The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I heard a guy on the radio, some Hot Talk jock, who said he was against not only minimum wage increases, he was against minimum wage completely. He argued that the largest growth spurt in U.S. history was when the corporations took off with little tax and with no regulations to prevent them from setting wages as low as the market would bear. Capitalism at its cut-throat best, unfettered, unregulated and unapologetic. The Roaring 20’s. I guess he didn’t read the next chapter in his 8th grade history book, the one titled The Great Depression.

Down here in the laissez faire South End, a lot of us don’t have minimum wage jobs cause we don’t even have jobs. The ones who do have minimum wage jobs don’t make enough to afford health insurance or to make the monthly nut on that double-wide they’ll never own outright. To make ends meet they’ll apply for food stamps or other supplemental programs. These are the folks my Hot Talk jock calls ‘Takers’. Or sometimes ‘Whiners’. And occasionally, when he’s feeling frisky, ‘Leeches’. And when he hears some candidate advocating for tax reform or health care or income equity, he screams ‘Class Warfare’.

The South End Food Bank barely keeps up these days. Moms with kids, fathers without jobs, folks who are disabled, people down on their luck. The Little Church in the Ravine helps the poor, I’ll give em that. Pastor Bob preaches the parable of the loaves and the fish, feeding the masses. I saw a bumper sticker on a BMW going into town: WINNING DOESN’T MEAN SOMEONE HAS TO LOSE. Or so he’d like to think….

Charity begins in the home, I’ll grant you, but sometimes we need to think of America as our home. Maybe you never needed a helping hand, but I suspect most of us got one except maybe that BMW driver. You maybe can’t legislate compassion, but you can sure legislate for fair play. You think folks living on the street or applying for food stamps or welfare are all Takers, turn off your radio and stand by the Food Bank half a day. It might just soften your heart.

A bunch of us yahoos went up to the Bud Hut yesterday, the island’s premier cannabis emporium, to have a little look around. After years of black marketeering on the Green South End, the boyz wanted to evaluate the ‘competition’. The staff checked our ID’s and criminal records, decided we were old enough and no outstanding warrants, then let us loose in the joint, no pun intended.

Two Toke Tom thought he’d died and gone to heaven. “Look at the inventory,” he whispered in a voice just this side of Reverential, and sure enough, there were glass cases filled with more strains of marijuana than Two Toke had tried in his entire 63 years on this earth. There were Indicas and Sativas, blends and hybrids, edibles and smokeables, oils and salves, balms and ointments, bongs and hookahs, pipes and vaporizers. The store offered everything an old pothead could’ve dreamed of if he’d ever dreamed one day the stuff would become legal. I thought Tom might weep.

All of us wandered the place for half an hour, asked the staff dopey questions and marveled at the assortment of bud and paraphernalia. We pinched ourselves. But when we left, we mostly left empty handed except for Two Toke who declared he needed to buy something legally just because he could.

Back in his ’65 VW bus, we were all silent for awhile. About halfway home, Tom broke the mood. “Boys,” he said, “I think we’ve seen the future. And it ain’t us. Someday they’ll make documentaries about the likes of us.” We all shook our collective heads. Prohibition was over and we moonshiners were driving into the fogbank of history. By the time we reached the South End we were pretty much gone.

If you’ve ever attended one of the free lectures at the Elger Bay Institute of Aesthetic Enlargement, you know that continuing education flourishes on the erudite South End. For those of you who have cable TV, you probably feel like you don’t need to take advantage of the Institute’s seminars, tutorials and lectures offered to the public, not when you can get every episode of every series made since Milton Berle brought enlightenment to America through the magic of television. But, of course, you’d be wrong and that’s why, no doubt, you read old Skeeter, make sure you aren’t missing anything of real and lasting importance.

Prof. Dimbulbsky spoke the other night to a packed audience in Macrame Hall. His topic was politics and specifically ‘Democracy Post Citizens United’. The good professor walked us through the Supreme Court case that opened up campaign financing to corporations and explained how freedom of speech for Big Business was as important as free speech for us South Enders. “Maybe more so,” Prof. Dimbulbsky said. “They represent all their employees, not just a Board of Directors. Why shouldn’t their votes be tied to profit?” he asked. “The more successful a company, the more votes they should be given.”

“In fact,” he stated, “I’ll go you one further. Why not peg the ballot to profit, not just for the corporation, but to the individual? We value success, do we not? Well then, doesn’t it make logical sense to give those at the top with proven track records more votes than the poor fellow scraping by at the bottom?”

Well, pandemonium nearly broke out in the Hall. Most of us in attendance could see we weren’t going to receive extra votes on the Dimbulbsky Democracy Chart. In fact, if we were following him correctly, he might recommend eliminating us from the voting roles altogether. Admittedly — and Jerry from the Marina did just that — half of us don’t bother voting anyway. And that’s in a presidential election. Off year, I suspect most of us don’t even know there is an election, although ballots come in the mail that maybe look like another credit card application.

Well, food for thought, I guess, the rich getting extra votes. Like the Professor said, they already buy the election with contributions, lobbyists and inside leverage, wouldn’t it just be better, more honest, more transparent, to just get it out in the open? Billy Farthmore, a bag boy at the Plaza making minimum wage, asked why the rich wouldn’t look out for their own interests if they had all the votes? Prof. Dimbulbsky shook his head sadly. “My dear boy, they do now. But who better to make policy than the Winners?” We all chuckled appreciatively. I don’t know if the Professor changed any minds, but worst case, we wouldn’t have to follow Presidential politics for years prior to every election. Out of our hands, out of our minds…. Better, I guess, than class warfare.

I know a lot of folks who are upset as hell about our porous borders. We got Mexicans coming up through Texas, Central Americans sneaking in through Arizona, Cubans boating into Florida, Microsoft retirees rolling into the South End. It’s apparently no more possible to secure the bridge onto the island than it is to guard the southern borders. This last week the Governor of Wisconsin, running for President but fading fast, proposed a fence on the Canadian border. I guess those disenchanted hockey players up north might be contemplating a mass exodus. Over in Europe the refugees from the Middle East are flooding the continent.

Me, I’m not too worried about Canadians. I’m worried about the immigrants we’re building in Amazon, at GM, in factories across America. Robots! That’s what worries me. Job-takers. Amazon wants to use drones to make deliveries door to door. Forget building a wall — they’ll just fly over. Gated community? Not unless they put up a canopy over the entire suburb.

Computers with bodies. Robots with attitude. Artificial intelligence smarter than me and my neighbors. Just what we need…. We’ll look back with nostalgia at the Hispanic crews who used to manicure the fescued yards of the wild South End, folks who you could talk to, folks who ate lunch at the Diner, real folks, flesh and blood folks. With families. And dreams.

The only dream a robot’s gonna have is to take your place. They already hypnotized most of us now. We live in their world, the virtual, digitized one we still think is in our control. Oh yeah, the immigrants are coming all right. We’re bringing em in like the pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Only they take over while we’re wide awake.

It’s Harvest Time on the South End and no, I’m not talking about marijuana. The Bud Hut and legalized cannabis pretty much ended that era. I’m talking kraut. Sauerkraut. I know most folks wouldn’t put a forkful of the stuff near their dog, much less their mouth, but I spent some time in Wisconsin where kraut was considered, if not a delicacy, a staple. So I guess it was only natural that I became an artisanal kraut maker.

We got a couple of huge old stoneware crocks, one 8 gallon and one 12 gallon, that we’ve used, oh, the last 20 odd years. We have an antique maple cabbage shredder that sits over the crock with three blades about 6 inches long that a head of cabbage riding on a little box carriage passes over while each blade shreds nice long ribbons into. When we have a few inches’ worth we add a handful of non-iodized salt and a big handful of garlic, then shred some more. Once we got the crock full we haul it down to the shack where the fragrance won’t disturb those with delicate olfactory buds. They think it stinks to high heaven. Which it does about one day later.

The cabbage, see, is fermenting. Bacteria starts breaking it down and the water that’s released gets frothy and aromatic. I got a weighted stoneware lid that keeps the cabbage under the foam and in the liquid. When you think you like the stage of fermentation — or when you can’t take the smell any longer — you haul the crock back up into the kitchen and you bottle it in Mason jars. That’s what we’re doing tonight. Some jars we’ll boil to stop the fermentation and some we’ll just put in sterilized jars, let them keep ‘working’.

The old timers would keep their crocks in the cellar over winter, scrape off the mold and enjoy all those probiotics long before the yuppies ever heard of yogurts and live fermenting foods. Me, I’m not a big fan of scraping molds off my foods. Probiotics are one thing, fungus is another….

Next week’s food blog we’ll explore the mysteries of homebrewing. Probiotics with a Kick!