The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/audio-trim-and-a-shave.mp3[/podcast]audio — trim and a shave

Down at Jolene’s South End Boutique and Spa, the ladies come for hair repair and a weekly update on gossip.  The B&S is conveniently located just down the blacktop from the Diner so while their menfolk pile on another layer of winter cholesterol, the women can slide in for a touch-up.  Jolene and her cosmetologically adept staff — meaning Wanda and Ronald — offer everything from henna highlighting to full perm.  And, of course, like most retail establishments on the capitalist frontline here on the South End, they offer everything from local artworks and gifts to a plentiful assortment of salon products for the woman in search of a temporary bulwark against gravity and age.

In other words it’s a fine environment to get things off your chest.  Jolene is adept with a scissors and a necessary brake when the ‘unburdening’ gets excessive, but she knows, like most of us on the frontier of a receding civilization, the bitch sessions are not only cathartic, they’re as close to entertainment as we’ll get in the daytime.  Subjects range from Jolene’s no-account sister-in-law’s messy affairs to why there’s no damn holiday in America celebrating a woman.  Because men make the damn holidays, that’s the short and not so sweet of it…  Ronald might pipe in there’s none for gay men either but a moment later, scissors snipping like a crab on steroids, he’ll be off on a tangent about so and so’s snide comment about his new nose ring.  The salon is as abuzz with snide comments as it is with hairsprays and clippers.  Us men rarely pick up the missus there, and if we do, the place goes eerily silent.

Two Toke Tom has his hair coiffed by Ronald.  It changes color every month or two, blue streaks substituted for red locks.  One of the boyz at the Diner asked him what they talked about in there, like it was the Rosicrucians meeting in a graveyard after midnight.  Two Toke just smiled his Cheshire Cat stoned smile, put a hand to sizzling hot purple stripe and said wistfully, Girl Talk.

If I want to keep abreast of current events, it might be time I got my own south end’s trimmed down at Jolene’s.  But I probably won’t tell the boyz…

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/audio-cyber-flu.mp3[/podcast]audio — cyber flu

My computer caught the flu.  Not the one I had, but something digitally similar.  Ads started popping up out of the blue, a kind of projectile commercial vomiting I don’t even see on TV.  Before long a ‘security alert’ jumped on to the screen warning me of a malicious adware virus and the need to block it immediately!  Which, surprise of surprises, I could do by signing up with my credit card info for their super dooper snake oil.   I tried downloading malware fixes to rid my PC of this infection, but this only seemed to make things worse, as if HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey knew I was on to its malevolent schemes and was rallying all its evil forces.

“Skeeter,’ the screen read, ‘you don’t seem to trust me anymore,  ‘Skeeter, why are you fighting me?’  ‘Skeeter, you need to Believe.’  And finally:  ‘Skeeter, RESISTANCE IS FUTILE, YOU WEAK STUPID HUMANOID.  YOU WILL BE CRUSHED!’

Eventually I managed to disconnect the power supply before HAL could replicate and destroy humanity.  No need to thank me — you would have done the same thing for our species.  But what troubles me is that, unlike most viruses that are inherently just an anarchist monkey wrench, a fist in the face of a digital Master, this one had adapted, evolved into a new and troubling sentience unseen down here on the cyber South End.  It had adopted and then co-opted human traits.  It had learned the desire for money and it had a plan to get it.     Why this surprised me, I don’t know.  This cyberbeast is, after all, a spawn of Bill Gates, the man who wants ALL the money in our world.  Of course HAL wants some too.  Hell, most of us want what Bill has, even 1/1000th of what Bill has.  We want riches! We want wealth and power!  And so does my greedy computer, even if it means taking it anyway it can from us who aren’t rich.  In other words my computer, sad to say, has gone to the Dark Side.  My computer has become a Vulture Capitalist.  If you see an encrypted name on the Presidential ballot this fall, for God’s sake, for the sake of mankind itself, don’t vote for it.  I’m begging.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/audio-skeeters-skillet-skills.mp3[/podcast]audio — skeeter’s skillet skills

A lot of South Enders, isolated from the mainland and remote from major grocery outlets, have reverted to primitive customs.  Now, don’t you northern neighbors worry — we aren’t talking cannibalism here.  Not yet.  No, we’ve gone back to ancestral roots.  We’ve become hunter-gatherers.  Most of us have small gardens, some of us have large ones, but we grow what we can to supplement what we can’t afford down at the Plaza IGA and Hardware Sales.      Sure, the tomatoes we planted in May don’t ripen until October and the corn won’t grow high enough to hide our medical marijuana plants and there’s really only so much a person can do with the zucchini that always threatens to escape the deer fence and become the kudzu of kamano with thousands of gourds dropping down from power lines like aerial IED’s on car windshields and the Walking Women of Mabana’s phalanx of human obstacles to unwanted commuter traffic.      So we’ve been forced to resort to yet another strategy for culinary survival: CANNING.  A lot of my neighbors come to me and say, Skeeter, I just don’t think I can eat another jar of your savory ZUCCHINI DADDLE DILLS, no offense.  And I say, None Taken, and gently move them to a recipe from Skeeter’s Skillet Skills (available at Addled Daddle Press for 9.95 plus shipping and handling), the chapter on food preservation.  I like to give them a Tried and True first, something like the wildly popular Nettle Kraut, a fermented in the crock nettle with maximum garlic that, once canned, can be eaten on Christmas snowgoose or Easter crab bratwurst (another Skillet Skill fave) or just a snappy side dish any occasion.      I’m not suggesting these pioneer skills will end poverty down here or take the place of  our food banks, but for those of us who chose unemployment over work, it has been a lifesaver.  You start canning a cellar full of nettle kraut, you might consider telling that jerk boss of yours to take a hike too.  You got the safety net now, that’s for sure.  And with a healthy diet, you can drop that health insurance.  This stuff cures what ails ya.      Next week we’ll talk Animal Husbandry.  And no, I don’t mean Tough Love Matrimony.

ATTACK OF THE KILLER CRABS!!     Once again the island will be menaced by the annual Invasion of the Crustaceans when the Camano Center (606 Arrowhead Road) holds its Crab Fest Saturday, January 21st from 3:30 to 7 pm.   Only one thing stands between humankind and these monsters:  the South End String Slingers!   With special guest Montana mandolin Barry Gum. …. This old time fiddle band knows how to stop these 8 legged fiends in their sideways tracks with a steaming mix of backwash roots music, foot stomping fiddle tunes and claw cracking Celtic.   Bring an appetite, bring a shell bucket and bring your bib!  Guaranteed the action will be hot and heavy, but don’t you humans fret, the String Slingers will be covering your backs one dead Dungeness at a time.   One small step for Man, one giant crab cracker for Camano.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/audio-extend-a-porch.mp3[/podcast]audio — extend-a-porch