The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I don’t care WHAT T.S. Eliot says, November, not April, is the cruelest month. The bottom drops right out of autumn along with all the leaves, then the rains come and so do the winds. Up here in the northern latitudes, the sun sets further and further south and earlier and earlier. God help the poor folks who live on the north side of the hills — they might as well be in the Arctic.

Humans, or so the scientists tell me, aren’t programmed to hibernate. That may be true, but you can’t tell me there’s no vestigial urge to hunker down and wait until spring brings my sap back up with renewed energy. I know folks who sit in front of a full spectrum lamp trying to fend off the winter blahs, hoping to trick the hormones that trigger the blues into thinking it’s a summer morn. Some of them revert to alcohol, balm of all us northern climate dwellers, probably just a self-induced hibernative state. And the neighbors who can afford to, they just pack it up and leave. Head for the sunshine of Arizona or Nevada, figure a trailerpark in the desert beats what we got.

I spoze we all have burdens to bear. Tahitians got coconut grenades dropping, Hawaiians got island fever. If there was a paradise, the cruise ships would ruin it in a season, the investors would cover it with resort hotels and Vegas-style casinos, the residents would work as maids and valets. Count yer lucky stars, I tell the mizzus, if there was Garden of Eden, we’d be the landscape crew, minimum wage, with Adam and his cranky wife barking orders, never satisfied with the weeding and edging, always wanting that damn apple tree pruned half to death, no wonder it never produces fruit. Naw, a month or two of rainy, windy weather, what the hell, maybe ought to catch up on our reading. And … a little extra sleep wouldn’t hurt either.

Up behind us and through our woods there’s a road that snakes into the interior, got a few houses back there, even some folks who live there full time. Marge was one of those. She moved here when the clearcut ruined her own woods down by Lake Stevens. Course, about a year later, two or three of her neighbors cleared their 2 and a half acres and she felt like there was really nowhere to hide anymore.

She asked me to come up one day. Her husband was there in the livingroom with a whisky glass and the TV tuned to a game show. It was about 10 in the morning and he was drunk as a purple skunk and friendly as most alcoholics, meaning he wouldn’t say hello or shake hands. Marge made muted apologies, said he was a boat skipper, gone a lot of the time. From what I could see he was gone most of the time, even when he was in the room.

Marge shot herself a few years later, I can pretty much guess why, sad deal, sad woman. Her husband offered the place to his no-account kin, some punk pedophile the sheriff warned us neighbors about. The kid ran around with a crossbow, putting arrows into the neighbors’ houses, killing deer and leaving them to rot. He had parties the neighbors complained about, but he told them to jam it, he’d do what he wanted. The cops weren’t much help, pretty typical, so for four or five years we had this drug addict Chester the Molester for a roommate on the South End.

A few years ago Marge’s husband stopped by my shack during our annual Ma Day Studio Art Tour. Said he was moving, just wanted to say so long. “I haven’t been much of a neighbor,” he said sheepishly, “but I’ve quit drinking and I’m starting over. Wanted to apologize and say goodbye.”

A better man might’ve accepted that hand and that apology. But … I’m not that man. I leaned in on him and said, “I’m sorry too, Charlie, but it’ll be a better place with your sorry ass gone and your evil kin too. Adios, man. Move a long ways away, be all right with me.”

I believe in second chances, I really do. But I’m not one who believes an apology necessarily makes things right. I know he didn’t hold the gun to Marge’s head. I know he didn’t kill her, she killed herself. But I’ll be damned if I’d shake his hand and say good luck. I said instead, good riddance. Like I mentioned before, a better man …. that’s not me.

KINK, the 500 watt AM radio for the South End, recently received its FCC certification to broadcast as a bona fide public radio station. The station manager, Rhonda Bodley, made a short introduction yesterday morning at 8 a.m., something to the effect that finally the South End had its own voice. Course, for the last two years, that voice was intermittent, coming as it did from pirate broadcasts. If you happened to turn your AM dial to 490, you would have thought the Dark Ages had come to a crashing conclusion, that the rock had rolled off our cave entrance and that finally we had joined civilization. Never mind that podcasting had rolled the rock back.

Wolfman Chuck volunteered to be KINK’s first DJ. Well, the first legitimate disc jockey, spinning platters of his favorite old stuff, Jefferson Airplane and B.B. King, Van Morrison and Bonnie Raitt, all the albums and 8 tracks he’d listened to stoned out of his head, at least any that were now out on CD’s. The first song to hit the South End airwaves was White Rabbit which he introduced as ‘our theme song’. “If you remember where you were when you first heard this,” he declared, “you didn’t hear it in the 60’s. Those memories were all … ERASED!” Wolfman would laugh his psycho laugh, usually ending in a coughing jag interrupted by another song.

Wolfman’s program is called Radio Free South End. “Where the truth comes to die.” Wolfman likes to announce it as four hours of Not-So-Easy-Listening, which is true, not so much for the music format as Chuck himself. He tends to ramble between songs, reminisces about the Golden Age of the sixties, extols acid rock and waxes nostalgic over everything from the Peace Movement to Timothy Leary, all in a sleepy stoner baritone punctuated by embarrassingly long pauses. He screws up the song credits, mangles syntax and punches wrong buttons for station ID when he meant to hit a public service announcement.

But … as Wolfman likes to tell us every few hours, “They pay me exactly what I’m worth. Nada. Zilch. Zip and zero. Speakin of which, this next tune is a million dollar winner … Cripple Creek with our own South End String Band!”

Like the man sez: not so easy listening.

Well, it was only a matter of time, of course, before the social media clamor for more of Skeeter went viral. You can blame yourselves or congratulate you and your Facebook ‘friends’, but either way, expect a full scale frontal cable assault and You-Tube blitzkrieg for that 15 minutes of fame we all so desperately yearn for. Okay, not for you. Roll over Kardashians, Skeeter’s got the news.

Reality TV and its attendant sponsors surely have their fingers on the pulse and wallet of America, possibly the world, more than these poor pathetic politicians vying for the scraps of our attention spans in their sad quest for the Presidency. You think Kim Kardashian would trade places with the Commander in Chief? When every newsstand, Twitter feed, internet ‘news’ spots and Entertainment Tonight covers her every wardrobe, romance and dietary inclinations in minute detail??? The President maybe gets a 20 second spot on what we now think of as the liberal media and endless hours on Fox as their favorite evil dart board. Kim’s nobody’s fool.

And Skeeter’s nobody’s fool either. Awhile back one of the honchos of Island County politics ran into him at a charity fundraiser he was attending incognito and she asked if he knew this Skeeter fellow. He said he did indeed. She asked, “Are you Skeeter?”

“Sometimes,” he answered cautiously, sensing dangerous tectonics. She confided that the Democratic Party wanted someone from Camano Island to run for county commissioner and would he consider? She had heard from her sources that he was a potentially popular candidate. Skeeter said her sources were either unreliable or drug addled. Undeterred, she assumed he was joking. “I’ve heard you have quite a sense of humor,” she chuckled. Skeeter pointed out that there was nothing funny in politics these days. “All the more reason to throw your hat in the ring,” the party charwoman retorted.

Skeeter actually ran for commissioner a couple years earlier. As a joke. Even got a campaign poster in the Stanwood/Camano News and still receives write-in votes to this day. The editor at that time eventually ran — and won — the commissioner seat, never suspecting that Skeeter would be a stalking horse in the campaign, one that he had inadvertently unleashed on an unsuspecting populace.

But no, politics is not a hell Skeeter wants to inhabit. He has bigger fish to fry as we say down on the South End. He has his sights set on What Matters, what’s important, what moves the public’s imagination in this 21st Century hive mentality. He’s taking on Duck Dynasty, the Kardashians, America’s Top Model, Dancing with the Stars and American Idol. He expects to be the next Big Thing. By the 2016 presidential elections, good luck to the candidates. If we even remember their names…..

Down at the laboratories of the South End industrial parks, our scientists are working 24/7 to catch up with the head start all those government subsidized research labs got on us. You might think we’re at a disadvantage, but you haven’t factored in the leg up our innovative crew of experimenters get from the creative ricochet of living near all those artists we got. Practically a Petri dish of teeming mutating e-volved thinking. Ordinary folks should probably suit up in bio-hazard gear. That, or vaccinate themselves with high dosage Prozac.

Our teams of specialists are working on stem cell research. You take some cell tissues, see, and you train em like circus fleas to behave like brains or bones or eyeballs or whatever you need right then and you give the patient a spoonful or two and I tell you what: you got a whole new lease on life, and if you got insurance, well sir, you might as well grow a few spare parts while you’re at it.

Now, we got folks who picket the lab. Neighbors who think we’re in the Frankenstein business, cloning mice and sheep and two headed humans. I tell em we’re not cloning, we’re stem celling. Stem cell selling, actually. Nothing to worry about. We’re curing diseases. We’re making a little money.

Cloning — now that’s putting a hard edge on it, dontchathink? Stem cells, that isn’t a real person, exactly. Dumb as a rock, most stem cells, but the protestors say so are most South Enders – which, I have to admit, is a pretty convincing argument …. Until you think of the lives that could be saved. And the money too, coincidentally. What IF, I say, we could make stem cells SMARTER than us South Enders. What’s so wrong with THAT?? And THEY say, your little friend would have YOU doing the chores while they did the thinking.

I got to admit, it’s a complicated issue. Personally I think we better go slow. Make my little friend not too smart. Maybe just smart enuff to do my chores,,,,,