[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/audio-version-north-to-alaska1.mp3[/podcast]audio version —- north to alaska
So I’m heading to Alaska — with the flu that dropped me to both knees the day before — and I’m admittedly not at 100% when I go through security at South End International. Full body X-rays now, bag checks for medium size toothpastes and shampoos. No underwear packing terrorist is getting through this gauntlet, allah akbar! There must be at least 10 TSA agents to every passenger.
I unbuckle, empty pockets, unshoe, de-hat, pass the breathalyzer, tell them who won the Series last October and get passed on to my gate terminal. I’m in a fog and a fever and a funk. “Good day,” as Chief Joseph or Sitting Bull or some luckless upstart indigenous said, “to fly.” Alaska. Winter. Glacial. Just what the doctor ordered for a rough bout of the flu.
At my gate I realize I have everything but my winter coat. It had apparently not come off the scanner conveyor and I hadn’t waited to see if it was being rescanned or donated to the nearest Goodwill. Alaska. With no coat. The flu. With no coat.
I had time to go back on the train, walk up the stairways, hurry down a few corridors and see what TSA had done with my coat, no problem, I was sure. Except TSA didn’t have it. They gave me a Lost and Found slip and said they’d gladly ship it to me if and when it turned up. They’d even ship to Alaska, they said, no charge. Can you say hypothermia? I felt like the trapper who falls through thin ice in subzero weather and no matches for fire.
Although the gift shops sell sweatshirts and matching scarves. Maybe buy two, layer up, look for a genuine bear fur Inuit eskimo parka up in the Anchorage outfitters’ supply tomorrow morning. Keep the rental car heater maxed and running, I’d be okay. The homeless do it every day. The Occupy crowd up there might scrounge me up a tent and a coat. I’d be fine. Really. Like that kid in “Into the Wild” who just launches off into the tundra, no clues, just learn on the job.
Course he didn’t have the flu. Or chills and fever to begin with. In the end he died. Then again, he was a city kid. Crazy to boot. I’ll be just fine. Don’t worry about me. Really.
Skeeter’s headed north to Anchorage on a job expedition, trains, planes, automobile and dogsled. Wish him luck! And pray for the dogs…. Meanwhile, scroll down the blogsite for some of those you might have missed if you need a ‘fix’. He’ll be back, with or without a job and frostbite, in a couple of days….
I got some groundbreaking news for all you Camano North Enders: we found Lost Lake. Down by us, we don’t lose lakes. Course, we don’t have any lakes. Got some ponds that dry up in the summer. Got some garden features. Even got a couple of seasonal streams. We know where they are, although we don’t give em names. Laziness, I suppose. Too damn much trouble to name a creek that dries up every summer drought. Then it really would make sense if we named it Lost River or Hidden Creek. For a couple months, anyway…..
I was driving around recently doing my usual Lewis and Clark on Camano, exploring the backroads in case we get another major road improvement detour, maybe come up with a Northwest Passage to Stanwood nobody has discovered yet, and right past Dry Lake Road —- another water feature disappeared — there it was: Lost Lake. I swerved right in. About 15 seconds later I was lost. Which is why it’s probably called Lost Lake. Not the lake — you! I found the lake pretty quick. Getting out of the labyrinth was a couple days of dead end cul-de-sacs, refusing to ask directions until the gas tank hit E.
Lots of places get lost on the “island you can drive to”. Folks just hit the mainline to the bridge and rarely explore the tributaries. I meet people all the time who live on Camano and have never been beyond their own blacktop turn-off. No interest, I guess. Maybe the high gas prices. Fear of the unknown. Who knows? They started homesteading their 40 acres and left further exploration of the hinterlands to latter day adventurers such as myself. Which means reporting back to civilization was spotty, if not outright, rip-roaring, belief-shredding lies and legends.
The South End, while not exactly lost, is very rarely found. Occasionally I’ll find a car cruising slowly, window rolled down to ask directions. How far to the Whidbey Island ferry an elderly couple asked recently, obviously shaken from hours of circling the Head. I pointed across Saratoga Strait. The lady in the passenger seat began a slow moan. And, of course, being the bearer of rotten news, I felt bad too. But hey, they probably made their way out. A day late for the wedding they needed to be at in 15 minutes. A lot of us weren’t that lucky.
[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/black-friday-terrorism.mp3[/podcast]black friday terrorism
It’s Black Friday today. Unless you’re living in a cave on a remote mountain in a country you don’t know the name of, today is officially SHOPPING DAY. Big sales, big stores, big news. A lot of stores opened at midnight for folks waddling away from Turkey dinners only hours ago who join their fellow consumers in the long lines at ToysRUs or Sears or WalMart. You snooze after the Thanksgiving pie, you definitely lose.
It’s early afternoon here at blackblogcentral, a bunker deep in the Midwest heartland miles away from the closest mall now under siege. Already news flashes are lighting up the War Room screens, mostly happy reports from giggling retailers, but one troubling crawler reported that at a San Fernando WalMart a woman sprayed fellow shoppers with pepper spray in order to get to one of a limited number of X-boxes.
In light of the recent rash of unprovoked spraying of Occupy protesters, this may be a new trend. Force Shopping. While I don’t condone it — pepper spraying, I mean, not mass shopping, which I certainly do not approve of — I can appreciate the tactic under these martial conditions. Let’s be honest, sale shopping is war. People are trampled, crushed, elbowed and knocked down. A modern consumer should be more armed than just carrying a hefty handbag or wielding a massive shopping cart. Guerilla tactics, trench hand-to-hand, diversionary incendiaries and high decibel sound immobilizers: these are the insurrectionist sale shopping strategies of the future.
Let the media wring its uncalloused, pampered hands all it wants, this is only the first salvo. Mortality rates will soar as profits are maximized. Sales will start before Thanksgiving Day dinners, families will divide between the armchair quarterbacks and their mallwife warriors. Blood and cranberries will be spilled. That, I humbly suggest, is the true price of Christmas. This year, stuff your stocking with tear gas canisters. Santa doesn’t give a damn who’s naughty and nice — he wants a winner.
Well, as the wise guyz always like to say: when the goin gets tough, the tough get goin. Never one to contradict the sages, Skeeter’s goin away awhile. Got some turkeys back in Wisconsin to eat, got some travelling up into the Yukon for a job prospect, got stuff to do other than track down a computer and try to file a post for this blogsite. So… if you two or three readers need a dose of Daddle, scroll down the site for some of those earlier posts you might have missed. Or just been avoiding. I’ll be back when the frostbite heals….
[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/audo-version-keep-em-barefoot-and-pregnant.mp3[/podcast]audo version —- keep em barefoot and pregnant