The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Down here in the soggy trailers of the South End we got plenty of folks who find it impossible to throw out anything. We call them Hoarders. Cars sit strangled by blackberry vines out back, garage is full of old parts rusting slowly, closets are jammed with clothes that haven’t been worn in years, sheds are piled high with lumber being eaten by powder beetles. You ask them why they keep that crap and they’ll give you the fish face like you were a complete idiot and tell you they might need that lawnmower that stopped running a decade ago for parts. The lumber they might build another shed with … you know, to store more crap.

Believe me, I’m not casting the first stone. I got way too many sheds myself filled with stuff from 30 or 40 years ago when money was tight and all those plumbing and electrical left-overs were kept ‘just in case’. Just in case comes along about as often as sunshine in November down here. Truth is, we’re too lazy to haul it to the dump. Although, some of us are serious and serial Hoarders. I have a buddy who has tunnels in his shack to navigate between the kitchen and bedroom and bathroom. He lives like an ant, burrowed into the ground. His place is a Black Hole, the gravitational pull sucking everything in, allowing nothing out.

We recently moved my old man from his house in Wisconsin to an apartment at the assisted living joint down the road, a downsizing that required tossing half his stuff. Considering that we moved him from Georgia over 15 years earlier and tried to downsize Mom and him then, encountering nothing but resistance, we told them we’d be back in 6 months with a U-Haul so they needed to do it themselves, no ifs ands or buts. We ended up needing two giant U-Haul trucks to move them. Most of what we moved was worthless junk. So years later we still had that worthless junk to sort through, toss, take to Goodwill or find someone to take the stuff. It took us nearly a week. Then a month later we had to move him again to a less independent apartment. Took us four days. And a month ago we moved him again into the nursing unit. Three days. Same drill, same junk.

Believe me, you do that for your parents, you’ll take an unjaundiced eye to your own closets and sheds once you come home. I took three large loads of clothes I hadn’t worn in years to the thrift stores. The dump loads barely make a dent, but it’s a start. Someone offered me a very nice cabinet the other day, something a few years back I would have grabbed, but not now. No more stuff! It’s the wrong direction now. It’s time to let go of these things. I don’t want to live in an ant farm when I’m decrepit. And I don’t have kids to clean out the debris of a lifetime.

January 6th is today. Donald Trump and his kids were just subpoenaed a few days ago. Jeffrey Epstein’s pimp was found guilty of procuring underage girls for their pleasure palace and the Theranos CEO was convicted of corporate fraud. Omicron is lashing the country with record infection rates and I’m noticing more and more folks in the grocery stores defying the mask mandate. It’s a wonderful day in the neighborhood.

The Civil War, yeah, that Civil War, rages on. And you thought it ended at Appomattox when Lee surrendered to Grant. Or when Clark Gable walked out on Scarlet…. C’mon, the War never ended. We call it the Culture Wars now, but it’s the same battle. White vs. anyone not white. Fundamental Christians vs. anyone not their sect. Heteros vs. anyone different. Rural vs. Urban, Fox News vs. Hollywood. Trump roared into office with dog whistles and barely concealed racism. Build the wall, build the wall! Keep em out, lock em up, knock em down! Don’t let them tear down the statues to the Confederate heroes! Don’t teach any history that blemishes our proud heritage! Whitewash it! Our kids don’t need to hear that stuff!

Make America Great Again! Bring back the Eisenhower era and declare Joe McCarthy the courageous commie fighter, bring back Father Knows Best, pretend to go to church, the True Church, not the synagogue or the mosque. Worship the True God, not Allah. Abide by the scriptures, no homosexuals, no equal rights for women. Times were good back then. People knew their place! We knew who the Enemy was.

The Enemy is us, we the people. January 6th is a day of reckoning. Democracy, that great experiment, is a far more fragile enterprise than we thought for most of our lives. Maybe we were just naïve….

My neighbors in the suburb across the road have a Homeowners Association. Which is a simpler way of saying they have created a set of complicated bylaws that promote factions between themselves to fight for – or against – additional dues on tree cutting – or growing if they’re over 17 feet tall – water restrictions, weed control, building requirements, paint color schemes, roof materials, on street parking restrictions, beach trail maintenance, bulkhead repairs and nationality of their prospective spouses. In essence, they’ve manufactured the potential for their own small civil war.

Of course if they didn’t have covenants, bylaws, rules and regs, board meetings and various committees, I’m sure by now anarchy would rule, neighbors would be shot, trees would block views of the Sound and the Olympics, vacant lots would grow weeds and abandoned lawnmowers, windows would be boarded over, some houses would sport fuchsia paintjobs and the whole she-bang would look like our very own Kabul.

Welcome to the South End! Welcome to my neighborhood! When the turnip truck I rode in on dropped me off back in ’77, the ‘hood was a cut over woods across the road. For 40 years house after house got built, one or so a year, folks came and then left, the politics shifted, money rolled in, new owners remodeled, outbuildings were added, the well was updated, the bulkhead was replaced, the wealthy outnumbered the less wealthy, and, of course, dividing lines shifted accordingly. Welcome to America!

Lately there’s a new disruption in the Force. The Big Storm of ’21 knocked multiple trees on the current bulkhead built decades ago and knocked a 30 foot section out into the wind and waves which promptly tore the logs away. Replacement had already been on the table, some folks arguing against it, some for, some wanting to wait, some wanting immediate action. The Storm left a gaping hole in all those plans as well as in the bluff behind the breach. Think of a hornet’s nest slapped with a big stick. Think of million dollar houses sticking off the bluff. Think of refugees pouring in from across the road to our side, tent encampments, razor wire, U.N. aid, cholera, a community gone mad. Welcome to the World!

All I can hope for now is me and the mizzus become the new waterfront. Good luck, I guess, to the old neighbors. They may have to relocate to some other island with less stringent covenants.

Ah, it’s déjà vu all over again is what you’re thinking. Same old politics, same old global warming warnings, same old faux news, same old Covid with a new name. You can hardly stand to turn on the news anymore, same as me. Another report on the plague statistics, a plea to vaccinate or wear masks, another record warm/cold/wet/wild weather phenomenon, airline cancellations, partisan politics, the feeling that you heard this yesterday, same stories, you heard it the day before and the day before that. You have a hard time remembering if this Covid pandemic started last year or the year before that. You no longer care what day of the week it is. Or month. Or …

It was two years ago. I know, it took me awhile too. Two years compressed into one long one, a stay-at-home, quarantine time. Zoom meetings, online shopping, canceled parties, mask mandates, anti-mask mandates. Oh right, there was an election in there somewhere, then an attack on the Capitol, a Stop the Steal, a Congressional investigation into the January 6th insurrection, wasn’t there an impeachment trial too? It’s all lost in a fog. Loss of taste, loss of smell, loss of memory, all symptoms, all long haul conditions. If you believe in the pandemic at all …. And a good unvaccinated percentage of us don’t.

But here it is, another year, a not so fresh start, time for resolutions, eh? Why bother, is what you’re thinking, same as me. Nothing’s changing, nothing is going to make this one different than the last one or the one before that, nothing is the best you can hope for. So ring in the New Year if you want. We canceled the party we’d had for the past three decades, we canceled the bonfire we thought we might have with a few other survivors, we may cancel 2022. We plan to just hunker down and celebrate in the same way we’ve celebrated the past 700 or so days of the lost years. Happy New Year, everybody! Make a toast! Hope for the best! Maybe next year will be different. But don’t bet the farm on it.