The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I’ve been cooling my heels in the Tire Shop in town getting a flat tire fixed. Sitting here in the communal waiting room I got pulled into the crackerbarrel talk with a few fellow customers when the palaver turned to government excess, corporate greed, pharmaceutical warnings, health care costs, pretty much the gamut of modern grievances in this dystopian world we now live in.

Did YOU know, for instance, that the government was dropping chemicals into the atmosphere to halt global warming? No? Or that John Wayne’s lung cancer was caused by nuclear testing outside Las Vegas where he rode his horse? You could see the mushroom clouds from your hotel room on the Strip.

Did you know that arthritis was the result of wheat harvested after being sprayed with Roundup, that gluten intolerance was actually chemical poisoning? No, you hadn’t heard that? Did you realize the EPA Superfund cleanup of the Duwamish River in Seattle got hauled a few miles north and dumped off Magnolia? You didn’t?

I bet you also didn’t know the oyster farms up north were so polluted they couldn’t grow baby oysters. No? Actually, it’s partly true, but not because of pollution, it’s because of acidification of the ocean. Bet you the ‘chemtrail’ is causing it. Along with celiac disease, irritable bowel syndrome, autism and presidential neurosis.

My tire repair didn’t take long, but enough time to cover some fairly major conspiracies, from government experiments on us rodents to ‘Deep State’ cabals. My new friends didn’t trust anybody or anything. Although … they did like their health care which cost way too much, but it was better than what Trump and his pals were going to do. If I had said I liked rainbows, they’d have told me they were oil sheens reflecting off the atmospheric poisons, a sure sign I would have rheumatoid arthritis in a month. The world was a mess and its leaders were evil. We were doomed, that was pretty much the gist of things. One guy said he was spending his grocery money to get the struts on his Honda fixed, had to do all four, cost a fortune. Damn car companies anyway! Damn tire place too!

My tire guy saved me finally, said he’d put my spare back up under the truck bed if I showed him where I’d hidden the gizmo that hoisted it up. I said I’d do it when I got home but he said he might as well do it, save me crawling on my back later. When the spare was in place, I asked what I owed. “On the house,” he said. “No charge, sir.” You know and I knew too after listening to my new pals in the waiting room, some kind of tire conspiracy was at work. I’m still trying to figure out what their game is.

Now, a lot of us South Enders look a little dubiously at Dad’s Day. It sounds suspiciously like one of those STING operations for deadbeat dads delinquent on child support payments. Get us all down here, then throw the net. We can already see the headlines in the Conway Chronicler: South Enders nabbed in Paternity Sting.

NOT that I’m saying I’m a deadbeat dad. I know being an artist and a banjo picker sort of doesn’t help the image, but we all been down on our luck. Little Jimmy understands that. His mom’s a little less forgiving, but when the CD sales start rolling in and the big art commissions, she’ll change her tune.

What with all these studies proving that more than a quarter of men in this country aren’t the genetic fathers of their children, Fatherhood on the South End has taken on a whole new meaning in these modern times we live in. DNA tests take all the romance out of relationships, you ask me. The old family tree’s got some extra branches now. And I guess that’s good, but it sure takes some of the mystery away from sparking and courting. Personally I don’t care to find out half the South End String Band is related.

But it IS father’s day coming up. Won’t be long before dear old dad is just a Test Tube in some sterile lab. Sample # 74 Double X, blue eyes, dark hair, long fingers for the banjo. I like to think I got more to offer than a Petri dish. Although, Little Jimmy’s mom might not agree.

The Band was thinking of maybe lobbying for Father’s Day being a day of amnesty. You know: Give a Dad a Break Day. Or even a whole month. NOT that I’m saying the boys down here are looking for a way to skip the June payments. We were just thinking a little breathing room ….. you know, til the CD sales pick up.

‘Well, I came upon a child of God
He was walking along the road
And I asked him, Tell me, where are you going?’
‘Woodstock’

It’s been 50 years since the hippie uprising bloomed in San Francisco and wilted shortly after. I went out to Haight-Ashbury in 1975, only 8 years too late. By then Flower Power was dried and pressed, steel bars were on the storefronts and the streets were filled with zombies too drugged to leave in time. I left in a few hours, scratching my long haired head where to go next.

Hunter S. Thompson famously said in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas that there was place in the foothills above Frisco where a person with the right kind of eyes could see where that bohemian utopian tidal wave crested and finally broke. I’m pretty sure I found the archaeological proof of that highwater mark. Just turned the truck around and headed ‘home’, a fictional place as it turned out, an old Polish farmhouse with a barn, summer ‘kitchen’, well and hand pump, plus an outhouse. Cut wood for the hard winter to come and settled in to work on a divorce. We wore icicles in our hair, not flowers. We picked at our marital wounds and by spring the Summer of Love was long since dead and buried.

But — and yeah, Virginia, there’s always a caveat — but some of those seeds from that era, passed bong to bong or secreted away in the short stints at communes, something remained fertile of those ill-formed dreams we had, some lyric or other took root and grew in my personal darkness until finally it emerged, a full blown song, tentative at first, I realize now, then more vigorous in the damp country air of the Pacific Northwest. We did go back to the land, we did set our souls free. We did realize, in the end, we are stardust, we are golden. And we finally got ourselves back to the Garden.

Camano Island 50 years later

For some strange reason I’ve been struggling lately to define ‘insanity’. The other day the former chairman of the GOP called the President crazy. This is grim news. The Roman emperors were ruined by a few insane leaders, whackos like Caligula who tried to put his horse in the Senate and declare Mr. Ed a priest. Trump hasn’t got a horse so we’re spared that sorry spectacle.

I live in a country now where half of us no longer believe in facts, or science, or can tell the difference between what is truth and what isn’t. This seems to me to be one definition of insanity. But when a majority of those around me are insane, then where does that leave the rest of us? Isn’t insanity the state of mind that’s abnormal? Or is that just a different definition?

I’m a little disoriented. It’s a bit like Alice walked into 1984, the Wonderland of Big Brother. History is being rewritten tweet by tweet, hour by hour. Nothing is as it seems and most everything I see is different from the Presidential Vision. We seem to be voting based on social media more than logic. The former arbiter of news, PBS, The NY Times, the Washington Post, all are accused of phony facts. Not much room here for investigative journalism, that’s for sure. If everything is skewed and twisted, if there really is no ‘fair and balanced,’ we all get to believe whatever we and our Facebook friends want.

There might not be Global Warming, evolution may be a fraud, the moon landing was staged, the government is dropping chemicals on us, Santa is real, the Matrix is here, the world is a digital construct. Believe me, it’s hard to get up in the morning wondering what’s waiting out there now that the earth’s solidity is in question.

What I do think is true is that there are a lot of insane people among us. The question is whether they’re the ones who are crazy. Or us.

Trump invited his cabinet today to go around the room and take turns praising the job he’s doing. Each poor schmuck took his or her turn heaping accolades on the President who started the meeting crowing that he had accomplished more in his brief term of office than almost any other president with the possible exception of FDR. And this in less than six months when all the others had had at least four years and some eight. And in the case of FDR, three terms. Forget Mt. Rushmore, this President will get his own mountain.

You got to wonder, are we in a 3rd world dictatorship where fear of execution keeps the lackeys in control? And I have to wonder, what kind of people value their job so much that they’ll jump through the hoops this fruitcake of a Commander-in-Chief sets up for them. Nothing seems too embarrassing, no deed seems too ignoble, no screw-up goes unpraised as high achievement. The world inside the Oval Office is square and the peg fits only with the utmost effort. Black is the new white. Truth is whatever the man thinks it is. The little goof in North Korea pretty much runs his show the same way. Welcome to government by the insane.

We were always told: we too could one day be president of the United States. Well, I never really believed that, but all the kids in my 6th grade Social Studies class would probably be a better Leader of the Free World than this guy in office right now. Okay, maybe not Jimmy Sutton, the kid who used to pick his nose and eat his own snot. Didn’t even try to hide doing it, just dug out a finger full and plopped it into his disgusting little mouth. Course, Jimmy probably has his own tech start-up and makes billions now down in Silicon Valley. Still, I bet he wouldn’t go around the conference table and make his staff take turns regaling the gathered assembly how much they liked snot eaters. Trump, of course, would make them eat his.