The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Let Them Eat Cake … or Twinkies

“We built a program to solve the problem of malnutrition in America, and now we have a problem of obesity,” Rep. (R) Steve King said recently, referring to Michele Obama’s nutrition in schools program.

What Mr. King is suggesting is that we build the border wall using the money from food stamps as well as the defunding of Planned Parenthood. King wants that wall built and he’s happy to use EBT card money to get the job done. After all, he says, the nutrition program of Michele Obama’s school program worked so well that now the poorest citizens are overweight. Thanks a lot, Michelle! You’re probably responsible for the diabetes epidemic in America too. Why aren’t we investigating your role in the murder of innocent people across this once great nation? And why isn’t Trump tweeting on this?

We elect these folks. My fellow Americans elect these people. Yours too, by the way. These are the people who want to end Medicaid and substitute health care you can choose, not something dictated to you by the damn government. Of course it will cost more, a lot more, but when you reach the point you can’t afford to buy it, that’s your decision, see? That, claims Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House, is freedom. Freedom to choose.

It’s like those school lunch programs Michele inflicted on our kids. Maybe they wanted desserts and pizzas washed down with Coke, not vegetables and fruit washed down with milk. Freedom of choice, freedom to eat what they want. Fast food vs. nutritious fare. Let the little tykes pick what tastes good to them. That’s the American Way. Not government intervention. Not a nanny state. Maybe offer them cigarettes too and a couple of shots of Jack Daniels. More options, good. Less options, bad. Land of the Free, see?

Same thing with science. Why shove evolution down our kids’ throats? Why not let them choose to study Creationism? Or witchcraft? Why limit their educational options? Why make those miners’ children in Kentucky study Global Warming when all those faux scientists’ claims will kill their daddies’ jobs? Doesn’t seem fair, doesn’t seem right.

Pity the fat kids Michele’s nutrition program created. We can’t help them now, but maybe we can help the next generation of children. Let’s take away their food stamps and cut out the Medicaid. They’ll thank us for creating new choices for them. Tough love, I know, but compassionate conservatism has to be.

Fresh off his victorious mistrial for sexual assault using quaaludes to drug his victims, Bill Cosby’s crack publicity team announced the National Funny Man would go on the road to conduct town hall meetings to educate us men on how to avoid being falsely accused of sexual misconduct. Presumably he would inform us how to court and spark with pharmaceuticals and not be convicted. At least not convicted on the first trial with a hung jury. If the second goes badly, Fat Albert may want to change the focus to something more attuned to his prison audience’s needs.

I guess Cosby has been watching politics lately judging by this chutzpah. If you’re caught in a lie, call your accuser the liar. If they tweet back, threaten them with lawsuits. If that doesn’t work, ramp up the lie. No doubt in my mind the President will offer courses at Trump University to help student/citizens avoid lawsuits on real estate deals that were fraudulent, on impeachments that were trumped up, on collusions that were really more egregiously done by others. Deny deny deny, but then go on the offensive. Blame the press, blame the jury, blame the crybaby liberals, blame those mean Democrats and those bitchy women. If you can’t rape em yourself, well, maybe there’s benefit in showing others how to do it. For fun and profit.

Cosby won’t pull this off, of course. Trump probably will. Donald has honed these skills from childhood and he has plenty of help now from the courageous profiles of his Republican shills. Plus, he’s already set up Trump U. The man is so far ahead of Cosby’s game, he makes Fat Albert look like a grossly obese donut addict starting his first marathon. The public has already judged Fat Albert, a ruined icon of American comedy, once a role model, now his own joke.

Trump, so far nobody’s laughing. But when we realize we’ve been fed date rape drugs and violated, when the drugs wear off, all the courses in his little faux University won’t help him either. Probably still make Time magazine’s Man of the Year and he’ll call it a Huge Success.

I guess I’ve been working in art for about 35 years. Some of it I’ve been doing okay at, even made a so-called Living at, and most of it, well, I’m not the poster child for Starving Artist, but maybe Anorexic Artist. We artists have a tough row to hoe in corporate America, that’s the truth, and so we try all sorts of strategies ranging from art fair booths to just giving up and getting a job, a real job. But probably too late for one that pays well or offers benefits and pensions. The money belongs to the Job Creators. Us creators, well, good luck.

I went up into the mountains this past weekend with a box of the Skeeter Daddle Blues, hoping to do a book reading and maybe sell a few copies. Ever since my old outlets for book sales dried up, I’ve been headscratching how to market these babies, get them out of my basement and into the hands of folks hungry for great literature. Tyee Store closed up and so did the Copy This Mail That office supply store that sold the first book Skeeter Daddle Diaries so well I ordered a second printing. The South End String Band CD’s sold like hotcakes too at those places, but when they closed shop, the only show in town was the Snow Goose Bookstore. And now they’ve shuttered their doors too. We probably sold two to three thousand CD’s before that. I sold maybe 1000 books. Not bad for a backwash.

This past year I haven’t sold more than ten books and the band is giving CD’s away at concerts for ‘the price we finally figured they were worth’. For free. One concert alone we handed out 150 CD’s.

A high tech, fast charging friend convinced me to try Amazon. Against my better judgement I signed on, figuring I’d be sending them a box of hot sellers they could pass out faster than candy on Halloween. But no, they wanted me to send one book at a time, priority mail, to their warehouse in Maryland or someplace far far away. I spent about $5 per book for mailing envelope and postage, losing a couple of bucks on each one. This went on for a couple of months, never enough sales apparently, to justify shipping them a full box. I might have continued this brilliant sales strategy right into bankruptcy but one day I noticed Amazon, love these guyz, had used copies of the Skeeter Diaries listed at 1.99 plus shipping. This was great. Me competing against me and the only winner was Amazon. It took me awhile to get out of this crummy cycle, the company not really responsive to any inquiries. In fact, they had no way to make inquiries.

I finally just kept sending them messages on the sales requests that the book was Out of Print. Which, finally, it was. Sadly, I buy my own book back from them occasionally just to have a few copies around. Cheaper than reprints by far. Bookstores competing against Bezos, like I mentioned at the last Snow Goose reading before they closed shop, are like Godzilla vs Bambi, it won’t be long before they’re toejam. Now I see where they’d like to be my printer too, print on demand. Probably ship them to me, then have me ship them back each sale. Lose even more money on every point of sale.

So I wish I had a tried and true strategy for you prospective artists out there looking for ways to sell your wares, I really do. It was always dog eat dog, but now we got Godzilla too. My only advice is to be like the little furry creatures during the Dinosaur Era, stay low, keep a close eye out, maybe move at night. I know, not much help, but the trick is to survive.

Yesterday I drove 60 miles up the Stillaguamish River valley, past the Oso Slide that killed about 70 folks a couple of years ago and into the tarheel town of Darrington for, ironically enough, a book reading given by me, Skeeter Daddle. This gig was sponsored by the local library, a branch of the regional library the mizzus used to work at, the big one that puts on Ted Talks and concerts and such, all those extracurricular to entice the citizenry to view libraries not as museums for Gutenberg, but vibrant places where discourse is aplenty and kids are welcome.

I admit, I had a bad feeling about this, even told the mizzus to stay home and save herself five or six hours of wasted time when the weather was sunny and warm, when we should’ve been picnicking with our fresh caught crab and our newly dug potatoes for potato salad, enjoying a cold adult beverage or six, basking in the lazy hazy halcyon days that are upon us. As I drove up the valley, past the jagged peaks of Whitehorse Mountain and streams filled with glacial melt gurgling into the Stilly, I wondered why the hell I was doing this. There was no remuneration and the possibility of selling a book or two wasn’t going to pay for the gas my truck was using to get there, about ten or twelve bucks, I calculated.

Darrington, even at the height of summer weather, was pretty much a ghost town. I never did see the library that sponsored this gala event, but I did finally find the bookstore and coffee shop where the reading was being held. When I got there the joint was closed, lights off, nobody home. I drove around town some more, made note of the redneck bars I might make use of if this reading had been called off, maybe read to the tarheel transplants some of my little stories about folks quite a bit, possibly too much, like them. I was imagining a story, the last story, with the working title: The Death of Skeeter Daddle.

My reading was at 6. At ten to the owner of the store showed up and we talked while we waited for the crowd. At ten after Larry showed up, ordered an ice tea and we all talked while we waited for the rest of the mob. At about twenty after the librarian who’d arranged this with me showed up and we all three chatted amiably about the state of running bookstores and libraries and such while we waited for the stragglers to show up. At 6:30 we decided this was pretty much the Whole Show.

I guess if you want seconds of Humble Pie, this is how you do it. We all exchanged information about our lives, the kids, jobs, how we got to the place we live, all that stuff strangers introduce themselves with. An hour later the librarian left and Tony was closing shop. I gave him a pile of books and said see if anyone wants to buy them, they’re yours. I handed Larry one too. The box I’d brought just in case the reading public of Darrington was smitten with my excerpts, well, they rode home with me. I stopped along the route home and bought some cold ones. I gotta admit, it was a lonely picnic.

I had a friend call me up the other day. An intruder – ‘a trespasser’, she called him – had wandered onto her property via bicycle. Armed, she said, with a clipper. Her neighbor had confronted him lopping English Ivy off her fir trees and asked him who he was, did he have authorization for this horticultural blitzkrieg, where was he from and why the Anglophobic hostilities??

My friend was sure if anyone had a hand on the pulse of the South End, if anyone was wired into the grapevine without the use of any social media of any sort, old Skeeter would know who this interloper was.

Indeed. I told her his name, gave her his address, website and phone number and approximate height and weight. More than that, I volunteered his M.O., his modus operandi. “He has a jag about ivy strangling the flora,” I informed her. “Harmless, really, old Clipper Carl. Rides his bike around the South End, usually asks the owner first, but I guess time is running out or the obsession has tightened around his trunk. It’s some kind of botanical fixation. Let’s not call it pathological, just a bit more like a religious calling. NOT that I’m saying Carl hears voices in the night “OUT OUT DAMNED IVY!!” Or that he might mistake a fellow South Ender for a strangler vine. We all have our hobbies. And sometimes we lose ourselves in pursuit of them.

The odd thing is, Carl is very well off, a wealthy retired professional and a big philanthropist. Sure, he could’ve chosen to eliminate poverty or disease on the South End …. but … he chose to eradicate ivy. Not maybe what Bill Gates would’ve chosen, but even Bill gets criticized for not choosing causes WE want most. You can’t really win with a lot of folks.

I was riding my bike by Carl’s property today, the ten acre parcel he bought down the road from his bluff house, the one he has the security camera aimed at the gate he keeps locked, and I noticed all the NO TRESPASSING signs he’d posted for a quarter of a mile on the perimeter. Right where I used to pick cherries and apples before he bought the acreage and warned us off. He doesn’t eat the fruit, I notice, but we can’t either now. I’ve been looking for a new hobby myself in my advancing old age and Carl’s given me something of an idea. Good sharp hatchet, hop on my bike and mosey down to those NO TRESPASSING signs I don’t much care for, I bet they’d come down faster than clipped off ivy vines. Free up those fruit trees to us neighbors.

If anyone would understand, I’m certain Carl would…..