The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Jihad Jimmy, last time any of us South End yahoos talked to him, was holding court at the Thursday AA meeting a month ago. Jimmy had kicked his drinking problem but now he had a religion problem, maybe not to him, but for the rest of the assembled abstainers, for sure. Jimmy had grabbed the first lifesaver that floated by when he was hopelessly adrift in a gin-filled sea and I suppose it could’ve been music or woodworking or yoga …. But no, Jimmy found four nicely dressed folks at his door one inebriated afternoon who asked if he’d care to discuss Scripture.

Good timing! Brenda, his long suffering wife and breadwinner the past two years, had left him the day before and in his drunken despair, Jimmy had sense enough to reach out for proferred help. Always nice to find a Sign or an Omen when you’re free-falling over the cliff of your imagination and believe me, Jimmy was expecting the Bottom.

Addiction, whether it’s alcohol or Heaven, makes True Believers of us. I’m not saying they’re equal, especially when you see Jimmy clean himself up, dust himself off and return to the world of the living. Course now J.J. is talking Rapture. Revelations. End Times. Sign of the Beast. He finds Signs everywhere now. He’s a prophet, although he never claims it. He just Sees what’s obvious, just wants to share it with us Lost Souls.

Just for once, I’d like a religion that loves THIS world. That doesn’t think the Next World is gonna be better. Maybe Jimmy’s going door-to-door with 3 other Jimmy’s, knocking on broken hearts, broken dreams, broken hopes. Maybe they’re saving lives, hell if I know….

Brenda’s doing some clerical work for Windy Rear Realty. It’s okay, she says. Twenty hours a week, not too stressful. She told me he’d stopped by her house a week ago. Wanted her to leave with him and start over. He’d changed, he said. He was sorry. He asked forgiveness before it was too late. “Too late?” she asked. “Too late for what?” “The Rapture,” he told her. “You’ll be left behind.”

Left behind?? “Jimmy,” she says to him, “that sounds exactly like heaven to me.”

Down here in the start-up labs of the South End we’ve been printing DNA. Got ourselves some sterile vats full of 4 major amino acid groups, hooked em up to a 3-D printer, ran a USB port to a laptop and went to work experimenting with interesting combinations. Make our own stem cells with unusual variations of chromosomes, another year or two, you’ll see Wal-Mart offering kits for the kids. Make your own sibling! Puppy in a test tube! Fun for the whole family!

Course we’re still working out the bugs, literally sometimes. South Endomex Technologies made a fast mutating paramecium that ran rampant in the dumpster behind their lab a couple months ago. Two or three cats lost more than their allotted 9 lives before Billy Brandon, the night manager, noticed clumps of matted fur behind the building and alerted Frank, South Endomex’s project manager next morning. “Looked like they’d been turned inside out and twisted,” he whispered before giving notice.

Kind of a wake-up call, I guess. They double bag unwanted recombinants now, no point taking unnecessary chances. Not that anyone’s very worried. I mean, what are the odds of escaped life forms surviving in the hostile environment of the nettled South End? Humans barely eke out an existence, what chance does an unstable pile of amino acids have?

Still, always good to err on the side of caution even if the government hasn’t gotten around to clamping down on the profit motive with overly burdensome regulations.     Yet….     Which only makes us all that more inventive. Time, after all, is not on our side. But judging by the influx of venture capital, the potential is nearly unlimited. Forget Silicon Valley. This here is the Next Big Thing. This is the new Garden of Eden, a chance to get it right this time. You want an apple, Adam? Tart or sweet? Red or yellow? With or without seeds? Just punch a program, Big Fella, no need to disobey orders from On High. But … maybe keep an eye out for any odd looking worms. Still got some flies in the ointment….

I was chatting it up with some of my UpCreek neighbors the other day and we got to arguing whether living Up River was the same as Up Scale. Bayou Bill was making the point that any riverfront property was upscale, no two ways about it. Course, Bayou was undercutting his argument by standing on what was left of his dryrotted, slick-as-snot porch in front of his 1973 single wide with the lower one third vinyl green with mold or algae or moss or all three. “Up scale,” Little Jimmy was saying, making his point with his second Milwaukee’s Best can, “might not be a description the realtors would come up with on the sales brochure.”

Bayou crumpled his own can and snorted, “What are you talking about, Jimbo? I wouldn’t sell this riverfront paradise for any price under a million.” The boyz talk like this, sort of like their Lottery Dreams, something to fill the conversation between ball games and Wheel of Fortune. Harmless enough, I guess, but not exactly uplifting or educational. Maybe we all live in our fantasy worlds … and that’s okay with me so long as they’re upbeat even if it isn’t a synonym for upscale. Us river folk — at least us up river folk — can use all the optimism we can muster. It’s dark back here, it rains an extra inch every inland mile and there’s no jobs left anywhere near for us moss-backed old timers. If the Oso slide had closed us off from downriver civilization during winter, our suicide and alcohol rates would have been alarming. As it was, illegal fishing and some minor deer poaching kept us occupied while the State was preoccupied with re-opening the highway.

Course now that the road to Arlington and Gomorrah is passable once more, Bayou figures his real estate values are soaring to stratospheric heights. Life is good, the river isn’t flooding and the boyz are getting richer drinking cheap canned beer. It’s a fool’s paradise all right. That, or a drunkard’s dream.

More Tales from UpCreek

My old shack looks east into the mountains and across the river where two or three fishing cabins still sit perched on the bank. Last year’s spring melt after a week of unseasonably warm weather and heavy rains turned the river into a rage that ate at the banks across from me and finally, one afternoon, sloughed off one of the cabins, Harry Watson’s, a Seattle attorney who’d come here since before me, and sent it into a log strewn Waring blender where I watched it go over sideways, hesitate a minute or so, then collapse in on itself. The boarded up windows turned beseechingly toward the sky, the front door popped off its hinges, the roof tore away in two parts and Harry’s cabin set sail briefly before sinking from view. It was a sobering sight to behold.

Harry came up to inspect for damage a few days later and I drove around, took the bridge and found him staring at the gash where his house had sat for 50 years. ‘I’m real sorry about this, Hank,” I said when I came up beside him standing over what must have seemed like an open grave. “Lot of memories in that old cabin,” he muttered mournfully.

I tried to console him, of course, said hey, you’ll rebuild another one, a better one, but we both knew the county would never grant a building permit that close to the river now. 1960, sure, go ahead, what’s it to us? Your loss if the river eats it and who cares where the outhouse drains? It all washes out to sea so let the Down River folks in the next county worry about septic overflow. We’re UpCreek people and maybe that’s what gives us an Uppity Attitude. But times change, not as fast as the river, but they change.

Trouble is, Harry’s no spring chicken. My guess is Harry’s fishing days are pretty much over. I just hope it’s only the fishing that’s ended for him. I sure don’t need to see another obit photo with a guy and his damn big fish he caught 30 years ago.