The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I was in the checkout line of the local pharmacy — and no, I don’t mean the Bud Hut — behind an older fella who had a joint remedy, some kind of modern snake oil guaranteed to alleviate arthritis, hair loss and lack of sexual desire. Wendy, the cashier, rang his cure-all up, something like $19.99, cheap, I guess, for a panacea. “My husband takes this too,” she told the geriatric gent. The customer nodded imperceptibly, swiped his credit card and waited for his receipt.

I’m always annoyed at folks who treat their checkout people the way they’d treat a store mannequin, just seems rude to me. The auto checkout was tailor made for these yahoos. So I asked, just to fill the awkward silence, “Well, did it work for him?” Our customer perked up at this; after all, this is close to a testimonial if not a full-fledged pharmaceutical double blind test. Wendy paused. “Jimmy says it does, so I guess it’s worth the money.” Her tone of voice suggested maybe Jimmy was BS’ing and the money was going down a rathole. “I hope that works miracles,” she said to the Arthritis Kid.

Exactly, I thought. We’re hoping for miracles at $19.99, why not throw the dice? I was over at a buddy’s house later on and asked him how his girlfriend’s broken arm was doing. You ask health questions at my age, you’re either desperate for conversation or you need counseling yourself. “Not great,” Billy said. “It isn’t healing up like it should. But … we’re taking Bone Broth.”

“Bone Broth?” I asked. “Yeah,” he answered, “lemme show ya.” Dr. Billy went to the fridge and extracted a quart jar of brown jello with lard on top. He gets bones from the local butcher, dumps them in a crockpot and boils em down for 3 days. Bone Broth!

“And you what?” I asked, “rub it on as a liniment?” “No, man,” Billy said, “you heat the liquid up and drink it.”

This, I guess, is homeopathic remedy writ strange. You got a broken bone, drink bone broth. You got hair loss, boil up some hair. Osteoporosis, well, bone broth again. Alzheimers, okay let’s not get into sweet meats. If you’re in pain, you’ll try most anything, if looks like, I get that. And maybe the placebo effect will actually kick in and work. What I don’t want to see are new ads from the pharmaceuticals for bone broth, replete with the warnings, may cause permanent rigidity, hardening of the spinal cord and permanent priapism. Course, they won’t call it bone broth, something pseudo-scientific like fibulagelomex or osteoglanulax. Or maybe just Elmer’s Glue.

Homeless on Camano

The county just got the results in for their survey locating the homeless on Camano. Turns out they didn’t find any. None. Zero. Zilch. I guess they went from gate to gate in the gated communities, maybe looked behind the forsythia, then moved on. Nobody came down to the South End, that’s for sure.

Turns out Island County sent teams into the hinterlands to search out the homeless. Well, except not Camano Island. The housing resource coordinator was quoted in the Gazette, “We just didn’t have the time. But next year we hope to get more of a head start.” They did manage to send out some fliers on the transit buses asking the homeless, if they were indeed out there, if they would respond. No responses were forthcoming. The coordinator speculated that maybe the homeless just didn’t want to be identified as the homeless. You know, IF there were any homeless.

I suppose this could be a new paradigm for social services in America if Washington DC gets wind of this. Poverty? Post some placards on telephones asking the poor if they’re poor. Call us, we want to help. You a veteran not getting medical assistance? We put some fliers on the buses in your town. You maybe didn’t see them? You out of work, chronically unemployed? We posted a notice on Facebook. Maybe you need to buy a computer, get some DSL service, reach out to us. We want to help….

I ran a poll myself this week. Posted a notice on my blogsite asking anyone in county government if they were intelligent enough to be holding office. If so, please call in to southendbrainresearch.com and answer the brief questionnaire. Take about half a minute, just want to do a head count of the bright ones…. Surprisingly, nobody responded. All I can say, if I can use the county’s own methodology, there’s no intelligence over there in Whidbey Island government. Course, maybe they’re embarrassed to identify themselves as smart. Or they’re just being modest.

Next year we’ll maybe have some time to organize IQ search parties. This year we were just a little too busy. In the meantime hopefully all the homeless over here will find decent housing. You know, the folks who don’t exist here in paradise.

The Island County sheriff’s office was holding a bipolar man for attempting to cash a $355 check, what we call identity theft. They brought him in and he promptly stuffed the toilet so that it overflowed his cell. The jail guards cleaned up the mess and decided to teach our boy a little lesson so they turned off his water. Turned the water off and left him for a couple of weeks without anything to drink. He died yesterday of dehydration.

Oh, I suppose some folks might consider this excessive. Medieval even. Cruel and unusual. The sheriff has been lobbying these past years for more money, what we thought might be used for additional deputies and staff, but now seems obvious will go toward racks and Iron Maidens and other torture devices since the jail is so bereft of funding all they can do is turn off a prisoner’s water. Until he dies. Maybe they just want to speed things up, I don’t know.

I do know Arizona’s got nothing on Island County for dealing with criminals in a firm manner. Abu Ghraib looks like a spa-resort in comparison. If they can execute a man for the high crime of attempting to cash someone else’s check for $355, you speeders better wise up, the full force of Island County law is going to come down on you like a nuclear bomb. Roadside justice! Maricopa Joe down there in Phoenix looks like a bleeding heart compared to our law enforcement officers. Swift and sure punishment, save the expense of a trial, not to mention the cost of food and water. These are hard fiscal times down at the cop shop and it takes a confident leader to make those calls.

This next few days should see the lawsuit for millions coming at the County. So much for that extra money for law enforcement. Or for social services. Or, well, for most everything. Maybe the folks down at the station haven’t been watching the news lately, maybe missed Baltimore and Ferguson and the others. Maybe they thought the public was too quick to blame the police in those deaths, they’d just knee-jerk some misplaced sympathy for the criminals. Shooting a suspect in the street is one thing, though. Killing him over two weeks is quite another. Where I come from, we call this murder in the first degree. And so far nobody’s been charged.

Like so many of us South End men in this post-chauvinistic era, I was in the kitchen chopping up vegetables for a tasty dinner for when the mizzus got home from the mine. Every store-bought pepper had this itty bitty sticker with a scanner bar glued on semi-permanent so I had to dig at it to get it off. And it got me to wondering — what kind of glue sticks like this and does washing my pepper really get that stuff off and does it add anything savory to the tastebuds and is it known to the state of California to be carcinogenic???

Now let’s understand here, I’m not talking about the government getting involved. I’m not advocating the FDA look into whether my level of glue toxicity is above some approved threshold. No sir! We’re living in the day of Get-Government-Off-My-Back and the last thing us South Enders want to see is paying some federal employee to investigate this when we can just run some studies on our own, find out exactly WHAT that sticky substance is and set up a double blind experiment to find out, for ourselves, what kind of effects this glue has. All I know it might be good for us. Might grow hair back. Might cure erectile dysfunction. Might prevent cancer.

I mean, why can’t we just think positive? Why do we assume GMO foods are necessarily so bad we got to have labeling? Or irradiated foods? Milk that last months instead of weeks? Take that fracking we got going on. The oil companies don’t have to tell the damn government what they’re dumping in those wells. They got government off THEIR backs, but do we celebrate that? Do we declare victory over burdensome regulations? Hell no, we don’t!! We whine and we cry and we scare everybody with horror stories of funny tasting well water and water that catches fire. Here’s a tip: don’t drink flaming water. Duh.

You’re worried, get a test kit and have a go at it. Government can’t do everything for ya. And when you find out those chemicals kill 99% of the bacteria down your well, maybe consider a little thank you card to the oil companies. It IS called Better Living Through Chemistry.

I ran into my old pal Junk Ranger Ralph today. He makes his living hauling folks’ junk to the dump. He’s got a 1960’s pickup that looks like he could leave the trash in the back and drive it right into the bin, the whole kit and caboodle, truck and all, good riddance, but of course he needs that truck. His hand painted sign JUNK RANGER is on half rotted plywood he’s attached so he can pile trash and junk and garbage clear to the sky. It’s a hard way to make a living, but then, what’s new? Most of us down here like to think there’s an Easy Way, but none of us ever found it.

Ranger Ralph saw me digging out front and pulled his Ford 150 halfway onto the shoulder where it could challenge the Sunday drivers out for a spin in the bucolic countryside. His emergency blinkers don’t work so he left it up to the Lord to protect the tourists. It usually turns out okay, at least so far.

Ralph and I went up to the house to catch up. Like I said, it’d been awhile. His big news was he’d found a ‘soul-mate’, which, when you stop and think, is big news for any of us. “The only problem,” he confided, “was she lives 300 miles away.” I guess soul-mates aren’t worried about the temporal world. I asked how he met her and of course it was on the internet. “I spoze it could’ve been worse, Ralph. At least she doesn’t live in Shanghai.”

They’ve met a couple of times, in person, I mean, and Ralph thinks it’ll work out, this distance thing. Me, I’m not so sure, but then we ARE talking about a soul-mate, not some chatroom hookup with an FBI undercover agent. At least I hope so.

It’s a New World out there and actually, I was surprised Ralph even had a computer to use to let his fingers do the walking. Maybe a recycled one from his dump hauls. All I can say is love blooms in the unlikeliest of places these days — and being an unrepentant romantic, I wish Ralph al the happiness in the world. Although, between you and me, I doubt his old truck can make too many trips 300 miles one way. With luck, maybe he’ll break down the last time in her driveway.