The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

When I was a young guy I used to think a bit about Death, capital D. Kind of a melancholy waste of time, I finally decided. You spend much time on the subject and pretty soon you’re down the dark alleys of heaven and hell, God and Satan, reincarnation and ghosts in the attic. I finally decided that there are some things in this world I’ll never understand, probably plenty I won’t even imagine, worlds beyond witnessing, universes within universes.

I decided reality is more than enough. Lately I’ve been talking with friends who are taking classes in Mindfulness, whatever that is. They tell me it’s a focus on shutting down their thoughts long enough to pay attention to the world that isn’t our own jabber. Used to be we would sit in a lotus position and chant OM, the original sound, the first noise, be still, be aware, be here now. Be mindful, I guess.

Swami Betty was over the other day, I guess is why this is on my mind, mindful or not. Betty is forever searching. For answers, for cures, for God, for something to fill her life up with meaning. It’s not a bad quest, you ask me, but it’s not my quest. I’m not looking for answers any more. In fact, I’ve even quit looking for questions. The world isn’t a puzzle to be figured out, at least not one I’m going to have any luck solving. I’m no Zen detective.

Betty’s husband died a year ago and her kids are estranged. She asked me last week, over her fungus tea she grows in a gallon jar on the kitchen counter, some concoction that she’s been keeping alive for ten years or more, while I had a cold beer, if I believed in God. We were out on her back porch, sitting on the rickety steps that led to her gardens, and the sun was full on our faces, the bees were humming as they slipped flower to flower, the world seemed plenty full to me. Betty wants to believe, but what kind of deity kills her husband and lets her children abandon her as an eccentric old South Ender? She’s a bit adrift and I know I would be too.

“Well,” I said, “ I would hate to run into God if there was one. I could do a better job dreaming up a world than that cruel fool. I’d ask what was He thinking? Just what the hell was he thinking?”

Betty chuckled. “Tough guy, huh? Kick his ass, maybe?”

Well, in the end we came to the usual conclusions. Just a couple of old friends sharing a porch, idling away our brief time in this hard old world. Life, I think, is more a music than a riddle. And if maybe shutting up for awhile, if being mindful or quiet helps us hear it, I guess that’s fine with me, just don’t ask me to whistle the tune….

Denny the Dealer and I were hunkered down in a watering hole up north and the waitress had just brought us our beers. Denny, always on the lookout for an ‘angle’, held up his hand and said, “Wait a minute. Is that what I ordered? “ The waitress didn’t know Denny, at least not yet, and she said, “Didn’t you order an IPA?” There was just enough uncertainty in her voice that Denny pronounced that no, he had definitely ordered an ESB.

You maybe never have known a boy like Denny the Dealer. He doesn’t believe in paying full price for anything. He thinks you should buy him dinner, I guess for the pleasure of his company. He will take a broken tool back to the hardware store, possibly not even the one he bought it from, and demand they replace it or give him a discount on the new one. Or on something else he wants to buy. He has a scam for everything from mailed packages to airline tickets. If you dropped him in a bazaar in Constantinople or a tourist shop in Tijuana, he’d make them sweat for any puny profit they might make off him.

He has a business that he pays virtually no taxes on. I asked him how that was even possible, naïve about the nature of corporate tax laws, and he spent half an hour describing various offshore corporations he’d created, multiple bank accounts that shifted money from one to the next so that they never showed more than $10K at some magic time for the IRS. He has money in another person’s name, underage and therefore beyond the revenuers reach. I assume he spends more time in fiduciary sleight of hand than he does in his business enterprise. You want to see capitalism in action, you need to drink with me and Denny.

I’m going to assume, for the sake of friendship, most of what Denny does is legal in a strictly tax law sense. Moral, I think we can safely say moral doesn’t weigh in on Denny’s calculus. Money, they say, is the root of all evil and maybe so, but what I know from watching folks who think money is pretty near Everything is that it usually doesn’t buy them happiness. Easy living, yeah, but it’s hard to be happy when you’re always worried someone is going to get the upper hand in your deal.

Our waitress was obviously flustered, what with screwing up Denny’s order, so she reached for his glass to take it back, dump it and get his ESB. Denny didn’t hesitate, he just offered to take the IPA and pay half price, fair is fair, he said. The waitress was considering it. At least until I said, “He’s pulling your leg. He does this everyplace we go. He ordered the IPA. He thinks it’s funny to horse around.”

When our relieved but somewhat puzzled waitress left, Denny shook his head. “I try to teach you a few tricks and what do you do? You’ll pay full price for everything, Skeeter, and lemme tell you, that’s not how the real world works. Full price is for suckers like you.” I took a long sip of my own beer. Which, being the first of the day, tasted like liquid pleasure. “Worth every penny,” I said, already knowing what Denny would say in reply.

We had some folks stay with us this week, out from the wild suburbs of Chicago, who had a couple of kids in tow so naturally I took them for a stroll through the rainforest behind the house here. They noticed a large tree I’d felled the week before with about half of it still laying there half cut up waiting for me to put the peavey on it and roll it over so I could finish. Dan, the boy, had never seen a peavey and I’m betting his dad hadn’t either now that the Chicago forests are long gone for toilet paper and baseball bats.

A peavey, in case you might not know either, is a pike with a cant hook attached on a swivel. You get that hook into the meat of a log and pull or push against the pike with a handle 6 feet long and meaty as a horse thigh so you can roll that log over, all this so you won’t saw into dirt on the bottom side and dull your chainsaw chain. It’s an indispensable tool of the woods soon to be relegated to relic in our local museum.

I just came in from rolling a few two ton sections over to finish my cuts. This afternoon I’ll take an 8 pound maul and split my sections, load them in a cart and haul them to the woodshed. Logging, kind of a lost art, even down here on the South End. Guitar Bob, my old drinking partner, once asked what I’d been up to that day and when I said ‘logging’ he smirked. “Oh, right, Paul Bunyan,” he mocked. Bob has his wood hauled in, already sectioned, and he splits it, then stacks it in the shed right beside.

“What’re you laughing at, man?” I asked, laughing myself. “You wouldn’t know a logger from a TV repair man.” And Bob says, “Oh, like you cut down trees ….”

I guess we never really know one another, most of us. That, or we like to keep our friends in our own image. But just between you and me and the Blue Ox Babe, some of us get our heat, not from a thermostat, but from a passing mythology, one soon to be forgotten. Although … maybe my second nephew Dan will tell his friends back in the Windy City how his uncle still stalks the Northwest Woods with a saw and an axe and how the ground shakes when he takes down those giant trees of his. But I doubt it.

Heaven — Free Admission

More and more of us South Enders are losing their religion, don’t ask me why. I just read a survey that showed a quarter of us don’t believe in a Supreme Being, too bad for Donald Trump. That’s way up since the last survey. But here’s the odd part: the number of us who don’t believe in God but believe in an afterlife doubled. Faith based Heaven, I suppose, or maybe just bad logic, a trend that seems to be more and more prevalent.

Down at the Little Church in the Ravine, Rev. Paul makes it a point most every Sunday to exhort his flock to eschew sin. Live a holy life, he preaches, and if you mess up, ask the Good Lord for forgiveness. Believe on the Lord, he says, or surely Hell will follow.

Now, I may be mistaken here, but I’m guessing most of the folks who believe in an afterlife are talking about Streets of Gold, not Beelzebub’s BBQ. You don’t believe in a deity, you probably won’t buy the quaint notion of the Devil. And if you think Heaven is waiting for you no matter what, why not enjoy a little sinning while you’re waiting for the Pearly Gates to open? No punishment waiting, no purgatory for the wicked. Believe me, Pastor Paul doesn’t pound that pulpit with his ragged Bible to tell parishioners they got nothing to lose if they covet their neighbor’s wife. Go right ahead, cheat the other guy on that used car you said was running great when you know damn well the engine isn’t getting oil up in the cylinder head. You can make a little extra money and still get a reservation in the Angel Motel after your last breath.

Shirley, my neighbor who runs the Pampered Pekingese Pet Grooming service, claims she’ll be reincarnated. As a pup. The Hindu believe the Wheel rewards those who do good, but I guess now we think we get what we want, not what we deserve. Shirley better hope she doesn’t end up at the pound with all the other unwanted pets. Not everyone gets pampered in this mean old world.

I just read that some of our educators are thinking of dropping algebra from high school curriculums because it lowers the graduation rate. Seems a lot of us students stumble over the difficulty of y’s and x’s and the formulas that use them, then we end up flunking math that year and well, that creates depression and depression causes dropouts and dropouts mean bad jobs, limited career choices and an increased probability for a life of crime. Put another way, if x=the # of math failures and y=dropout rate, x squared divided by y over 3= z, z being the crime rate of any given school district.

Down here at South End Central High the dropout rate is astronomical. Plus the job market is virtually non-existent. I guess we know what this means. It means, even if you don’t understand probability theory, we need to get rid of algebra. We might even need to drop science itself from the curriculum, given that 50% of our students don’t believe in evolution or deductive reasoning. And if we want to increase self worth and employment opportunities, let’s axe literature and grammar too. I don’t know when the last text message or e-mail or twitter I saw had a complete sentence or correct spelling. Certainly not both. You think kids need to read a book, you haven’t been doing your homework. Graphic novels maybe, War and Peace, wake up, you’ve been watching too much Downton Abbey.

Who needs algebra when you can Google up formulas and let the computer do the math? You maybe want to bring back slide rules when a hand calculator does everything you need? Oh, sure, you figure maybe it would be good to understand the underlying priniciples. Like the way you understand your microwave or your CD player or your hybrid automobile??? You think it’s useful to know how to parse verbs or construct a compound sentence in a world that limits itself to 140 characters? C’mon, wake up. Watch a 5 year old kid work a laptop and tell me he needs to learn how to read when the computer can translate words into speech. Or vice versa.

When the day comes that our local heroin dealer needs basic algebra to conduct a drug transaction or our addict needs it to calculate the percentage of worth to sale at his favorite pawnshop when he sells my stolen guitars, okay, we can consider bringing it back into the curriculum. Until then, you might want to consider a career in computer coding and forget math teacher as an option.