The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

It’s disheartening sometimes to see yourself becoming what I used to call ‘an old fogie’, a poor clod so behind the times he doesn’t know what the newest fad is or what Kim Kardashian said yesterday, someone shuffling along life’s autobahn in slippers befuddled by the traffic whizzing by. Obviously the technology gets a little ahead of us fogies. That’s just something we accept. If we got grandkids around, we let them handle things like downloading music for us. Me, I don’t have grandkids laying around so I’m stuck in my timewarp.

Trends, fashion, innovations — it would be a full time job to keep abreast. The world is accelerating just when I’m slowing down. I got friends who can tell you the name of every actor in every movie that came out in the last six months, what HBO series was cancelled, who John Stewart skewered last night and what gangsta rapper was involved in what ruckus where…. If the Information Age is all this, I’m thinking maybe we should go back to, if not the Dark Ages, maybe the Age of Partially Drawn Shades.

Today I read an article in the Sunday newspaper — and yeah, I read it on newsprint, not on a ‘feed’ (sad, I know) — about museums contemplating a ban on selfie sticks. Now, a few days ago, practically a lifetime in today’s fast paced universe, I came across the nomenclature and found it incomprehensible so I just moved on to another article. Today I saw a picture of one. A stick holding a camera to take a picture of the person holding the stick. I got it. I mean, I got the picture, not the stick. And the point, I’m guessing because I really don’t know, is so the photographer can shoot hisorherself to post on Facebook, which, fogied up again, I’m not on.

What can I say that won’t sound hopelessly geezered? If folks want to walk around snapping pictures of themselves, is it worth my snide commentary? Is it an indictment of society at large or just a normal need to see ourselves on the internet alongside Kim? Us fogies, we’re disappearing, that’s for sure. And I doubt if snapping a selfie off a stick is going to make it happen any less fast. So I’m thinking maybe me and the old lady are going to take a bike ride down the road today instead. Just a sunny two wheel cruise down memory lane where we seem to spend most of our time now.

It’s not uncommon down here on the much maligned South End to be at the leading edge of the breaking wave. So far ahead, actually, that those trailing behind misunderstand us. And of course misunderstanding leads to mistrust and mistrust leads to avoidance and avoidance leads to contempt and contempt leads to fear and fear leads to hatred. We artists understand this implicitly. Or at least we like to say that is why our work is reviewed with such negative criticism. We’re just ahead of the Curve. We’re misunderstood. We’re too sensitive for this world.

Redemption sometimes comes too late to do us much good. Down here, we’ve been stigmatized for our handicaps and ostracized most of our lives. We’ve been badly misunderstood, isolated from the island mainstream and treated as third class citizens. Maybe it’s too late to help most of us, but in light of the medical community’s latest findings, we can at least take some cheer that we were victims of ignorance.

Branded as shirkers of work, lazy lay-about and shiftless men of leisure, we now have the full backing of the AMA that ours was a bona fide, certifiable physical affliction, not some bogus hypochondria intolerance to work. Just recently the Institute of Medicine called for a review of the malady we South Enders have lived with most of our lives, one that heretofore was considered, not a disease, but a psychosomatic condition. Those who have never known its symptoms easily viewed us as whiners and misfits, slaggards and sloths. We were treated as psychological lepers, shunned by our newly arrived neighbors and subjected to their silent scorn, just as those with depression and anxiety were once similarly abused before science substantiated the underlying root cause. We suffered silently, secure in the knowledge that we were victims of a disease little understood or studied by the medical community.

Until now. What previously was diagnosed by our decidedly non-medical neighbors to the north as chronic laziness or chronic fatigue syndrome has now been deemed a true physiologic pathology deserving of a proper name: Systemic Exertion Intolerance Disease (SEID), a crippling affliction most of my buddies and me have lived with for years with little sympathy from our mizzuses. Well, guess who’s going to have to apologize now, eh, little Miss Critical?? And, with a kinder gentler healthcare system in place, maybe now we can get the care and treatment we need … and even a sizeable disability check to help us cope with our difficult lives.

So next time you feel see a South Ender balking at work or employment, maybe you’ll show a bit of compassion. All I can say is you better hope this isn’t contagious.

I was doing a little supper shopping today at Island Foods up the road. Had my little baby cart half filled with about anything that didn’t seem double-the-price and fell in behind a lady whose overflowing groceries indicated a resident who didn’t worry much about little things like prices or specials or coupon discounts. If she’d been sporting a mink coat, I wouldn’t have expected less.

Tina, the checkout clerk on register #4, the one labeled ‘Utsalady’ as a nod to our island’s sketchy history, was scanning items faster than a TSA agent on meth. She turned to Marie Antoinette and said in her usual cheerful greeting, ‘How you doing today?’ By this time Zsa Zsa had a smart phone in her bejeweled ear and ignored Tina as any High Lady would when an impudent commoner affronted her status. M’lady was now occupied with a conversation about the horrific traffic resulting from a fender bender we’d both apparently passed earlier. It had been a terrible inconvenience to her schedule for Tea Time.

They say time is money, but they don’t say it on the South End. Tina, who lives half a mile north of me in a small ghetto subdivided with a zoning variance that made some commissioner’s friends rich, well, Tina makes minimum wage plus a buck. Time, I seriously doubt, is mostly money to her. It’s a bad back, varicose veins and a wrist brace for her carpal tunnel syndrome that will soon doom her fabulous career. Half the people she checks out never say boo to her. A quarter are on their cellphone. A few are just unfriendly like she was price gouging them.. And the rest don’t see or hear her, she’s just the checkout girl.

Tina has a husband, Billy, used to be a contractor before he crushed a disk in his spine that ended his career. He gets some disability and between that and Tina’s largesse, they make the payments on their double-wide, but barely. It’s a scrape every damn month, but I’ve never heard her complain. She’s glad to have this job. “You have a nice day!” she smiles to Her Majesty who’s still chattering on her cell. Tina turns to me and asks happily, “How’s it going, Skeeter?” If she and I weren’t happily married, I swear to God I’d propose to her on the spot.

Day after Tomorrow

Someone asked me the other day
buttering me up, I spoze
if I would like to be remembered …

Without thinking much I said no.

Like maybe I’m a buddhist zen priest
or something.

No? this somebody asked. No?

Who no’s?!! The days roll off the calendar
making a noise like wind through the firs, which, when I think about it,
is a bad metaphor. The wind’s coming back.

We don’t even have kids, fer chrissake. The woods
beyond the garden sits cat silent. And waits. Long
after I’m gone, maybe the firs’ll remember.
Maybe the wind is just a memory. Or just the wind without the fir.

Some of us farmers down here on the organic South End are alarmed at the news Coca-Cola is making milk. They claim they’re making it better. God is going to be heartbroken to hear this. Probably thought She’d pretty much perfected it after all these millennia. Course God neglected marketing, something the labs down at Coke sure didn’t.

I’ve been getting milk down the road from my friend the Goat Lady. Pure, unadulterated, no growth hormone, no antibiotic, free range goat milk, unpasteurized, really creamy stuff. What we South Enders call ‘natural’, Coca-Cola would characterize as raw, meaning it’s pre-manipulated. They’re planning to separate that into sugars, proteins, carbos and fats, all its component parts, then reconstitute it. I’d tell you the formula, but it’s a secret, no doubt the hangover of those first Coke recipes that used cocaine before the pharmacologists and food scientists realized sugar and caffeine would be cheaper and less criminally suspect.

Science, a powerful tool. And … if you can’t trust your food to a soft drink corporation, who can you trust? It’s not as if they’re a cigarette company, chopping tobacco into its component parts, making a slurry, then adding 200 ingredients known to the state of California as carcinogens before rolling the goop into a totally addictive product for the consumer. Not like that at all! Besides, we got the FDA regulating food, right? Right??

The future looks grim for us farmers is what I think. Reformulated broccoli candy bars, reprocessed pea popsicles, endive gum, bus bean twists. But … when the chemists are done, what an improvement on that stuff growing in dirt and you-know-what. They’ll take that out first step in the centrifuge.

It’s a brave new world and maybe we better put on a brave new face. Hey, if nothing else they’ll take the sting out of our nettle crops. Sales might go back up to pre-Recession and the good times might return. Plus we won’t have cows tromping around pooping in our fields now that they’ll be confined to laboratories. Thank you Coke! But … wasn’t your slogan a few years back ‘YOU CAN’T BEAT THE REAL THING’? So why try?