The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

We’re about to head out before Christmas hits its Big Finale, Santa sets his GPS and leaves all his elves waiting for that fat bonus which is as likely as a Peking Pension Plan. Just shut the door behind us, leave the island and motor past the malls jammed with desperate folks on their last frenzied Push, credit cards and stress maxed, feeling like Jimmy Stewart when the bank run ends. Only without the Norman Rockwell town to back him up with community support….

I remember the Old Christmas. The one where we were poor as churchmice and all those gifts to friends and family felt like one more weight on the anchor dragging us below the surface. The folks who make minimum wage or who are unemployed or who pick our crops for next to nothing — Christmas isn’t A Wonderful Life, let me tell ya.

I know, we say the same thing every year. Christmas. Too commercial. Too materialistic. Too phony baloney. A month or two of seriously clichéd songs, TV specials, movie reruns. Scrooge, the Grinch, Tiny Tim, Christmas Future, Miracle on 34th St., all to sell cars, perfume, watches, toys, baubles and bullshit. I’m as sentimental as the next he-man, but C”MON!! It’s a tad excessive. It’s pretty close to obscene. I’m sorry, Virginia, but Santa is an executive at Wal-Mart, hate to be the one to break it to you.

I could tell you we go away to some dark hollow to escape all this … but the truth is, we leave so we don’t dampen the neighbors’ spirits here on the cynical South End. No need to thank us. It’s our gift. And as always, it’s really the thought that used to count.

The British Medical Journal just released a study confirming what most women and a few of us men already know: guys do stupid things. I know, it’s not exactly news, but this is Science, a powerful tool. Okay, only half of us believe in it anymore, but the newspapers have to put something in between the appliance ads and the comic page.

Nevertheless, it got me thinking about my own Great Moments in Jackassdom and I’m sure you got your own. Not all us males will risk our lives frivolously, whether from high IQ or low courage, but I’ve noticed plenty who do. A few years back a bunch of us South End yahoos were having a little bacchanalia off the backroads at a log cabin in the nettle savannahs. A few drinks, some medical herbs and next thing you know we’ve got a roaring bonfire lighting the sky to whoops and holler and general mayhem. At some point we haul out a couch and four of us (right, all guys) toss it on the fire sending sparks halfway to the space station. I don’t actually remember who initiated it, but some idiot (right, a male) decided to leap the conflagration. Then, at the encouragement of one particular female, others took a turn Fire Jumping, crazed drunken pheromone-incapacitated morons hurtling over a sofa in full toxic flame. Great fun!

I had worked in Everett General Hospital one 4th of July and I remember a guy we got in the ER who’d toppled into a fire and been dragged out by bystanders. He died that night. So when I saw my overweight out-of-shape artist buddy revving it up for his turn, I said don’t do this, man, but I could see he needed to impress the cheering lady and nothing I could say was going to deter him so whoopee wahoo! off he goes … and stumbles at the edge of the bonfire. I can still see him, arms akimbo, off balance at the launch pad, a silhouette aglow like a Bosch dream of Hell, another human sent packing to the furnace. He hit the ground all fours, tumbled to a landing to cheers and celebrations. I was the one weak in the knees.

We don’t burn as many couches these days. I don’t know if we’ve grown wiser … or the dumb have all been incinerated.

South End Greenworks finally opened its doors. They’ve pretty much avoided the radar and the microscope since they bought the old cinderblock building that sat vacant for years after Shari’s Style Shoppe closed up when Shari retired and moved to her Nevada trailer court retirement villa. Since then it’s grown a nice patina of green mold. You’d think they’d have had a Grand Opening, throw open the doors to all the smokers and tokers who’ve been buying marijuana for years illegally. When Prohibition ended — hoo boy! — the celebrations rang to the rooftops and the liquor flowed like glacier melt. And lasted for days. It was an undeclared National Holiday.

Maybe we’re just accustomed to being miscreants and scofflaws down here, but I didn’t see much hoopla the day they opened their windowless doors. Only a discrete sign in a barred window timidly declaring they were OPEN. The End of an Era and it went out with a whimper, not a bang. A few folks stood across the highway with cameras. Two Toke Tom waved and smiled and said ‘cheese’. I think he thought they were reporters for the Stanwoodopolis Gazette chronicling the momentous event, but Tom was maybe overdosed on the ‘edibles’. The so-called press sure wasn’t going to help publicize this affair even if it might sniff of newsworthiness. No sir. The South End String Band played a tongue-firmly-in-cheek Strange Grange Ganja Gig a few weeks earlier to fundraise for the South End Grange, something they do most every year. The papers, every one from Skagit Valley to Everett, refused even to list the concert on their events calendar. Oh my. So much for that left wing bias. Even legal, the sheer mention of the drug that apparently can’t be spoken scares the ink off these folks.

No, the photographers wanted mug shots of the citizens brazen enough to enter the Greenworks. By god, if the government won’t label these folks criminals, they sure would. Paste those shots on Facebook instead of the Post Office. Maybe call these infidels out if they show their shameless faces at the Little Chapel in the Ravine. Shame them and blame them and defame them!!

Sure, I thought about photographing them photographing my pals, then running their sorry mugs on the Skeeter blogspot, but I was worried they’d go North Korean on me, hack my e-mail, threaten to blow up my shack. All I can say is I sure am sorry we’re overseas fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We could use some help down here on the South End.