The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Half my neighborhood’s been for sale for years, mostly since the Great Recession when, unfortunately for the neighbors, prices fell through the floor, rolled down the bluff and laid there on the beach waiting for the tide to lift them back up here. It’s been a long wait. The suicide rate at ReFlux Realty is a closely guarded secret, but it’s got to be right up there with stock market day traders this past week.

Obama’s fault, no doubt, but leaving partisan politics aside, the economy seems to be on the upswing. Which is NOT Obama’s doing, of course … but slap me upside the head with a left wing newspaper for suggesting it sure couldn’t be Congress.

Whatever it is, the houses across the road started selling last month. Frank put his on the market and by the time he could crack his first beer, the place had SOLD. The old Bucklin Store sold about the same hour. Pat’s bluff house sold. Pin’s house on the corner closed. The section 8 million dollar joint on the bluff, the one renters squatted in long after the water was turned off — and, trust me, none of us want to inquire where the ‘waste’ got disposed of — even IT sold. Realtors are digging out of their hasty graves to get in on this bonanza. Zombie Realtors: the movie. They want your listing, not your flesh.

Okay, they want both.

Half our neighborhood is changing. New folks moving in, old friends moving out. I had just mentored them in the intricacies of retirement and now I got a freshman crop to deal with. Me, the geriatric Mr. Chips. These folks paid real bucks for these haciendas, what I guess is the gentrification of the South End, and I won’t see a dime for the education I’m offering. Way of the World, I suppose — certainly the saga of the South End. All I can ask in return for all this shared wisdom of an old banjo whacker is maybe think of the mizzus and me as neighbors, not what they refer to us in the association they got: Out of Platters. O.P.’s. Damn, it makes a person feel … I don’t know … like an outsider. Course, that’s exactly why I came here in the first place. Just didn’t expect folks to follow me here, is all.

Capitalism succeeds because it combines two primary drives in the human brain: greed and the urge NOT to work for someone else. On the South End most of us tried our hands at employment but came up a little short. Short of a work ethic, short of money, short of tolerance for a Boss. So we did what most desperate, unemployed people do. We started our own business.

Any good STARTING YOUR OWN CORPORATION FOR THE COMPLETE IDIOT book will tell you under-capitalization is the main harbinger of Failure in 90% of startups. Obviously none of us down here bought the book, probably couldn’t afford it. “It takes money to make money.” Page 2, Chapter 1. Folks just figure, I guess, they’ll buy a couple of yaks, breed em, then sell the little yaksters to a clamoring public. They don’t really factor in the yak feed, the vet bills, the yak barn and the yak fences. And they NEVER factor in the publicity campaign to create a viral fever for WANTING or NEEDING a yak. Maybe many yaks.

The other thing they don’t calculate in is how much work self-employment entails. Without overtime. Without benefits. You’re supposed to trade off working for Cap’n. Bligh in return for slaving 80 hours a week for Mr. Wonderful, yourself. Course Mr. Wonderful isn’t issuing paychecks at the beginning. He has yak bills to pay before he pays himself and the debts are growing deeper than yak droppings out in the barnyard.

So it’s little wonder us entrepreneur types, us Job Creators, us Captains of Industry, end up broke, disillusioned and depressed, our dreams shattered, our shacks mortgaged, our divorce rates sky high.

But! By god, we’re South Enders and South Enders don’t quit! Well, okay, we gave up on our capitalist fantasies of entrepreneurial riches. But we stayed true to our vow never to work for the Man again, never to be a cog in the well-greased machinery of some #@*&!!^# company, no sir! If we have to live poor, so be it. If we have to live by our wits, even if that’s a SERIOUS disadvantage, okay. And if anyone out there is looking for a very nice herd of cute yaks, I think we can help you with YOUR dream.

I got a pal, Guitar Bob, who just came back from the doctor’s office for his yearly checkup. The doc, he told me, last time I was over, said he should start taking statins. “Statins?” I asked. “Aren’t those for lowering cholesterol?” Bob’s cholesterol has always been low. His old man died at about 99 and Bob’s got genes like Methuselah.

“Whaddaya think?” he asked. Guitar Bob and I have spent many a night talking medicine between songs, mostly with the determination to avoid it. Folks I know spend a fortune on herbal remedies for arthritis and colds, pump ibuprofen for pain, take meds for depression, drink fungi-infused teas for god knows what, all in the hopes it’ll cure what ails em. I believe in eating good food. I know, not gonna sell self help books with that, but I believe you ought to skip the experiments and stick with apples off the trees in the orchard.

Statistics don’t lie, mister. But they are misleading. For awhile I was taking a baby aspirin every day. Supposed to cut down the odds of a heart attack. Now they say it increases the odds of a stroke. So I quit the baby aspirin. If the doctors can’t make up their minds, I sure can.

Who knows what combinations of the myriad stuff we stick into ourselves does what to what? Tomorrow night we’re making sauerkraut, fermented cabbage, garnished with Cindy, the goat woman’s, garlic. Her cabbage too.

Some day, years from now, some future foodologist will discover that fermented cabbage combined with garlic caused duodenal cancer in 10% of the South End population. Except for the lucky few who were taking statins to control cholesterol.

For years I went to the local Beauty College for cheap haircuts. For a nominal fee, I’d let the students learn from their mistakes, something I apparently didn’t learn from. Maybe it’s low self-esteem or the simple realization that a major tonsorial make-over isn’t going to matter one whit, I don’t know but I hate getting a haircut and I particularly hate paying for one.

Course, I had a couple of memorable coifs, usually at the hands of gay guyz I let experiment on me, what I call Revenge on the Straight Boy. One unforgettable clip left me with a standing wave that no amount of shampooing or combing would tame. A year later it exhausted itself on the beach of my forehead and I never let another avant-garde stylist do a dada surrealist masterpiece with my locks. I assume my sadist scissorist has long since died of nostril cancer from the chemicals in blue hair perms — or at least I hope so. If he could embarrass me, an avowed unhandsome sort, he should probably have been brought up on atrocity charges.

I’ve had my share of bad cuts, most at the hands of those Beauty College students, but some from Ozark butchers hoping to teach the hippie a lesson with an Army cut or small town barbers who learned their craft using a bowl and shears, same as my old man when we were little shavers. Needless to say I go in for a clearcut every year or even two, usually, like today, when I’m off to a job interview. Which, sadly, should give you some insight into the frequency of these job interviews.

These days I go to the chains, SuperCuts or Great Clips or Hairy Masters. They don’t cut any better than the students, but they cut quick. And quick, if you’re a Samson in the hands of your tattooed Delilah, is of the essence. Half hour silences in the swivel stool seem like an eternity — I’ll pay extra for a 5 minute speed snip. I leave a nice tip, say adios, then slap my beat up hat over their artistry. By the time I come back my salon will have closed or been bought up by another carnivorous chain. One free haircut after the 10th, they like to tell me, handing me a coupon card with the #1 circled. Right…. Talk to my undertaker.

Down at the Cupcake Hut, the South End’s only bakery, the talk over the Hobart bread mixer consists mostly of yeasty gossip and glutinous outrage over fears of being asked to bake a gay wedding cake. Rita Mae, the current owner and born again Christian, was slapping dough down on the kneading table the way a sado-masochist masseuse would pound a hated client.

“No way,” she was fuming for any and all of us pastry lovers standing in front of the display case filled with bismarks and jelly rolls, danishes and apple fritters, muffins and doughnuts, worrying we’d never get our orders until Rita Mae was finished slapping that loaf silly. “I won’t do it. My beliefs come before the law and my law is Higher than theirs and that’s the real truth,” she grunted with a ferocious fist to the lump on the table.

But she wiped the flour off her hands on her apron and slid behind the pastry case to take our orders. Ronnie took a few doughnuts for his landscaping crew and I ordered a fritter and a cup of coffee. To go. I sure didn’t want to sit at one of the little round formica tables while Rita Mae was in one of her Full Rants.

“What’s next?” she shouted and at first I thought she meant what else did I want. “That’ll about do it, Rita,” I shrugged, wishing I was already out that front door.

“Boy oh boy, that’s the truth,” she retorted, ringing up my coffee and fritter. “Next thing’ll be wedding cakes for polygamists. Who knows where this is going? Sodom and Gomorrah right here and I’m supposed to cater the orgies??”

I could feel my sweet tooth going rotten, decaying faster than civilization. “I don’t know, Rita, maybe it’s not really that big an issue. I mean, you don’t get all that much call for wedding cakes, do you? Much less same sex ones.”

Rita Mae shot me the evil eye and I shut up. Ronnie, always the provocateur, turned at the doorway, his bag of pastries held high. “Love thy neighbor, Rita Mae!” Rita Mae grabbed a day old muffin from the tray beside the register and just missed Ronnie as he slammed the door on his way out. The muffin exploded against the back of the sign that said WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO ANYONE. That was probably going to be my last fritter, I decided. I can read the writing on the wall about as well as Rita Mae can read her Good Book. “You have a nice day,” she frowned as she gave me change and somehow I knew I wouldn’t.