The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Buried in today’s obituary column was the profoundly sad news that the Playboy centerfold is dead. Or at least a completely nude body has been sent to the graveyard of pornographic history. Airbrushed, lipsticked, coiffed and embalmed. Teenage boys of the 50’s and 60’s went into deep mourning, their dreams of one day living in silk pajamas and a smoking jacket all day, every day, surrounded by a bevy of heaving bosoms by the pools and the hot tubs of their own mansions, dashed forever.

Hugh Hefner, with his stockpiles of Viagra and Cialis, has thrown in the towel. The bunnies will use it to cover themselves now, relegated to the status of pin-up girls, coquettish and demure. Maybe it’s the old raconteur’s way of atoning for bringing the world non-stop hardcore internet porn, sex stripped of elegance and glamour, returned to the raw basics of grunt and rut. Or maybe he knew he couldn’t compete with global orgiastic excess.

Old Hef brought sex out of the closet back in those prudish, frigid years of Ike and Nixon, surrounded it with literature and essays, packaged it in glitter and sold it on the newsstand next to Life and Good Housekeeping and National Geographic. Even the women’s right movement couldn’t shame Hugh from making them a toy, an object, a living sexdoll.

It’s a dark day when sex can no longer sell a sex magazine. If we’re not careful, violence won’t monetize movies and video games either. Political correctness will once again rule the land of the bland, home of the fleeced, and the preachers of purity will return again to their pious pulpits. And, of course, worst of all, us adolescent boys might finally have to grow up.

Taking the First Bite

It has come to the Crab Cracker’s attention that a petition to boycott Halloween this year has been circulating since summer. Supported by Pastor Paul of the Little Church of the Stingless Nettles, it decries demon worship, gross-out costumes, sugar gluttony, crass commercialization and yoga, particularly Hot Yoga, what the Reverend calls Satan’s Sauna. The anti-goblin signatures numbered in the many dozens.

The Mabana Institute, the South End’s not quite non-partisan think tank, has been conducting its own polls regarding Halloween this past month, according to Prof. Lawrence Glewkose, former director of the American Candy Lobby and now a permanent board member of the Institute. Prof. Glewkose reported that in their admittedly non-scientific poll of children at South End Elementary, 69% were in favor of Halloween as a national holiday while 11% supported having 2 or more Halloweens a year. 11% of the survey responders believed Halloween was already an ongoing event 365 days a year, judging by the proliferation of zombie movies and candy machines and their siblings’ Goth wardrobes. 9% couldn’t read the survey.

According to Joan Hypoglyseemly, spokeswoman for the Pro-Diabetes Foundation, anti-Halloween sentiment is based on  superstition and fear of high fructose sugar perpetuated by the ignorant and the dietary obsessed. “What these people need,” she suggested, “is a Paleo diet exorcism followed by the first ten episodes of Walking Dead.

Prof. Glewkose, unmoved by her sense of humor, suggested she might consider removing her witch costume next interview. Needless to say, Halloween started early on the previously zombie-free South End. According to a Stanwood General Hospital nurse, Prof. Glewkose will recover from his bite wounds, but probably not in time to take his kids Trick or Treating this year.

I drove my jalopy down to Bellevue and Babylon this week. They got a new Pay-as-you-Drive lane system now, fast lanes for the folks willing to pay up to $10 for a commute to Microsoft and the high tech cubicles, more if you’re like me, the occasional traveler without a transponder and a special bank account. I thought I’d already paid my gas tax and license fees, maybe now I could drive the same roads as the rich, especially since percentage-wise, I was paying even more than them.

I figured wrong. As usual. I’m used to sitting in the back seats of planes jammed in like a chick in the crate going to the slaughterhouse. I’m growing accustomed to feeling second class. Nobody said life was fair, even in a democracy. You pay to play. College. Jewelry shops. Opera. State parks. National parks too. High speed internet. Politics. You maybe thought your taxes give you a free pass to Yellowstone or equal opportunity at the ballot box, think again. It costs $10 to drive into the State Park and I not only throw more optional money at them on my driver’s license fees, I maintain a county park us Friends of Camano Island Parks maintain so the county can use the saved dollars to enforce boat launch fees when I haul my sailboat down.

Maybe the rich do deserve their own lane for commuting. Maybe they deserve every break we can give them. When the King’s carriage rolled through on the highway to the castle, you better believe us peasants pulled over, doffed our caps and bowed ceremoniously to M’Lord. Call me cantankerous and slap me with a macaroni, but I don’t like it.

Probably won’t be too long, though, the gated communities down here will demand their own lane over the bridge onto the island. That, or they’ll go whole hog and insist the state retrofit a drawbridge, just for them, the rest of us, buy a boat. It is, after all, an island. If the riffraff can’t swim, all the better. A few less of us and the property values will go up. The free ride is over. For now, the boat ride’s fairly cheap.

Little Jimmy was preaching at the South End Marina’s Pilot House Lounge the other night, carrying on about the upcoming elections. “It’s like we got two Halloweens,” he was orating to about 8 of us layabouts who weren’t quite ready to go home and face the music. “One with goblins and then the one we vote for spooks, no treats.”

“Yeah,” Biker Bob threw in, pounding his Bud bottle on the formica table, sending suds onto the pulpit. “And then you got 4 more years of Halloween every damn day.”

Some of the boyz, especially after more than a couple, don’t much believe in the democratic system we got. “Throw em all out, I say,” says Ralph from behind the bar where he’s filling in for Joey, the usual weeknight bartender and referee. Joey never takes a side in a political discussion, wouldn’t say Gerrymander with a mouthful, which explains why the place stays open in these partisan times we live in and the Stanwoodopolis Gazette isn’t half obituaries of patrons shot in the parking lot.

George next to me sits pensively peeling the label off his beer bottle before venturing, “You mean everybody but YOUR guy, don’tcha Ralph?”

“Oh, my guy’s okay,” Ralph agrees, wiping his hands on a dirty apron. “He voted to kill that Gun Bill this year.” Ralph’s a big NRA fan, something he usually espouses this side of the bar most nights until Joey tells him to pipe down. Ralph can get pretty agitated without much counter-argument even. Argue with him and he can get scary as Halloween in an Ebola isolation unit.

Half the place votes for their guy, it turns out. The other half are too disgusted or apathetic to even vote, especially mid-term. They’d vote if they could vote out the president, but nothing’s going to change, why bother? they think. So Ralph’s vote should count double, a fact that makes him happy. And me … I take the point about a prolonged Halloween in the Land of the Brave.