The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

A few years ago my folks decided it was time to be pro-active about setting up for Old Age. They had lived in Georgia for 20 years when the Old Man retired, but none of us kids lived near and three quarters of their friends had died or moved away themselves. My brothers met with them in the spring and we all decided they’d move in August. That way we could move them when it was 99 degrees and humid, more fun that way.

We said go through your stuff and throw away all the crap and junk. We’ll have a 26 foot U-Haul trailer and your stuff has to fit in that. No problem, they said. While we were there we started hauling stuff to the dump or to the Goodwill. “Whoa, whoa!” they’d cry every item, every load, “we can’t throw that away. It’s valuable!”

Our folks grew up in the Great Depression. Pennies mattered. Stuff got passed down and stuff got reused. Everything was saved. Recycling before its time…. Rusty useless tools, busted TV’s, battered Christmas ornaments, goofy knickknacks, nothing was too ruined to toss. For a week we battled over what to keep, what to throw away. We pretty much decided 90% of their lifetime possessions were disposable and half that was rubbish. They decided 100% was keepable, if not indispensable. We reiterated that come August, what didn’t fit in a 26 foot U-Haul was going to be left behind. “You make the call,” we said, “but in August, we make it.” They’d moved about 20 times in their lives so we figured they’d be ready.

Ho ho. We flew into Georgia in August. Hot, humid, stressful. The first day we filled half the 26 footer and we hadn’t dented their pile of ‘indispensables’. Downsizing, apparently, was an alien concept. My brother and I shook our heads. Now what? we asked. We called the U-Haul place and rented another 26 footer. When it was full we closed the doors and pushed hard. In the end we left grills and patio furniture where they stood, a gift for the new tenants.

Last trip out to my folks, the Old Man was digging through unopened boxes in his basement. Five years after the Big Move. “I don’t know why we brought all this crap with us,” he said, shaking his head. I never said a word … but when I got home here I cleaned out my own closets. Believe me, there was plenty of crap. Why wait for the nursing home? I just hope I don’t buy half of it back accidentally from the thrift stores I donated to.

Saturday night at the End of the Road Tavern, Big Larry was pounding the weathered fir table he and Ed Grabowski, a newly unemployed log skidder, were sharing as they finished up a dinner of Donny’s Hot Wings and a plate of curly fries. Big L. was exercised over the Big City liberal weatherman calling the upcoming storm the result of Global Climate Change. “My global ass!” Larry roared. Ed seemed more inclined to drink away his recent lay-off than encourage environmental debate. As he got up for his 3rd or 5th or whatever bottle of Budweiser, he said to Larry, “Who the hell cares? The weather’s the damn weather. It changes. So what? Hit me again, Donny, willya?”

Donny slipped a hand into the cooler, corralled a Bud and knocked the cap off with a practiced expertise, then slid it two feet down the bar. “I dunno,” he ventured, “they might have a point. Heating up like a greenhouse, gotta change the winds, probably the ocean too.”

Larry wasn’t having any of it. “Aw, what next, Donny? We gonna quit cutting trees? Quit drivin our trucks? We gonna live like Afghans cause we’re afraid the weather’s too hot?”

Trapper Charlie suddenly came conscious at the end of the bar where he was watching college basketball between two teams he’d never heard of. “Ain’t like it’s gonna be all bad. We might become the new California.” Big Larry avowed how he’d rather get sent to Lake View Nursing Home down river than live in a new California with all those wine-sipping yuppie yahoos. Charlie said we’d still be the ones living here and Larry said he’d be damned if he’d live here then!

These are meteorologically interesting times, I guess, and we’ve debated this many a rainy night at the End of the Road. The scientists seem pretty much in agreement and the Hot Talk Radio folks are in total disagreement. I can tell you this — and I know it’s a small sampling poll — we aren’t going to do much else about it but argue, at least up here in UpCreek. It’ll be a cold day in hell before we change our minds or our habits. Donny says to no one in particular, “Maybe I should start stocking up on a higher class of wine. You know, just in case ….”

My neighbor Jill was working down at Labor and Industries and since I needed to get a contractor license so I could install my stained glass in a state project for two whole days, I ended up with Jill. The whole process took half an hour so we covered subjects ranging from dogs we have owned to retirement strategies for us geezers. Jill’s main point was the necessity ‘to keep moving’ when you retire. She herself wanted to establish her post-retirement interests pre-retirement.

“I used to work at the Casino,” she said, something I didn’t know. “Lot of people spent their whole day sitting on a stool playing the slots. You didn’t see em for a few days, you could figure they probably died. The Casino was their whole life. We even provided funeral services. Why not? Half their friends were us casino workers. You have the funeral in-house, we didn’t take half a day off to go to a funeral downtown.”

I said it was something I never imagined. Maybe scatter their ashes under the crap table, one stop shop. Jill muttered ‘why not?’ and kept stamping my documents, checking stuff against her computer screen read-out, asked an occasional question. “Lot of those folks,” she said, “they thought of retirement as dying. Kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Kind of like filling out this endless paperwork, I thought. “Uh-oh,” Jill said after half an hour and I thought here’s where you return to jail, do not pass Go. She asked a few questions, made one small change on the form that warns NO CHANGES PERMITTED. Casino work, I thought, might not be as far removed from government bureaucrat as I thought. I bet L&I might even provide funeral services for those of us who died in these long lines … but I was hoping I wouldn’t find out today.

I know most of you probably think I’m a red-blooded American male, gorging myself on synthetic testosterone and subscribing to ESPN so I can watch soccer matches in Brazil and tennis tournaments in Australia and Nascar anywhere they got an oval track. It’s understandable, your misconception. I probably haven’t exposed my poetic sensitive metrosexual side near enough, but it’s late in the game now and I guess you’ll have to take my word even if it brings my manly manhood down a notch or two in your estimation.

Sports. I have to confess I was never much for team sports in my youth. Oh sure, I played some Little League baseball, but I got that out of my system pretty early. And by the time I realized that proficiency in sports was inextricably connected to desirability by women, it was too late, I was doomed to lonely intellectualism. Without being very intellectual, which as you might guess, is lonely indeed.

So when Fantasy Sports reared its head this year, I didn’t have Clue One what the hell this was. I kept asking my more sports-minded buddies what this new sports craze was all about, and they kept telling me it was an on-line something or other where you could pick a team from anybody on any team and compete against folks in the world of the internet. And you could bet on your team! Gambling, that I could understand.

So now the government is looking into whether this Fantasy Sports is really gambling or is it a skill? The skill, I guess, is figuring out the odds and variables of whatever intricacies of betting on different players in different combinations you can come up with. Sort of like blackjack, you ask me. Which, if you’re a card counter, is a skill. But if you’re just a schmuck like me at the casino table, it looks remarkably like gambling. If you had to play against a good card counter, I bet (but not much) it would seem like a skill, one I don’t possess.

I saw a piece on the news last night how 91% of the money made in Fantasy Sports was made by 1.3% of the people who bet. Those, except for the Lottery addicted, are long odds. I have to say, the government might want to regulate what seems like gambling to me. The danger, of course, is they might have to take a hard look at the stock market too. I think those same 1.3% who make up the algorithms and the formulas might be the bright boys in Goldman Sachs. And I quit betting against them a long time ago.

I got a pile of friends who claim to be envious of my so-called Lifestyle. Get up when I want, work for myself, do what I feel like doing, live off the calendar and my wits and off the beaten path. Who wouldn’t like that? Unless we factor in the poverty, the hand-to-mouth, the lack of pensions or retirement. There’s a reason hippies became extinct and it has nothing to do with an asteroid slamming Earth.

As the mizzus will gladly attest, I took this road — this choice? — because I don’t play well with others. And certainly not managers, supervisors or most any other bosses. I didn’t like the city. I didn’t like most jobs. Okay, all jobs, any jobs. And since poverty never scared me, the Path of Least Resistance led to here, a place remote and cheap, and not surprisingly, a backwash without much opportunity for employment.

Perfect! All I had to do was learn a few skills. Carpentry, plumbing, electrical, truck repair, subsistence living. Education — it never really ends. Something they neglect to teach most of us in school. The School of Hard Knocks doesn’t need a post-graduate program. Tuition’s not exactly free, but it’s reasonable.

Folks who claim to be envious of my lifestyle really aren’t. They didn’t have the appropriate skill sets. If they did, retirement would be easy for them, a hippie vibe with a fat income guaranteed. Who could ask for more? But … like I always say, it takes more than a little while to learn bohemianism. And if you’ve spent most of your life paying for insurance policies to protect yourself from the vagaries of existence, chances are it’s too late to become a latter day beatnik. Don’t feel bad, you’re probably the Lucky Ones.