The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Over on the other side of the island I have a little 5 acre park I caretake, mostly mow the grass, weed eat the ditches, chainsaw up the trees that fall over the trails and pick up trash my visitors are kind enough to leave behind. It’s a thankless job but I figure it’s the only park on the South End, one that nobody else volunteers to help maintain, so somebody ought to step up and if that someone is me year after year, so be it.

The other day I was sprucing up the picnic grounds and found a little baggie of dogshit considerately left on the table for someone else to dispose of, but not the dog’s owner, apparently. Giving credit where credit is due, at least my visitor, no doubt ‘woke’ enough to scoop the poop and bag it, cleans up after her/his pup. But what I always wonder when I find the baggie tied and left behind is whether they/them/it understands the principle behind scooping. I’d prefer they/we/us just shoveled the crap into the woods where it could compost naturally somewhere no one would walk on it or smell it, but to encase it in a plastic bag and leave it on the picnic table, somehow that seems, oh, I don’t know, inconsiderate unless the leaver is mentally challenged by the concept of scooping and bagging.

I could leave an instructional sign up, I suppose, although I’m not wanting to man/womansplain to the folks who walk their dogs there how the process is supposed to work. Seems obvious to me. Too obvious to explain. But there are folks out there who definitely could use a manual. A few years back the South End String Band decided to set up an impromptu concert on one of the hills at Terry’s Corner, this being before Freedom Park was imagined. Fools on the Hill, we called it that day. Eventually a woman drove in and we thought, well, here’s the first of what would be a gathering audience.

She got out of her car, attached a leash to her german shepard and proceeded to walk the path up the hill to where we were playing Cripple Creek. About toward the finale she came up beside us and the mutt took his dump next to our bass player, then the woman turned and headed back to her car. A lesser band might have called out, hey, you forgot something, lady! But instead we shook our collective heads, finished the song and then laughed until we cried. Critics, I guess, come in all breeds. I wonder, though, if that same woman is the one who leaves the bagged poop for me/you/or them. Maybe doesn’t like the way we maintain her park…..

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Maybe you saw where a gang of killer whales over in Europe launched coordinated attacks on sailboats, the speculation being that a dominant female orca had been injured by some encounter with a ship and was severely traumatized. Traumatized is a nice way of saying she was mightily pissed off. Out there in Mother Nature the birds are dropping rapidly in numbers, the insects are being reduced too and of course the amphibians are thinking about skipping metamorphosis and staying in the water. We humans haven’t been too kind to the creatures who share the planet. A little busy developing combustion engines, clearcutting the Amazon and working to develop artificial intelligence.

Course we homo sapiens aren’t too concerned, not yet anyway. Global warming? Climate change? What, me worry? We got our jet skis and our air conditioners, who cares about a few less mosquitoes, right? If we have to put up dams to keep the Atlantic from flooding Florida, well okay, we’ll put up sea walls and tide gates, not gonna stop burning coal just because a few environmentalists are whining, sure not gonna litter up Arizona with fields of solar arrays. The future will take care of itself, always has, always will. The birds, well, they’re on their own.

But … I just wonder if this gang of killer whales might be a harbinger of nature taking revenge. I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds as a kid, the world under siege by billions of feathered attackers, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. What if all the insects banded together in massive swarms? Or the frogs formed militias? And the snakes joined them? I know, it sounds paranoid, but dammit, what are those orcas up to? We even gave a few of them nice homes in the swimming pools of SeaWorld and fed them their favorite fish and all we asked was they do a few acrobatics for the paying customers. Geez, talk about ingrates.

I don’t know about you but I plan to keep an eye out down by the garden for any … well, unusual activities by the squirrels or the robins. Yesterday I watched two robins attacking a red squirrel, something I thought was probably normal. Today I’m not so sure.

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As a home improvement specialist I had a set of toilet seat hardware break, no big deal, just buy the replacement parts and attach them back on the seat and top. Trouble was, when I did just that, the seat top had to be held so that it wouldn’t slam back down. The seat and top were custom fit by me about 30 years ago when I built the house, big thick curly maple and maybe the new hardware wasn’t spec’d out for twice that thickness. Although … it had worked well enough for 3 decades. Plumbing, as any of you know who have ventured into that matrix of horror, is as mysterious as it is implacable, a labyrinth of broken dreams and leaky futures a mere mortal might emerge from babbling and cursing. Me, I have been there many times and some might conclude that this is the reason for more than most of my, let’s call them ‘problems’.

Today I spent four hours assembling new hardware. Backwards, upside down, inside out, you name it, I screwed it in, I screwed it out and I screwed it up. Nothing I did seemed to work, most were just total lack of engineering brains, something I have none of apparently. I have the kind of brain that is spatially dyslexic, so I flip the hinge backwards, then realize my mistake. And then do it again. And possibly, later, one more time. Something in my synapses is short circuited, I don’t know what else to call it.

In the end I had a toilet seat whose lid had to be hand held to keep it up. I suspect some evil femme in a factory somewhere in Hunan modified the design to accommodate women’s pleas to us men to leave the damn lid down when we’re done peeing, but of course the problem is more likely in the design of my weak brain. Finally, out of frustration, I took an old wood toilet seat from the shack and replaced it with the Chinese revenge model, then hauled it up to the house here and installed it. Thirty years on that curly maple throne and now I’m stuck with a store-bought.

Nevertheless, all dark toilets have a silver lining, isn’t that what they say? And mine is to hurry down to the patent office to lock in my new specially designed SEAT DOWN commode for the women of the house whose husbands refuse to listen to their laments and protestations and leave the seat down when they’re done. I expect to make a fortune and trust me, I don’t care how many threatening messages I get from pissed off men who tried to fix that seat on their own so it would stay up. Of course I’ll pass some of the royalties on to that Chinese factory worker. If I can ever locate her….

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I just read that 60% of wage earners in the Land of Opportunity are living paycheck to paycheck. Which means they don’t make enough to save anything for, oh, that next ER visit or the unexpected auto repair or the jump in their house or apartment rental. Sure, some folks just spend everything they make anyway, wouldn’t matter if they got a 50% raise in their hourly wage, they’d run out and buy more, probably put it on their credit card, pay the monthly minimum, ignore the huge interest accumulation and just sink deeper in debt. But … I suspect most of these 60%ers are struggling to feed their families, pay the mortgage or the rent, cough up the car payments and buy clothes for their kids. Their incomes are probably down in the minimum wage bottom area.

Nice to know, though, that the Fed keeps jacking the interest rates to try to keep inflation at bay. Or put another way, the Fed wants to see unemployment rates rise. And the last thing they want is for hourly wages to start rising too, just another form of inflation. The lower the unemployment numbers, the more employers will have to pay to entice workers to hire on to flip burgers, repair tires, serve café patrons, scan groceries or make beds at the motels. Yeah, it’s a vicious cycle, a downward spiral, at least for the poor.

Housing prices are going through the roof. Gas is high. Try to find an affordable used car or get in line to buy a new Honda. Supply chain issues, price gouging, too few rental apartments, remote working, you name it. Opioid addictions, homelessness, civil unrest, what’s not to like if you’re the Fed? Crank up those unemployment numbers, keep the wages low, spare the rich. This time around we have the debt ceiling crisis looming, a game of chicken where the right wingers in the GOP put a gun to everyone’s head and dare them to refuse more tax cuts for the wealthy and less benefits for the poor. You might think the richest country in the world might worry less about its billionaires and more for those 60% hanging by a thread. But you’d be wrong…. The rich, in case you hadn’t heard, just keep getting richer.

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