The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

My recent request for a visa to emigrate to my old country, my place of birth, was turned down yesterday, no reason given, but I suspect it’s due to the fact no one knows where that country is these days. It’s been moved or it’s become invisible, you tell me. I’ve had a love/hate relationship with my old nation most of my life, probably because I reached so-called adulthood during the Viet Nam War, the Kennedy assassinations, the Martin Luther King murder, the Chicago convention riots orchestrated by Mayor Daley, the Gulf of Tonkin and Tricky Dick. J. Edgar Hoover was head of the secret police and Watergate was about to unfold. It was hard for me to send Valentine cards to my place of birth back then.

But age has mellowed me. Or at least it’s made me more senile, more forgetful, maybe even more forgiving. Oh sure, there was that military mop-up in Panama, Grenada, the first Gulf War. Kind of brought back those bad memories of the 60’s and early 70’s. I guess I’d sort of dropped out for a few decades, moved to the edge of the continent, crossed onto the island and didn’t look back. Literally burned my TV, didn’t read newspapers, internet hadn’t been invented, life was, to use an overworked phrase, idyllic. The future looked okay, but I was mostly living in the present, not a bad place to live if you got a few acres, a roof, a part time job that pays the mortgage and covers the groceries, not bad at all.

You keep your nose to the ground, grow a garden, plant an orchard, build a house, you don’t spend as much time watching politics. Oh sure, there was that Iran/Contra war Reagan illegally funded with arms sales, covert for awhile. Clinton got himself impeached for chronic dickmanship, then Bush Junior invaded Iraq again after the Twin Trade Towers were toppled by bin Laden, a bad piece of intervention that will cost us and cost us and cost us again. Okay, I was starting to pay attention to national and world events, even voting, even got asked to run for county commissioner, that’s how above ground I stuck my head. You start to give a damn, you’re asking for trouble, real trouble.

Obama got himself elected right when the Great Recession started, the one where the banks and Wall Street gambled heavily with our money and lost, but even so, I got caught up in that Hope thingy of his, maybe America, if it could vote for a black guy, a half black guy anyway, as President, well, the future looked bright. Real bright. I guess I shoulda bought shades….

Well, somebody pulled the shades on that bright future anyway and his name was Trump. They’ve impeached him but no way are they gonna find him guilty with this sycophant Senate. Without a doubt the little huckster might win another four years in office and if so, he’ll want four or eight after that. My country is gone. And for some odd reason, not clear to me now, I want it back. The question I have, the one I have yet to answer, is why.

I’ve been upgrading my carpentry skills lately, helping a buddy build a chicken coop for a good friend of ours who had a deadline to get it done since she had inherited some show birds from folks who needed to get them gone, (a long story I’ll spare you). Every now and then I get a wild hair to raise the rascally little fellows myself for the eggs, but then I remember my first experience with chicken husbandry, a story I will repeat here as a cautionary tale for myself. It goes something like this rightchere….
Now the South End’s got its own economics. Being’s how there’s no work, no industry, no banks and no investment firms, we’ve had to resort to alternative fiduciary strategies. Course I’m talking about bartering. You know, good old fashioned horse trading. Bartering’s an age-old tradition on the South End. It’s a cousin of stealing and an uncle of lying. When it’s working right, both ends of the trade feel like they cheated the other guy blind.

I got my first banjo in a swap for a .22 Remington rifle I didn’t want any more. Most of my illegal building structures are erected from bartered lumber, doors, windows and the like. I’ve traded boats and cars and pickups. Hell, I’d probably swap the muzzus if I weren’t so fretful she’d get the short end of the stick….

Course on the South End you’ll run into fellas who know the horse-trading game a whole lot better’n you. And I don’t mean just the artists. I was trading an old boy for some chickens when I first arrived and I was putting together my barnyard petting zoo. Chickens and a rear end for my Chevy half ton. He lived up some holler in a one room tarpaper house and lived completely off what he gleaned from the old dump. He had a TV showroom set up out in the drive: black and whites, color, consoles, cabinets, with or without hi-fi, whole entertainment centers. The chickens were there too, watching sixteen of their fav-o-rite programs. I said I’d take a dozen if they were good layers. He said, hoo boy, get ready for an omelette and we commenced to chasing chickens from CBS to the outhouse, from NBC to the barn. Stuffed em cackling and flapping in a burlap sack.

We counted em out at the end and this old boy says LOOKEE here and damned if he doesn’t pull two eggs out. Them’s real layers, he says with half his teeth missing. Course I was real pleased with this trade right from the get-go. Oldest trick in the book. Guess I never read the book. You all know, I suspect, I never got another egg and those old banty hens, being one hundred years old, was way too tough to eat. After awhile I just let em watch TV.

So I’m okay with letting someone else raise chickens for my eggs. And if I have to help to build the coop, that’s all right too. Sometimes in this harsh world, you still have to do some bartering. What an old geezer like me has learned is who you ought to barter with….

Some of you gentle readers may not realize that when you open up a blogsite like this one here, you open yourself up to all manner of incoming enemy fire too. Occasionally one of you will respond on the Comment section, which is fine and dandy, but 99% of the time what Skeeter gets is SPAM. Not even ordinary spam, but some alien mangled English non syntactical version that invariably leaves him scratching his head. What is it they’re after? What kind of advertising ploy is it when the message is indecipherable?

Here’s the latest example: Aсtually whеn someοne doesn’t know after that its up to other users that they will help, so here it happens.

????????????????????????????!!!! I’m no genius, but c’mon, what is this trying to say? And what are they trying to sell? Am I supposed to click on the website to find out? It’s like running into Crazy Mary down by the library, the woman who mumbles to herself and becomes irrationally angry at a moment’s notice. You sort of learn to cross the street and avoid eye contact unless you’re looking for a morning wake-up confrontation. And most of us aren’t. You certainly aren’t going to ask her if she’d care for a cup of coffee, see what’s really bugging her. That’s why we pay mental health professionals the big bucks. Well, that’s why we used to pay mental health professionals, even if it was fairly minimal. Now we let Mary wander the streets until she hurts herself or someone else.

I guess these spammers aren’t really hurting Skeeter. Being a former English teacher, they do hurt me. I see better language skills on my made-in- China product’s assembly directions. It IS worrisome that there seem to be a lot of Crazy Mary’s out there hustling god only knows what on the internet. That, or Skeeter is a whack-magnet who hasn’t got sense enough to cross the digital highway.

I know this, it gives a fine American meat by-product a really bad name. Actually, if when someone who does know after opening this can its up to other eaters that they can chew helpfully, so yes, here it happens. Give that to the dog and see if it prefers dry.

Like a lot of places, the South End is far more discerning of the oddities of others than themselves. The Avant-Gardeners’ hippie commune was the most prevalent gossip for years down here. Were they communists? Were they polygamists? Were they drug addicts? Were they pagans? There was no end to the rumors, no matter how fantastic — and, of course, the Gardeners themselves fed the flames with their fantastic behavior. Not just their colorful gypsy attire or their unorthodox social behavior, but Grand Experiments involving ship building and dome construction, all gone horribly awry, yet never diminishing their unbounded optimism or their total lack of fear of failure. They were pioneers, not just in breaking ground for their greenhouses and their livestock sheds, but in how they viewed the world. And the rest of us South Enders.

So we shunned them, most of us. Made them Outsiders in a place already Outside. Oh, a few of us bought their eggs and raw goat milk. I traded bread for those and vegetables, even got to know a few of the menfolk. The women mostly held back, kids peeking from behind their long granny dresses. Although I did teach Betsy, the most gregarious of the whole troupe, how to make stained glass. She would walk to my shack and glean scraps from the throwaway pile, then make the most beautiful suncatchers and small windows, far surpassing her teacher in no time flat.

After a few seasons I showed them where the wily Dungeness could be caught by hand and where to dig for free range clams. I took a few of the boys out in the S.S. Pterodactyl, my little sailboat, and we fished for true cod and bottomfish before they were gone, both the fish and the boys. Because one day the FOR SALE signs went up and the farm was abandoned as fast as it had arrived.

I bought a couple of their goats and some laying hens, took some greenhouse glass panels, accepted some macramé and pottery gifts, then waved adios as their gypsy caravan exited the South End one misty, fog filled autumn day. I guess they were as mysterious to me as they were to my neighbors, the only difference being I never minded their hippie presence. But I still remember that day when the Flower Children headed off island, north into the cruel ‘70’s, waving goodbye as I stood by my blue mailbox in a slow drizzle, wishing they would never leave. For me at least, that was the day, looking back, the 60’s really ended.