The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/audio-glaciers-of-garbage.mp3[/podcast]audio —- glaciers of garbage

About 20 years ago last century I started building our new house.  1992.  Took a couple years, but when it was finished, I walked everything up the hill from the shack we’d lived in since 1977.  I decided if I wasn’t willing to carry it up, it wasn’t worth keeping.  You want to downsize, this strategy can’t be beat.

I cheated a little on the clawfoot tub and the wood cook stove and used my truck and a buddy or two with beer bribes, but otherwise I spent a week moving ant-like up and down the hill with occasional breaks to haul the discard pile to the dump or the thrift stores.  By the time we took occupancy we were down to the bare essentials.  All that clutter and crap from the shack was gone.  And good riddance!

Fast forward a couple decades.  Not only has the dust collected up here at the hacienda, but so have boxes, knickyknacks, books, CD’s, clothes and all the rest of those possessions piling up slowly enough to avoid detection or set off hoarder alarms.  In a perfect world I suppose I’d build the next house back in the woods, then downsize again, taking only the necessities.  This seems like a nuclear option and anyway, I’m too decrepit and old to build another mansion.

So … I’m going to Option B.  I’m digging into every closet, every nook and most crannies, behind the stairs, up in the rafters, back in the crawlspaces.  I’m hunting junk, scraps, extra dishware, broken pottery, bad art, tattered books, drawers of cassette tapes, stacks of vinyl, unused camping gear, beat up shoes, torn coats, old tape decks and Beta machines, analog cameras, relatives who never left, lost puppies, missing children, Romney advisors, leftover lunches, tube TV’s and every computer we ever owned.  I want it out.  Gone.  Forgotten.  I want space.  I want Grand Vistas once again in the living room.  I want closets that aren’t sedimentary.  Pots and pans that aren’t archeological.  Art that isn’t historical.  I want my house back.

Seems like every twenty years or so this could hold back the glacier of garbage.  Course, it might take twenty to finish the job.   Check back in a year or so.  See if I’m okay.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/audio-south-end-health-care.mp3[/podcast]audio — south end health care

Half the folks I know down here on the organic, antibiotic-free South Endzone are self-insured.  Meaning:  they don’t have health insurance, life insurance and possibly not even car insurance.  They count on clean living, herbal remedies and a whole lotta luck to get them to old age without accidents or bankruptcy.  When they DO get sick or their luck runs out, we collect donations and the bank calls in the mortgage.  This is the state of health insurance these days.  A half wit on meth could dream up a more sensible plan, it seems to me.  Course, I’m not on meth….

I’m on the catastrophic plan.  High monthly payments, high deductible, high probability my coverage will be denied anyway.  One time long ago I had health insurance through my employer — and yes, way back when I actually had a job.  Part time.  Low pay.  But it offered health insurance.  Hot damn!!  Since I’d never had coverage of any sort previously, I ran right out and bounced a double-bladed axe off a maple I was cutting down right into my leg about ankle high one 4th of July.  Deep gash right through the ligament, fireworks in my brain.  So I dropped the axe, tightened up a tourniquet and drove to the nearest emergency room which was 40 miles north.  The ER doc put about 15 stitches in the ligament, then another 15 in the leg and declared me good as new, maybe in a few months.  He declined any pain med prescription, fearing, I think, I might enjoy them.  “Stop on your way home and buy yourself a six pack of something strong,” he advised, no doubt remembering his Hypocritical Oath.  I asked would this wound hurt much and he assured me it would hurt like hell.  “Roll a fat doobie,” he added, “you’ll be fine.”  Medical marijuana four decades ahead of its time…. I wasn’t fine.  I spent the summer on crutches after a week of pain and pogo-sticking on one leg.  Which was bad enough, but then the other shoe dropped, metaphorically and literally, when my insurance policy refused to pay my ER bill, some clause that required my accident to have taken place NOT in the county of my residence.

Well, since 95% or more of accidents occur near home, this was a stroke of genius for my ‘insurers’.   Insured them from the possibility of payments, I guess.  Shortly after this, I left my place of employment and rejoined the ranks of my fellow South Enders.  Semi-retired, self-employed and very vaguely entrepreneurial.

So when I hear my neighbors whose companies pay their health premiums complain about my friends who don’t carry insurance at all, I tell em what my ER doc recommended:  just drink until the numbness hits.  You still think health care works,  roll a big fat one too.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/audio-my-computers-big-fat-foot-in-the-door.mp3[/podcast]audio — my computer’s big fat foot in the door

I occasionally wet my whistle in the fine taverns of Stanwoodopolis where I got a bartender who invariably asks me if I want a particular beer, hoping to curry favor by remembering what I might have had the last time.  Doesn’t much matter that she doesn’t know my name, just my brand of brew.  Some folks like this kind of consumer familiarity, maybe makes them feel welcome, a family member in their drinking society.  Me, I don’t much care for it.

My computer is doing the same thing.  Says hello by name even, then pops up stuff like what I looked at recently.  Shows me a picture, what it costs, maybe a special sale.  If I ever actually buy something on-line, my computer starts ringing, flashes lights, looks like a Vegas Jackpot.  It figures I’m a genuine, bona fide Consumer and it knows my brand, my preferences, my price bracket, my sales soft spot.  Maybe some folks like this.  Me, I hate it.

Welcome, I guess, to the new world of capitalism.  Kind of like having a salesman coming to your door, only he doesn’t have to knock, he just uses the key he took from you and comes right on in.  Every day.  Every week.  From here on out.  The Kirby vacuum guy can test drive his product forever.  Slam the door on him, he’ll be right back.  My computer now is a 24/7 Home Shopping Channel and I don’t even have cable.  I suppose there are folks who appreciate this service, but I sure never met them.

Most of us didn’t bargain for this when we bought a computer and wired up to the internet.  I didn’t read the fine print, apparently, but it must have had some subclause about the right to invade my privacy, sell my information, keep records on me and set up shop in my house like some kind of shirt-tail relative who goes to my refrigerator, grabs himself a snack and offers me a beer.  Knows what brand I like.  Just helping out.  Unlike my bartender, though, he’s never leaving….

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/audio-political-divide.mp3[/podcast]audio — political divide

Politics down here on the bucolic South End isn’t much different than most everywhere else in the Red/Blue USA, meaning, we’re a bruised Purple too.  Signs get vandalized and letters to the editor warn about Farmageddon if so-and-so wins.  Pastor Paul at the Little Church in the Ravine rails about the medical nettle legalization issue and turns downright apoplectic over the same sex marriage initiative.  He doesn’t even like the word SEX on the ballot much less Same sex.  Even God Hisself doesn’t use the word in the Holy Book, he fumes.  And the congregation either nods approvingly or sits in the back with their arms crossed.  More like Little Church in the Schism, these hot button days.  With only two weeks to the election, it’s touch and go whether the Flock can hang together.

These days even the South End has a south end, it’s that polarized.  We got the newcomers who want more fire and police, figuring, I guess they need quick response time emergency services for their next heart attack and some police protection for their BMW’s.  The old timers are too suspicious of government, even one they never see, to trust in much else than Smith and Wesson and a snarling dog chained near the porch.

Not that the dividing lines are so easily drawn.  We got libertarian anti-abortionists and we got Tea Party medical marijuana opponents.  We got folks who want government off their backs but want it in their bedrooms.  Well, YOUR bedroom.  We got folks who demand less taxes but more police.  We got folks who want less police but wanted Colton caught.  We got the people who vote based on Scripture and folks who want separation of mosque and state.  We got free range clammers and clamorers for free range.  It’s enough to knock the South End off its axis.

In the end I suspect it’s all sound and fury, much ado about nada.  You got a government that’s out of money, it’s broke all right.  Folks kind of forget we live on Camano, the Tijuana of Whidbey, the ugly step-sister, and on top of that, its keester end.  Vote yer conscience or vote yer wallet:  you’re still a long day’s drive from the reach of Rome.