The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/elger-bay-institoot.mp3[/podcast]elger bay institoot

Folks are always a little surprised to learn that the South End is home to a school of higher learning, figuring, I guess, that a brackish backwash with virtually no commercial potential, with no public schools even, might be likelier to have a minimum security penitentiary than a college.  For awhile we had the Tucson School, an unaccredited mail order degree factory run out of Nate Benson’s basement for a few years before enough irate students complained to the state attorney general.  Nate did get his opportunity to attend a minimum security prison, but not around here.  He graduated in 3 years with good behavior and no one has seen hide nor hair since, but late at night I notice TV ads for university degrees that sound vaguely familiar.

The Elger Bay Institoot of Aesthetic Enlargement has been training young artists for nearly 25 years now.  Half the graduates end up staying here and some become instructors themselves.  The pay isn’t great, but considering the graduates who don’t teach are making far less, it beats the options.  President Otto Vermouth runs a pretty tight ship, near as any of us unwashed masses can tell and nowadays you can find art plastered everywhere from Tyee Store to Jolene’s Beauty Salon and Boutique.  Even the Marina and Bait Shop sports watercolors and bird sculpture.  It’s practically a Louvre down here, although sadly I won’t say most of us have really had our aesthetic consciousness blown up too large.  The Mabana Body Shop has an egg termpura of one of our more infamous graduates, Safari Jack.  Jack says it’s worth more than Roadkill Ronald’s 1964 Mustang convertible, fully restored, but right next to it is a 2003 girlie calendar Ronald must like as much as that egg tempura of the Clamdiggers.  Most of us like it even better, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder and Miss July 2003 fills the eye, believe me.

The Institoot has classes in everything you can want to study art-wise.  Right now they’re running Winter Classes.  I thought about taking something myself, stained glass maybe, but it cost a bit more for the supplies and anyway, I figured I’d lacerate a finger or an artery and my literary ambitions would be ruined.

Maybe in Spring session I’ll take Figure Studies, if they can squeeze another voyeur in.  Jerry Cochran’s wife models for the class.  She’s no Miss July, but it seems safer than stained glass anyway.  At least until Jerry finds out where she’s been moonlighting….

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/audio-new-age-medicine.mp3[/podcast]audio— new age medicine

Down at the forward thinking South End, we were New Age before it became Old Hat.  Herbal remedies?  You bet!  Nettle-opathy has been practiced in the hollows here since old Ma Wexler applied a poultice of the fresh stingers to her Erectile Dysfunctional husband’s non-working parts and boy howdy, things livelied up at the Wexler homestead after that, let me tell you.

Nettle-opathy is a country cross between acupuncture and herbal cure-all.  Apply a few fresh spring leaves to the correct chakra, you can cure everything from shyness to arthritis, halsitosis to insomnia, hair loss to memory loss, seasonal affective disorder to major depression.  You won’t have time to think of much else other than that panacea tickling your chakra.

We’ve been brewing medicinal nettle tonics about since Prohibition forced us to seek alternative medicines.  We got hefe-nettle, nettle stouts, IPA’s, nettle bock, all available in a handy 12 oz. dosage.

Aromatherapy?  Sure.  We got everything from burn barrel poly-blend to chimney cedar to compost leaf mulch/food scrap.  A few minutes of olfactory stimulation, you’ll forget most of those insignificant cares and woes that nag your good mood all day long.

Hypnotherapy.   You want a spell put on you, just wander down to the South End Hotel and belly up to the bar, listen for awhile to the whoppers these old time fishermen spin over a few bottle bass.  You’ll be buying Penn reels and downrigger gear and a boat and motor too — you’ll be broke but if fishing doesn’t cure what ails ya, god help you.

In all honesty — full disclosure here — this New Age stuff, old to us, is really mostly a placebo.  But then, isn’t that the New Medicine now?  And really, who cares so long as it works.  Not our fault the South End itself is really why we live longer, smile more, work less and basically just have most of the answers to life’s tough riddles.  Placebo?  You bet.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/audio-faith-based-agronomy.mp3[/podcast]audio—faith based agronomy

Down here on the South End Banana Belt, the Kauai of Camano, we get quite a jump on spring planting.  Personally I like to roto-till about when I’ve eaten the last of the papayas and mangos, but some of my more conservative neighbors believe you should wait until the oranges have just about played out.

I guess we’re in what you call a micro-climate, sort of the sweet spot where the convergence zone hits that warm Pacific gulfstream up from the Hawaiian Islands, misses Everett and Utsalady, but is ideal for growing tomatoes the size of grapefruits by July.  God’s honest truth — nobody down here would lie about their garden yields.  Unless they were hiding the bounty from the poor raindrenched, fog shrouded, miserably cold neighbors up north.

Me, I like to believe, since we don’t believe in science based climatology these days, that the weather is really just a reflection of our clean living and high moral standards.  Not trying to put too fine a point on it, but those poor souls who get a sour tomato ripening by, oh, October, well, maybe they should change their ways.  Better weather through better living.  Like us!

Sure, we used to study weather patterns, frost zones, jetstreams, all that hocus pocus we’ve relegated to the trashpiles of history.  Science: believe it if you want.  Experiments, proofs, double blind studies, computer modeling , labs and testing — not much use in this faith based agronomy we got down here working 12 months a year for us.  Global warming?  Hey, chill out!  Stop by some winter day and have a Papaya cocktail with us.  Fresh picked, blend em while you watch.  Stick around, we’ll help you sort out your moral dilemmas.  You’ll have more tomatoes by July than you can shake a stick at…..

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/audio-O-Zi-Ya-Tow-and-Impound1.mp3[/podcast]audio—O-Zi-Ya Tow and Impound

About a month after I bought my homestead, my car broke down between Shangri-La-La and Elger Bay Store, giving me the opportunity to walk most of the South End to get back home.  Before I set out hitch-hiking, a tow truck pulled up and Ted Snowden handed me his business card:  Tyee Towing.  24 hour service.     Ted’s retired now and the tow truck is long gone and the wrecking yard behind Tyee Store — also Ted’s — has been mostly hauled off, although at some of the Swamp Soirees Concert Series every summer you’ll see an old axle or a truck bumper poking out of the field, which is still giving up its dead.  Ted was pretty fair on prices, considering he had a monopoly down here, and if you needed a part to repair your jalopy, he’d let you loose in the boneyard with a socket wrench and a prybar.  Strictly Self-Serve.  Ted didn’t dismantle them.

Now we got O-Zi-Ya Tow and Impound.  Big Walter cruises the South End the way a vulture drafts on air currents, both looking for carrion.  Big Walter doesn’t get business from us locals, not more than once, but he listens to his police scanner squawking constantly, giving him clues on accidents, breakdowns and DUI’s.  He’s almost always the first one on the scene, too bad for the victim.

Because Big Walter charges a country fortune.  Once for the tow.  Twice for the impound fee.  Back behind the trailer office he has an acre cyclone-fenced and topped with razor wire, a Gitmo for GTO’s nobody is getting through without Walter getting his blood money.  The wealthy newcomers threaten him with lawsuits but eventually pay up.  The rest of us leave our beaters behind bars until he sells it to the auction yards, probably save us a fortune in future repair bills, if nothing else.  Pretty small consolation.      Like most places, the South End has its fair share of predators.  Some are legal….