from a meteorite. I suppose you and I and the scientists might conclude this dagger was made from a meteor that landed near Cairo. But I can assure you the late night alien hunters won’t.

No, they’ll know with a certainty as large as Bigfoot’s Butt this dagger came from outer space. Hell, they may even figure Tut himself came from the same place as the dagger, why not? Probably explain how the Egyptians were able to move hundred ton stones into pyramids, just hit them with the anti-gravity beam and drop them lightly into place, couldn’t be easier … if you’re an advanced alien culture. If you’re maybe troubled by the timeline here, don’t be. They got time travel down too.

We live in a world where fantasy and fiction are more than slightly blurred, maybe even sleeping together. I guess we could blame the internet or Rush Limbaugh or bad TV, but it’s probably not going to help. We’ve been disappointed in facts, bored with the real world and skeptical of science so now we’ve turned to snake oils, diet supplements and late night advertising deals. Call now and you’ll receive another Donald Trump, just pay shipping and handling. If you’re not satisfied, just send them back and we’ll refund your money. What we do about your gullibility, well, wait until tomorrow night. Yours, for only 19.95, the fabulous meteorite knife!! Slices dices and never dulls. Chops vegetables, saws lumber, moves slabs of stone. But wait! If you order now we’ll send you not one, not two, but three Tut daggers for the unbelievable price of 19.95. Just pay shipping and handling from our warehouse in the Milky Way.

Hits: 229

Hits: 17

The political season is in its final innings here on the South End. Down at the Diner the debates continue unabated, but practically everywhere else, we’re wore down, depleted, dejected and pretty much exhausted with the whole damn thing. Even the Pilot House, once Hotbed Central for lively late night alcohol fueled discussions, even the Pilot House has turned its short span of attention to the basketball tournaments and the baseball scores.

The tulips are coming in early up north in the fields of La Conner. I was thinking maybe going there instead of the caucus this Saturday. Last time I went to a caucus it was Carter running against Reagan. All the local politicos were in attendance. And me and the mizzus. We never really understood the process and we never went back. I like voting in private, to tell you the truth, not in small groups of people I don’t really know. The tulips, I get tulips. They come in early some years and some years late and rarely, but it happens, they bloom on time. This year they’re way early and the Festival, that two week traffic jam miles and miles long, well, it’s going to be pretty much after the harvest.

I spoze the folks stuck in the colorful backup out in the flats can while away the hours arguing whether global warming is to blame or if the low price of gas is a blessing or not. The big tour buses can haul up the city folks for a slow creep through the countryside and hope for a few fields of blazing candy color seen vaguely through the rain. Us locals pretty much avoid the whole show now. You’ve seen one tulip field, you’ve kind of got the idea.

I wish I could say the same about elections. I’ve seen a few, but … this one is very very strange. Maybe even troubling. Says a little too much about my neighbors, for sure, but hey, that’s the price of democracy. You admire a trash talking billionaire who thinks political correctness is just some liberals’ way to keep racism from rearing its ugly head, well, you got a new hero. You think all Moslems are terrorists and all Hispanics are on welfare, you got your candidate. You looking for a bully for the presidential bully pulpit, he’s got your back. They say we get the leader we deserve. This year we’ll find out if a rich reality show money grubbing pitchman is that person. If he is, I’m gonna lose a lot of my faith in this democracy. And in my neighbors.

Hits: 172

Hits: 17