The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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We don’t really have a Senior Center on the South End.  The Diner is sort of a substitute, but you need to at least buy a cup of coffee before you park in a booth or belly up to the counter for the daily gossip specials.  The vintage car guyz, the Flatheads, fill the joint Wednesday morning.  Tuesdays the Bible study crowd rolls in and most of the regulars roll out.  It’s not that they’re religious averse, but like Freddy the Freeloader sez, Sunday’s plenty.  Freddy gets his disability checks first of every month.  He’s a busted up stump jumper chain choker from the days when logging was man’s work all right but good luck living to be an old man.  If he had his druthers, the Diner would be church a-plenty.

The AA used to congregate on Fridays, but Brenda, the Diner’s owner since 1987, finally asked them to find another meeting place.  She was losing money on their endless coffee refills and the parking lot out front looked like Pittsburg in Carnegie’s day, the smoke from their unfiltered Camels hanging heavy on air inversions.  Plus, she and Big Larry, the grillman, had quit drinking years ago and the new AA members’ determined but usually hopeless drought between benders or DUI’s depressed them mightily.  Half of them ended up in Bible study anyway so AA didn’t complain very vocally, just moved it on up to the toxic mold blue Camano Center the County rents cheap and never cleans up.

Thursdays now the Zumba crowd pulls in after an hour of aerobics at the nearby South Grange, mostly post-Mom women desperately fighting the midriff bulges and Michelin Man thighs.  After a morning workout they replaced the calories lost with Brenda’s Blue Plate Specials, burger baskets with fries and slaw and fountain Coke they could get refills on for free, sort of a zero sum gain.  But without the guilt.  They earned every calorie!

We been thinking about maybe fundraising for a Senile Center.  Lot of work.  Lot of money.  Something ever happened to the Diner, maybe we’d motivate.  Meanwhile, the coffee’s cheap and the gossip’s free.  You ask me, we got the best of both worlds.  Without the Book of Revelations or the 12 step program.

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Big Walter was looking for a high five down at the Pilot Lounge a couple of nights ago after showing the Kentucky congressman’s photo of his entire family assembled happily in front of their Christmas tree with semi-automatic weapons in every hand. ‘Nothing says Happy Holidays like a warm gun,’ Walter was crowing. Under the photo was a P.S. to Santa to please send ammo. Ho ho ho.

Two Toke shook his head sadly. ‘I don’t know, Walter, but doesn’t it seem like bad taste to post something like this right after that kid in Michigan shot up his school? Sort of tone deaf, isn’t it?’ Big Walter, not exactly attuned to nuance of any variety, snorted loudly. ‘No, Tom, it sends a message to you snowflakes that we’re not cowering to all of you who want to take our guns away.’

Jerry put his beer down and applauded that sentiment, another yule log on Walter’s fire. ‘Damn right,’ he practically shouted. The Lounge quickly divided on party lines as usual, the Bud Lite crowd vs. the craft beer boys. Well, okay, not exactly. Jerry was quaffing his third South End IPA and Two Toke and I were drinking Rainiers. Actually, party lines drawn at the Lounge were fairly elastic, depending on the topic du jour. On abortion, the lines were agnostics vs. the Chapel in the Ravine camp although I have friends who are fairly progressive but want more restrictions on abortion rights. Guns, sometimes the lines were hunter vs. peacenik but other times they blurred. Fairlane Fred fought in Viet Nam, knew guns a little more firsthand than he’d ever dreamed, voted Republican but wanted a ban on semi-automatics. You never know. And probably shouldn’t try to assume. You know, unless you’ve been drinking….

‘I ought to make my own Christmas card, ‘ Walter said and Tom smirked, ‘What, Peace on Earth?’ ‘Piece, like as in check out my piece? I like it, Tom, I like that a lot. Piece on Earth. That’s great. Thanks, Buddy.’

And so it went, another joyous evening of holiday spirits down at the Pilot Lounge. Like we always say most meet-ups, we can always agree to disagree. Hopefully without firearms. Feliz Navidad!

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Half the South End is For Sale. Three quarters of the neighborhood have real estate signs out by the driveway, everything from WindyRear Realty to Reflux Realty. They used to hold open houses on the weekend, but after 3 or 4 years, I guess even the optimism of a realtor starts to look like a horny snake courting a garden hose. Or vice versa.

Some of the homeowners have given up too, bought haciendas in Arizona or trailer court lots in Nevada. They come motoring back in their 40 foot mobile homes when the asphalt starts to melt down there and the gila monsters stay under the rocks all day. I guess they’re the optimists, folks who figure the housing bubble will eventually swell up again and they’ll get the million dollars they thought the place was inflated to back in the carefree days before October 2008 when the betting stopped and the banks had to show their cards. House of cards, it turned out, one very bad bet.

We’ve gone through the Boom and Bust cycles on the South End many times since I lost a wheel on the Conestoga and decided to stay put. Folks find out the neighbor sold for twice what anybody dreamed somebody would pay and next thing you know, everybody figures they can sell now and retire like a dot.com executive. Signs sprout up and proliferate like nettles in chicken manure, eventually they DO sell or the sellers give up and we return to normal. Although … normal may just be more of those selling binges than living our lives, hard to say.

The realtors do fine most of the time. Commission coming in, commission going out. Rita, down at WindyRear’s North End office, tells them when they’re ready to get rich, come on back, she’ll sell their dream house for 50% more than they paid. There’s ALWAYS another house — the real dream is making money.

Personally — and nothing against the wisdom of Rita the Realtor — I don’t care how much my bank account would swell, I wouldn’t want to end up in a trailer park in Nevada. I don’t care how good the air conditioning is.

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So the 15 year old Michigan kid who shot his fellow classmates right after a counseling meeting his parents had with the school had gone a few days earlier with those same folks to buy a semi-automatic pistol. At the meeting the school mentioned their concern that little Ethan might be contemplating mayhem. The parents apparently never really felt that the gun purchase might be relevant to this discussion because as soon as the meeting ended, their kid took his backpack into the toilet and emerged minutes later locked and loaded.

Now, I’m sure you’ll agree with me that every troubled 15 year old kid is entitled to own a semi-automatic weapon. But … sadly, not all of us have the kind of parents who would help us purchase one. My folks probably would have said no. Actually, they would have said ‘hell no, what’s the matter with you?’ Little Ethan’s parents probably were pleased as punch their delinquent kid was showing some spunk, c’mon, let’s get right in the car and drive to the nearest gun shop and we’ll buy you an early Christmas present, son. Maybe for your birthday we’ll get you a bazooka. You know, if you’re good.

What better way to say Merry Christmas than a gun? I got a capgun when I was six, a BB gun when I was ten … but that was then, this is now, time to upgrade to something a tad more lethal. The 17 year old kid whose parents got him an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle took it on himself to play vigilante up in Kenosha, Wisconsin, go defend the city against those bad Black Lives Matter folks who were protesting racial discrimination and ended up shooting a couple of them in what he called self-defense. Got off scot free too. Nice message for the kids of America, the white kids, anyway.

I’m not really anti-gun. I am anti-stupid. The folks who set up a Fund Me site for the killer at Kenosha, well, somehow making a hero of him sends shivers down my spine. Second amendment or no second amendment, you don’t have the right to kill folks you don’t like, I don’t care how many hours of video mayhem you watch.

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