The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Hits: 51

Barbarians at the Gate

So a week ago we put a little library in the phone booth that mysteriously appeared in the park I care-take here on the South End. I built a fancy bookcase in a tree configuration, painted it like a Jackson Pollock, installed it inside the booth and filled it with novels, how-to’s, kid’s books and CD’s. It lasted less than a week before some anti-literacy vandals decided that very nice wood bookcase would look nicer broken to pieces and thrown out on the lawn and the books would be better off left unread strewn around the Little Library in the rain. They burned a few of them, tore up others and spit loogies on the windows of the phone booth, then started to paint F… something on the sides. Which raises the question: if you didn’t want to read the books, why bust up the library? Just do like most folks in America, don’t go to the library. And don’t defile the temple, even if it is just a phone booth.

I’ve been mowing that park for a decade, a pretty thankless task, let me tell you. I mow the lawn, clear trails, chainsaw up deadfall, plant shrubs and flowers, put in sculpture and birdhouses and art. Three of our sculptures were stolen the first week. A grill was sawed off and taken the second week. If you were the ranger, I bet you’d be discouraged as much as me. I know I stopped trying to add more sculpture and art after awhile, too much a kick in my soft head.

Today I went over to clean up the mess and restock the books. A carload of women drove in while I was there, hoping to see the new little library. Cultural tourism after the Vandals have trashed Rome. They had seen the photo in the newspaper and driven southward to see for themselves the grassroots biblioteca. What they saw instead was the smoldering ruins of our answer to the Library of Alexandria.

These are tough times in post-Truth America, for sure. The ignorant are up on their hind legs braying like donkeys and the politicians are too timid to tell them they’re complete imbeciles, afraid of the angry backlash that might, god forbid, remove them from their coveted offices. The illiterate and the conspiracy promoters walk hand in hand now with monkey wrenches and pickaxes. Who needs government? they howl. Who needs facts? Who needs the truth if it goes against our beliefs. Burn the witches! Burn the books! And who needs a dopey little library right down the road?

Well … I think we know who does. Trouble is, they don’t and they won’t. Our little library is still open. We’ll see for how long.

Hits: 83

Hits: 43

Maybe you were busy yesterday with something else besides watching the Kavanaugh hearings all day. Lawn mowing or hair appointments, picking up the kids from school, going to work, raking leaves. Me, I watched the entire hearings and had trouble sleeping last night. So if my nerves seem frayed this morning, that’s my excuse. Today the Judicial Committee will weigh the testimonies of Ford and Kavanaugh and make a recommendation whether to move the confirmation of the Judge forward. Tomorrow, the entire Congress will vote on that motion. I may lose a lot of sleep this week.

It would take a heart as hard as Donald Trump’s not to believe Dr. Ford. It would take one harder than Lindsay Graham’s or Brett Kavanaugh, both red-faced and sputtering with fury in their monumental rage toward the Democrats, the Left, the conspirators of the Clinton cabal, the Unfair World . I know how they felt. They made me feel the same way toward them. Rachel Mitchell, the Maricopa prosecuting attorney for sex crimes, interrogated Ms. Ford, probing for inconsistencies and came up with nothing. When she tried the same for Judge Kavanaugh, the GOP Senators, sensing a debacle in their plans, pushed her to the side and mounted rabid broadsides. It was a spectacle. Little wonder they avoided questioning the accuser directly. Wouldn’t want another Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas mess in this current #MeTooMovement, apparently the only lesson these 11 male senators have learned from it.

Judge Kavanaugh berated and wept, cried foul and wept, wailed like Lear and wept some more. He did not have sex with that woman. He did not know her and he did not go to a party and shut the bedroom door with his buddy Mark Judge, no way, no how. Nobody asked him between sobs and spluttering how it was his accuser knew Mark Judge, how it might be possible the two teenagers were sloppy drunk, even too drunk to recall the attack next day. Judge Kavanaugh has suffered enough, he said repeatedly, his family has suffered enough he made angrily clear, and no way, no how was he interested in extending this circus to allow time to interview Mark Judge, the third person in the bedroom with these two witnesses. This from a man who would be Supreme Court Justice.

The FBI, he parroted the GOP senators time and time again, doesn’t decide guilt or innocence, an ingenuous ruse by all. No need to gather data or facts, they won’t give us a verdict. This from folks who are choosing a Supreme Court Justice and one who wants to be one. It’s just ‘he said, she said’, guess we have to assume innocence until proven guilty, what else can we do? Certainly not take more time to dig a bit deeper, we need to Get This Thing Done.

There is a certain demeanor I would expect from any judge and particularly a judge on the highest court and that is a measured impartiality, an equanimity of mind in considering the cases before him or her, an ability to weigh two sides equally before rendering decisions. What I watched yesterday was a petulant puffy-faced preppie who feels entitled to the job that was close to slipping away. He blamed everyone but himself, he cried and he whimpered and he beat his fist on the table. But he wanted nothing to do with clearing his ruined name by taking a lie detector test or having the FBI talk to his old pals or other potential witnesses. He’d suffered enough. Dr. Ford did her best to warn us about this man. She put herself through an Inquisition on national TV and had her life too turned upside down. She told her story quietly and convincingly. None of us should have slept well last night.

Hits: 92

Hits: 72

Hits: 50

When Wally and Edna Burkholtzin first conceived the idea of a 50 cent store, they were convinced competition would make them, if not rich, at least profitable. Sure, they said, Dollar Tree was a national conglomerate, but hey, someone had to open that first store somewhere. Why not them, why not here?

Here, unfortunately, was near the long forgotten Happy Kennels, a dog and cat boarding house that lasted a shorter time than a Trump advisor and ended on a sour note when Marta’s husband Jerry left the pens open after feeding time (some say alcohol played a small role) and next day the place looked like a prison riot in Angola, victims dead or bleeding, beloved pets clawed, chewed and bitten. Thus are dreams deferred … and lawsuits submitted. Not so sanguine, Happy Kennels, now the stuff of South End lore.

The Burkholtzins shared Marta and Jeremy’s entrepreneurial zeal right down to their under-capitalization. Rent was low and goods sold under 50 cents obviously were dirt cheap and definitely low grade even by Chinese standards. “If a Dollar Store could make millions,” Wally loved to tell his many detractors and doubters, “ a fifty cent store could make six figures.” Good math, most of us thought, poor economics. At the Grand Opening we all wished Wally and Edna the best of luck, but we went home shaking our collective heads, probably the same for Jobs and Gates, Musk and Bezos, Zuckerberg and Joe Swisherman , the guy who invented and marketed X-ray glasses sold in the back of comic books to see through walls and women’s clothes. Millionaires don’t hear laughs, they hear cash registers.

When, after two months of pretty near zero sales, Wally grumbled to Edna, Location Location Location, he said they needed a new one. So they relocated lock stock and plastic cutlery to the office/store under Windy Rear Realty’s South End office, I guess figuring the potential buyers of high end properties might avail themselves of an opportunity to save nickels, even dimes. When they vacated the building three months hence, they took nothing but themselves. If they’ve found the Right Location, it’s nowhere near here, but their two bit legend definitely lives on.

Hits: 50

A buddy of mine told me he was throwing out his beat up old fleece vest after a decade of usage and so, in a hasty buying decision, decided to go to REI for a new and improved version. He drove to the sporting goods outlet and tried on a few before sticker shock made him flee for the front door, back home and into the trash can where he’d tossed his tried and true, broken zippered vest. He googled up zipper repair, found a site that advised greasing the skids with olive oil and lo and behold, his old vest was functional once again, ready for another decade or two of daily wear.

But … this wasn’t the story he wanted to convey, as inspirational to us South End flea marketeers and thrift store addicts as it was. No, what he wanted to tell us was the part where he was googling up zipper you-tube repair strategies and noticed ads from REI for fleece vests EXACTLY LIKE THE ONES HE HAD BEEN TRYING ON earlier that day. Holy Capitalism, Batman, how the hell did they know he’d been in the store?? And what he tried on? And who he was???

I half expected malevolent, creepy, ominous music to exude out from under the couch in the room next to us when he told this story. Did you use your credit card to buy something? I asked, but he said no, he tried on a couple of vests and immediately left the store. Did they take down his license plate number? Have these outlets got surveillance cameras with facial recognition? Sporting goods detectives watching for hesitant buyers. Are we all in jeopardy from Big Brother, Inc.???

Or … could we just settle down a paranoid minute and accept welcome-armed the modern notion of advertising’s future? If you search for a product, a place, a person or whatever on the internet, you already get ads marginally related to that search appearing on your sidebar. Look up Hawaii, say, and check out the volcano. A nano second later you’ll have hotels in Hilo with prices and sales. Save you the trouble of searching, right? Airline fares to Honolulu, excursions to Maui, whale watching trips, yup, right there at your fingertips.

Maybe REI can read credit cards from that new chip they’ve installed for security concerns. Privacy, okay, not the priority in these social mediated times. And if they can get that, maybe they need to know your credit rating and minimum balance, no need to contact you if you’re too far in debt, right? Okay, let’s be honest, that’s exactly who they want to contact. Not their problem if you go broke. We all have Free Will. We don’t have to buy the damn vest. They’re just making sure you didn’t make a mistake when you left the store, maybe had to go to the restroom and got disoriented and left accidentally out a side exit. Come on back, we got a sale on!!

I haven’t seen my buddy since yesterday. I’m hoping REI hasn’t found his place of residence yet, but I’m betting next time he drops by he’ll sport a nice fleece vest and want me to go up for the sale he’s been asked to promote. If so, I can tell you this: resistance is futile.

Hits: 55

Hits: 29

Down here on the South End where unemployment figures fly in the face of national statistics showing the lowest percentages in decades for the rest of the country, we layabouts and welfare queens rely heavily on our one main crop. Nettles. Oh sure, there are other industries down this way, everything from dog grooming to … well, real estate sales, I guess. Let’s be honest here, most of us are either retired or on the dole. We’re not apologetic about either, but those real estate agents, maybe they should be.

So when this tariff war started up we didn’t think it would have much of an impact on us local yokels, not unless the cost of dog shampoo went through the ceiling. Like a lot of fact-averse Americans, we just figured we’d poke along, harvest our bounty of wild nettles for the Asian markets which revere the stuff as a supernatural aphrodisiac and an organic antidote for erectile dysfunction. If ignorance is bliss, we found out the hard way that maybe we got it backwards. And if the Asians looked at a map of the island, they’d realize it looks like a Before ad for Viagra.

The Chinese took umbrage to the billions of yuans in tariffs the Trump boyz piled on them and so, in a tit for tat, watch THIS gringo, socked us with import duties mostly on products from the red states to teach the Trump-tolerant a hard lesson in economics. As if they’d be likely to learn…. Soybeans, wheat, apples, ginseng, oh, and you betcha, nettles. We weren’t exactly making a killing on those nettle bales shipped by container ships bound for Ghuangzou, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Dongghaun, but we eked out a meager living now that marijuana was legalized here in La-La Land and ruined our underground economy.

So now our unemployment figures, already at record highs, are going to shoot up stratospherically. Great. Thanks a lot, Mr. Prezident! Don’t blame us when creeping socialism rears its ugly head. You’re the one who put us on welfare. And maybe, just maybe, you could offer us what you offered those soybean farmers, our own subsidy. Capitalism, right?

Hits: 46