The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Seven Habits of Successful South Enders

START THE DAY BEFORE NOON

At least on work days. The other five days, sleep in. You earned it.

LEARN HOW TO READ
Writing is no longer essential, but … the successful South Ender can tweet, twitter and text, even if spelling is marginal.

LISTEN TO OTHERS
Especially on Facebook and other social media. Keeping track of friends’ and enemies’ likes and dislikes is an invaluable tool in the South End toolbox. Decision making is easy, just see what the herd is doing.

WORK AT LEAST ONE HOUR A DAY.

No matter how severe the hangover, the lethargy, the ennui or excess hedonistic activities. Work isn’t ALL bad.

WORK OFF THE GRID

No South Ender worth his or her salt works in order to pay half his or her income to the IRS. Barter heavily with your neighbors and friends. Crab, clam, trap, fish, hunt or grow it! Food is free and food is fun! If you buy your dinners, food is neither.

LEARN TO REPAIR

Your own car, truck, toaster, wellpump, toilets, etc. You can’t barter or sell busted stuff and repairmen cost an arm and a leg per hour PLUS that service fee to drive half a day to and from your hell-and-gone address. Knowing a few handyman tricks can save you another part-time job at the fast food joints 50 miles away.

MARRY UP!

Chances are you’ve embraced an aesthetic lifestyle. You artists and musicians need supplemental income and unless you plan to work full time low paid minimum hour jobs, a second salary is essential. Marry one.

If none of these suggestions work for you, plan on moving soon. Life on the South End is mostly for those with alternative-fact occupational schemes. If you landed here thinking this was just a suburb of America, get yourself a GPS and head back to the mainland. Not guaranteeing jobs necessarily, but at least the possibility exists out there in Trumpland when America’s CEO brings them back. And those of us who stay, well, we could use the extra elbow room. Good luck to ya!

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A few weeks ago some Silicon Valley bazillionaire announced he thought it was highly possible this little reality we live in is some sort of computer simulation. Yesterday I read where two physicists were theorizing the universe is actually two dimensional, not three or four, but similar to a holographic image. I guess they’ve all been watching too many reruns of The Matrix.

It’s a discouraging notion, this idea that the Creator is a computer programmer, at least to me, a boy with nary a binary bone in his body. The tech boyz must think God was created in their own image, but I suppose if I’d invented the silicon world and made a fortune, I might see it their way too. Life, as the Bard once said, is but a dream and maybe it’s a cyborg dream after all, some simulation by an artificial intelligence where we all live in a fractal virtual world.

I’ve never been much interested in this kind of speculation, the stuff that religions are based on and faith revolves around. The universe is way too large for me to get my mind around and I only get to live an incredibly brief lifespan in the big scheme of things. I just figure there must be better ways to spend my time than dream up explanations that aren’t provable, then try to convince others they’re true and maybe have them worship at the font of this ersatz wisdom. Maybe even have them give me money. Maybe fight wars with the infidels who refuse to see the Light and the Way.

I know it’s appealing to create a world in our head. We probably do it all the time, every day, year in and year out. At least I do. Reality is pretty slippery and if you don’t believe it, you haven’t done psychedelic drugs or you don’t have friends who have lost their moorings. Reality is pretty much a misnomer, something I hate to admit in this newspeak world of ‘alternative facts.’ The truth is (if I can still use that word), if reality is relative, we haven’t got any solid ground to stand on. But I can still walk the beach, hike the woods, till the garden. One day I may wake up and find it’s all gone. More likely, someday I just won’t wake up. Then, maybe, we should reprogram, check for updates, add some apps, reboot. Hopefully then things will revert to normal. You know, if you believe in normality.

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For most of my early elementary school years, every Valentine’s Day our teacher would have us write little cards to everybody in the class. I guess they believed in Universal Love, although looking back, I know they were good God-fearing Georgians and probably didn’t intend to promote what would now be banned behavior in most of our cautious classrooms outside Sodom and Gomorrah. WILL YOU BE MY VALENTINE? we asked everybody oh so sweetly. So innocently. Who knew the Supreme Court would probably be the ones to answer that ultimately. So I guess the jury is still out…..

Whatever the ruling from the folks in the black robes, we’ll still have Valentine’s Day, celebrated not so much for Cupid and his/her aphrodisiac-tipped arrows as a marketing tool for florists and chocolatiers bent on cashing in on the lovefest. And why not? After all, candy’s sweet, flowers are fragrant. They celebrate Love, and lately, that seems more and more an endangered species. I see the boyz down my end of the island rushing in to the wilted flower section of the Tyee Store MegaMart after work on the anointed day, hoping to grab a last minute bouquet of anything colorful and perfumed, about to go home to the love of their life with a handful of posies instead of the usual quart of Steel Reserve 9%. And maybe they buy a card, something saccharine and hokey and cloying as only Hallmark can manage, then they get back in their 4×4 extended cab Dodge Ram one ton with the workboxes and ladders and upside down wheelbarrows filling the acreage of the truckbed, and for a moment, right before they tear another hole in the cratered blacktop of the parking lot, we’re back in Mrs. Fleming’s 2nd grade class in backwash Georgia with all the rest of our love struck classmates, scribbling Valentines and putting candy hearts with inscriptions in the envelopes. For everyone.

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A few years back the South End String Band wrote a little ditty about the Barefoot Bandit and submitted it to the Ron and Don show on KIRO radio, at the time the slot with the largest listening audience in the entire Pacific Northwest. We got something like 25,000 hits and the Band, unaccustomed to prime time notoriety, had heads swelled to the size of Goodyear Blimps. Well, the size of pumpkins anyway. Okay, we were mildly amused.

As we followed our number of hits daily, we noticed at the bottom the COMMENT section so naturally we checked to see what our admiring public had to say about our soon-to-be-classic Side A. To say it was an eye-opener is an understatement. It was a stick in the eye, is what it was, a few dozen trolls unloading on us for everything from celebrating a criminal to undermining the Judeo-Christian faith, stuff so far off the wall it was hard to get our mind around what they were driving at. Except that they seemed angry and angrier, dumping toxic waste and their disgust with the world into their commentary.

I didn’t understand then, and probably don’t now, this trolling stuff. I mean, are people really this creepy? The poisonous venom spewed in those comments was troubling and still is. Occasionally I peek at the comments to some news feed, just to see what the peanut gallery has to say, and invariably find myself blown back by the sheer unadulterated nastiness. Maybe, I sometimes think, it’s just seven maladjusted teenage guys venting their rage at a childhood with no toys and bad parents. After I get the taste of their venom out of my mouth I desist peeking at these commentaries for a few more months. Who needs to spoil their day reading noxious stuff from people you (hopefully) will never meet? It’s worse even than the punk who flips you off in his car for some unknown slight. You want to follow him to the gas station and see what’s bothering him?

Seven guys. Not likely. I have been trying to wrap my head around this country voting for a mean spirited, misogynistic, racist bully who shoots from the lip via tweet at every imagined slight. All I can come up with is there are a lot more trolls than those seven dwarfs. And they not only vent on the comment section, they vote.

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So you voted in this guy thinking, what, he’d mature once he took the oath? How many folks married the person they wished he or she would be, only to find out they were the same sad sorry sack they’d dated? And now what? You’re supposed to reform this goof of a husband?

All your friends told you the guy was a jerk, but no, you thought you could manage him. Sure, he flirted with your girlfriends, might’ve even slept with your best friend, but you weren’t married yet, he was ust sowing some wild oats. Later he would be faithful. Okay, he was a thin-skinned hothead and offended your family, but you figured he was maybe just drinking a bit too hard, something you’d correct with a little encouragement or maybe some nagging. And if he seemed a bit, oh, I don’t know, obstinate maybe … or … resistant to criticism … or … all right, just damn pigheaded most of the time … you thought he was just showing off for your friends and missing the mark somewhat. Nothing that wouldn’t level off once he’d slipped those rings on your fingers.

But now you’re wondering, was this all just crazy hopeful expectation? Were you so desperately alone, even this philandering, blowhard know-nothing looked, if not good, at least okay? Were YOU drinking a little too heavily perhaps? Oh sure, sometimes he said mean things, but you didn’t think he’d lay a hand on you, did you? And now your friends are saying you should leave the sonofabitch after that last black eye and Sheila, your former best friend, finally confessed that yeah, he’d basically raped her that night after he’d taken you home and given her a ride to her apartment.

The folks are tearing their hair out over this son-in-law. They’d offer to pay him for a divorce, but he’s got more money than Midas has gold. He’s contented to be at the Thanksgiving table, to hell with the looks that could kill across the carved turkey, he ain’t going nowhere, and Christmas looks like Halloween coming back again, no treats this time.

We wish we could offer some advice. We wish we could offer condolences. But we warned you, didn’t we? Trouble is, you brought this bully into our neighborhood and now he’s our problem too. He feels like he’s entitled and he’s got the clout to back it up. Thanks, Eve, for bringing the snake into the Garden. Now, how do we get rid of him???

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