The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Did you know the world’s richest 8 people had more wealth than the poorest 50%? You think maybe this is an April Fool joke? Faux facts? No, eight people had amassed as much riches as 3.7 billion people at the bottom of the heap. Stop and think about that for more than a nano second. Stop in your tracks. Let your jaw drop down to your knees. 8 people – 8! — with more money than 3.7 billion people combined!! 3.7 billion people in poverty, some starving of famine, some refugees from wars, some just us South Enders who maybe didn’t want to work very hard and never started up a Tech Company.

I guess I knew we had some income inequality, growing wider every year, but c’mon, this seems slightly skewed. I don’t begrudge Gates and Bezos and Buffet and Zuck a few billion, but show me the trickle down. Better yet, show the 3.7 billion people at the bottom whose only trickle is maybe a golden shower. Oh, I know I got a lot of neighbors who think whatever we do, don’t tax the rich! Because they think they might be rich one day…. You know, get an inheritance from Uncle Bezos or finally get around to that start-up tech company or reap the gains from those bitcoin investments or … more likely, win the Powerball Lottery. That, or just bottle lightning and sell it to the poor.

God forbid that we redistribute wealth!! Wouldn’t want to be accused of communism or social engineering or even basic Christian values. Those eight fellows made their money the old fashioned way, with lobbyists and sweetheart deals, with ruthless monopolies and cut-throat capitalism. Why on earth would we tax them exorbitantly when we can take the money from regressive taxation, user fees, sales taxes and other old fashioned usury? Sure, we could use those trillions to feed the poor, cure diseases, fund scientific advances, stuff like that, but you know and I do too we’d probably just build a bigger military. Kill the poor, let them die of disease and starvation, pay them as little as possible. After all, they’ll get to inherit the earth, right? Not that I’m blaming those 8 fat cat rich guys, no sir, they’re probably nice fellows, the way we’ll be when we win the Sweepstakes. I’m just saying there’s billions of folks who maybe deserve a slightly bigger piece of the pie. And I don’t mean Humble Pie.

Yep, everybody seems really really happy that the debt ceiling crisis got resolved. Me, not so much as some. I don’t really care to negotiate budgets with a threat to bring down the economy, instigate a recession and ruin our financial standing in the world. Don’t ask me why, just doesn’t seem like the way to run a government. Unless the goal is to run it into the ground.

I particularly don’t like deals that spare the rich and rob from the poor. Okay, maybe rob is a bit over the top. Borrow, you like that better? We’re compromising, you like that word?, we’re compromising by agreeing not to raise taxes on the wealthy by cutting 20 billion from the IRS in return for asking food stamp recipients to find a job. It might seem fair, free food but you have to work. Unless of course you can’t find a job because maybe you have a criminal record and no employer will hire you. Or where you live doesn’t have many job openings and the commute into high-priced cities makes a minimum wage job a joke. Or maybe you have kids and working means hiring child care for more than you make. Lots of reasons but none that matter to the compromisers.

Back when I was on unemployment the Social Services people would always send me and my ilk to a sawmill 30 miles north of me, minimum wage, bad shifts, basically a sweatshop … but… if you turned down a job there the good folks at Social Services stopped paying you unemployment. For me and probably a lot of us down-and-outers, it was better for our mental health to turn that job down. Good racket, though. For that sweatshop and for the bureaucrats who bought into the scam, money saved all around.

They say work gives a person dignity. What they don’t say is that a lot of work does just the opposite. What they also don’t say, ever, paying your fair share of taxes might give the rich a deserved sense of dignity too. And maybe even an honest sense of patriotism. Just saying….

Now, a lot of us South Enders look a little dubiously at Dad’s Day. It sounds suspiciously like one of those STING operations for deadbeat dads delinquent on child support payments. Get us all down here, then throw the net. We can already see the headlines in the Conway Chronicler: South Enders nabbed in Paternity Sting.

NOT that I’m saying I’m a deadbeat dad. I know being an artist and a banjo picker sort of doesn’t help the image, but we all been down on our luck. Little Jimmy understands that. His mom’s a little less forgiving, but when the CD sales start rolling in and the big art commissions, she’ll change her tune.

What with all these studies proving that more than a quarter of men in this country aren’t the genetic fathers of their children, Fatherhood on the South End has taken on a whole new meaning in these modern times we live in. DNA tests take all the romance out of relationships, you ask me. The old family tree’s got some extra branches now. And I guess that’s good, but it sure takes some of the mystery away from sparking and courting. Personally I don’t care to find out half the South End String Band is related.

But it IS father’s day coming up. Won’t be long before dear old dad is just a Test Tube in some sterile lab. Sample # 74 Double X, blue eyes, dark hair, long fingers for the banjo. I like to think I got more to offer than a Petri dish. Although, Little Jimmy’s mom might not agree.

The Band was thinking of maybe lobbying for Father’s Day being a day of amnesty. You know: Give a Dad a Break Day. Or even a whole month. NOT that I’m saying the boys down here are looking for a way to skip the June payments. We were just thinking a little breathing room ….. you know, til the CD sales pick up.

Clyde stopped by our place yesterday, wanted to know if I wanted some wood flooring. Clyde’s notorious for scrounging lumber — beams, 2×4’s, plywood, chopped off rafters and joists full of nails — he takes it all, he and his partner Fred. They’re true South Enders, no building parts are too unworthy for future projects. No oddly shaped root or burled tree trunk couldn’t be imagined as a trellis or a doorway or a garden gate. Their greenhouse/apartment is a testament to homesteader ingenuity, from the recycled plumbing for a radiant heat floor to the gnarly limbs of a cedar tree that frame a window made from sliding glass door panels. The roof is raftered with bridge beams and salvaged lumber, all covered with earth and plantings, a green ecosystem.

So when Clyde asks if I want some wood flooring, red lights go off and a siren shrieks deep down in my hippocampus. “You don’t want it yourself?” I ask, meaning, what’s wrong with this flooring if you boyz are turning it down? Clyde avows how they don’t need flooring and anyway, it’s all mismatched remnants. Like they don’t have mismatched remnants from one end of their property to the next??? “Use em for furniture,” I advise. “I took my leftovers and made cabinets and bookcases, banjos, hell, it’s hardwood.”

“We’re jammed up,” Clyde says sadly. “Stuff we got now is getting powder post beetles. We couldn’t use it all in the rest of our lifetimes.” Which is true! They’re beyond Scroungers now, heading toward Hoarders. It’s a fine line, I know, and only a packrat like myself who’s scrounged most of his life is qualified to define the slip from Collector to Psychopathology. Clyde, I diagnosed, had stepped back from the Abyss. Enough was finally enough. Clutter was one thing, tunnels to the kitchen and bathroom quite another.

No mas! There comes a time when a sane man knows implicitly to STOP. Before it’s too late. Before madness descends like a dark curtain blotting light and reason.

Today I picked up 10 boxes of hardwood flooring, enough to lift the front end of my truck. No, I don’t really need flooring. But, you never know, right? Now if I can just figure out where to store all this wood until I need it….

I identify as a guy, a cisgender, actually, and yeah, I had to look it up. It means I kept the same sex as I got tagged with when I was born. I’m pretty happy with the designation, not planning to start experimenting at my advanced age, not having gender doubts, not really worried about others who do. Folks have to figure this stuff out themselves and it probably doesn’t help one bit that we’ve politicized the journey for these people, hard enough without the whackjobs taking their jabs, passing their laws and generally just being, oh, for want of a better word, un-Christian. Live and let live, do unto others, all that peace and love stuff, let’s just learn to get along, children.

I know, for some it’s really hard to accept the idea of a man wanting to be a woman … or vice versa. But c’mon, you’ve all known people who were caught in between hormones, tomboys, sissy guyz, macho women, some who loved people of their own sex, some who wanted to be the other sex, some who couldn’t make up their minds, some who loved both. It’s a complicated world, for sure, and if the pronoun preference bugs you, okay, I get it, but look, not too many years ago gays were relegated to the closet. For a long time it was illegal to love someone of your own sex. Seems like ages ago, but believe me, it was yesterday and worse, it still is yesterday for a lot of states in these not very united states.

Uganda just passed anti-gay laws, some that trigger a death penalty. We got nations that are anti-woman, much less gender bending. In this country we like to think of ourselves as enlightened. Progressive. Although progressive is now a pejorative word in plenty of sectors. Movies, the internet, television, streaming, you name it, pretty much an across the board acceptance of LGBTQIA2S+, the plus being a catch-all for whatever part of the sexual spectrum we missed. But now we have a political party that thinks demonizing Hollywood or Disney or permissive parenthood is a path to winning office in the Land of Grievances. Too late, boyz, your hormones are too toxic! Plus, you’re on the wrong side of history. Homosexuality isn’t going away. Trans aren’t either. The closet doors are open, fellas, and if you look close, you’ll find a few of your friends and family. You might even, if you open your eyes, find yourself. Scary, I know….