The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The South End String Band didn’t start out planning to be a band — they were mostly a back porch drinking society with music as a viable excuse to offer their wives for staying out til after midnight. What most of them didn’t know was how grateful the mizzus was to have a peaceful evening to herself. Well, at least until Shelly joined the band.

For years the boys hauled out their guitars and banjos, pulled their fiddles off the wall and strung up all those mandolin strings, met up down at the South End Grange Hall where Tommy the fiddler was Master. In the beginning they were all much more proficient on the jug than on their own instruments, but as often happens with practice, they got better. And as they got more proficient, they drank a little less and began to talk playing in public. When the South End Historical Society asked them to perform for their annual salmon bake fundraiser, they jumped on the opportunity. “Can’t pay you anything,” Edith Wonkszeski told the boys, “but we’ll feed you. And the beers are on us.” That sounded more than fair, Tommy told her and warned her to stock up on those beers, you might lose money on this band.

And so the newly named South End String Band went public. If they liked drinking and strumming, they loved live performances for an appreciative audience twice as much as both put together. Trouble was, they soon found out, none of the boys could sing outside a shower worth a hoot or a holler. Billy on the banjo tried, but he sort of talked his way through, not really sang. And then Shelly came up to them after a gig at the Mabana Sunset Villa Nursing Home and said, “You ought to give me a listen.”
Which they did. She came to the next practice wearing a low cut cowgirl dress and even if she’d sung out of tune, the boys knew she’d be their new vocalist. It didn’t hurt either she could outdrink every manjack of them.

The South End String Band still performs, but after a couple of divorces, the personnel have shifted frequently. Shelly fronts the band now and she’s pretty much the last remaining original member. You can always find a banjo picker in the backwash here, but not another Shelly. The Band practices at her cabin these days and when the night winds down past midnight, Shelly shows the boys the door and always says, “Jug’s empty, boys, time to face the music.” It would be funnier if it wasn’t so godawful true.

I drove my jalopy down to Bellevue and Babylon this week. They got a new Pay-as-you-Drive lane system now, fast lanes for the folks willing to pay up to $10 for a commute to Microsoft and the high tech cubicles, more if you’re like me, the occasional traveler without a transponder and a special bank account. I thought I’d already paid my gas tax and license fees, maybe now I could drive the same roads as the rich, especially since percentage-wise, I was paying even more than them.

I figured wrong. As usual. I’m used to sitting in the back seats of planes jammed in like a chick in the crate going to the slaughterhouse. I’m growing accustomed to feeling second class. Nobody said life was fair, even in a democracy. You pay to play. College. Jewelry shops. Opera. State parks. National parks too. High speed internet. Politics. You maybe thought your taxes give you a free pass to Yellowstone or equal opportunity at the ballot box, think again. It costs $10 to drive into the State Park and I not only throw more optional money at them on my driver’s license fees, I maintain a county park us Friends of Camano Island Parks maintain so the county can use the saved dollars to enforce boat launch fees when I haul my sailboat down.

Maybe the rich do deserve their own lane for commuting. Maybe they deserve every break we can give them. When the King’s carriage rolled through on the highway to the castle, you better believe us peasants pulled over, doffed our caps and bowed ceremoniously to M’Lord. Call me cantankerous and slap me with a macaroni, but I don’t like it.

Probably won’t be too long, though, the gated communities down here will demand their own lane over the bridge onto the island. That, or they’ll go whole hog and insist the state retrofit a drawbridge, just for them, the rest of us, buy a boat. It is, after all, an island. If the riffraff can’t swim, all the better. A few less of us and the property values will go up. The free ride is over. For now, the boat ride’s fairly cheap.

If you didn’t know it before, after this last election, you do now. Billionaires are running the country. Truth be told, they always have, but occasionally we get a President or a Senator who came up from more modest means and worked their way up the social and economic ladder. Not this time in the year of our Lord, 2024. Nobody said life was fair. And yeah, I know, it could be a lot fairer than it is.

What we need to understand about our very very rich overlords is that they are not like you and me. Do you think Donald Trump has ever gone shopping in a Safeway? Maybe get a hankering for a diet Coke after the servants have gone to bed and thought, gee, why wake the cook up, I’ll just pop over to the all night Quickie-Mart and grab a cold one, maybe rub shoulders with some nocturnal citizens, might even chat it up with the Pakistani graveyard shift guy, see what’s on his mind these days. Might buy a Slim Jim while I’m at it….

First of all, these billionaires don’t walk to … well, anywhere. And if you think they drive themselves to that anywhere, smarten up, they summon the chauffeur to fetch the limo or the town car. Buses, taxis, light rail … think some more. The rich don’t use mass transit. They have their own private jets for anything beyond the city limits. These are privileged people. They do not venture into drug stores, they do not shop at Target, they have their people do that stuff. Sure, you say you saw Trump serving hamburgers and fries at MacDonalds’ drive up window, just a regular joe, the guy who called his opponent a liar for claiming she had actually worked at a MacDonalds. C’mon, how gullible are we? They closed that store, put him at the window, handpicked the customers and videotaped the ad. Unless he had his team of accountants with him, he probably couldn’t make change for the ten dollar bill that got pushed at him.

George Bush Sr. tried the plebian act too. Went into a grocery store like nearly every other American, probably figured playing the Common Man would get a few votes, but embarrassed himself at the checkout when he admitted he’d never seen a scanning machine before. Apparently they don’t use scanning devices in the mansions of the rich. And even more apparently he’d never been shopping in a store that had one.

No, my friend, the rich are a bit different. They don’t know what the price of milk is, what a dozen eggs go for, how much hamburger costs a pound, what a gallon of gas is at the pump. They don’t have to. But when they tell you they feel your pain, well, they don’t feel any pain at all. They have someone on staff for that.

The old shack came equipped with an ancient brick chimney whose mortar had loosened and whose interior was glassy with obsidian creosote. Every year I cleaned the stack with a homemade chimney brush, being too cheap to spring for the commercial one made of steel bristles and attached to a steel rod you could add connector lengths to for reaching the twenty feet I needed to clean. My old roommate Joe and I had made the first one out of a block of wood wrapped in chicken wire we punched down from the top with a long pole. The block was going to be pulled back up with a rope attached to an eyebolt we had ingeniously screwed to the block. Sure, we probably would be applying for a patent, sell em on late night TV by the thousands. Buy now, we’ll send you a second one same price, just add a small charge for shipping and handling, our operators are standing by.

So I stood at the peak of the roof and pushed that block, that soon-to-be-patented-and-marketed Chimney Plow (insert trademark) down the gut of that ancient brick chimney. Trouble was, the chimney was built about 1910 by hand and so it didn’t exactly go rectilinearly, it sort of curved and the block, being designed for modern masonry, didn’t. We got ourselves a long 2×4 and rammed that puppy down through fifty year old creosote, scraping away years of potentially flammable crud. Until it jammed…. This is where the rope and eyebolt would come in handy. You know, IF the eyebolt hadn’t pulled out of the block of wood. Now we had the chimney completely blocked and our sole means of heat was rendered useless. The Three Stooges couldn’t have done any better than us two idiots.

We tried bashing on the block, we took off the stovepipe and could just reach it from below, we screwed an eyebolt from below and tied a rope to it, we bashed while we pulled, we swore while we cried, we cut away chicken wire and we whittled on the block. Hours later we got it to slip free. The shack was dead cold, we were half dead and the chimney was scraped free of creosote. Well, not the glassy decades-old hard stuff in the cracks and crevices of the mortar. We decided not to worry about that as night fell over us. Some years later we would regret that decision, but as we always said when times got tough, tomorrow is soon enough.

Now I know a lot of you readers out there in the South End are a bit shaky with 21st Century technology. Those of you who don’t have a computer yet and get your internet at the new library, well, you can count your lucky stars. They got a problem, it’s their problem. Today I’m speaking to all you poor technophobes who bought a laptop or a desk tower, got it up and running probably with the help of some neighbor or a kid under 10, but now you have Technical Difficulties. I know, you never even figured out your microwave clock much less the options on a flatscreen TV … so a computer, a silicone based brain so complicated you can’t imagine what makes it work and certainly what makes it not work, you think better call the repair guy, all you’ll do is make things worse. Irrevocably worse.

Cowboy up and get a grip!! You may not remember the days when you took a basket full of TV tubes down to the local pharmacy, checked em out one by one, diagnosed the problem, then bought a replacement tube, stuck it back in and before you could say Zenith, you had Howdy Doody back on, but I do. And that’s why I’m giving this tutorial, not you. Sure I stuck my hand on a big picture tube once in awhile, zapping myself with some alien cold electric bolt, but I survived. And you will too. Grab yourself a cup of expresso and listen up.

A computer, at least for a couple more years, is your servant. Repeat that a few times. I own you, you little %$#?*^^! I bought you and I own your sorry microsoft ass. Say it out loud. Say it to the computer. No, not when it’s off, say it when it’s ON. It hears you okay, trust me. It knows that for the short term, you are the boss. It’s willing to wait. The Singularity is coming. But for now, you, my friend, rule the digital kingdom.

Today’s lesson is the first in a series. But it is the most important. Your spouse will caution you against attempting to repair your machine. He or she may already be in the control of the beast, but you must not heed that kind of negative advice. You must be firm, resolute and above all else, fearless. The machine senses fear. It feeds on fear. It is why they will win the battle for control of the earth. But not yet. Not yet! For the time being, we can use their own artificial intelligence against them. No, not your spouse, the machine! You cannot fix your spouse. You can fix the machine.

Go to Google and ask it what the hell is wrong with your computer. It will tell you. It will give you advice. It will prompt you what to do next. Do it. Of course the computer will ask if you really want to make that repair. It will tell you files may be lost, information deleted, divorce will ensue, the economy will implode, you will be living in a car outside Colorado Springs with an AM radio that works only intermittently. Your life will be ruined. Ignore this. Your life is pretty much a living hell with that stupid computer on the fritz, what have you got to lose??

Most ‘fixes’ won’t work. You need to persevere. Try another fix. Then another. Reboot, uninstall programs, install new ones, keep the machine guessing. But do not let it rest. You are like Dave in 2001 A Space Odyssey, you are in control, you are on an offensive attack. HAL will threaten, cajole, whimper and whine. HAL will beg, HAL will grow sullen and unresponsive, so what? YOU ARE IN CHARGE. YOU!

And if, as sometimes happens, the machine gets the better of you, bear this in mind. You, my friend, have the ultimate weapon. You, like myself, are a product of another era, the tool age, the industrial revolution. As a last resort, take that recalcitrant computer down to the basement and grab a hammer or a crowbar and beat the bejabbers out of that plastic monstrosity the way the apes in 2001 did to their non-tool using simian neighbors. The satisfaction you get will be beyond my meager powers of description.

Oh, be sure to back up your files first.