The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/audio-jimmy-the-gyppo.mp3[/podcast]audio — jimmy the gyppo

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A lot of the newcomers to the fabled South End build their mega-mansions with their yards left menaced by 100 year old 2nd growth nettle forests.  The first windstorm slamming them with 80 mph hurricane force winds triggers frantic calls to their insurance agent … when the power and phone service return.

It’s only a matter of time before they realize their woodland retreat is a potential deathtrap and, better safe than sorry, they decide to clearcut the property.  Worst case, they can put in a 9 hole golf course with sand and water traps and never miss the forests that brought them here in the first place.  The eagles and deer can migrate back inland a ways among us poorer residents, the ones with handicaps too high for golf.

Course now they need a tree expert.  Or at least some logger bonded and insured with references a long resume in the woods industry.  Trouble is, the logging era on the South End is pretty far back, mostly black and white photos down at the Historical Society and Tourist Information.  So … after some futile internet searching, they invariably get to Jimmy the Gyppo.

Jimmy’s been topping trees for suburban worriers ever since the log market went to pot, medical and otherwise, and the price of a board foot of timber nettle plummeted to less than the cost of hauling it to the mill over in Arlington.   He figured out the real money was in One-Offs, either before or after they were on a roof, didn’t matter to him either way.  When clients asked if he was bonded and insured, he’d just laugh.  That’s why you got the home insurance, he’d say, knowing full well their options were fairly constricted.

Jimmy the Gyppo didn’t come cheap and he even charged to haul the downed trees away.  Then he sold the firewood off a flatbed down by Tyee Store, what he called a Two-fer.  The rich folks didn’t mind.  The whoppers Jimmy regaled them with, spitting tobacco plugs across a pansy garden, made them feel a little like pioneers, breaking soil for the next expansion of the American West, bringing civilization to the wild old South End before finally deciding to move on to the sunny southwest where the winters were dry and there were no forests left to threaten their vacation homes.

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Down at the forward thinking South End, we were New Age before it became Old Hat.  Herbal remedies?  You bet!  Nettle-opathy has been practiced in the hollows here since old Ma Wexler applied a poultice of the fresh stingers to her Erectile Dysfunctional husband’s non-working parts and boy howdy, things livelied up at the Wexler homestead after that, let me tell you.

Nettle-opathy is a country cross between acupuncture and herbal cure-all.  Apply a few fresh spring leaves to the correct chakra, you can cure everything from shyness to arthritis, halsitosis to insomnia, hair loss to memory loss, seasonal affective disorder to major depression.  You won’t have time to think of much else other than that panacea tickling your chakra.

We’ve been brewing medicinal nettle tonics about since Prohibition forced us to seek alternative medicines.  We got hefe-nettle, nettle stouts, IPA’s, nettle bock, all available in a handy 12 oz. dosage.

Aromatherapy?  Sure.  We got everything from burn barrel poly-blend to chimney cedar to compost leaf mulch/food scrap.  A few minutes of olfactory stimulation, you’ll forget most of those insignificant cares and woes that nag your good mood all day long.

Hypnotherapy.   You want a spell put on you, just wander down to the South End Hotel and belly up to the bar, listen for awhile to the whoppers these old time fishermen spin over a few bottle bass.  You’ll be buying Penn reels and downrigger gear and a boat and motor too — you’ll be broke but if fishing doesn’t cure what ails ya, god help you.

In all honesty — full disclosure here — this New Age stuff, old to us, is really mostly a placebo.  But then, isn’t that the New Medicine now?  And really, who cares so long as it works.  Not our fault the South End itself is really why we live longer, smile more, work less and basically just have most of the answers to life’s tough riddles.  Placebo?  You bet.

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Well, sir, it’s just about that time of year again for old Skeeter to round up the boyz and journey up into the High Country.  I know what you’re probably thinking —- but you’d be wrong.  Mostly.  It’s time for our annual safari up into the snowfields of Roslyn for our 20th or 25th or umpteenth Beer Hunt.  Used to be more of us hunters, but time and domesticity have taken a toll.  We’re down to a motley crew of die-hard veterans, grizzled men who can travel for days on a subsistence diet of barfood, cheap hotdogs and canned beans.  Times have changed over the decades, but we haven’t.  Sadly.

We got a run-down packrat infested cabin near the Cle Elum River dam and reservoir right on the edge of Suncadia.  Suncadia is a 5000 acre high end mucky muck resort and retirement community carved out of elk country, clear cut and subdivided and over-developed for the 1%ers.  When they began bulldozing back 10 years ago, they chained off our access down the rutted dirt mountain road we always used.  Legal access, I might add.  So we did what any South Ender worth his salt would do, we cut the damn lock with bolt cutters and drove the usual easement 5 miles into the interior.  Kind of ruined the 9th green of their new golf course, it turned out.  Although it did get their attention in a hurry.

The boyz, I maybe didn’t mention, are lawyers mostly — how we all met, actually, back in their law school days and my slumming — and now one is a prosecutor for Tacoma and another is a judge in King County.  You want to tangle with folks over property easement rights, you couldn’t pick worse victims.  Needless to say, we now drive through the Guard Station, where they know us well, and they say hello, have a nice stay.  Stay means stay off the putting greens with our vehicles.  After the first trip in on their fine blacktopped roads, at least until the last mile or two, we use the trails to the dam or else bushwhack over to the rotten bridge across the raging Cle Elum to get to the sacred hunting grounds of Ronald and Roslyn and sometimes even as far as the Cle Elum, the town.

The damkeeper — shortly after 9-11 and the fear of Al Qaida blowing the dam — would threaten us with arrest.  The judge would apologize and we would be courteous, but we were crossing that dam like it or not.  After Suncadia’s megabuck tactics, the U.S. government held little to no fear for us Beer Hunters.  I admit we’re an older, if not wiser crew now.  We don’t look for fights any more.  Nope, we’re all business.  And that business is hunting the wild and wily ales.  Oh, some day we’ll probably ‘catch and release’ I suppose, but that day is a long ways off.

So  bear without old Skeeter a day or two while we’re traipsing the Cascades, stalking prey from the Brick to Old #  5, the Past Time to the Brewery, and maybe even a couple new waterholes along the trail.  Give you a break from all this moonshine wet powder wisdom.  You might want to do a little hunting yourself in the meantime….

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76 trombones led the big parade. With a hundred and ten cornets close at hand.

Aw, who doesn’t love a good parade, marching bands, twirlers, floats and banners and our boys in uniform? Women too now! And Transgenders! Followed by tanks and artillery, jets flying overhead in formation, bunker buster bombs carried on carriages two blocks long. Formation after formation of the Army, the Navy, the Marines and the Air Force. Battalions and generals and military hardware. The Commander-in-Chief looking down from the stage specially constructed for his viewing pleasure, salutes to him as thousands pass by rank and file, hail to the Chief!!

Damn the expense! If we can’t put on a good military parade once a year, what kind of cowpie country are we? Let the rest of the world cower before our display of drones and cruise missiles moving mile after mile down the banner festooned streets of D.C. Patriotism on Display!! Military Might on Display!! Who doesn’t love a good parade?? Forget that Mickey Mouse balloon stuff. Homer Simpson three blocks high. We’re talking about Fire Power, not Star Power. Save the Disney stuff for the Mummer’s or the Rose Bowl or Mardi Gras. Bring on the Bradley Fighting Machines, the 1126 Stryker, the MK19 grenade machine gun, the Black Hawk helicopters, the MK-54 torpedoes, bring it all out and let the world tremble.

Shock and awe on the streets of the USA, that’s what we need. You wonder how we won the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria, well, sir, check out that hardware we’re selling to every hungry dictatorship around the globe. What’s on display here is more than Uncle Sam’s mighty muscles, it’s a runway for arms sales, pure and simple and who better to brand that than the Trumpster himself, Captain America. You need a second generation jet, we got em. You need some Surface-to-Air missiles, we’re your supplier. Just don’t resell them to terrorists. Don’t want those SAMs falling into the wrong hands like that time with the Taliban back in the cold war days when they were fighting the Soviets.

No, give me a good parade any day. Celebrate the weapons of destruction. Hell, drop a nuclear bomb out in the countryside, nothing too big, just a little show of atomic power, a warning to the enemies of liberty. Small mushroom cloud over the capitol, better than the 4th of July. Guns and God, let freedom ring. 76 trombones and a huckster Music Man, is this a great country or what?
4th

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I guess if you’re the kind of person who never reads, you can be forgiven if you muddy up your facts occasionally. Or always. Ignorance, after all, is bliss. But maybe when you take the stage to a national audience on Independence Day in a salute to the armed forces and especially their Commander-in-Chief, you might want to have the staff do a little fact-checking. That, or just order the Department of Education to go back and rewrite those faux fact history books. If you live by the teleprompter — and especially if you mock those who use one — and the rain blurs your speech, you die by the teleprompter. Or if you’re Donald J. Trump of the very big brain, the man who skipped Viet Nam with a bone spur strategy backed by buy-outs, you go Impromptu, arrogantly plunging into the Void full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes. Saturday Night Live, you ought to be paying this guy a writer’s salary and laying off half your staff.

Here, then is some Presidential History, Mr. Peabody on Rocky and Bullwinkle couldn’t have said it better. George Washington, man, that guy, according to this fractured fairy tale, was certainly ahead of his time. He crossed the Potomac AND the time barrier, captured the British airports and won the Revolutionary War. Why they called it Revolutionary, I’m guessing, anybody has the vision to commandeer future airports. Probably sunk a few English subs too. And maybe shot down their drones. The man, like Trump said, was a hero. An American Hero. You don’t see British airports here anymore, do you? And those lunar landing bases, uh-uh, wiped out in a surprise assault. No wonder the Commander-in-Chief decries faux news! Today’s media look like a 3rd grade journalism class compared to what Donald can spin out.

For those who forget history, well, they’re doomed to repeat it. For those who never knew it to begin with, okay, just about anything’s possible. Turn off the teleprompter and let er rip. History, after all, is written by the winners and let’s be honest here, Donald Trump won that last election. At least that’s what he says….

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/audio-thinking-outside-the-box1.mp3[/podcast]audio — thinking outside the box

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Before the advent of circuit boards, silicon chips and computerized everything, us do-it-yerselfers took no little pride in fixing our broken appliances, our busted stereos, our crippled cars and even our dysfunctional lives.  Really didn’t have much choice given our fiscal challenges.  The washing machine quits, you have to weigh that $50 service fee just to drive down here.   Believe me, you’ll learn to diagnose a blown fuse or a broken fan belt yourself before you wait two days in your last clean underwear and then pay half the cost of a Maytag to keep the wringer washer working another six months.

My dryer quit this week.  Nothing new there — it goes on strike regularly.  But this time the little gizmo that held the blown fuse wouldn’t let go of the fuse.  No big deal — I went on-line, googled up the part, found it … and discovered it cost more than that service fee I’m trying to save.  Being a South Ender I balked at the rip-off price.  No way was I paying $54 plus shipping for a plastic toy fuseholder.  Next trip into town I scrounged the hardware store, found a reasonable facsimile and rewired the dryer to hold it …. And yeah, $5 later, I was fluffing up my dungarees.

Sometimes it pays to think outside the box, cornball as that expression is.  I bought an extra hard drive for my computer — and oh yeah, I got one — but when it came it wouldn’t fit inside the Tower.  A North Ender might send it back, see if there was a better fit.  But like I said, we like to think outside the box, so I cut a slot with a hacksaw in the tower side and slid that new blank brain right in and left its frontal lobe sticking out for better ventilation.  Sure, the missus shook her head sadly.  But the salient point here is that it worked and  MORE IMPORTANT BY FAR, the job was done.

The trick here is to show No Fear to these malfunctioning objects, even the ‘black boxes’.  They sense fear quicker than a dog or a tax assessor.  Open them up, grab a handful of wires, pull on em with authority, half the time they’ll respond positively when they realize unequivocally you’re the Boss.  When my VCR ate a rental movie, I eviscerated the aggressive little unit and when it still refused to function, I made an example of it to its electronic brethren and tossed it two stories out into the driveway.  I have put rocks through recalcitrant TV picture tubes and in one instance burned one alive, fully plugged in, begging like HAL in 2001—A Space Odyssey.  Some machines are incapable of learning.  You must be firm.  You may even need to be ruthless.  The worst mistake you can make is allowing one miscreant cyborg mutant monster to infect the rest.  Give em an inch, they’ll grab half of cyberspace.

For those who think it’s a brave new world, one where nothing can be fixed or repaired, cowboy UP!  Down here we aren’t going to be slaves to the machine.  Even if we have to destroy every damn one ….!

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