The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

People always ask me ,how is it you can manage to live down at the Millionaire Club of the South End when you don’t really have a job?  They think the way the world works is you make an hourly wage or a salary, then you hop right out and buy a new car, a palatial  house, a plasma TV  —- all of it on time, all of it figuring out those payments the mortgage company or the credit card company or the car dealer are gonna fit into your income. I think the schools in America, at least the ones I went to, wanted to keep us in the dark about interest and principal.  The only principal me and my wiseass buddies saw was in his office, reading us our detention notices.  I don’t owe anybody anything.  Except maybe an apology.  I drove a jalopy.  I lived in a shack  for 17 years.  I built my ‘new’ house myself.  I’m not saying it’s going to make the Street of Dreams, but it’s paid for and I tell you young’uns, that’s a dream come true for a boy a mortgage would’ve made into an indentured servant. I had a former friend’s punk teenage boy ask me one time if I was rich.  Big smirking grin.  Real smug kid.  Already a con-artist like his old man.  Smarter than you and me by a country mile, he figured.  I thought about wiping that smile right off his map.  But finally I said, naw, I’m not rich, not the way you mean, not in any way you’d ever understand.  But I am free.  I don’t owe anybody a red cent.  Don’t have debts weighing me down.  Don’t have to worry about the mortgage.  Course, that’s a rich money won’t touch.  That’s a wealth you can’t take to the bank. I won’t tell you my buddy’s punk son got any lessons here — but at least I figured he wouldn’t come back after dark to see what he could steal.  He’d go find a rich guy….

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/audio-south-end-mayoral-election-ends-on-a-high-note.mp3[/podcast]audio — south end mayoral election ends on a high note

A collective sigh of relief could be heard from the South End Diner parking lot to the newly opened Greenworks Medical Marijuana Outlet once the Mayoral Election results came in after the preliminary votes were tabulated at Crab Cracker Election Central.  With 17% of the vote tabulated, the Cracker is projecting the outcome of the election for 2012 based on algorithmic models utilizing programs so powerful even the FBI and CIA  have subpoenaed our editorial board to turn over our data.

Nevertheless, in one of the most contentious electoral battles in recent history, the mayoral mudslinging campaign has finally come to a conclusion.  The ad campaigns, funded by unheard of influxes of cash from Camano Crossroads and the Puget Patriots Political Action Committee, sent a virtual landfill of extremely negative mailers during the final weeks.  Perhaps none were more vitriolic than the South End Anti-Newcomer PAC whose incoherent legions of ground troops offended most everyone south of the Mountain View/Dixon divide.

The Cracker Central team found that the last minute write-in candidacies of ‘Two Toke’ Tom Fiehlgud and Colton Harris-Moore were essentially tied for the lead at 43% each (with a margin of error of 22%).  Trailing by significant margins were Tweeter Daddle of the 47% Party (7%), Sarah Doolittle of the Do-Nothing Party (4%) and Bubba Frisk the 3rd and his Job Creator Party (2%).  The South End String Band received a scattering of write-ins but were disqualified with multiple hanging chads that gummed up the voting machines.

Because Colton Harris-Moore is a convicted felon currently serving time in a federal penitentiary, Cracker Central confidently projects Mr. Fiehlgud as the winner of the South End mayoral contest  in an electrifying outcome certain to be studied for generations.  Mr. Fiehlgud, , apparently riding the cannabis tsunami of Washington State’s 2012 referendums, was unavailable for coherent comment, but an anonymous spokesperson for his ‘grass’ roots campaign stated in a phone interview that Two Toke was ’higher than a Katmandu Kite’ and would use the powers of his newly won office to promote world peace and galactic understanding between species.  “This election,” she stated, “is incontrovertible proof, if proof was needed, that the South End is the epicenter of cosmic consciousness.  Long Live Mayor Tom!!”

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/audio-back-wash-days.mp3[/podcast]audio —- back wash days

Historically the South End has been a place where the lumber companies cut down the forests and the developers sold off the scrub and slash that was left as ‘view property’.  You look around and times haven’t changed too much.  Except the price of a lot now is more than all the five acre chicken ranches of Mabana sold between 1910 and 1950.

Folks wonder why it took so long to discover’ the island you can drive to’ never knew our history as an exploited backwash.  The developers didn’t worry about zoning here.  Blast a bluff down with hydraulic hoses and call it Tyee or Tillicum.  Sluice down Summerland and build a rock jetty around it out into the bay.  Dig out a canal at the country club and double the waterfront.  It was wild west stuff, all right, where a man and his bulldozer could cut a wide swath without fear of government regulation or horrified neighbors.

Nowadays we look askance at dynamiting bluffs to make waterfront or dredging a lagoon to create lakeside gated communities or draining the wetlands to make quality 18 hole golf courses.  Judging by the agonized screams of the developers, you’d expect growth would reverse, forests woulde expand, housing starts would sit half finished, abandoned and rotting.  Oddly the juggernaut of gated communities and developments with names like South End Estates, Elger Bay Meadows, Tyee Vista all seem to be doing just fine with more on the way, thank you very much.

Clear Cut Cul-de-Sac, Blast Zone Barrio and D-9 Trailer Court are going to struggle, but the South End is gentrifying now that some of the trees have grown back and the chicken farms are broke and the Dot.com retirees are priming the pumps.  Won’t be long before we South Enders celebrate Back Wash Days and the rough and tumble no-holds-barred pioneers who carved out our civilization over the past century.  Thank you boys!

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/audio-blue-tuesdays.mp3[/podcast]audio — blue tuesdays

One of the things we don’t talk about much down here on the sunny South End is depression.  I know, it’s hard to imagine.  Sort of a worm in the apple of the Garden of Eden — before God made the rule not to eat it.  But we got everything from Seasonal Affective Disorder to Monday Morning Blues that last until Friday to outright disabling pull-the-covers-over-our-head-and-wait-until-spring depression.

I was always of the school of thought that depression was a symptom of bad marriages or crappy jobs or poor life choices.  External stuff but something you could change.  I don’t believe that anymore.  I got friends who struggle, who wrestle, who go 10 rounds with this stuff and in the end, lose on a TKO by the first cup of coffee.  We all know folks who try all manner of self- medication.  Sort of leads to other problems which compound the original diagnosis, maybe like mistaking gasoline for water to fight a smoldering fire.  Next thing you know, you got a 3 alarm.

I know it’s hard to believe we could suffer severe bouts of depression, living as we do, in Shangri-La-La, but even Paradise has its ups and downs.  Don’t try to tell me Heaven is all sunshine and bliss — I know better.  God herself has more than a few Bad Days, at least judging by the state of the world out there.  You come home —All Alone — to the news that there’s more genocide, more torture, another couple of wars and a few new extinctions —- and that’s just on this planet, well, I bet She needs a few stiff drinks to get through the evening news.  Who wouldn’t?

I’m no psychiatrist so I don’t offer up panaceas any more.  Religion, drugs, self help advice:  might as well sing Sinatra to the wind.  I hear there are meds now, everything from Prozac to lithium, that may or may not help.  This world is hard enough without seeing it through a Blue Veil.  If you’re suffering through a cyclical bout, don’t think you’re alone.  I realize it doesn’t help much, but hang on.  Reality’s a slippery slope, but Hope is a ladder.  Even down here we always have to climb our way back up….

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/audio-nip-and-tuck.mp3[/podcast]audio — nip and tuck

Well, you knew it was bound to happen.  Zumba has come to the South End.  It won’t be long before we’re overrun by personal trainers, Weight Watchers, fitness centers, nutritional supplement stores and eventually rampant steroid use.  For a long long while we seemed exempt from that national narcissism that needs a mirror on every wall and a scale in every room, monitoring for an hourly check on weight gain or wrinkle formation the way a Day Trader checks his stocks every  15 minutes.

I actually know one or two people who DON’T think they’re overweight or out of shape.  Course, they’re 80 plus years old and didn’t get brainwashed by TV commercials or fashion magazines, or … well, about everything that floods across the airwaves or through the mail or via the internet.

It’s a lot like living in Eternal High School where everyone is excluded from the Kool Kid Klub.  Too overweight, too out of shape, too much gray hair, too many varicose veins.  The pharmaceutical folks are making up non-caloric fats and artificial sweeteners.  The medical industry will offer us Botox treatments and plastic surgery.  There are 2500 diet plans known to the state of California … that work for 6 months.  You can get hair transplants and you can get dye for the plugs.

Old age is not something we accept gracefully.  And judging by every other ad in every media, old age starts at 30 or earlier.  Course the next ad will sell us potato chips, pop, beer and fast food — sort of like selling oxycontin then advertising the rehab clinic.

I guess we’re just not comfortable in our own skins.  Which are way too thin….  Unless you only see the fat.  Or the varicose veins.  If Zumba will toughen us up, okay then.  Throw away the bathroom scales and break the mirrors.  Go take a walk and read a book.  You’re not going to be the Prom Queen or the Star Quarterback.  It’s maybe time to really graduate from high school.  Oh, and when you’re contacting those long lost sweethearts on Facebook, show them your actual photo.  We all got a little older.  Naturally….