The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/audio-slave-wages.mp3[/podcast]audio — slave wages

I was chatting it up with my UPS driver a few years back.  He had a shack like mine, burned wood for heat, lived in a remote spot up in the hills east of Stanwoodopolis.  I asked him how he liked driving for a living and he said, well, it’s okay if you don’t mind only making wages.

I said what does that mean?  And he took some precious minutes from his frenetic schedule to explain he delivered to all the dot.com millionaires up the road, boyz who retired at 40, cashed in their stock options and lived like shahs in their palaces on the bluff while he was making mere union wages.  You know, with health insurance, vacation and pension.  Stuff me and my pals don’t get….

Wealth, I guess you already know in the land of the free, is relative.  All these folks with early retirements, McMansions, dot.com money, his and her BMW’s — well, it can sure make a decent salary with benefits look like pauper’s wages if you care to do a comparison test.  Make you feel positively deprived.  Make you think if your time isn’t worth $500 an hour you’re being cheated, sorta like being homeless at Christmas in Beverly Hills.  Probably explains why folks play the Lottery.  Even up their playing field if they hit big.

We spend too much time wanting what we don’t have than enjoying what we do — and that maxim that money won’t buy you happiness, well, save that for the simple minded.  Money for most of us will BE happiness.

My UPS driver left awhile back.  Maybe a new route.  Hopefully one delivering to minimum wage earners.  My guess is he’s starting up some new software company, fishing for venture capital, looking for investors.  Probably in a couple of years he’ll sell out to IBM or AT&T, retire near me with enough money to buy the bluffs across the street and build a Taj South Hall.   UPS trucks’ll line up at the coded gate and he’ll regale the drivers with stories of when years ago, in another lifetime, he drove big brown trucks and worked for slave wages.  Won’t be long, we won’t have enough folks left to drive delivery.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/audio-egotopia1.mp3[/podcast]audio —- egotopia

Some of the Hotheads down at the Diner have been talking about seceding.  We’ve always heard talk of Camano seceding from Whidbey, but some of these Firebrands are advocating something more than that.  They want to make the South End a sovereign entity, sort of Freedom County South.  Dig a canal from Elger Bay over to the east side, put up a gate and make our own island.

I admit at first I thought they were loony tunes, something out of a Jack Gunter movie, but I been thinking about it lately and I wonder if they’re not onto something.

Sure, the taxbase would be smaller.  At least til Tyee Grocery gets its WalMart permit approved and the CostCo comes in right behind. Course we could charge tolls at the canal bridge to pay for essential services.  Like the South End String Band.  And all these valuable artists.  After all, what would the South End be without its endangered wildlife?  We could name ourselves what my old professor down at the Elger Bay Institute of Aesthetic Enlargement  has always suggested:   EGOTOPIA, a paradise for free spirits, fine artists, bohemians, tax dodgers, scofflaws, tree huggers, paganists, banjo players and xenophobes.  Basically what we got now.

Working’ll disappear. Traffic congestion’ll go away since nobody’ll have jobs or money.  SUV’s will rust and we’ll make art projects out of the corroded carcasses. Eveybody’ll be king of nothing.

If it gets too crowded, we’ll annex Hat Island and impose our more spiritual way of life on them.  Operation Liberate Hat Island, we’ll call it.  Make us an archipelago of anarchic artistic license.  Bring em the news.   Teach em the fine arts:  macrame and mailbox decorating, stained glass and popsickle stick twirlers.  You live in harmony with nature and your enlarged ego, the way we do, you’ll realize pretty quick government isn’t really necessary.  Course in a few months, it’ll probably look like Rwanda.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/audio-rich-man-poor-man.mp3[/podcast]audio — rich man poor man

One of the saddest things in this whole wide world is to watch someone who comes into money, a lot of money, then manages in the time it takes to spell L-O-S-E-R, fritters it all away.  They got it made in the shade, but no …. They want more.  So they ‘invest’ in, oh, the stock market or commodities or some knee-jerk pal’s idiotic scheme to double that blessed largesse.  Only to watch the market crash or nettle futures drop to $1 a bale or the ‘can’t miss’ investment in medical marijuana growing go down in flames.

My pal Fishin Freddy got a million dollar settlement from an Alaska boat disability that left him with a bad back and limited mobility and constant pain.  Some South Enders might think a million greenbacks were the pot at the end of many a rainbow guarded by troll-like leprechauns, but Freddy?  No, Freddy thought of this as in initial downpayment on future wealth.  And, of course, a smart boy might’ve parlayed that pot, grown it with conservative investment strategies, maybe even hired investment counselors.

Fishin Freddy didn’t need fiscal advice, he was pretty damn sure of THAT!!!

Bought him and the missus his and her sinister black Chryslers with dark tinted glass.  Looked like the Mafia had infiltrated the South End.  Kind of a police magnet, really, all the more problematic if you haul contraband which, you know, I know, and certainly the sheriff’s knew, he did.  You don’t like investment counselors, believe me, you won’t like attorneys and their fees and court costs.

First time I saw Freddy after his windfall, he was selling high end tools he’d bought …. at yardsale prices.  Not a good sign, I thought at the time, turning his offers down.  Last time I saw him he was selling firewood.  Millionaires don’t usually sell firewood.  Hard work for a disabled fisherman rich guy.  Especially when half the wood was cut off property he didn’t own.

I haven’t seen Freddy for awhile.  Heard he was poaching deer in the ravines behind me.  The law says you must use only a shotgun, not a rifle, since a rifle bullet might travel a mile.  Freddy, of course, was using a rifle.  Believe me, I’m reluctant to walk the woods lately, but I figure, give him a few weeks, he’ll offer that 30 ought 6 to me for a song and maybe some fresh venison to boot.  Sell it for a price that should buy himself a case or two of cheap beer.

I guess a million dollars just isn’t what it used to be.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/audio-driving-in-the-scenery.mp3[/podcast]audio —- driving in the scenery

We got a lot of neighbors driving in the scenery lately.  The telephone pole just south of our shack got toppled two months ago, some yahoo texting his girlfriend who failed to notice the slight curvature to an otherwise straight road.  Airbags saved his silly hide.  Another telegraph pole got pole-axed near Hutchison’s Park.  Some pickup with a hot engine came out of the intersection thinking he was on the Bonneville Salt Flats, hit 60 in a few seconds, then lost control and took out the pole, the fence to the park, a concrete piling and still came up laughing.

Guitar Bob’s mailbox was hit too.  The guy had to cross clear over from the other side of the highway to do it.  On a straight road.  His cousin had driven into a couple of ditches the month earlier, supposedly fell asleep, and totaled about three of his grandpa’s rigs.  “Falling asleep” is apparently a euphemism for driving under the influence of narcotics.

Further south an SUV wrapped around a power pole.  Airbags once again saved some lives.  What I wonder as I walk along the shoulder of these roads is how do I get an airbag into my hat?

Pretty obviously today’s drivers aren’t paying too much attention to the road.  They got e-mails to read and texts to send and phone calls to make and a radio to find music that needs dialing.  I see folks with reading material on the steering wheel and folks who do their hair in the mirror behind the visor.

I’m not a real great proponent of most technological advances, but I’m hoping for cars that drive themselves real soon.  Cars that sense the shoulder.  Cars that see approaching objects.  Cars that stay inside the white lines.  Cars that won’t tailgate.  Cars that don’t read their manual on the highway or put on make-up on the way to work.  I want cars that drive without any help from their pre-occupied passengers.  I mean, somebody ought to be at the wheel.  Even if it’s just a circuit board.