The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

As most of you careful readers know, political correctness down here on the partisan shores of the steamy equatorial South End is probably not one of our more valued virtues. Maybe because we’re all trapped down at this skinny dead end backwash cul-de-sac, we’ve learned — the hard way usually —- that if we want to get along without civil war, we have to disagree without resorting to a full blown arms race. And believe me, we disagree. On most everything. That’s why we all ended up down here at the end of a tilting island at the end of America on the edge of a continental shelf sliding herky-jerky under another tectonic plate.

This week the talk down at Jolene’s Beauty Salon and Boutique revolved exclusively around the question of same sex marriage. Scissors and tongues snipped and clucked, but Jolene says no blood was spilled. Ronald, her frothy new beautician, might have intentionally miscolored Mrs. Adeline’s silver perm a tad on the electric blue side when she made the comment that ‘gayness’, seemed to her, was a lifestyle choice, but mostly the banter was affable.

Rhonda Wilkins did wonder out loud if the bill’s passage meant she and her no-account husband Tom’s opposite sex marriage would be annulled now. “That’s wistful thinking,” Wanda blurted from two chairs away in the middle of a henna touch-up on the minister’s mizzus who steadfastly refused to be drawn into a curling iron showdown, and if Rhonda hadn’t been curled herself and heat-lamped into her chair, she might have stormed out, but by the end of the drying cycle she was cooled down and still unhappily married to the love of her life whose zenith of ambition was to reach retirement before cirrhosis.

So Valentine’s Day on the metrosexual South End this year promises to be a cross between Mardi Gras and a Pink St. Patrick’s Day. Maybe no parades by the Diner, but a lot of closets opened for an early spring cleaning. Believe me, the South End could always stand a little more love…. And just in case Mrs. Adeline is right, some of us should think about renewing those old marriage vows. On the outside chance there really might be a statute of limitation.

A man can only kill so many dogs and cats before he wakes to ungodly howls and screeches in the middle of the night. Call it a Human Society if you want, if it shields you from Nazi guilt over canine and feline genocide, but trust me, when you throw the unwanted creatures into an incinerator, excuses won’t cut it. Euthanasia. Let’s call that a convenient euphemism. Killing is pretty much killing.

So I left my minimum wage job at the Pound. Lasted 3 months, probably two too long. A metro driver job I’d filled out a forgotten application for popped up. Good money, three times minimum wage, drive these 40 foot buses all over the city of Madison, Wisconsin. I took a training course, learned every route, joined the Teamsters and got assigned to everything from school bus duty to fill-ins for sick drivers. When I kicked a mouthy high school kid off my bus miles from his house in sub-zero weather, my boss called me in and explained their insurance would frown on frozen juvenile delinquents abandoned along my route. I said I understood, but actually I didn’t.

We drivers were in the Teamsters Union, contracts for 60 plus hours a week, six days a week one day off. I asked the boyz — there were zero women drivers then — why on god’s green earth they’d negotiate slave labor hours … and they told me they’d get overtime pay. And the best part, they said, they wouldn’t have time to spend it. This, needless to say, was Incomprehensible to me! You work 6 days a week, 60 hours or more and see how long YOU last. Me, you guessed it, 3 months. I mean, if I wanted a career, I’d have gone to college. Wait! I did go to college. If I wanted a career, I would have taken courses Other Than literature, philosophy and poly-sci. Obviously, I didn’t want a career. Or a job that lasted longer than 3 months.

So when my boss, this gruff no-nonsense sort of drill sergeant, called me in again for another little sit-down, only to inform me that a passenger had complained about my humming — my humming! — and would I cease and desist my musical annoyance. Also — ALSO! — the passengers complained that I drove only 15 mph at the end of the route. Yeah, I said, if I drove the speed limit I would pass stops 10 to 20 minutes ahead of the printed times. You want me to sail by early, I asked. He said he didn’t want me driving 15 mph. Neither do I, I said. He said,
So we’re clear on this? I said, You want me to stick to the schedule or you want me to leave folks waiting at the stop when I’ve gone by 10 or 15 minutes early, subzero weather, remember that insurance policy you got. He said, I don’t want complaints about you driving 15 mph. Catch 22.

My boss asked, Are we clear here? Are we done here? I said, you bet. And gave my notice…. I am not — I want to be clear here — I am not a man who avoids burning bridges. I have always believed the best days of my life are the ones where I’ve quit my job. Freedom, baby, freedom at last! Course, the worst days are the ones shortly after, looking for the next crappy job.

So after the disillusionment of a short career in middle management as a Food Manager at the University of Wisconsin, I decided to take a job as kennel worker at the Humane Society next door to the Oscar Mayer hot dog factory which lent the area a fragrance of feral flatulence. The dog pound, every other day or so, fired up its Incinerator and burned the cats and dogs, kittens and puppies which Mike, our manager, had dispatched with an injection of phenobarbital, adding burnt hair and searing meat to the olfactory mix. We had ourselves an animal Auschwitz.

I had gone to the Pound to look for a pet, see if they had a little guy whose beseeching eyes thawed my wintry heart enough to adopt. I found a wiener dog, appropriately enough, a dachshund, and by the time I’d put the little fellow on a leash, I’d seen the sign Kennel Worker Wanted, applied for and been accepted as their new employee, start next day.

There were three of us on the crew working the pens and the outdoor runs. Larry sprayed down the pens, I was the puppy room guy and Mary Jean handled the cats. All day I cleaned the poop and piss, laid down fresh newspapers and talked to prospective adopters. My partner Larry had just gotten out of prison, served 16 months for selling LSD to a federal undercover narcotics agent, and this job was the only one he’d found where an ex-felon could get hired. Mary Jean had terminal cancer, she told us one day at lunch break, but she didn’t. She just liked the idea, I guess, of an early and tragic demise. Maybe too much soap opera in her teens.

I told myself shoveling shit was no worse — and maybe the same — as my last job, just slightly more literal. And maybe that was true. But I never killed anyone or anything at my dining hall or my grill or my ice cream parlor. Even though I did poison a few dozen folks with my toxic potato salad warmed to a microbial paradise under the heating lamps. But that, I told the cuisine cops who finally discovered the source for the rash of food poisonings, was accidental, the result of ignorance. Personally, I always like my potato salad a little on the warm side.

I lasted three months at the kennel. You can only kill so many dogs and cats before the toll on your psyche weighs on you with the tonnage of guilt no rationalization can lighten. To lighten the burden, I ended up adopting three dogs, maybe a bit too much atonement for a one bedroom upstairs apartment over a TV repair shop. But of course, that’s another story. One, for the time being, I’ll spare you.

Right after I’d graduated college and quit my job as 8th grade teacher — deciding, I guess, I’d had my fill of institutional learning — I applied for a job as ‘food manager’ of the University’s Student Union. I’d been supervisor of the dining hall that served most of the old dormitories on the Univ. of Wisconsin lakefront for three years so I was hired to run a dining hall, an ice cream parlor and a grill on the side of campus where engineers and folks who wanted a career that would result in well-paying jobs would go to eat. Unlike the Union on the lakefront where folks who majored in Renaissance English or Poly Sci came to plot the Revolution, this being the late ‘60’s, early ‘70’s, when idealism trumped fiscal survival. Good Karma was all we needed.

I lasted three months, not long after the Union South Poisonings in which multiple students and staff ate the potato salads left under the heating lights to grow bacterial toxins. Hell if I knew mayonnaise would spoil so quick. I was good at managing a hundred employees. Food, not so much.

Dave, my boss who ran the entire Union, asked how I could not know that. I told him I had a degree in Useless Information, not Food Science. ‘You knew that when you hired me,’ I said as my no mea culpa, but in the end I pled guilty and told him I would move on soon as he found a suitable replacement, which took no time flat, some former military cook. The days of my employees smoking dope in the freezer with me were about to end. The General would tighten their ship, count on that, Mister!

Dave wanted me to go back to school, get a degree in Restaurant and Hospitality. Good jobs, he pitched. ‘Well paid. You could go anywhere and find work.’ Dave was a good guy, even after I refused to wear ties, dress up or act adult. I think he saw me as the kid he never had, but he could steer from delinquency to the straight and very narrow.

Course, I had bigger dreams. A month after I’d trained Col. Hardass my job, I walked into a Humane Society that needed a kennel worker, two bucks an hour, no managerial responsibilities whatsoever, got hired on the spot, started the very next day. The rest, as they say in the movies, was history. I was on my way ….

The Chinese just brought back a few pounds of moon rocks. Awhile back the Japanese hauled in some comet dust. Won’t be long before we excavate Martian soil and send it back to Earth too. You might expect, if it isn’t true already, that Qanon or some other reality-free zone will report on the alien viruses that these extra-terrestrial geologic immigrants have unleashed on our unsuspecting population. Right alongside the story of the Martian landing hoax conspiracy.

After all, comets are suspected of ‘seeding’ the planet with rare elements that made life possible here at home. And probably Mars. And maybe the moon. Forget building that beautiful wall on our southern border, buddy, maybe you need to worry about the Killer Virus from Mars. Hopefully our space scientists are using advanced screening technologies to insure the Lunavirus doesn’t escape the confines of their highly secure labs. You know, the way they do with the ones they’re making here on planet Earth.

Me, I’m not so sure. We send out satellites to the end of our solar system looking for life forms that might like Chuck Berry, figuring, I guess, that any species that rocks to Johnny B. Goode must be the variety that won’t see us and our pals as food. You know, intelligent beings like ourselves. The kind who wouldn’t wage wars over religious differences, the beings who wouldn’t overheat their planet or exhaust its resources, the species that believed in provable facts not Venusian mumbo jumbo, smart folks like ourselves who evolved big brains without really believing in evolution. Those beings…

So yeah, bring that space dust here, see what’s hiding in it. Probably benign. Harmless. You know, like us ….