The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Zorba, a buddy of mine, stopped in today. I asked what’s new? and he opened up the tailgate to his truck and pulled out a metal attache case, snapped open the fancy clasps and lifted out a spidery looking gizmo with four propellers at each corner. Nestled beneath its insect body was a gimbaled camera. I was looking at my first real life drone.

Roll over H.G. Wells, give Beethoven the news. Zorba, whose real name is Mike, ran me through all the sci fi protocol, then showed me photos of where we were on the South End from hundreds of feet up, photos where I could see Port Susan lapping shore on the east and Saratoga Straits on the west. He ran this aerodynamic spy plane with his laptop. He said it could go up 500 feet and fly as far away as a mile and a half. I thought I heard a Time Machine land in my backyard.

This is indeed an age of miracles and wonders, a future we barely have to wait for. Zorba and I shook our heads, laughing. At least until he asked, “If we can buy this, what do you suppose the government has? How much more sophisticated is theirs?” We’ll all have one these before long. $300 now, they’ll put em in cereal boxes as prizes in a couple of years.

Well, I haven’t given enough thought to how I’d like to use mine yet. Course, I’d have to get a laptop first, maybe even a cellphone first, something to control the little hummer. Doesn’t seem likely. Once again I’ll be the last yahoo on the South End, miles behind the curve, watching the aerial acrobatics in the neighborhood, everybody taking photos from outer space while I’m earthbound. I know it’ll seem like techno-envy, but I may have to set up a No-Fly Zone over the shack, enforced not by laser beams maybe, but I still got Gramp’s old shotgun.

Ma and me got a sign down by the road that identifies us as a Backyard Habitat. I think folks who are official members are spozed to put up bird feeders and robin bubble baths. You need to have more than just a damn backyard with a bbq and lawn chairs is what they’re saying. But you don’t need a whole lot more….

I didn’t really want to join the Backyarders, but the mizzus insisted. The more backyards they got signed up, she argued, they could qualify as … I don’t know … a real woods or something. We got 7 acres of real woods and more woods next to that woods. Coyotes and deer and raccoons and squirrels and porcupines and all kinds of varmints who enjoy our backyard fruit and vegetables more than they do the sparse pickings back in the wilderness. I don’t want to get all snobby, but a backyard habitat isn’t going to fire up my tired blood. I didn’t come to the South End to feed squirrels from a bird feeder. They don’t need welfare, they need to be left alone. I’d much prefer they steal from me than wait for handouts.

This year we got a velvet horn buck who thinks maybe I’m the one stealing from him. He chomps on our plums and apples about 10 feet away from me and when I offer him a fresh one, damn if he doesn’t eat it right out of my hand like he expects to be served. He’ll be wanting a napkin next.

I guess all of us on the wild wild South End are more and more gentrified these days. That, or we all realize now that we’re being threatened with backyard confinement, we’d better learn to live together. Probably won’t be long before we put up bird feeders…. I just dread the day when they feed us.

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.