The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/audio-Paranoid-Paul.mp3[/podcast]audio — Paranoid Paul

I ran into my old neighbor Paul down by the Post Office.  The Post Office we got is just a private outfit:  Copy This, Snail That.  It has some P.O. Boxes, sells stamps and envelopes, handles packages, sort of the harbinger of the privatization of mail, I guess, in these distrustful times.  Paul had about 6 letters in his mitt, which he almost dumped into the blue mailbox curbside, but pulled up short abruptly.

“Paying bills?” I asked innocuously.  “No,” he said somewhat furtively.  “I’m flying under the radar these days.  The government’s monitoring our phones, reading our e-mail, listening to our cellphone conversations and checking text messages.  I’m only communicating by mail now.”  He gave me a hard look.  “They’re watching everyone now.”  When I asked who was watching, he looked disgusted.  “Big Brother,  that’s who.”

We walked into Copy This, nothing now but a watered down version of its former self, downsized from its heyday at the end of the strip mall, now relegated to a counter just beyond the checkout stations of the IGA.  Paul needed a roll of stamps and I needed some too, although not near as many.  “I still write letters,” I said, just to pass the time.  “Course, they’re not encrypted or anything.”

“Laugh if you want, Daddle.  Chuckle all the way to the gulag.  This is war now, buddy.  War on the citizen.  You can lay down if you want, you and all the rest of the sheep, but I’m not going down without a fight.”  He got a wad of Forever stamps, nice photo of waterfowl.  Government sponsored art, I wanted to say, but Paul was obviously not in the mood for small jests.  Still, I couldn’t resist when he handed his mail to Judy, the ersatz postmistress, apparently not trusting the security of the outside mailbox.

“So the government is eavesdropping on all your phone calls.  It’s monitoring all your e-mails.  It listens to what you say on your cellphone….”

“Correcto, chum.”

“So tell me this — you hand your letters to the U.S. Post Office, you even pay em for each one.  You think licking an envelope is security enough?”

Paul glared at me incredulously, probably wondering if I was a secret mailman.  But I think I struck a nerve.  I never saw him at the Post Office again and I can only assume he communicates by carrier pigeon or trusted courier.  Next time I see him, I’ll offer to buy his leftover stamps, maybe half price.  War always has its profiteers.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/mp3AUDIO-Suppose-you-threw-an-election….mp3[/podcast].mp3AUDIO – Suppose you threw an election…

Suppose you threw an election … and no one came? This week that was pretty much the scenario with only the library issues on the ballot. Oh, I know, it’s high summer and we’re a little busy barbecuing, boating and beer drinking to squeeze in the time to mark an absentee ballot, put it in an envelope and mail it in. More than half of us 15, 600 residents couldn’t find the time … or the stamp … or didn’t care enough to vote on a library levy.

About 1 in 5 of us voted to approve the new library. About 1 in 6 of us figured we didn’t need a library in this post-Gutenberg computer era. And most of us had more urgent issues to occupy us this hot happy August. I don’t know, short of offering up social media as a way to vote, how much easier we can make it. No more polling stations, no more ID checks, just mark a ballot and send it in. I mean, c’mon, do we have to vote on Facebook to get folks interested???

I heard we fought the Iraq War to bring American style democracy to Saddam’s dictatorship. Rumor has it we want the same in Afghanistan after the Taliban took over and let Al Qaida use the country as a terrorist base. You ask me — and I know you’re too busy right now to bother — we ought to fight for a little democracy here first. And if we don’t give a damn enough to vote, to exercise the fundamentals of what democracy really means, then we ought to quit our yammering about those poor oppressed countries that need our intervention to help set them free. It’s us, the pathetically apathetic, that needs the intervention.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/audio-McMeat.mp3[/podcast]audio —- McMeat

Scientists on the South End have announced yet another major breakthrough in the genetics front. Hot off the heels of the first known cloning of old growth nettles, the labs at Tyee Technologies have grown meat from the stem cells of Wanda Davenport’s Rhode Island Reds, blue ribbon winners at the county fair two years running for biggest chickens. Dr. Frank Steinberger brought reporters from the Crab Cracker and Stanwoodopolis Gazette to witness the world’s first Hot Wings artificially grown on yo-yo strings in the sterile environment of their laboratories. From petri dish to deep fat fryer in 30 days, the zesty morsels were sampled and declared ‘hotter than a Texas abortion debate’ by patrons of the Diner where the tasting was conducted.

Dr. Steinberger, asked what the purported production costs might be, stated that to feed, say, a half time Super Bowl party of 6, would be in the range of $250,000. Or over $50,000 per person. “In other words, Bill Gates might afford this if he didn’t invite two many gridiron pals.” The scientist did say costs would drop appreciably when Full Production was reached and that Tyson Foods had already expressed an interest in the formula for the secret sauce along with Tyee Technologies’ advanced bio-engineering know-how. “Already we have teams working on Teriyaki Wings, Honolulu Lava Wings, a Cool Ranchero dip and others I’m not at liberty to divulge at this time.”

Asked what the nuggets would taste like without their grease-released flavorings, Dr. Steinberger, ever the comedian, cracked up the packed crowd of reporters by saying, “they taste a lot like chicken.” He went on to explain that artificially grown poultry would soon supplant the muss and fuss of “that barnyard mess, feather picking, manure and the ever dangerous bird flu. In a world clamoring for hotwings, we foresee a bright future. I think you’ll find the venture capitalists doing the flocking from now on,” he crowed.

This reporter hoped they were working on bio-engineered Pepto Bismol.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Clipper-Carl-the-Kudzu-Kid.mp3[/podcast]Clipper Carl — the Kudzu Kid

I had a friend call me up the other day. An intruder – ‘a trespasser’, she called him – had wandered onto her property via bicycle. Armed, she said, with a clipper. Her neighbor had confronted him lopping English Ivy off her fir trees and asked him who he was, did he have authorization for this horticultural blitzkrieg, where was he from and why the Anglophobic hostilities??

My friend was sure if anyone had a hand on the pulse of the South End, if anyone was wired into the grapevine without the use of any social media of any sort, old Skeeter would know who this interloper was.

Indeed. I told her his name, gave her is address, website and phone number and approximate height and weight. More that that, I volunteered his M.O., his modus operandi,. “He has a jag about ivy strangling the flora,” I informed her. “Harmless, really, old Clipper Carl. Rides his bike around the South End, usually asks the owner first, but I guess time is running out or the obsession has tightened around his trunk. It’s some kind of botanical fixation. Let’s not call it pathological, just a bit more like a religious calling. NOT that I’m saying Carl hears voices in the night “OUT OUT DAMNED IVY!!” Or that he might mistake a fellow South Ender for a strangler vine. We all have our hobbies. And sometimes we lose ourselves in pursuit of them.

The odd thing is, Carl is very well off, a wealthy retired professional and a big philanthropist. Sure, he could’ve chosen to eliminate poverty or disease on the South End …. but … he chose to eradicate ivy. Not maybe what Bill Gates would’ve chosen, but even Bill gets criticized for not choosing causes WE want most. You can’t really win with a lot of folks.

I was riding my bike by Carl’s property today, the ten acre parcel he bought down the road from his bluff house, the one he has the security camera aimed at the gate he keeps locked, and I noticed all the NO TRESPASSING signs he’d posted for a quarter of a mile on the perimeter. Right where I used to pick cherries and apples before he bought the acreage and warned us off. He doesn’t eat the fruit, I notice, but we can’t either now. I’ve been looking for a new hobby myself in my advancing old age and Carl’s given me something of an idea. Good sharp hatchet, hop on my bike and mosey down to those NO TRESPASSING signs I don’t much care for, I bet they’d come down faster than clipped off ivy vines. Free up those fruit trees to us neighbors.

If anyone would understand, I’m certain Carl would…..

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/audio-Letters-from-the-Perfessor.mp3[/podcast]audio — Letters from the Perfessor

I was out on the road the other day trying to sell the last of my Skeeter Daddle Diaries, the second printing. I’m about as good at door to door sales as I am at hedge fund managing. Me and money don’t really mix, I’ve learned slowly over a long life without an MBA degree. Neither of us trusts the other….

I meet folks — even down here on the indolent South End — who knew shortly after teething that they wanted to make money, get rich, retire early. They didn’t go to college and spend four years on a Philosophy degree. They picked careers in law or dentistry or finance. You don’t drill for water in the Sahara, that’s what they understood.

Me, I always thought I’d rather do something I loved doing. Call me naïve and slap me with an IOU, but I figured there was always a job, even a miserably low paying one, that would pay the bills and allow me to pursue some quaint interest or other. So I took English, majored in literature and poverty, then stepped off the educational track years later with a nice solid background in arts and history and yeah, literature, then promptly discovered I had virtually NO marketable skills. Kind of a shock. You kind of figure if they sell you a degree, there’ll be a placement.

I worked awhile in a dog pound, ran a cafeteria, drove metro buses, wrote poetry and short stories that got published for, oh, nothing, drove school buses, seriously considered graduate school (maybe get a PhD. in Unemployment or Swahili), moved around a bit, lived in shabby apartments, ate a lot of macaroni and cheese. To be honest, I didn’t mind. What I did mind was not finding the exact perfect job that fulfilled some as yet undiscovered passion in life. Four years at a university and I sure didn’t find it. Now I had to do it AND work crap jobs looking.

I can tell you youngsters — in hindsight — the only thing worse than some crummy job is looking for the next crummy job. But I can also tell you — and don’t get me wrong, I’m not a Perfessor of Smartology — if you settle for the money, or the security, or the health insurance benefits, or the pension, you’ll maybe be satisfied, possibly even happy, but you will never find the thing that makes working really worthwhile. It took me plenty of dead end jobs, too much macaroni, far too many bad bosses, but in the end, you’ll persevere. Probably not rich, but trust me on this, a helluva lot happier.