The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

ROCKY HORROR STOCK MARKET SHOW

Like maybe a few of you, I’ve been watching the stock market in the aftermath of the worst economic meltdown in most of our memories. It looks like a jumping bean on steroids and meth both. Huge jumps, kamikaze dives. Nobody knows quite what to do with the money they got left after the 401-K’s were looted, bury it or invest it with the Wall Street crowd. It’s like the creepiest of horror movies where the dead keep getting back up and killed again.

The zombies, of course, are all those folks who preached unbridled capitalism. You remember them. The people who wanted to privatize Social Security. Why make a puny couple of percentage points interest when we could make some SERIOUS money in the Market? Why put the brakes on a wild ride to riches? Bubble? No sir, that was a balloon sailing to Eldorado, streets paved with gold…..

I will make you a prediction you can take to the bank: they’ll be back! They’ll dig up out of the hasty grave we threw them in and kicked dirt over. They’ll knock on our door some midnight dreary when our own fiscal wounds have started to heal and the memory of this nightmare has faded. They’ll be at the door grinning blood and money, offering impossible returns, easy loans, no interest, fast bucks.

Me, I’m resharpening my wooden stakes. I’m hanging credit cards wrapped in garlic by the porch. I’m looking for silver bullets, not silver linings.

So when the rollercoaster levels out and you know the extent of the damage finally, don’t let your guard down, don’t call your broker and don’t assume the worst is over. It isn’t. They’re clawing their way above ground even now.

And here’s a tip: when dawn finally comes and the ghouls in Brooks Brother suits slink back to their coffins, check your MasterCards. From now on, Leave Home Without It.

With this next presidential election cranked up about two years ahead of the Big Vote, I’ve been thinking about another round of debates we should have between the Job Creators and us Takers. The Pope’s been in town this weekend, talking about the obligation of a society — or a religion — to take care of the poor and the sick. Seems like the decent, the moral, thing to do, he says. Course, this makes him a socialist. A ‘taker’ too if you figure his salary’s paid from tithes.

I was just in my local Haggen grocery store. They bought about 150 Safeway and Albertson stores this spring, figuring, I guess, they would create thousands of jobs overnight. Now they’re closing stores, laying off thousands and applying for bankruptcy protection. Job Takers, looks like to me.

VW just got caught fudging its emission control tests. Put in a little software to fool the regulators, make it look like their diesel engines were clean as whistles. Now they’re going to end up either going down the Rabbit Hole or, best case, downsizing when the lawsuits and the fines reach many billions of dollar and sales dive. Job Takers, you ask me.

I’m a small businessman myself. Occasionally I even create jobs. Been awhile, since the Great Recession knocked me back on my heels, the one where the financial sector played a little fast and loose with our money. Cost me a little, cost the country plenty. Job Takers, if anyone wants my opinion.

Capitalism is fine with me — I got my little business and it’s given me a livelihood that pays the rent. But you know and I know and the Pope does too, the game is rigged. The winners make the rules and okay, nobody thinks they’re fair, except maybe the winners, but let’s take care of the losers. Let’s think of it as the cost of doing business. If government is only there to rig the game, the Big Boys can do it on their own. Maybe that’s why they hate government — it’s just a waste of their money.

My old landlord was building a plane in his basement. We were renting the walk-up 2nd floor apartment above Sky Pilot Phil and his long suffering mizzus. I don’t know what Phil did for a living, but I’m fairly certain he wasn’t an airline pilot. When we first moved in, he took me down in the cellar to see his pride and joy. His pride and joy wasn’t his wife, I could tell that right off the bat. He treated her not much better than his cocker spaniel that filled the backyard with landmines we tried to avoid without much luck.

Maybe you’ve never built a small airplane. I sure hadn’t. But I can tell you, it wasn’t small crammed into that basement of his with all the stuff you usually find in a basement. Plus all the stuff Phil needed to assemble this contraption. “Wow!” I said. “How long you been AT this?” He told me he’d been working on this five years. It had a fuselage and I guess he had the motor or engine or whatever aviators call it, mounted on the front, but no propeller yet.

“Wow,” I said again, a little at a loss for words. All I could think was you couldn’t pay me enough to crawl in that flimsy mess, sit in the cockpit and take off to a certain death by gravity. “How much more you got to go, Phil?”

He was close. Real close. I thought of Icarus, maybe too close. “It’s really something,” I said lamely. Like a lot of places I lived during my roaring 20’s, I felt like I needed to move on. Phil’s family life was a wreck and I didn’t care to share it through the heating vents so the day came when I gave notice. “Sure hate to leave before you take her up,” I said, like I really wanted to be a witness to another Hindenburg.

Phil shook his head sadly. “I don’t know if I can get it out.” “Up, you mean….” I asked. “No, out. I didn’t think about getting it through the basement door. It’s a little too big, even disassembled. I may have to cut through a wall.”

We all have our dreams, I suppose. Some realize those dreams and some … well, some are like Phil. Just lucky. My suspicion is he’s still taking renters down in the cellar and still imagines a day, not too distant, of his own personal Kitty Hawk. I’ll give him this: he built a plane. And he lived to tell about it. His wife, I’m betting, probably has a better story.

In 1973 I worked at a dog pound in Madison, Wisconsin. What we called a Humane Society. We adopted 40 % of our mutts … meaning, we killed 60% of the animals, the correct euphemism being euthanized. The national average was 25% adopted so we patted ourselves on the back. My minimum wage job was to clean puppy cages and help kill critters. Let’s just say it’s a short career track unless you’re a practicing sadist, which I am not.

In fact, I adopted three dogs myself, maybe not a big deal if I lived on a country estate with acreage for the hounds to chase rabbits and deer for days on end, but I lived in a second story one bedroom apartment over a TV repair shop. Hard to believe now, looking back. No, not three dogs in a small apartment. That there used to be TV repair shops. When’s the last time you remember fixing a television rather than buy a new one?

One day at the pound they needed me to man the front desk, something I’d never done previously, something that might just lead me up a rung on the promotional ladder. I asked what was expected of me up here at the front door and was told I would direct folks to the kennels where could inspect their future pets. Beats shoveling shit, I thought.

My first encounter with the public was a woman bringing in her old dog and its 4 new puppies. “I can’t take care of these,” she said, pointing at the little wiggling pups in a cardboard box. I asked if maybe she might’ve considered spaying as an option. She shook her head. “Costs money,” she answered. “So you want to leave the mother too? Hasn’t she been with you awhile?” I asked. “Yeah, I’m tired of her too.” Oddly, this pissed me off.

I picked up the phone to our intercom. “Larry,” I said, “fire up the incinerator. We got five to torch.” My dog whisperer seemed suddenly alarmed. Shocked even. “You gonna just kill em?” she cried.

“Whadja think?” I said cruelly. “You think people are lined up for an old dog and her litter?”
About this time Larry emerged from the back, looked at the box of pups and asked, “These?” I nodded. Larry looked at the woman with measured contempt, picked up the box and went into the back where I knew he’d unload them into the puppy cages. He’d be back for the mother shortly. I started filling out the paperwork the way a guard at Dachau would, dispassionately. Name. Address. Reason for wanting your pet killed. Basic stuff.

I guess the woman called later to see if her dogs were toast because Mike, my supervisor, called me into his office. He explained — patiently — how our job was not to judge, our job was to take in unwanted animals so they weren’t drowned in pillowcases in the lake or shot behind the barn. “We want them to bring them to us,” he sighed, painfully aware I was unfit for further front desk duty.

I lasted a few more weeks. Larry lasted a month. There are, I’ve learned, some jobs that aren’t a good ‘fit’. My trouble, of course, was that was pretty much true of all jobs.

These are fast times we live in. You maybe remember when we talked about the Rat Race, that post-Eisenhower era when the corporations took over the South End and America too in a bloodless coup, ran a few efficiency studies, then busted the unions and paid us serfs paltry wages for long hours. The ‘modern’ citizen isn’t just in a rat race — we’re watching the information tsunami breaking over us, rocketing us forward on wave after wave of googled crap disguised as news or finance or sports, but is really a vehicle for advertising and a prescription for attention deficit when we’re tossed on the rocky beach of a fearful future.

You ask a friend or family member how their summer’s going, they say ‘crazy busy.’ We’re on our own treadmill now. Cellphones, laptops, text messaging, e-mails, sexting, online dating, online shopping, online everything. The truth is we’re not busy, we’re just half crazy, bored to death without a ‘device’ in our hands, constant stimulation but not anything with depth. Couple minutes max. Short text, quick internet search, got to move on to the next stimuli….

We don’t have time anymore for a walk on the beach, for reading a novel, for growing a garden, for learning new pursuits or new hobbies. No, we have to check our e-mails, messages, stock markets, ball scores and Facebook. We have to stay ‘connected’ and being ‘connected’ means keeping up with an accelerating digital glut. Not metaphorically — we’re rewiring physically. I guess you could say we’re evolving if you’re not a faith-based computer user, intelligent design if you are ….

I rowed out in my boat today, fighting wind and swells, to drop some crabpots. From far offshore I could see our house up in the trees back off the road, mostly obscured, but peeking out. I suspect my life is like that now, an anachronism peeking out from behind a woods no one ventures into anymore, a very long distance away as the waves pushed by a new wind crash up against my little dinghy and I’m in two places, but both are growing smaller and smaller, just specks on a receding horizon.