The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Some years Halloween comes early to the South End … and some years it never seems to leave.  Down here in the nettle regions the kids get driven north to the Stanwoodopolis Suburbs where the candy flows like bottled mineral water and the sodium lights force phantom predators back into the shadows.  This season we just got the fright-filled statistics from studies that show philanthropy by the wealthy dropped by nearly 5%, wealthy being those who made over $200,000 a year.

I guess the candy jars are going to empty a tad earlier when our little ‘Takers’ roll up to the festooned front doors of the Tricklers.  Forget that trickle down theory of supply-siders, I think the drought of charity may be a prolonged one.  And no, it isn’t the result of Global Warming….  Next year we’ll probably see moats around the castles and the gated communities will add spikes to the fences.  Treats for the beggaring poor?  Fuggedaboudit!  When times get tough, some hearts get harder.

In the same study they found that the poorer folks had actually increased their charitable giving by as much as the wealthy had decreased theirs.  I suspect when we belong to a community, we think of neighbors as real people struggling with the same problems as the rest of us.  We don’t think of folks who can’t afford health care, folks who lost a job, folks who had their house repossessed as vampires feeding on the Body Politic.  They’re us.  They’re not who we ‘Unfriend’ when they need help the most.  They’re who we look at in our own mirror.

It would be way too easy to demonize the rich.  Oh, sure, we could send the kids out this Halloween in tuxedoes and Armani suits.  Wearing fangs.  But charity, like our mothers said, begins at home, so maybe we should trickle some down to them.  And no, I don’t mean give them another tax break.  They already got Christmas 365 days a year.

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Eco-activists are at it again in the art museums.  Following the tomato soup assault on Van Gogh, this week we have the mashed potato splatter on Monet.  I’m at a loss to connect the spud dots on this movement to turn art into a food fight, but I wish the anti-oil crowd would pick something other than museums to demonstrate their rage.  Although … I can understand using mashed potatoes.  After all, one of the better stories of Donald Trump as a kid was the one where his brother got sick and tired of Donald bullying him and finally dumped a plate of the stuff on the future president’s head, a humiliation that haunted him throughout his never ending childhood.  Let’s just say that Trump was a more appropriate target for the eco-spudsters than the Monet.

Hard to say what metaphoric point these folks are trying to make.  Other than maybe we ought to do something to save the damned planet.  Monet painted impressionistic ponds and flowers, nature through the lens of astigmatism, what’s not to like?  Maybe throw pies at Francis Bacon’s horror laden paintings instead.  Or toss spaghetti at Dali’s surrealistic melting clocks.  As if any of that would make sense to a public addicted to violence and social media trolling.

I mean, what’s next, strangle puppies at the dog pound?  C’mon, kidz, dumping on art is best left to the critics.  Even the philistine ones….  Go trash an elevator playing Muzak.  Superglue yourselves to a sports stadium.  Lash out at Hallmark cards or protest car commercials.  Go down to Wall Street and sling hash at the bronze bull.  Gotta be a hundred better pillars of greed or crappy art to make your statement.  Why pick on the best our culture has to offer?  You gonna actually kill the fat lady singing in the opera?  Piss on the collected works of Shakespeare?  Burn some books but only the really great ones?   Smash a Stradivarius using a leg of lamb?

I know, it’s hard, but if you want to be taken seriously, you have to pick up your game.  It may take a little imagination … or a lot.  Kind of why you might use Monet or Van Gogh or a few others as your muse, not your target.  Just saying….

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Right off the get-go here I want to declare I’m a Plague survivor.  Two vaccinations, three boosters, fairly careful the past two or three years (who can keep track anymore?).  But so far so good.  So imagine my dismay when our President comes out and warns us we might be on the verge of nuclear annihilation.  And you thought climate change was something to worry about.

I guess you don’t have to sweat Long Haul Covid, forget about long haul anything when they drop the Big One!  I was twelve years old, a snot-nosed kid in Georgia when the Cuban missile crisis was putting us on the brink of … Atomic War!  Neighbors were building fallout shelters, stocking them with food and water, guns and ammo, figuring, I guess, they’d survive the holocaust and kill the mutants who banged on their door.  My school was conducting ‘duck and cover’ drills.  You think ‘Active Shooter’ drills are messing up kids’ heads, try Dr. Strangelove on for size — as the real deal.

So okay, there’s always some kind of existential threat, some virus or asteroid or robot apocalypse, some unexpected menace, government overthrow, a new war, famine and drought, another ice age.  You could maybe get used to one of those … but all of them coming at you at once?  I don’t think so.  Maybe just pull the sheets over your head, call your boss and tell him you’re sick, turn off the TV, cancel the newspapers, avoid social media and imagine a happy place.  A place you once lived in but forgot how to find again.  A place where the sun shines and children play, a Shangri-la-la far from the maddening crowd.  Puppies romp and butterflies fly.  Laughter fills the air like puffy clouds and worries drop away and evaporate.  Does that place really exist, you ask?

If it does, you know how to find it. It’s not on your GPS, you won’t find it online, you can’t find it past a secret door the other side of your Closet of Anxieties.   You want to worry about the future, it isn’t there.  The future is the last place you want to look.  Try right here….

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In the aftermath of 9-11 when the Trade Towers were destroyed, I noticed a lot of friends, couples mostly, broke up.  Maybe just a coincidence, but it sure seemed like that event led to questioning everything from politics to marital compatibility.  After a couple of years of Covid isolation, I bet something similar is going on, folks trapped in their homes and apartments, slowly reassessing jobs and marriages and lifestyles, taking a hard look at new realities.

The South End String Band started up right after 9-11.  You need help with the math, that was 21 years ago.  We started out as a back porch ensemble, mostly beers and potlucks, pickin and grinning, no big expectations, just play some music, bbq, socialize, anything goes.  We ended up with two dozen folks but eventually whittled that down to 11, then started playing benefits, small gigs, eventually larger concerts, made 4 CD’s, ended up with 5 of us going into 2022.  Last two years we didn’t play very often, didn’t do concerts, didn’t even practice much, just waited for the Plague to run its course, no need for the band to be Super Spreaders.

So when the first member quit — by email —maybe we shouldn’t have been too surprised.  Next day, the second one quit … and shortly after that the third, all by email, nicely impersonal, definitely socially distanced.  21 years … and we get a digital WE QUIT.

Bands don’t generally have a long expiration date.  Tough life, a musician’s.  Road trips, groupies, drugs, crooked promoters, disruptive spouses, the inevitable corrosion of fame.  21 years is longer than the Beatles, longer than the Who, okay, maybe never catch the Rolling Stones unless we get blood transfusions like Keith Richards, and even then, probably not.

But here’s the deal: don’t write us off.  We got a banjo, we got a fiddler, we got a bass from one of the original band, we’re the South End String Band, dammit, and we’re not going anywhere … fast!  Stay tuned.

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In case you haven’t been tuning in to the midterm election debates and their talking points, you might have missed the shocking news that schools around this once great nation of ours are installing litter boxes for the kids who identify as felines.  Yes, you heard right, there is an outcry from the far right, those defenders of family values, patriotism and birth gender to stop these extreme left wing radicals from turning our institutions of learning into a veritable zoo of children claiming cat status.  I know, it’s hard for me to believe too, but if candidates for school boards are sounding the alarm, you know it must be true.

What’s next? you ask.  Fire hydrants in every hallway for the canine identifiers?  Pastures for the equine crowd?  Milking stations for the bovines?  Is there no end to the madness of these leftist anti-MAGA’s?  I don’t know about you, but I for one think it’s time to get down to the PTA and demand that this animal transference stop!  Bad enough the kids want sex changes, now they want equal status as bestial middle schoolers.  By high school they would be fully devolved … and don’t get me going on evolution.  Another good reason to ban those books with extreme ideas.

Historians one day will look back at these troubled times where homosexuality was condoned, where children with sex changes could use the opposite sex’s bathroom … or the same sex bathroom … or, well, you know what I mean … where abortions were given out free to any and all, and the only thing stopping this all-out assault on our Christian values, our American values, was the vigilance of the folks who understood that Hollywood and the Sodomites planned to undermine everything dear to this society.  Like to keep and bear arms, just to name one fundamental right.  If kids are allowed to trans-species, how will the law abiding gun owning hunters know what is fair game and what might be someone’s feral kid?  Litter boxes are just the first step in the decline and fall of this once proud nation.  Make em use a toilet!

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