The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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I have this 1% for Art project that ordinarily would require meetings that I would have to drive or fly to and usually stay overnight in some fleabag motel with the other tenants who mostly rent by the week or month or the rest of their lives. Now some folks like to travel on their jobs and I admit I thought I might too, but hauling over snowy passes in winter or navigating the freeway system of Los Angeles or trying to find something to do in fun-filled Salt Lake City, Utah took a lot of the joy out of visiting exotic places. Spend a night or two in Yakima and tell me you can’t wait to go back. I can wait.

But this year is the Year of the Plague. Meetings are scheduled now as virtual meetings. Maybe you’ve had the pleasure of Zoom Meetings, little talking heads lined up in the corners of your computer screen, an annoying delay in the sound, everything about as real as a late 20th century video game. Better than nothing, you might say.

Course, I wouldn’t. My first attempt at one of these virtual meetings was a total bust. I bought a teeny external camera, cheapest one I could find online, and when I experimented with it, the image I saw of myself on the silver screen was anything but silver, it was pink. Everything behind me was pink too. Not quite Pepto Bismol nauseous pink, but plenty sickening. When the time came to log in for our meeting, my committee informed me they couldn’t see me on their screen. I assured them they were the lucky ones. You know, a little humor to lighten the mood. You learn real quick humor on a zoom meeting is likely to fall on its pink face.

We managed to get through the first meeting without a virtual visual of the artist himself, okay with me, just a disembodied voice they might associate with some movie actor they were reminded of … and hopefully admired. Second meeting I bought a different camera, not exactly high end, but at least the image I got on my own computer was semi-natural, you know, if anything about this is natural. When the meeting started, the committee said they could see me just fine (oh swell) but they couldn’t hear me. I suspect this is the nature of zoom meetings, glitches, ignorance, fumbling, scrambling for a remedy, a comedy of errors. After a few minutes we discovered that if I turned off the camera, they could hear me just fine. Of course I wondered if this was a ruse to get me to go dark, 30 seconds of my face being more than enough for all of them.

The last meeting I didn’t go out and buy a 200 dollar state of the art video camera, opting instead for the voice-over, no visual. And no, I didn’t try the humor approach by suggesting I was wearing nothing below the belt, not after that last attempt. I suspect my camera actually has a teeny tiny tinny mic imbedded in it that I need to command to work instead of the default microphone, why they can’t hear me when they could see me. I suppose I could troubleshoot it, get tech support, schedule a test meeting and see if my theory is correct. But you know, don’t you?, that I’m not going to do that. What they don’t see won’t hurt them one little bit. Ignorance may not be bliss, but I’m happy to report it does have some advantages. And I don’t mean not wearing pants to my meetings.

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Once again our intrepid entrepreneurial spirit has raised its banner on the globally connected South End. In the face of a newly invigorated craft distilling industry across the state, our own liquor suppliers have risen to the challenge. Admittedly hobbled by government laws and regulations set by the State Liquor Board and unable to advertise for fear of police intervention, they have been forced to raise the bar once more in order to compete with their well-funded and legitimate adversaries.

Just last evening I was huddled at my kitchen table with Whisky Bob, a moonshiner of some repute down here for his double distilled mashes, a white lightning so powerful Bob enforces his No Smoking ordinance with serious vigilance. If a ‘client’ ignores the admonition, Bob tells them the story of old man Jeffries who tried lighting his cigarette with a mason jar of High Octane Hooch open in his lap driving home to his doublewide in O-Zi-Ya. He survived, but his eyebrows never grew back and without going into gory graphics, let’s just say the miracle drug Viagra was of little use thereafter. For years he would relive the explosion every time he struck a match. The Post Stress became so severe he gave up smoking altogether.

Whisky Bob tells me he’s ready for the Next Stage of distilling, gonna dial back the alcohol a mite and go for the niche market in boutique boozes. I said it sounded like a great business plan, and Bob leaned in conspiratorially, afraid, I guess, Cost-Co might have the place bugged.

“Nettles,” he said. “Nettles?” I asked. “Nettles,” he repeated, louder, maybe thinking I needed hearing aids. Nettles. I pondered it a moment. Bob said he remembered that Heavy Nettle Ale I’d made two years ago, a fine year for the green crop, good crisp bite, a telltale aftertaste that tickled the tongue. Nettles, I finally agreed. Slow Food Movement, utilize the area agriculture, stop global warming, drink Local, save the planet. “Bob,” I said, tilting a glass of his double distilled, “it sounds like a winner! And I don’t think it’s the Everclear talking.”

This week Whisky Bob will begin the harvest. I told him my own organic nettles were available if he needed more than his backyard yield. By summer Bob should have his flagship mash aged to perfection. Jack Daniels, good luck to ya….

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My neighbor Roy was down at the new watering hole the other day trying to decide between the 3 dozen microbeers they have going stale on tap. So many choices, so little time …. Finally, after inquiring about a couple of their options with the bartendress who really didn’t know much of anything about any of them other than reading the name off the tap, Roy asked her what she preferred. Roy is single and probably thought it would give him a leg up on a possible dating opportunity if he ordered same as her.

So what if she’s 20 years younger, drinking the same beer is one rung up the ladder of shared ‘likes’. Now, if she liked to fall asleep on the couch watching ESPN after a hearty dinner of peanuts, Doritos and vodka tonics, Roy was in like Flint, a match made, if not in Heaven, somewhere this side of internet dating.

“Bud Lite,” she told him, beer of choice. “Bud Lite?” he repeated, sorely disappointed. It was as if he’d gone to a white linen restaurant, asked his waitress what was good this evening, and been told Big Macs. With fries. Roy told me he actually considered ordering a Bud Lite so as not to hurt her feelings. Roy — as you can see — is a Sensitive Man. Although his first wife, and second one too, might disagree. He met them both in bars late at night in Stanwoodopolis. Poor lighting, I guess, or lack of competition. A relationship probably lasts longer built on more than a shared thirst, but then, I’m not a marriage counselor.

Roy finally decided he’d just go somewhere else to find a beer. Maybe he noticed her wedding ring or maybe it was just too many unknowns on all those taps. Down at the South End we like to keep it simple, but not too simple.

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Jerry Hatrick had converted the back booth of the Marina’s Pilot House Lounge into a personal office, judging by the papers strewn around his empty pint glasses. “Whazzup?” Flathead Fred asked amiably as three of us yahoos slid in with our own beers at risk of foaming onto Jerry’s table top filing cabinet. “You doing your taxes early this year??”

Jerry pushed a pile of papers into a heap, leaned back with a groan and said, “Just trying to decide whether to take Social Security now … or wait.” The boyz are all over this one since we’re of that age. Fred took his at 64 even though the benefits were way less than if he’d waited til 70. “I’m grabbing what I can before they go broke,” he told Jerry. Phil laughed. “Fred, if the government goes broke, you got worse troubles than no monthly check.”

“Laugh all you want, Phil, I’m hedging my bets. There’s less people putting in and more of us taking out. You do the math.” Jerry said that’s exactly what he was trying to do before we interrupted. And that was assuming he lived until, oh, 90 and then how much would the difference be if he took early retirement and what would it be if he took it at 66? The last thing he needed was Fred’s monkeywrench logic, which included inflation, health insurance, nursing home care and anything else he could throw in to muddy Jerry’s mathematics. “Whadda you think, Skeeter?” Phil asked about ¾’s of a pint into the discussion.

I’m 70 and even though I was eligible for an early pay-out myself, I hoped to hold out til the bitter end. Recently I got my earnings statement for the past 47 years. Four years I made zip. Nada. Zilch. Nine I didn’t break into 4 figures. The boyz always considered me semi-retired and so do I … since about 1975. Truth is, I tell em, I’ll be working as long as I can. Which, of course, cracks the table up.

“Next you’ll be wanting us to buy your beers out of sympathy,” Fred crows, shaking his head. Fred worked for 45 well paid years as a construction foreman. His reduced benefits would look pretty good to this grasshopper who fiddled away his working years. Jerry’s going to have a hard time too, I know. But his working days are over with his arthritis problems and pretty soon he’s going to have to roll the dice like the rest of us. If I know Jerry, he’ll have a few more pints, divide by an even number, weigh the empty glass and then flip a coin. Just like the rest of us high rolling gamblers….

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Well, now that the euphoria of the Trump Firing is beginning to wear off, no doubt most of you are slowly learning that the post-Donald era is about to begin. No more late night tweets, no more foaming at the mouth by our leader, no more firing of aides who thought he was a moron and said so publicly, no more tell-all books by his lawyers and friends and relatives and previous cabinet heads, no more Trump Comedy Show. Oh sure, there will be the indictments and trials, the tax returns finally becoming public, possibly even incarceration, but all those will take place in Covid Time, meaning, staggered out in endless weeks and months, not the rapid fire minutes we’ve come to expect the last four years.

And those wild and crazy cast of characters that zipped through the White House, here one week, gone the next, a constant merry-go-round of hirings and firings, all the Bannons and Stephen Millers, the Giulianis and those kids of Trump, a kaleidoscope of insanity, a circus really of clowns piling into the VW bug, a thousand clowns one after the other so that you could barely keep track of who was Sec. of State this week or who was running the EPA, half of them never confirmed anyway, but lordy, there were a lot of them and they never failed to light up the twitterverse. You think you’re not going to miss them? Oh, you’ll miss them. What will you spend your time on if not the constant news cycle once Biden Boring becomes the norm. No drama Joe. Smooth running government machinery. Sure it sounds good now, but wait a month or so, you’ll be watching cute kitty You-Tube videos again, nostalgic for the Orange Man. You’ll be online shopping, a consumer junkie, addicted to Ebay and Google but better than the void left with no Donald.

If you’re lucky, the P.T. Barnum of politics will reinvent himself, find the backers for a new network and return triumphant on your cable TV subscription, maybe a small additional monthly premium but nothing half the country wouldn’t gladly pony up, forget the mortgage payment an occasional month. America needs Trump the way a junkie needs smack, no price would be too high. Sure, you think you can kick the habit. You think your mental health would improve. They all think that way. Until someone sets the needle on the table next to them. The Trump Network: Not just prime time, Trump all the time.

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