The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Uh-oh, Skeeter’s taking off once again. I know, what a slacker/blogger the mofo is! But let’s cut him some slack. The guy has had a difficult time lately with his so-called career. He was a finalist for a Colorado project, looked like the frontrunner, only to be asked, just prior to boarding a plane to go pitch his glass proposal, if he could possibly put his stained glass mural in something other than their windows. They didn’t ask his sculptor competitors if they could put their sculptures on something other than the entryway courtyard grounds. You know, hang them from a cloud or something.

Skeeter said, and I quote: “Huh?” Then he said, and I quote again, “Let me know when to cancel the flight into Colorado.” And they said, quoting once more, “Cancel now.” You think the blood-sport of public art isn’t hard, think again. Skeeter’s got plenty of war wounds from recalcitrant architects benumbed by the legacy of Frank Lloyd always Right, window manufacturers voiding warranties and clients nervous about, well, everything….

Course, you don’t want to hear this and Skeeter doesn’t want to depress you with his problems. Life is fine and if he did want to whine and cry and throw himself on the floor in a fit of despondency, he’d be the idiot and one thing Skeeter isn’t … well, okay, maybe he is. But he has sense enough to pick himself up, dust his hat off and say let’s just move on. Which, of course, is exactly what he’s doing, moving on. Out of town, out of sight and maybe out of mind. His, anyway.

Once again, apologies for leaving anybody who reads this stuff in the lurch. Give you time, maybe, to work on resumes or write that novel you always thought you’d write or just watch more Fox News and see what the fair and balanced crowd thinks that President of ours is doing to ruin America. Skeeter, he’s going into the hinterlands of the ruins, see what the locals there have to say about the current state of affairs. Actually, he’s going to the Tetons. Purple mountains majesty. He’ll get back to you in a week or so….

Purple?

The KKK in South Carolina is holding a rally to protest the banning of the Confederate flag last week, I assume mostly as a recruitment tactic. The mizzus was surprised the KKK still exists. Admittedly there’s no active chapter on the South End. Course, we don’t have a whole lot of minorities a KKK could light crosses in their front yards. You want a hate club, you need someone to hate, otherwise you might just as well join the Moose or Rotary.

Rudy, down at the Diner’s Debate Society, sometimes gets up on his high heels to rant about the ‘War on White Males’, but Anita, the current owner, usually cuts his legs off at the knees with her sarcasm. “Wait til after Hillary’s elected,” she called over to Rudy’s table of male pensioners hoping she wasn’t going to cut off their coffee pipeline. “When she stops you poor white boys’ Social Security payments down to what us women get, then you can talk to me about Male Discrimination. Course, I’d be glad to hire you victims on as morning waitresses, let YOU work for the measley tips you high-rollers leave.”

Rudy’s like a lot of folks these days, one of the oppressed. Taxes too high, jobs too scarce, the country —or so he thinks —is on the downward slide. He blames immigrants, he blames the damn government, he’d blame global warming if he didn’t think it was a left wing conspiracy mostly to bring him down a few more notches. And he blames women for expecting equal pay, equal jobs, equal rights. He thinks Bruce Jenner’s sex change is an act of treason to us he-men.

I watch Anita pour him his 4th cup of joe. He meekly says thanks, but we all know he resents being challenged. Rudy lives in an insular world of bitterness. Bitterness to WHAT, I don’t know. We live in a world of plenty, a peaceful world, a world most folks would envy. Nothing seems sadder to me than a refusal to be happy. But Rudy and his kin the KKK are looking for fresh recruits who think the oppressed are the oppressors. Maybe Anita has the right idea — give him a refill of kindness and hope for miracles.

There are people who think the Civil War is over. They even think the North won. All I can say — as a person who grew up down in Dixie — Gen. Robert E. Lee may have surrendered at Appomattox, but the South sure didn’t. Slavery might’ve officially ended, but white supremacy didn’t disappear with the Emancipation Proclamation.

The Confederate flag, what some folks declare as a symbol of southern pride and its honorable heritage, still flies at state capitals and is still a part of their own state flags and license plates. These people will tell you, with a straight face, the War was fought over state’s rights. Not slavery. Oh no, not slavery. Just the state’s right to own slaves. And the War of Independence was fought over soggy teabags, I suppose. These folks think our birthday was yesterday.

The Confederate flag still flies because these people are still fighting the Civil War, still denying Africans, now African-Americans, the vote, equal rights, a proper place in the post-bellum South. They resent the current president, in large part because he’s an uppity black man. Or half black man. Which, for the proud Confederates, is totally black. The Republican Party, happy to jump on the racist bandwagon, what we call the ‘Southern Strategy’, fans the flame that’s been smoldering for 150 years.

This week a few shame-faced Southerners called for banning the rebel flag in light of the killing of 9 innocent black churchgoers by an Aryan nation nazi bigot who paraded himself under that same flag and decided to wage war on the inferior race that was trying to take over his white country. Even Walmart has said it will no longer sell Confederate merchandise, profits be damned!

Germany banned the swastika. Nazism was a national scar that would take generations to heal. But they’re willing to try. The South … not so much. 150 years later and they’re still in denial over the stain of slavery. If you think this is the final surrender, you don’t know the South. Ban the flag, but don’t assume they’ll be saluting Old Glory any time soon. Not in your lifetime anyway. Not in mine. There’s no truce. Just another bitter indignity to endure. Just more salt in old wounds.

Rumor has it, once again, that Tyee Store is reopening. They evidently gave up on the dream of growing marijuana legally. Probably illegally too, I’m betting. Gonna just sell cigarettes and beer and wine and white bread, all the supplies we South Enders were waiting two years for. Two and a half, but let’s not quibble — let’s celebrate!

Me, I went out today with my trusty sickle and reopened my trail from the back 40 to the road just south of the store. About a mile last time I kept that trail. New folks have moved in back there. Fences have gone up. Blackberries have blocked the path. It’s been, after all, two plus years for the jungle to reclaim my trail, the one I made back in 1985. Although … that trail has moved the way a river alters course. Trees have come down, pastures have been fenced, two loggings have changed things drastically, barbed wire has fenced me out. So okay, change is inevitable. I’m a South Ender; I’m familiar with the notion.

But a few new neighbors forced me into the woods for some serious bushwhacking, mostly to avoid the appearance of trespassing. Okay, the actuality of trespassing. I know what the Amazonian explorers must’ve felt like, hacking into the wilderness, running into dead ends of insurmountable barriers, turning back and trying another route. I didn’t have a guide. Since the Barefoot Bandit left the scene, the interior is uncharted territory. In the end I cleared double the trail I eventually plan to use. Maybe the deer and the raccoons can use the rest.

It’s a pleasure, in case you wonder why I bother, to still be able to traverse the island west to east by moccasin. In the old days I’d slash my way across, buy a beer, jaw with the storefolks and the local yokels by the crackerbarrel, then wander back to the west side. Me and Marco Polo, Lewis and Clark, Livingston and Stanley. They got the fame, but I get a beer. Pretty good trade-off. And who knows? Maybe they’ll grow cannabis too eventually. Save us wasting all that garden space ….

Skeeter’s headed for the hills…. That’s muy correcto, amigos, he’s vamoosing to the mountains of Rosylyn for the annual Beer Hunt, no license necessary. And no, we’re not going politically correct. Meaning, we do NOT catch and release. I know it sounds cruel to some, but sometimes tradition outweighs compassion. Ask a white southerner crying over their rebel flag. “My great grandpappy fought those damn Yankees so we could have states’ rights. I just want to honor his service.”

Sure, it’s a proud tradition, fighting for the right to keep human beings as slaves … or at least the right to keep them from voting now that the traitor Lincoln freed them. Traditions like that are, as Scarlet might say, gone with the wind. If they ban the Confederate flag, what’s next, a ban on swastikas??

Beer hunting. A whole different animal, trust me on this. We’re thinning the herds is what we’re doing. It’s not like we’re Nazis, killing them because we’re superior. It’s not some kind of foamy genocide. Jeez…. We respect the ales. We honor them if you want to know the truth. Someday, when beer hunting is deemed as uncivilized and immoral as slaveholding, our progeny will stand up for us, one last rebel yell!! “My grandpap fought those bottles to a standstill up there in the coal hills. If you want to take down that statue in the square of Skeeter standing mightily in front of two dozen dead ales, you’ll do it over my dead body.”

Course, Skeeter hasn’t got any grandkids….