The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

So okay, the terrorists are killing cartoonists and satirists. Make sport of them at your own risk, Monsieur! There’s definitely something lacking in a jihadist — a funny bone maybe?

Don’t ask me why, but you take folks real serious about their religion — any religion — and you poke a bit of fun at their beliefs, good chance you’ll need Kevlar clothing. Mix in some politics — and no, let’s not call that a religion yet — and you got all the makings for a full blown riot.

Now you might not believe this, but old Skeeter here pulls his punches. Religious idealogues and right wing Tea Partiers, I try to avoid poking my elbow in their eye socket. Too easy a target, maybe. Or maybe freedom of speech should have some self –imposed limits. Granted, I think those limits shouldn’t be imposed by the government — and definitely not by pissed off terrorists and North Korean chubby dictators. Bad taste is offensive but doesn’t meet the capital punishment test. Not only that, but the counter-reaction is going to be grim, nasty and violently incommensurate with the perceived grievance. You think a Fatwah to kill Salman Rushdie is ill advised, wait til the Europeans’ favorite hairstyle is Skinhead and the new Jew is Moslem. The joking’s going to stop real quick.

So forgive me if I skip the cartoon of you-know-who or the name-that-cannot-be-spoken or the politician-who-needs-horsewhipping-with-his-own-tongue. Short of a funny bone transplant, what’s the point? Their world is set in granite, nothing humorous is going to penetrate their idealistically pure forcefield. I’d poke fun at us satirists, but hey, we’re a little busy right now screaming First Amendment! First Amendment! in our building that’s not quite on fire. There’s no one left here except us trampled few….

I was chatting it up with my neighbor today who bought the old farm next door. He’s been out of work awhile but said he’d been doing a little consulting this past year. Consulting. I like the sound of that. Conjures up visions of bathrobe and slippers, a cup of joe and a home computer screen. “Sounds good!” I offered, semi-envious. “Well, he countered, “I don’t know about that … but it’s good to make some money for a change.” Indeed. And isn’t that the question for all us South Enders: how much money versus how much work? Or, as I opined to my neighbor, “what’s the bottom here? What’s the LEAST amount of money we need to live so we can have the time to do just that?” Live. Sure, it’s probably germane to a more global audience too, but … let’s be honest. This is THE burning question on the sloth-inducing South End. How much is Just Enough? Wen do we draw a line in the beach sand and say, No Mas!

Admittedly it’s a slippery equation, one fraught with peril. Foreclosures, collection agencies, repossessions, divorce, severe depression. But obviously we didn’t move to the end of a skinnyass island off the beaten career path looking for a management position with a high tech startup. Those people RETIRE here. The rest of us, we’re hoping to retire here too — just a lot earlier. Without a pension, without a 401-K plan.

Let’s just say it’s a high wire act without the safety net.   Sure, plenty of us slipped. Hit bottom and couldn’t scrape ourselves off to try again. You don’t get second chances down here. The bank isn’t going to offer grief counseling and Tyee Store isn’t going to extend credit. It’s a hard road when you screw up. Paradise when you balance the risk to the reward. Point is, you want to keep both in equilibrium. You need help, call me, I’m available for consultation.

Back in the 70’s when everyone else in America was putting on leisure suits and rocking out to the BeeGees and disco, I headed north up to a Polish homestead in upper Wisconsin. Had a farmhouse and the old summer cook shed, a smoke house and a barn. We pumped water from a well outside and we did our business in an outhouse we had to build to replace the rotted original one. It was primitive living, but you ask me, better than disco by a country mile or two.

I guess I went whole hog on this going back to the land thing. We put in a big garden over the old pigpen, laid in wood for the winter that was going to come soon and hard, made homemade bread and tried to steal honey from the bees in the barn who taught me a vicious lesson about theft and the need for better bee helmets. Somewhere during that idyllic summer I decided to become a hunter. My father-in-law gave me a .22 semi-automatic rifle and so I wandered into the oak woods across the road to pursue my luck at squirrel hunting.

Maybe you never shot a semi-automatic rifle before. If not, let me explain that it’s made for folks who don’t intend to be marksmen. You sort of point it in the direction of your target and start shooting. It fires as fast as you can pull the trigger, a couple times a second. You don’t really need to aim, just watch the bark peel back as you zero in on that poor little squirrel who really has never seen anything like that in his woods before. Needless to say, Davy Crockett here came home with plenty of varmint for dinner those first couple weeks of autumn.

We skinned em, we tanned the hides, we ate stews, we fried em, we put em on the grill. It took a couple or three to make a meal. A squirrel is really more of an hors doeurve than a meal, but you have to kill a few mammals to fill your belly. It started to seem, well, cruel. I mean, I know I was going back to a hunter/gatherer ethos and all, but a lot of squirrels were dying to satisfy my pioneer dreams. After all, this was the 1970’s, not 1870.

My last hunt I shot a little gray squirrel, knocked him off his limb and he managed to hang on to another on the fall. I shot him again and he stayed put. I put another couple of slugs into him and he finally dropped in a heap to the leafy ground, but then he hauled himself into a hole in the trunk of the oak. I had to pull him by the tail out of that shelter and dispatch him mercilessly with one final shot. I still remember that moment and I still remember that little squirrel, riddled with my bullets, dying for what would be a morsel to me. Call me squeamish, call me a bleeding heart liberal, call me a squirrel lover … but don’t call me a hunter. I put the gun back in a closet and never shot it again.

When I moved out here, I threw the gun in the Conestoga along with most of our possessions, but that first few months I traded it for a 5 string banjo. Which can fire a note as fast as I can pull the trigger. So … I guess I’m still inducing unnecessary suffering on innocent creatures. But at least no lives are being lost….

I was contacted recently to participate in the annual Christmas Bird Count. I’m not all that curious about bird censuses, but hey, maybe it’s time I paid a little more attention to my feathered fellow companions here on the nettled South End. After all, we all flock together most days, bumping into each other or giving each other plenty of space. We’re what is called a Backyard Habitat, what I used to call my woods. The birds don’t care what we call it so long as the fruit and berries, seeds and nectar keep them on task. We got so much food these days the hummingbirds stay for the winter, altho … hell if I know how they live through the freezes and still find enough to eat. Probably the neighbors who put out hummingbird feeders with sugar water and apparently anti-freeze when the temperatures drop into the 20’s….

So I wander out for a gander … or at least a look-see. I wander around the yard, down through the orchard, around the shack, back into the woods, back out and up the hill. I hear, but don’t see, two crows exchanging gossip so I diddle around by the rhodies, back through the yard and into the garden, then retrace, slip by the pond and hike up the back way to the house. In twenty minutes of paying a little attention to the bird life around me, I realize there’s no bird life whatsoever around me. None. Zilch. Nada. Zip.

It’s not like we live in the South End Sub-Sahara. It’s not semi-arid or desert. Although it appears to be deserted. All aviary existence has ceased! The birds are gone! It’s like a reverse Alfred Hitchcock, instead of billions of the feathered beasts gathering for the final assault against mankind and those killer cats that prey on them constantly, they’ve simply disappeared. It’s obviously a die-off. I think DDT. Might be. Or a radiation cloud. Those quirky North Koreans at it again, this time killing our birds. Or all those microwave towers, maybe they upped the voltage. Who knows? Who’s investigating? And then I realize, I haven’t seen a car go by. Or a neighbor out in their yard. Or heard a chainsaw in the distance. The world has ended, just me and those two crows left and they’re not talking to me. Or are they?

And of course that’s when it hits me: the birds are like illegal immigrants when the census people come knocking, they don’t want to be noticed, much less interviewed and counted. They’ve hidden in the bush, crawled into their nests, stopped flying, stopped foraging, stopped period. They’ve become invisible to us. They don’t want to be counted!!

Today the count is over. My tally was apocalyptic. Noah could build a pretty small ark if the Flood comes back for my sinner neighbors. I went outside to prune fruit trees today and … well, the birds are back, busy as bees. But wait! Where are the bees????