[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/audio-piranha-brothers.mp3[/podcast]audio — piranha brothers
[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/audio-detroit-resurgence-on-the-south-end.mp3[/podcast]audio — detroit resurgence on the south end
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Down at the weekly South End Diner Vintage Auto Ad Hoc Meeting, Hudson Bob, one of the old car guyz piped up in dual exhaust mode how he’d seen a George Will article the day before. Politics is usually about as popular as debating whether each others’ wives are still attractive, so ordinarily the talk revolves from tools to Chevys to the next road trip to the latest obituary, both car and people. Hudson Bob was pounding his cup of joe for emphasis and his place mat looked like the garage floor where 4 Finger Fred kept his 1956 Studebaker with the leaky oil pan.
“The man says we’re done already with electric cars! Only the tree huggers were buying them and that was before they started spontaneously combustin. SUV’s are back, he says” The old car guyz aren’t real big on electrics. Hell, the old car guyz don’t even like cars with more than 6 volt batteries and don’t get them started on electronics or you’ll have Big Larry coming out from behind the grill waving a spatula like it was a Tazer to quiet them down so the other customers, meaning me, might enjoy their runny eggs and cold toast. “George Will says we got so much oil and gas right now we could all drive semi’s.”
Most of us down at the tree hugging South End drive old beaters, not quite vintage, just sputtering, backfiring, perforated muffler, gas guzzling jalopies waiting to die and end up in Hudson Bob’s spotless shop with the heated floor and the hydraulic lift and every tool SnapOn ever made. Or out back up on blocks in the blackberry and nettle cemeteries. None of us, I notice, have oil rigs pumping crude 24/7. But we got plenty of tidal potential, some solar, gutter hydro, lots of wind, especially me, blowhard extraordinaire, and so I wondered Out Loud since the Diner is sort of half prayer meeting and half town hall and a third AA, why on God’s green earth we would root for the Saudis and hope the electric car companies – the American electric car companies – catch fire and go broke. About half an hour later – after Big Larry had broken up the riot and deputy Pringle with the Island County Sheriff’s office had interrupted his donut break – we separated and went to our separate corners. The judges, Brenda and Anita, the morning waitresses, gave them a technical knockout and I slunk out to my old Toyota pickup, hoping at best to catch a tailwind on the long drive home on Loser Highway.
Mostly I drove with my tail between my legs. I’m thinking of buying a Prius and going back next meeting.
[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/audio-south-end-uprising.mp3[/podcast]audio — south end uprising
Some of the boyz at the South End Diner got wind the other day that their cellphone company was going to start charging them a $2 a month service fee to pay their bills online or by check if they didn’t go to an auto pay plan. Coffee cups got pounded on the formica and obscenities got hurled until finally Brenda Bodice, our waitress, said enough was enough. ‘You break them mugs, you’ll pay more’n two dollars.’ Mabana Mike said it reminded him of that $5 fee Bank of Stanwood wanted when he used his debit card and Tyee Tom said he’d texted til his fingers bled to everybody he knew ‘HELL NO’ and they’d stopped B of S in their greedy little dollar pinching tracks, hadn’t they? These are heady times down here on the digital South End, I guess. The boyz are het up and frisky fingered now. Jim Bob pushed his plate of half eaten chicken fried steak into the center of the warzone and declared he was taking his grievance directly to Facebook. ‘This will not stand!!’ he repeated again and again until Brenda had to come over and tell him to quit his shouting. ‘You’re upsettin the kids,’ she said and sure enough, Milly’s juvenile delinquents were starting to work themselves into a sugar tantrum. The whole diner was heating up, near as I could tell. Thank God it wasn’t noon yet and the boyz were commencing cocktail hour …. Things would’ve gone more than Viral. After all, this was the South End and the boyz weren’t going to stand for tyranny, for economic two buck waterboarding, for corporate hands reaching into their pockets, no sir. They’d reached a limit. Wars, subprime housing busts, economic collapse, gridlocked Congress, slashed education budgets, discontinued social services, okay, but not another damn dime for Verizon. THIS WILL NOT STAND! Libya and Tunisia got nothing on Camano. All I can say is cable TV better not try anything cute with rate hikes this spring. The boyz are social networking guerrillas. The boyz are empowered. And the boyz are fed up. Democracy — or at least coupons and price reductions — will be coming to the USA if they got any say in it. Money to the people!
[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/audio-why-we-throw-a-new-years-bash5.mp3[/podcast]audio — why we throw a new years bash
For the past 25 years or so the mizzus and me throw a big New Year’s Party here on the South End, partly so we don’t get to know the sheriff’s deputies any better than we do now, which is what we tell the neighbors, but the real reason is a bit more shrouded in the mists of lost memories. I got a call today from Brent, an old friend now in Alaska, and it triggered a couple of neurons into firing spasmodically once more and voila, I was back in, oh, 1985 down at the shack with just a few of us struggling mightily to make it to midnight so we could toast the new year and pass out in our bunks.
My brother was here with his wife and we had Brent and Liz visiting from Portland. My brother is what you’d call a spark plug for party stuff. Meaning, when conversations lag, he springs into instant action. ‘Let’s go around the room,’ he says, ‘and tell what the best day of the year was for each of us.’ So Brent goes first and he relates a warm summer day when he and his collie were at the park and the sun was shining and the Frisbees were sailing and it was just a golden day, a boy and his pooch, fetching the Frisbee. Not maybe what my brother had in mind, I bet, but just a hippie dippy zen day that stood out for Brent more than some birthday or Christmas or the day he got a raise or the usual dopey stuff we trot out when you play Name Your Best Day.
I don’t remember what my favorite day was. I don’t remember Karen’s or my brother’s or Judy,my brother’s wife’s, favorite day. But I remember Liz’s turn, Brent’s girlfriend who I’d know a long time. A real long time. A way too long a time. And as the clock ticked glacially toward 1986, gears needing oil, glasses waiting for that toast and then goodnight everybody, my brother sez, ‘Okay, Liz, what was your favorite day?’ And to this day I can remember Liz turning to Brent who was rubbing his collie’s head, probably still warm in his remembrance of a summer day in the park, and the clock’s hands stopping forever, the wood stove throwing a heat nothing like what Liz was focusing on poor Brent with a laser look that would burn through titanium like it was cheap plastic, and our glasses with champagne broke in the sudden stillness before she said, ‘My favorite day …. (and the ‘my’ was a small caliber bullet) My favorite day was the day we got back together, Brent.’
Maybe you’ve had a New Year’s ‘Party’ like that. The room emptying of air and sound and mirth, as if a stopper had been pulled from the tub of our happiness and no matter how hard you try, and Brent desperately tried, that stopper won’t go back in and all the merriment drains out by your feet and deep down in your cold curling guts you know, you know absolutely this is not the way you wanted to ring in the next year. You know what they mean by ill-omened now and all the months to come you will dread the next New Years’ Eve the way you would dread death itself. And of course Liz and Brent broke up and Brent moved to the furthest corner of the earth and my brother admitted maybe that wasn’t the best holiday icebreaker of all time and we decided either to forsake New Year’s altogether or bring so many people in we couldn’t possibly go around the room and play parlor games like Stab Your Lover.
And that is how the South End got its gala New Year’s Extravaganza Potluck and BYOB Party. And of course, you’re invited! Unless you got some serious issues with your girlfriend or boyfriend, lover or husband, wife or mistress. Then I think you should get a new parlor game for you and a few select friends. Happy New Year anyway.