The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I guess I’m reaching the age where friends are starting to leave this Mortal Coil.  Last weekend I went to another funeral.  Same church, different deceased.  Same minister, different crowd.  Same platitudes, different Bible quotations.  Most of last week’s mourners were old ourselves.  Watching them hobble down the aisle, you sort of knew we’d all be back here way too soon.

You might’ve guessed.  I’m not a real big fan of funerals.  I can only listen to the 23^rd Psalm so many times.  And I’m not real comforted by the promise of ‘Going Into the Light’  or ‘passing through the Pearly Gates.’  I never was much for Gated Communities and all those covenants and bylaws.  Oh, I know a lot of folks get some reassurance there’ll be a Better Life, but me, I’m not that unhappy here and now.  And the promise of Life Eternal … well, that may sound good to some but I’m not too keen on filling the hours of Eternity with something that’ll hold our interest.  Most folks are bored by afternoon.  Try half past Perpetuity and see how bad daytime TV can get, even a Perfect World.

Death is one of those so-called facts of life we don’t want to believe in.  So we say it’s just a way to go to the ‘after’ life.  Not really dying, just shedding some skin.  If folks really believe this, we’d be partying for the deceased, celebrating their new birthday, the first in a line of them stretching farther than the decimal calculations for Pi.  Dust to dust, is my thinking.  Ashes to ashes.

There will come a time — for all of us —when all these words fail us, when vision is lost and memory has receded back to its source.  We are really spirits who emerge from some unnameable darkness and for an all too brief moment, glow incandescent.   It’s little wonder that what we know of the world is that small circle of light…..  We who share it together can take some comfort that for a fleeting moment we could rise like sparks from that same fragile fire.

In the end we won’t know many others.  Friends and family are few.  All the more remarkable and precious it is to share some of each other’s light and each other’s warmth. When the darkness beckons, some part of us will pass on, but certainly not the totality of what was us.  Each of us who knew the deceased and loved him and were loved by him, we each carry some part of his spark now.  We each carry a piece of him in our hearts and our memories.  Prize it because it’s a very valuable thing.  It is the most valuable thing.  It’s what keeps the circle from being broken.  From here on out, in no small way, we are now their torchbearers.   And always remember:  this is all that holds the darkness back.

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

Nostalgia seems to be the antidote to cure the Shock of the Future here on the wireless South End.  Just when folks are thinking about that Prius purchase or waiting for a fuel cell Chevy, the old car guyz are intent on something pre-fuel injection, non-hybrid and seriously retro.  The Flatheads, an ad hoc group of antique car aficionados, meet once a week at the Diner for a hearty breakfast of bacon and eggs and toast buttered with 30 weight.  Whey they roll in, the Diner looks like a scene out of American Graffiti, gleaming waxed Mercurys and perfectly restored Oldsmobile Rocket 88’s.   For a few hours the South End freeways return to Big Fin glory.

The boyz argue double vs. 4 barrel carburation, rebored cyclinders vs. short block, stock vs. custom.  They trade sandblasting work for decal painting.  They travel to each other’s garages  — which, by my shade tree standards, would qualify for Health Dep’t food prep certification, they’re that immaculate.  Snap-On tools are organized in rolling cabinets, parts are labeled and easily accessed (I bet they even have computer files.  I know they used the internet to locate replacement parts.)  Lifts and grease pits look like a dealer’s repair bay.  The boyz are serious.

One of the drawbacks to their hobby, other than high divorce rates and a serious drain on retirement funding, is something most Flatheads acknowledge but not proudly or loudly:  Car Accumulation Syndrome.  One restoration leads to the next.  They no more than finish that ’57 BelAir than they’ve got a project car hauled in on a flatbed, some must-have, couldn’t pass up Model A or  a ’65 Mustang from their high school glory days.  Garages get enlarged and the missuz’ dream of a kitchen remodel gets deferred once again.

I used to park my beater ‘70’s pickup at the end of the Diner’s showroom, hoping their enthusiasm for vintage vehicles might rub off.  But sadly, my days of busted and bleeding knuckles, recalcitrant bolts seized in the block, hateful stripped threads, all the grime and grease and grunt made that a little unlikely.  I never had a garage.  Just crawled under my broken rigs and worked in the rain, the cold, the private hell that was MY car repair.  I didn’t work on them for fun.  I worked on them because I was too poor to own a decent rig.  So when I drive by the Diner these days, I salute the Flatheads with a toot of the horn and thank my lucky stars I own a truck, a modern, computer modulated, sensor-driven, circuit board-on-wheels truck WAY too complicated for a boy like me to work on.  Nostalgia is nice, but I like to make it to town.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/white-trash-avalanche2.mp3[/podcast]white trash avalanche2

Today walking on the beach north of Camano Head a few miles, I found my first Tsunami Radioactive Debris, a plastic bag with Japanese lettering.  So …. I thought here comes the onslaught, litter drifting thousands of miles, all the terrible detritus of that tragedy rolling and tumbling across the wide Pacific to arrive finally on our pristine doorstep.

Won’t be long, I figured, before all us beach combers would need a Geiger Counter and a crash course in reading Japanese.  Everything from rusting Prius’s to entire houses broken into their original components, all laying down on the sand like a garage sale from Hell.  Sure, a lot of us South Enders would sift through the spoils, maybe set up a Mother-in-law unit out back by the edge of the nettle forests, nice for the missuz’s old lady, a few extra roentgens  of background radiation, no worse than daytime TV screens.  Plenty of stuff for the weekend teenagers to build something a little more architectural than driftwood forts, maybe 3 story kid condo units, outfit em with cabinets and furniture and square dishware, sort of a Tokyo Motel.

A few hundred yards further I found a rusting washing machine cylinder.  And another ways down, some casing for the washing machine.  I looked for Japanese labeling, but nothing readable.  Quarter of a mile later, I stumbled on the washer case, pretty new looking.  Kenmore, it had on its instrument panel.  American.  Probably not radioactive, probably not from the tsunami, probably rolled down the bluff a week earlier if my forensic litter skills are still up to date.

I guess the alarm bells of all that tsunami debris are fair warning for the coastline here to Alaska.  But me, I’m more worried about appliances tossed off the front yard of my neighbors’ places down the bluff, landslides of steel and plastic hurtling toward me in a white trash avalanche.  All I can ask, I guess, is holler down a warning!!  Seems like the neighborly thing to do…. That, or just take it to the dump like the north enders do….Might save a few lives.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/audio-the-high-price-of-infamy.mp3[/podcast]audio — the high price of infamy

I just finished my latest – and last – interview with a documentary filmmaker doing another take on the Barefoot Bandit saga.  Nice enough woman.  Dedicated.  Skilled.  She’s spent a year doing this and plenty more work to go.  It’s not HER, it’s just that after 50 interviews with reporters and film crews and book writers, you just get tired of it.

If you ever wondered what a famous person’s life might be like, try just a peripheral taste of it.  Telephone calls, cameramen in the yard, reporters from France, magazines from England, film crews from Canada and Brazil, Newsweek magazine writers tromping the woods, Wired magazine guys peeking in the outhouse.  Sure, it’s amusing for awhile.  Hilarious even.  But how long do you want the gag to go on before it’s in your throat???

Fifteen minutes of fame should be all most of us need … or want.  Beyond that your life gets co-opted.  The paparazzi of the news media will call and call, no taking prisoners, no taking NO for an answer.  It’s their job and you’re just a paragraph in their Big Story.  Trouble is, you’re a piece of hundreds of the same story.  At first you think you can control the spin, but pretty quick you realize you can’t.  Editing, revision misquotes, all of it slipping away on shifting sand of pseudo-notoriety.

Today I hope I’m calling it quits on this Colton mythology.  Seems old, but the Hollywood movie is still on its way.  So is the Canadian documentary.  And the one shot today.  The South End String Band can hardly stand to play the song we wrote.  Although…. We’re talking about a Free Colton! Concert.  Not really advocating getting him out of jail — just no admission charge to the gig.

Be careful, is all I’m saying.  You want 15 more minutes of fame, better get yourself a publicist and an unlisted number.  I don’t have either ….

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/audio-dreams-for-sale.mp3[/podcast]audio — dreams for sale

Half the South End is For Sale.   Three quarters of the neighborhood have real estate signs out by the driveway, everything from WindyRear Realty to Reflux Realty.  They used to hold open houses on the weekend, but after 3 or 4 years, I guess even the optimism of a realtor starts to look like a horny snake courting a garden hose.  Or vice versa.

Some of the homeowners have given up too, bought haciendas in Arizona or trailer court lots in Nevada.  They come motoring back in their 40 foot mobile homes when the asphalt starts to melt down there and the gila monsters stay under the rocks all day.  I guess they’re the optimists, folks who figure the housing bubble will eventually swell up again and they’ll get the million dollars they thought the place was inflated to back in the carefree days before October 2008 when the betting stopped and the banks had to show their cards.  House of cards, it turned out, one very bad bet.

We’ve gone through the Boom and Bust cycles on the South End many times since I lost a wheel on the Conestoga and decided to stay put.  Folks find out the neighbor sold for twice what anybody dreamed somebody would pay and next thing you know, everybody figures they can sell now and retire like a dot.com executive.  Signs sprout up and proliferate like nettles in chicken manure, eventually they DO sell or the sellers give up and we return to normal.  Although … normal may just be more of those selling binges than living our lives, hard to say.

The realtors do fine most of the time.  Commission coming in, commission going out.  Rita, down at WindyRear’s North End office, tells them when they’re ready to get rich, come on back, she’ll sell their dream house for 50% more than they paid.  There’s ALWAYS another house — the real dream is making money.

Personally — and nothing against the wisdom of Rita the Realtor — I don’t care how much my bank account would swell, I wouldn’t want to end up in a trailer park in Nevada.  I don’t care how good the air conditioning is.