The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Radio Free South End was the ‘brainchild’, or lack thereof, of Wolfman Chuck, once a DJ for KRAP, the alternative music station down in Seattle and Gomorrah back before the city morphed into Tech Town. He claims he was ‘let go’ for pushing the boundaries of even those leftist programmers who decried censorship, something to do, they told him, with violating all manner of human decency.

Not to be so easily cast off the airwaves of Puget Sound, Wolfman laid his plans, moved to the politically incorrect South End, recruited a few of us slackers for his Bandwidth Comeback and launched Radio Free South End, a laughably puny low watt FM frequency so low on the dial even the FCC would have to stoop to find us. This was the Year of our Lord 1999, slightly before podcasts and blogblasts, sort of Old School but without much emphasis on the school. Wolfman had a primitive transmitter — don’t ask me the technical — and a tower he erected over his trailer’s roof. All he needed, he said, were volunteers to be the DJ’s when he needed a break. Of course we asked if this was criminal and of course Chuck said Hell No! Freedom of speech, he told us, First Amendment, he claimed. So sure, we volunteered, why not, we had some things to say, even some music to play.

I doubt anyone further than 5 miles north of the island’s head could hear us, but when you consider most of the bloggers out there on internet podcasts get half the listeners Wolfman got, who really cares? Chuck wasn’t interested in advertising revenue, he just wanted what he called, reverentially, airplay. Chuck played old rock and roll, early blues, strummed his homemade mandolin, told off color stories mostly about us local yokels, even played the South End String Band every damn day, probably as thanks for half of us band members volunteering to DJ.

I can remember like yesterday the day our music died. It was my morning to fill the 10 am to noon slot only to find Wolfman slumped over his microphone, headset off one ear, holding up an official looking paper from some government agency or other.

‘We’re signing off today, Skeeter,’ Chuck told me as American Pie was playing, I bet for the 16th time that morning, the last song on KINK’s brief but glorious existence. A week later Wolfman was gone, the radio equipment too and his trailer had a For Sale sign out by the road. Camano’s infamous and only radio station had put a thumb out and hitchhiked into legend.

Rumor has it there’s a pirate radio station operating off the coast up in the San Juan islands, some DJ on the run from the Feds, still broadcasting to any and all in listening range. I’m betting it’s Wolfman Chuck. Every now and then I crank my radio up and run the dial north to south, hoping, I guess, to hear a crackly South End Blues coming out of Canada on the magnetic waves of an aurora borealis, Wolfman still howling into the wind, the last real DJ fighting the corporate mega-stations. And some nights, maybe too much to drink, I think I hear him and his tinny little mandolin.

O Cannaba!

As most of my THC-saturated neighbors here on the South End know, Canada just went green. Marijuana is soon to be legal across the great white north. Little wonder the Trumpster has washed his hands of these hockey loving infidels and put tariffs on them in our ‘national security interests’. They’re a clear and present danger, a hostile, potential invasionary force, a nation of dope huffing, hockey crazed whackos so menacing we probably should build a border wall on our northern flank. The bastards believe in the metric system, for cripesakes, you think that’s not foreign to our American values? Wake up before it’s too late! I don’t want a hockey rink in MY backyard!!

Hopefully this cannabis legalization will serve merely to sedate these Canucks. Eh? But I’m not – and the President certainly isn’t – betting on drugs being the Answer, not when we’ve seen how marijuana has proven to be a gateway drug to liberalism, abortion, anti-gun sentiment and all manner of unspeakable sexual deviance. These tundra dwellers are so stoned right now they can barely negotiate a trade agreement to take the place of NAFTA, what kind of trading partners will they be when the stuff is legal??

Tariffs are only the first phase, believe you me. This Menace must be stopped. If a Wall won’t protect us, we have other options. A First Strike must be kept on the table. Trump should demand Trudeau surrender now. Don’t make us pull the trigger, Canada!! We just want you to be compliant neighbors. Is that so very much to ask? But if you refuse to concede to our demands, no matter how much tar sand oil you promise to deliver to our pipelines, it’s nothing compared to what you’re packing your pipes with. We have drug rehab clinics here that we can provide you. But the first step is to accept you have a Problem. Don’t make you ours.

The pundits and political scientists, the sociologists and the couch philosophers, plus half us yahoos will parse this last election til the cows come back to the barn that’s leaning into yesteryear. We’ll find bigotry, blame the Latino turnout, fault the woman candidate’s presumed expectation of presumptive victory, dig into Alt-Right and Fox News and Breitbart. We’ll find plenty of fodder to explain a Trump victory.

Jobs are going away, the middle class is shrinking, the gap between rich and poor — once a leapable ditch — is now a Grand Canyon. The white majority is gone and the immigrants are coming! The immigrants are coming! Terrorism rocks the Middle East and Europe and now here. A college education costs six figures and may not translate to anything but a lifetime of tuition debt. And to top off everything, monthly cable costs for a citizenry desperate for digital opioids, keeps going through the roof. What’s a poor white boy to do? Well, vote for the carnival barker selling snake oil, a panacea for all our ills, that’s what.

I know this, if nothing else: there’s a Disquiet on the land, an Unease out there in the Starbucked suburbs, a Dread covering the wired cities. Change is coming, scary as a Terminator who keeps getting up after being killed time and time again. The Terminator, of course, is the computer we brought into the livingroom, carry on our belt or in our purse, wired our house to, runs our car, plays our music, knows our habits and buying preferences, watches us constantly.

Future Shock. It’s here. It’s been here a few decades now, accelerating like a car we’ve lost the steering on. Half of us can’t program a Blu-Ray much less comprehend Implications. We just see the landscape blurring at breakneck speed. The Industrial Age isn’t closer than it appears in the rearview, it’s gone, nothing now but nostalgic longing for a past that ain’t comin back.

The social fabric is being torn apart. We are Borg now, getting our news exclusively from Facebook. Only 15 percent of the Facebook news feed folks look somewhere else. You read it on Facebook, it’s got to be True. So what if it’s just pablum and paid pandering? It’s all we need, right? We are morphing into the Hive and we know the relationships aren’t quite … what? Real? Deep? Meaningful? We don’t know, we can’t predict, we’re afraid of what’s coming next. Wait?! What’s that signpost up ahead? Naw, it’s not Rod Serling. It’s Mark Zuckerberg. It’s Big Brother.

If there was a place worse than homelessness itself, the While-a-While was it. Ancient RV’s, rusted out Winnebagos, Airstreams down on their axles — they all came to die, slowly sinking into the wetlands, grass up to their pitted aluminum windows that seldom opened anymore, a muddy trail leading to the communal restrooms and showers which occasionally all functioned but not usually.

In the summer the While-a-While offered tourists and fishermen some spaces, most without power, for $25 a night. Half the permanent residents had come and for reasons best left for late night binge talk, they ended up trapped there. Milt came 20 years ago in his reconditioned Cortez, a heavy 20 foot industrial RV built when gas was 24 cents a gallon but was now too much for Social Security retirement if he wanted to actually drive it somewhere else. And now it was a rusted relic, flat tires, busted front axle, long dead battery. Milt lived there with his menagerie of cats, half of them feral, all of them breeding like rabbits. Residents who’d ventured inside claimed the place smelled like one giant litter box over a gas burner.

Most inmates of the While-a-While gave Milt a wide berth. If familiarity bred contempt, with Milt it bred outright hostility. He was a hermit now among enemies, most of whom he’d alienated over slights so small they never really understood they were slights and so they concluded the man was a total asshole, a near universal assessment at the trailer park. If you were a dog owner, too bad if they growled or chases Milt’s feline herd. If your politics were left of Genghis Khan, too bad, you were a hopeless radical. If you drank or used drugs, he wrote you off. So what if he’d done more of those than half the park in a quarter of the time — he’d reformed, rehabbed and now was righteous as a born-again preacher.

Maybe we all end up where we deserve at the end of our ropes. If so, the poor souls consigned to the While-a-While probably wished they could have a do-over. But they were there, not to while awhile, they were doomed to quite awhile. With Milt as a neighbor.

“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” DJT

Hot damn! Finally, a President who understands that we don’t need a President, we need a Fuhrer! He gets his ear shot by a sniper and now he’s convinced God herself has anointed him our New Savior, why else would he be spared unless by heavenly intervention? Unquestionably, the boy is anointed. He’s been sent to save America!

I know I’m putting myself in the gunsights of future enemy lists, but geez, let’s put a couple feet on terra firma here. This is a guy who grew up with some serious issues, maybe not loved enough, maybe just wants some serious attention from the Old Money mob, the literati, the New York elite. I’m not a psychiatrist and I don’t play one on TV, but I doubt you need a medical degree to identify psychosis when it lays a trip on ya. C’mon, the fella has a thin skin and far too much money, gonna lay some leather on the people who offended him, plenty of those, from the impeachment folks to the judges who found him guilty of … well, plenty. Witch hunts! Political persecution! Weaponized judiciary! He’s gonna show you what that really looks like!!! He’s got the bully pulpit and the bully is in charge!

Sure, some folks are cheering him on, the man with the monkey wrench, mass firings of government employees, mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, investigations of anyone who had a part in his impeachments or his felony trials, denigration of former allies who may have slighted him in the past, primary revenge against his political enemies or any legislator that defies his will. They love it. Drain the swamp? No sir, blow it up with dynamite! Sweet revenge, right? Right?

The bull is in the china shop all right. Moving fast, breaking things. Not gonna matter to you, the voter. You aren’t a government slacker (employee, I mean). You haven’t hired an Hispanic lawn maintenance outfit or a construction crew to build your new house. You aren’t worried your kids’ school funding will diminish their education. You maybe weren’t planning to buy an electric vehicle. You weren’t planning a vacation to a National Park. You don’t live in a fire danger zone. No sweat off your brow.

But … maybe you are one of the one quarter of Americans who get Medicaid. Maybe you have kids and grandkids who will have to worry about global warming and those fires and hurricanes. Maybe you would like someone looking after the quality of your food, the cleanliness of your water or the purity of the air you breathe. If you’re a rural resident, you might not have considered that eliminating USAID meant all those food crops we sent to other countries was 40% what you grew. Those clinics and hospitals you thought were a long drive, well, better hope the price of gas goes down, they’ll be a lot farther when the ones you got now close.

I know, you really hated Covid lockdowns and those masks and the vaccines. You didn’t know any of the over one million people who died of that disease and probably don’t believe the statistics anyway. The other 5 or 6 million deaths overall, just foreigners…. So you probably are happy the guy running the health department doesn’t much believe in vaccines. Let’s hope the bird flu doesn’t mutate. Although … it has infected more than birds now and even a few humans. Yeah, okay, you’re mostly bothered by the price of eggs.

Maybe you voted your pocketbook. Price of eggs, price of gas. No affordable housing. No affordable rents. You wanted government off your back and you wanted a tax break. Maybe you even wanted the deficit reduced. The rich will get a big break, the deficit will take off. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a little back too, not much, count on that. You voted for a billionaire with his billionaire pals. You didn’t vote for a philanthropist. In fact, you really didn’t know who you voted for. Yet.