The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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We got a little library down here at the notoriously (but proudly) illiterate South End. One of those 1960 phone booths landed in the park I care-take across the island about a year ago so I decided it would be easier to make something interesting with it than try to haul it to the dump. We turned it into a Little Library, built bookshelves and stocked it with fiction and non-fiction, even some CD’s. A week later vandals pulled the bookcase out, scattered the books, burned a few, tossed some in the woods and painted graffiti on the glass walls of the booth. Sure, I was bummed, but since I was married to a librarian, I decided to rise above the obvious desecration of literary values and try again. To that end I posted alien robots to guard the sanctuary.

Yesterday I drove by and noticed through the windows the bookshelves were gone so I pulled into the parking lot only to find the entire library, books and bookcase, scattered on the ground and left in the rain, ruined. It’s not like the burning of the Library of Alexandria exactly or even like our own evangelical book burnings, more like a senseless attack on anything intellectual or bureaucratic. Although, to be honest, it’s probably just a couple of kids who think it’s funny to destroy things. You see it all the time, not just on the South End, but it’s epidemic on the internet. Ransacking a little library is probably just our way of trolling down here.

Obviously I underestimated the intelligence of our potential Vandals. It only took them one year to recognize the alien security guards as harmless sculptures. Sure, we could bring in surveillance cameras, hire some security, lock the library up at night, set up lending hours. But … let’s be honest here. Maybe the South End isn’t ready for culture just yet. It might be better to bow to the public, acknowledge their mistrust of books and art, maybe just use the phone booth for a private vaping salon. That, or patiently wait for our hoodlums to grow dumber since pretty obviously they’re not interested in learning much of anything. Couple more years on drugs then we can try the alien robot guards again. Third time, they say, is the charm.

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I understand that we humans are basically social animals. I get that. But I grew up in a family that moved from one part of the country to the next, uprooting us munchkins from our schools, our churches, our boy scout troops, our Little League teams and our neighborhood friends. By the time I was 18 we had moved 14 times. So when I started school in a new town, the teams had been picked, the cliques had formed, the lines had been drawn. I ate a lot of lonely lunches in those school cafeterias.

When we moved from Georgia to Milwaukee, the only kids who would give me the time of day were either the geeks or, oddly enough, the hoods. The hoods, despite what you might think, weren’t pretend hoodlums, they carried switchblades and some had guns. But all in all, they were friendly and I was friendless. If you want to understand why kids join gangs, this is basically the reason. My good newfound buddy Randy asked me one day if I wanted to join him and the boys for a drive into downtown that weekend. ‘What’s the plan?’ I asked innocently, thinking maybe a movie or grab an ice cream cone.

‘We’re gonna rumble,’ he grinned. ‘We go downtown every Saturday night to rumble.’ I asked, what’s rumble? Not a term we used down in rural Georgia much. ‘Fight,’ he said. ‘Kick some ass.’ ‘Fight?’ I asked. ‘Fight who?’

‘The niggers,’ he answered. ‘We got four of us, we look for a few of them walking the streets. Then we rumble.’

‘Kick some ass,’ I said, ‘ but ya know, that does sound like fun, only I’m not much for fighting. Dancing maybe. Find some girls. More up my alley. Rumble, I don’t know, Randy. And besides, I don’t have anything against niggers. I don’t even call em that, no offense.’ Like I was worried at that point of being offensive.

Needless to say, I went back to my old lunchroom cafeteria ways and my career of a streetfighting man ended before it even started. Way of the world, I guess. But along comes Facebook a few decades later, offering me one more chance to join in with my fellow tribesmen, an opportunity for social approval, acceptance and the distinct possibility of trolling, ratings, defriending, all those wonderful popularity scorings I’d missed by being a loner in my youth. Oh you bet!

So once again I’m happy enough without the thumbs up thumbs down, the like or dislike, the conformity of my extended group. If this is anti-social, count me in. I’m content being my own worst critic, okay by me.

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The mainstream media, ever attuned to the pulse of America, trotted out a little article about the return of exorcism today in my two morning papers. 175 practitioners, it stated, men of the cloth who, when summoned, would cast demons from the afflicted. And no, for the record, they won’t cast Trump from office, just other demons, particularly the Devil. Don’t get me started … it’s too dark a detour.

Sixty percent of us in this country believe in the existence of Satan. Not Satan as a metaphysical construct, but Beelzebub as the embodiment of Evil. Until this President I didn’t believe in the Prince of Darkness, but now I’m not so sure. But again, let’s try to stay on topic here, no point in taking on the impeachment hearings when Schiff and Pelosi are undertaking their own exorcism. Why muddy the water?

Sixty percent of Satan believers is more than the percentage of us who think Donald should be yanked out of office. Okay, I apologize, but the devil made me do it. I will try to stay focused. My point is that if you believe in Lucifer and then start hearing horrible and angry voices or getting mysterious and ugly tweets, you might seek remedy, not in pharmacology, but in ecclesiastically based exorcism. I’m not sure if it’s covered under Obamacare, but it would be worth looking into. Even if it weren’t covered under your insurance plan, the cost of casting out demons might be worth the expense. How long before those nasty tweets eat holes in your brain?

I suppose there must be a School of Exorcism somewhere. A degree. An apprenticeship. Sure wouldn’t want to be the first guy on someone’s exorcism list and end up with a REALLY pissed off Antichrist rattling the cage inside my head because a doofus with a hankering to be a professional Demon Expeller used me for a test case. I want to see some references. I want to see proof he graduated from a certified College of Devil Extermination. I want to see that degree, buddy, before I let you inside my hell-fired brain to battle with the King of Evil.

And … forgive me here for once again violating my promise not to go all political … I’d want to know, if the Devil was impeached, exorcised, cast out, whatever term you want to apply, who would take his place? Winnie-the-Pooh? Mike Pence? Or just another satanic acolyte? A lot of us, if the polls are right, prefer the devil we got to the devil we don’t know. It might just be we need a lot more exorcists than 175. Might be time for our Sec. of Education, Betsy De Vos, to start using charter schools to churn out exorcists by the thousands. Kind of up her alley.

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Back in the dark days of a dying print journalism, the Shipley editorial team embarked on what, to most tired and cynical newspaper people, was a foolhardy, quixotic enterprise: to publish local news and local events and local yokels … and to pay for it all, not just with their meager savings and their kids’ college fund, but the Old Fashioned Way. With Advertising. The Walter Cronkites of the Stillaguamish Valley said Don’t Do It! Print has gone the way of the dinosaurs and the House of Representatives’ urge to compromise. Better just to blog. Better yet, get a real job!!! But don’t bankrupt yourselves.

Two years BEFORE Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for a quarter of a trillion dollars, Crab Cracker was launched, corny as it sounds, on a shoestring and a prayer. And now, many laces later, the gods of Gutenberg have spoken from On High and the little Cracker has crabwalked with claws clacking wildly into its 10th year. The Cracker, like the Big Lebowski, abides … while a flailing print medium dogpaddles in the turbulent waters of a digital ocean in expectation of being swallowed lock stock and crackerbarrel. I like to think their success is due to the savvy linkage of their Calendar of Events with local artworks, local poetry, local music and of course, top notch local literature. So okay, literature with a small ‘L’, maybe. All right, they did okay DESPITE these words of marginal wit and not much wisdom. Geez, whaddaya want? A refund?

No doubt the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Le Monde, London’s Daily Telegraph and the Stanwoodopolis Gazette will rush to emulate the Cracker’s example of journalistic freedom and economic viability. Amazon and Bezos’ competitors at Google will no doubt make multi-million dollar offers, Facebook may put the ‘book’ back in for truthfulness, Yahoo may see the profit in using ACTUAL yahoos and the Cracker may someday succumb to the sweet courtship of corporate dating. But I suspect not. The Cracker is here to stay, a constant beacon of current fishing reports, local gossip, tide tables, upcoming auctions and concerts and events, interviews with new artists and the old farts too, all of it eminently suitable for late night reading and stove kindling later and fishwrap now, something digital and video journalism will never, not in a million megabytes, be capable of duplicating.

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