The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/audio-thinking-outside-the-box1.mp3[/podcast]audio — thinking outside the box

Before the advent of circuit boards, silicon chips and computerized everything, us do-it-yerselfers took no little pride in fixing our broken appliances, our busted stereos, our crippled cars and even our dysfunctional lives.  Really didn’t have much choice given our fiscal challenges.  The washing machine quits, you have to weigh that $50 service fee just to drive down here.   Believe me, you’ll learn to diagnose a blown fuse or a broken fan belt yourself before you wait two days in your last clean underwear and then pay half the cost of a Maytag to keep the wringer washer working another six months.

My dryer quit this week.  Nothing new there — it goes on strike regularly.  But this time the little gizmo that held the blown fuse wouldn’t let go of the fuse.  No big deal — I went on-line, googled up the part, found it … and discovered it cost more than that service fee I’m trying to save.  Being a South Ender I balked at the rip-off price.  No way was I paying $54 plus shipping for a plastic toy fuseholder.  Next trip into town I scrounged the hardware store, found a reasonable facsimile and rewired the dryer to hold it …. And yeah, $5 later, I was fluffing up my dungarees.

Sometimes it pays to think outside the box, cornball as that expression is.  I bought an extra hard drive for my computer — and oh yeah, I got one — but when it came it wouldn’t fit inside the Tower.  A North Ender might send it back, see if there was a better fit.  But like I said, we like to think outside the box, so I cut a slot with a hacksaw in the tower side and slid that new blank brain right in and left its frontal lobe sticking out for better ventilation.  Sure, the missus shook her head sadly.  But the salient point here is that it worked and  MORE IMPORTANT BY FAR, the job was done.

The trick here is to show No Fear to these malfunctioning objects, even the ‘black boxes’.  They sense fear quicker than a dog or a tax assessor.  Open them up, grab a handful of wires, pull on em with authority, half the time they’ll respond positively when they realize unequivocally you’re the Boss.  When my VCR ate a rental movie, I eviscerated the aggressive little unit and when it still refused to function, I made an example of it to its electronic brethren and tossed it two stories out into the driveway.  I have put rocks through recalcitrant TV picture tubes and in one instance burned one alive, fully plugged in, begging like HAL in 2001—A Space Odyssey.  Some machines are incapable of learning.  You must be firm.  You may even need to be ruthless.  The worst mistake you can make is allowing one miscreant cyborg mutant monster to infect the rest.  Give em an inch, they’ll grab half of cyberspace.

For those who think it’s a brave new world, one where nothing can be fixed or repaired, cowboy UP!  Down here we aren’t going to be slaves to the machine.  Even if we have to destroy every damn one ….!

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/audio-4th-of-july-on-the-south-end.mp3[/podcast]

We got our fair share of veterans down here, heroes of the wars, past and present, maybe too many wars, you ask me, but nothing anybody should voice too loudly any particular night at the VFW Hall.  Patriotism means a lot of things to every person, but most of the veterans I know pretty much believe they got the patent on it.  Maybe they do.  After all, they marched into the fray and a lot of their buddies didn’t march back out.  You don’t question the loyalty of these vets, not ever, and you don’t doubt their patriotism.

The other night some of the boyz were waxing nostalgic over a bottle of some privatized CostCo single malt Baghdad Bill had brought to the Marina and Bait Shop for the usual Friday night poker game.  Two Toke was there, and Big Larry too after closing up the grill at the Diner, plus me and a few other draft dodging, student deferred, anti-war types, and what with the 4^th rolling right up and the fireworks stands about to set up red white and blue bunting to sell incendiaries legally, we naturally gravitated to holiday talk and that led to Independence Day, not just here but for Iraqis and Egyptians and Afghan women, and that got us going on wars, good and bad, won and lost.  Two Toke was about one toke — or at least one shot glass — over the line when he started musing about Viet Nam.  Two Toke was there during the Tet Offensive.  He lost most of his unit and a part of a knee there.  He doesn’t have one good word to say about that war, and really, none about any since.  I guess he earned the right.  Bill was in Iraq.  He argues with T.T., but it’s like arguing with a Stanwoodopolite whether they’d like to be annexed into Camano Island.  You’re just asking for some vicious yelling.

Big Larry served in Korea, meaning, we got about all the wars covered since WWII.  Except maybe Granada.  Okay, Panama and Bosnia too.  Some nights we even have Jimmy Z sit in for a hand or two and he was in on the tail end of the Big One, kind of the grand old soldier, and when Jimmy’s sitting in, not even Two Toke questions the point of the latest wars.  Jimmy, though, doesn’t talk much about his two years in the Pacific theater, which took him through Iwo Jima and some nasty business on the beach and then back in the jungle.

Two Toke was wondering aloud if the Revolutionary War was fought so we could just march back over to some foreign country and make life hell for somebody else while Big Larry and Bill were starting to take swigs with every one of Tom’s verbal shots.  I might’ve let them duke it out if it wasn’t for the fact that I had 3 kings over a couple of jacks and the pot was by far the fattest it had been all night.

Boyz boyz boyz, I said, trying to sound like the cool head I never am.  Let’s agree to, you know, not agree.  But hellfire, we’re all in this together, aren’t we?  We got food to eat, a bottle to finish, we got friends and family, some of us got jobs, we got the great good luck to be born here and not in Smokey Point, let’s just be a little thankful, shall we?  4^th of July is coming and we can all at least be glad we’re sitting here in the Land of the Brave Home of the Free.

Course, that set Larry off, fuming over mangled quotations, and before I could get my bets down, the Marina was its own 4^th of July, fireworks ablaze.  I don’t know who won the argument by the end.  I know this: one of us lost a plump pot while he held a winning hand.  Poker, I guess, is a little too much like war.  But we’ll all be at the table next Friday night.  Probably fight about privatizing liquor.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/audio-trim-and-a-shave.mp3[/podcast]audio — trim and a shave

Down at Jolene’s South End Boutique and Spa, the ladies come for hair repair and a weekly update on gossip.  The B&S is conveniently located just down the blacktop from the Diner so while their menfolk pile on another layer of winter cholesterol, the women can slide in for a touch-up.  Jolene and her cosmetologically adept staff — meaning Wanda and Ronald — offer everything from henna highlighting to full perm.  And, of course, like most retail establishments on the capitalist frontline here on the South End, they offer everything from local artworks and gifts to a plentiful assortment of salon products for the woman in search of a temporary bulwark against gravity and age.

In other words it’s a fine environment to get things off your chest.  Jolene is adept with a scissors and a necessary brake when the ‘unburdening’ gets excessive, but she knows, like most of us on the frontier of a receding civilization, the bitch sessions are not only cathartic, they’re as close to entertainment as we’ll get in the daytime.  Subjects range from Jolene’s no-account sister-in-law’s messy affairs to why there’s no damn holiday in America celebrating a woman.  Because men make the damn holidays, that’s the short and not so sweet of it…  Ronald might pipe in there’s none for gay men either but a moment later, scissors snipping like a crab on steroids, he’ll be off on a tangent about so and so’s snide comment about his new nose ring.  The salon is as abuzz with snide comments as it is with hairsprays and clippers.  Us men rarely pick up the missus there, and if we do, the place goes eerily silent.

Two Toke Tom has his hair coiffed by Ronald.  It changes color every month or two, blue streaks substituted for red locks.  One of the boyz at the Diner asked him what they talked about in there, like it was the Rosicrucians meeting in a graveyard after midnight.  Two Toke just smiled his Cheshire Cat stoned smile, put a hand to sizzling hot purple stripe and said wistfully, Girl Talk.

If I want to keep abreast of current events, it might be time I got my own south end’s trimmed down at Jolene’s.  But I probably won’t tell the boyz…

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/down-at-the-marina1.mp3[/podcast]down at the marina

imes are tough these days down at the South End Marina and Bait Shop.  A lot of barnacle-bottomed boats moored idle at the docks, their glory days of fishing now just a dry-rotted memory.  Occasionally you’ll see one of the skippers doing a little brightwork on some faded trim or turning over an engine just to clear the cobwebs from the lines and the tanks, but time and overfishing have taken heavy tolls.

Used to be the fleet was the pride of the island, running from Mabana to Bristol Bay in search of salmon openings and halitbut catches.  We maybe didn’t have the widows’ walks the Narragansett boys had for their lonely wives to gaze forlornly out to sea scanning horizons for men returned from hunting whale, but it was an event nonetheless when captains sailed into view with full cargo holds and tales of Alaskan storms.

Sadly, those catches dwindled and the fleet turned to lesser dreams.  For a time they chartered for the tourist fishermen,  CEO’s up from San Diego and Frisko, Portland and Seattle, in search of trophy gooeyducks and the elusive free range oyster, but even those became uncommon, then finally rare.  One by one the Captains Courageous were forced to sit idle, swapping tongue-worn tales of the Big Catch of ’78 or the killer storm of ’82, mostly lies now, but better than constant complaining.   And far better than hanging out in the unemployment office.

Some of the skippers sold their boats for what they could get, just pesos on the dollar.  Hazy Jake ran Canadian Bud for awhile through the islands until the borders tightened and his nerves frayed worse than his lines.  You see the last of them down at the bait shop most days, those Ahabs whose Mobys disappeared, hunkered down  over big chipped mugs of thick coffee from the self serve pot, predicting tide and weather, predicting  everything except the future, a place they rarely visit now.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/audio-johnny-appleseed-in-the-garden-of-eden.mp3[/podcast]audio — johnny appleseed in the garden of eden