The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Johnny Fever lives down the road from me in the house where he was born, a 1920’s cabin that’s been added onto multiple times and that he inherited when his mother died. Johnny’s about 50, going on 110, got some health issues and some serious mental ones that meds keep under control. Johnny, though, doesn’t like the mood stabilizers he takes to keep him from running without a governor on his engine. When he goes off his meds, he revs up to a high pitched scream, a condition he prefers to the blah moods his drugs maintain.

Johnny’s an old old friend, a brilliant guy who can be dumb as a box of rocks. Apparently he can’t tell the difference. And I’m having a harder and harder time myself. Bi-polarity has a way of blurring those lines. Johnny’s long suffering wife has basically thrown up her hands. She doesn’t even ask me now to try and talk him into taking his medications when he’s flying high — she just collects his credit cards and explains best as she can to their three kids, daddy’s gone bonkers again. Mr. Hyde is here now but Dr. Jekyll is coming back. The doctor, well, he’s not half as interesting, just watches a lot of TV all day long. You watch TV all day long, you’ll become pretty damn boring.

Johnny stopped by my place this morning. It was 4 AM and he’d called 911 when I didn’t get to the front door right away, informing the sheriff he had an emergency: his car needed a jump, dead battery. He had airline tickets at SeaTac in a few hours, non refundable. I cursed, I hollered at him, I even pushed him when he got 4 inches from my face, then I gave up and got my truck, grabbed the jumper cables and drove us to his car, the one he’d left his headlights on the night before.

“Where you headed, John?” I grumbled. “I’m getting the hell OUT of this place,” he shouted over both our engines, then laughed maniacally, not a laugh I much like. I could see heads looking down at us from the upstairs windows.

John’s on his way now, wherever he’s going. “Thanks for the jump, old buddy, old friend,” he’d hollered out the open window as he rolled out his drive, “see you in hell.” A friend in need isn’t necessarily a friend in deed. When he comes back, he’ll be in hell, all right, and I’ll be here too.

Every once in awhile I get wind of another town that thinks it would be a good idea to arm the teachers in their schools. Having been a teacher for a very short career, I probably would’ve liked carrying a sidearm. Cut down on a lot of backtalk, for sure. And saved the cut-ups a long trip to the principal’s office. Course, when I think about it calmly, seems sort of harsh to inflict capital punishment from the front of a classroom. They are, after all, children.

I guess being Americans and all, the idea of a fully armed populace is appealing. You don’t hear many stories how some hijacker or bank robber met his match with a Dirty Harry packing heat, but that could change quick if we just advocated for universal ‘conceal carry’. Probably take some collateral damage, planes decompressing in a shoot-out at 30,000 feet, 7-11 customers caught with their Big Gulps in a withering crossfire. But it wouldn’t take long for us pacifists to realize we need to return fire ourselves, simple law of survival in the urban jungles of America.

We’ve maybe seen too many Westerns, all those cowboys with six shooters slapping leather on their hip and a Winchester in a scabbard beside the saddle. The folks down in Malheur rode in fully armed and they can’t understand why the Feds and the troopers and the sheriff won’t surrender. Or at least negotiate to give them the range land they say belongs to them, these folks up from Utah. Too many Westerns, like I said. Then, a month into their occupation, one dead and most under arrest, the remaining gang wanted amnesty before they left. Lucky for them the bureaucrats whose headquarters they liberated and whose jobs they disrupted didn’t take their own 2nd amendment rights as seriously. Be like letting the kids in my old classroom carry live ammo — for sure my odds would go way down.

The burning topic down at the Diner this week was bathrooms. Mississippi and North Carolina had passed legislation to the effect that women’s bathrooms were only for women born women and men’s bathrooms were … well, you can deduce the rest. The bathroom in the Diner is for both since they only have one restroom. Which is a step up from the Tyee Store. The Store has an outhouse. Concrete block with plumbing, even got a sink. Unisex too just like the Diner’s.

I guess the folks in Ol Miss and the Tarheel State got their important issues resolved, now they can turn their attentions to public bathrooms. Pastor Paul preaches down at the Little Church in the Ravine that homosexuals and the deviants who change sex are the root cause of the moral decline on the South End. Me, I’m not so sure. Heroin addiction ranks pretty high on my list of problems. Maybe wife abuse too. Even crab poaching seems more a problem than where folks tinkle.

Walter was making the argument at the Diner’s corner table that men would be able to use women’s toilets and rapes would skyrocket. Brenda, pouring the table’s third round of refills, laughed out loud. “Walter, you are a crack-up.” Walter stopped in mid-rant and asked her what she meant. She said, “I mean, think about it. A guy who’s changed sex from a woman to a man is going to use the men’s room. A man who’s switched to a woman is going to use a stall now. In the women’s restroom. “

“That’s right, that’s the whole point. Now you got a natural born guy in with the women.” “Yeah, but Walter, if you make the woman who’s changed into a man use the woman’s room, you got a guy with the parts a rapist needs in with the women. How does that help your argument?”

Walter thought about it a half minute. Finally he said it just wasn’t right. It just wasn’t natural. It just ought to be illegal. “Men should just stay men, for the luvva God. And use their own damn bathroom.”

As usual, we didn’t resolve the issue that morning. But when Walt got up to relieve himself of four cups of coffee, Little Jimmy called back to him to be sure and lock the door. “Don’t want any mishaps, Walt.” “And leave the seat down,” Harry hollered. “Some of us girls might be using it next.”

Every blue moon I get this masochistic urge to read the Comment section below a news story, you know, see what my fellow citizens are thinking. Maybe it’s because I don’t have a cellphone with text messaging capabilities so I get the digital equivalent of cabin fever, some kind of isolationist feeling that needs assuaging with input from total strangers. I suppose I could go hang out at the mall, but the mall is 40 miles away and I don’t need anything else from a few dozen stores under one roof.

Me and the mizzus watched the ‘Motorcycle Diaries’ last night, the account of Che Guevara before he became a Marxist revolutionary, just a med student who hops aboard a buddy’s Norton motorcycle in 1952 and heads north from Argentina to Peru, pretty much penniless, pretty much at the mercy of the kindness of strangers. So today I wondered what I could find out about Che after this trip. Kerouac headed into the mountains to sit fire watch in the Forest Service towers in the North Cascades. Che went into Cuba and was instrumental in overthrowing Batista.

I found another article after the first bios whose point was that Guevara was a cold blooded commie killer. Fair enough. Maybe a little biased, but hey, free country and all. So then I decided to see what the peanut gallery thought of this article and you can maybe guess, it being political hunting season these days, the decibel level ratcheted right up to eardrum damage levels. Folks have a lot of built up bile is all I can say. Only took a few comments before we got to anti-Obama and Bush-bashing, then the personal attacks on the commenters and finally I thought maybe I’d had enough for the morning.

My father, who usually sends me Tea Party e-mails still questioning birth certificate authenticity and Muslim affiliations, sent me instead a nice group of photos, mostly of cute animals, tulip fields in bloom, artistic shots of dancers, mostly nice fluffy stuff. Not really my cup of herbal tea, but better than the usual vitriol he passes on to ruin my day.

Curious how the Comments would go on beautiful photos, expecting only sappy enthusiasm for the beauty of the shots, imagine my surprise to find the same trolls blasting away at everything from animal abuse to anti-sunset sentiments. Here’s one, I guess in response to some ice skaters in formation: “at the rate the migrants are arriving, in ten years the Italian skating team will be all black.” Nice, attack the refugees and throw in some racism too. Here’s one after the cute picture of the tiger cub: “ I am disturbed and sickened by the photo of the tiger cub in his cage. HOW DISGUSTING THAT YAHOO WOULD POST THIS PHOTO AS JUST A CUTESY PHOTO OF A LITTLE CUB IS ALL THE MORE VILE!!!” Well, it was a picture of a circus animal….
Or this in response to who knows what: “Silly little tart, should have broke her neck.” And: “I’ll bet he’s even worse in bed!” Okay, I don’t have a clue really about what either of these are referencing, but they’re pissed, I get that. What I do know is I’m going to have to ask my old man to quit sending me these cutesy photos. I think I prefer the vitriolic poisonous e-mails. At least they come without further comments.

The South End Assembly of the Profligates is fighting the Good Fight for their religious freedom, hallelujah! The infidels are at the gate and by God, they aren’t taking secular attacks sitting down, not on your life!! Their old time religion, based on texts transcribed from the original German of Claus Wermuth’s Nostradamus prophecies, serves as their guide to all things worldly. And now the government demands they violate their fundamentals, their creed, their belief system.

“This will not stand!” Preacher Ezekiel declared the day the Supreme Court ruled homosexuals could not be discriminated against. “The blasphemers will be smited!” he roared and the congregation stamped their feet in joyous approval. Amen!

The Assembly of the Profligates has more than gay issues to fight. Their religion relegates women to helpmates and persons not Caucasian to second class status. They ban all forms of music, even muzak, and the banjo is reviled above all other infernal noise-makers as the Bark of the Beast. This does not bode well for the South End String Band, apparently purveyors of filth and depravity whose members include women and people of mixed heritage.

Now personally I like religions about equally. Which I thought made me non-discriminatory, but might only be non-discriminating. When the mizzus dropped in at the Island Cupcake Emporium next to Reflux Realty’s South End satellite branch to order a special birthday cake for me in the shape of a 5 string banjo, my chosen instrument of destruction, well, all hell broke loose. Jennifer, who owns the bakery and, it turns out, is a devotee of the Assembly of the Profligates and their All-Seeing Premonitions, well Jennifer told her she could take her sick request to Stanwood and Gomorrah, no way was she going to bake a Bark of the Beast birthday cake. “Take your disease to the Erotic Bakery,” she howled. “If they’ll make penis cakes, they’ll bake you a banjo. But I don’t make either!!”

Well, I guess we could’ve filed a civil rights lawsuit, we could hire a good attorney, go to court, make our point and probably end up with a saliva-filled banjo birthday cake on my 75th. The mizzus compromised instead. I sure won’t foget that phallic German chocolate 3 layer birthday cake any time soon. Maybe, Lord willing, I’ll get a banjo cake next year. Amen to that.