The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I got a buddy who’s required to take a drug test before he’s hired on as a consultant for an oil consortium.  He worked ramrodding the construction site for the same oil companies for decades up at Prudeau Bay where part of his job was making sure the riggers stayed drug and alcohol free through long days and longer nights.  Sorta like Wyatt Earp asking the cowboys to stick with Coca-Cola Saturday nights, if they wouldn’t mind….
So now that he’s retired and going back for consulting, I guess the Big Boyz are worried he’s fallen into decadence and drugs along with the rest of us South Enders.  The required test is given in Bothell so my pal dutifully makes an appointment, navigates the I-5 bumper car gauntlet, arrives with a full bladder of freshly filtered latte which he desperately wants to unload ASAP, but, unsurprisingly, is told to wait.  Short time later, long past that anguished outcry of a Guernsey with 10 gallons of unpasteurized backed up past an udder while the farmer is out drinking with his Scandihoovien reprobate buddies, the secretary comes in with the bad news that the urinary nurse in charge of the drug testing doesn’t come in on Fridays.  Yah, shure, you guessed it — it’s Friday.  Can I leave you the sample? he asks through clenched teeth, bent over in pain and growing anger.  And … well, shure, you guessed right again and no, sir, that would be against the rules.
My buddy is almost 70 years old, drug free as a priest, a loyal employee and now he’s made to stand hunched over, practically peeing his adult diapers and trying to come to grips with What Is Wrong With This Picture?  Do they suspect him of Viagra dependency?  Do they merely want him to understand his real place in the corporate hierarchy?  Are they testing for latent homicidal urges, maybe see if he’ll snap in the lab offices where only a contract worker will be sacrificed, not a VP of operations?
All I can say is, my buddy must really want to avoid retirement to endure this kind of knee-jerk, low brow humiliation.  The rest of us on the South End … well, let’s just say the drug tests down here are only for quality control.

When I was a hothead radical in the 60’s, I thought the government was killing Black Panthers, spying on civilians, letting industry and corporations foul our air and poison our water and lying to us about the war in Viet Nam.  Turns out most of that was true.  My old man said if I didn’t like it here, I could move to the Soviet Union.  Four decades later the Soviet Union is broken up and I still live here.  The government still lies about wars, still spies on civilians.  And my old man is now the one sputtering about the damn government, never mind that he worked all his life in the public sector for the U.S. Forest Service.  The Republicans, now in full battle cry, denounce the EPA, the Post Office, most all government agencies as evil incarnate.  I guess this is the American version of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.  Round up the bureaucrats and send them to Dakota to farm sunflowers.

Social Security is now called a Ponzi scheme.  Regulations on businesses are job killers.  Taxes are a pox on the body politic.  Politicians, except the GOP, are liberal bloodsuckers.  We have moved a long haul right of Richard M. Nixon.  And compromise, once the cornerstone of American democratic prinicples, has become a white flag of surrender to the anti-capitalist Democrats.
Hot talk radio, misinformation from the internet, corporate consolidation of the media — who the hell knows what is true or not anymore?  Demagoguery is winning.  Maybe it has already won.  I get my father’s e-mails of patently false vitriol, week after week, forwarded by his pals to millions.  They believe what they want to believe.  And they want to believe the president is a Muslim, is a terrorist, is a communist and a traitor and a foreigner.  They want to believe the government is responsible for their unhappy lives.  They want to drink their Kool-Aid, turn on and tune out.  The Times, they aren’t just  a’changin, they’ve reversed polarity.  Oh, and Dad, if you and your cronies don’t like it here, why don’t you move to China!

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/CLICK-TO-HEAR-spud-spirit.mp3[/podcast]CLICK TO HEAR — spud spirit

The other day Mt. Vernon decided it was high time their tulip-blighted burg put its mark on the international map.  A lot of towns around here are content to sink quietly into the mudflats while celebrating their past glory days, but Mt. Vernon, looking to the future, decided to seize the moment.  Think Big, the Downtown Bizness Association declared, and so, given that ‘Spirit of the Spud’ was this year’s theme and mantra, they aimed their sights rootward and prepared a full frontal shock and awe assault on the Guiness World Record for …. wait for it …. largest potato au gratin.
Well sir, they blew away the old record, the one held for just over a year by Netherlanders also eager for tuberous fame.  They nearly doubled the tonnage, now tipping the Guiness scale at 16,000 pounds, no sneezeable au gratin, that.
Now I come from the great potato state of Maine and my granddaddy was a potato farmer his entire life.  I eat the buggers fried, baked, boiled, mashed, chipped and grautined.  Spuds are no doubt a huge percentage of my genetic make-up.  And sure, I look forward to Tulip Town’s probable upcoming  art inspiration:  giant potatoes the size of glacial boulders on every street corner, sponsored by local biznesses and inflicted on all those artists weary of competing for the Tulip Fest Poster year after year after year.  Let the Spud Spirit soar, I say.  Let it shine through!  Let it heal the sick and inspire the young.  Sing the praises of the tulip colored tubers, reds and yellows and Finn purple.
A curmudgeon might have hoped for, oh, a slightly grander vision.  A cynic might fault a society fed on the pablum of American Idol instead of nutritious values.  A wag might wonder aloud if the volunteers and the donations might have served, well, needier, loftier purposes.  But I am not one of those.  No, I salute Spud City, au gratin capital of the civilized world!!  And tomorrow I’ll be calling my broker to buy up as many shares of Frito Lay as I can lay hands on.  When the chips are down, I say, buy chips.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/CLICK-TO-HEAR-the-lfie-you-save.mp3[/podcast]CLICK TO HEAR —the life you save

I know I don’t have very many fans judging by the sparcity of hits I get on the Skeeter Daddle blogsite,  but occasionally someone acknowledges they read something in the Crab Cracker and then usually they offer me ideas for my next so-called humor sketch.  I assume they figure, possibly a bit too accurately, that I’ve run out of my own ideas.

Recently a friend said I should write one about Zumba.  I don’t actually know jack about Zumba.  Course, I don’t know doodley about much of anything and that hasn’t stopped me, but my friend was kind enough not to mention that.  We got Zumba down at the South Grange.  Looks like a rock concert parking lot out there where they’re zumba-ing.  Without the drugs and drinking.  I got a buddy who goes so I asked, hey, Zorba, what’s the deal with this Zumba stuff?  And he looked at me the way Lance Armstrong would look at the jerk who asked him why he didn’t just buy himself a Harley.   To meet women, he said, what else?

Now, I’m not politically opposed to organized exercise.  You want to get in shape, I’m okay with it.   Really.  But there is something about group sweating I’ve never warmed up to, no doubt a personal failing, a flaw in my communal DNA, and probably the reason my career as quarterback in the NFL took a small detour.  I drive by a gym and see those panting bodies cycling maniacally with headphones strapped on next to dozens of other aerobiscists and I get the deja-vu of a high school locker room crammed with week old jock straps and the pheromones of pre-steroid sadists and I think to myself I’d rather have two teeth extracted without novacaine than join back in with the athletic crowd.

I chop wood and haul brush and clear land and build outbuildings and, well, all that old school exercise that wasn’t considered exercise, just an active lifestyle.  A study recently (and I KNOW we don’t believe science anymore) said exercise for folks who are basically sedentary really didn’t offset the deleterious effects of entire days spent in a cubicle or at a desk.  Not that you should give up and wait for that aortic stent….

Then again, maybe you should do like we do down at Nature’s own gym of the South End:  quit your job, go back to the land, find your natural aerobic center.  The life you save might just be your own.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/CLICK-TO-HEAR-saving-time.mp3[/podcast]CLICK TO HEAR —saving time

Even down here in the bucolic nettle fields of the pastoral South End, our laid back, porch-rocking, garden hoeing pace is definitely picking up speed.  More and more satellites are whizzing through all that space junk overhead to bring us faster weather reports, more TV channels, instant text messaging and close-up photos of the rocker on the porch from Google Earth we don’t have so much time to sit in anymore.  Our attention spans now aren’t long enough to make it through the Stanwoodopolis Weekly Gazette so we check Yahoo headlines on the computer that rockets in on DSL.  If you’re younger than 30, you never looked at a newspaper in your whole life.  Why bother, you can get the only news you’re really interested in on Facebook, what your ‘friends’ are doing, news enough, I guess, these days.
Our old shack has its share of 21st century gizmoes.  Microwave oven, digital telephone answering machine, ma’s nano-pod, two computers (his and hers) and all the peripherals right down to a podcast microphone.  We got lazerized CD players, DVD players, a remote controlled TV antenna, digital alarm clocks, electric guitars.  We look like the Jetsons without the robot maid.  And that’s on back order from Amazon….
This is all the stuff advertised as Time-Saving Devices back when.  Help do your chores more efficiently.  Give you leisure time galore.  Free you to live your dream.  Be your True Self, not a slave to the menial tasking days.  Right…
Maybe I’m too old and too cynical.  Maybe Facebook updating IS your true self.  Maybe bad TV IS the dream.  Maybe what we wanted all along was something to keep us busy, keep us constantly entertained, keep us from sitting too long on the rocker contemplating the front yard that needs mowing.  The world is smaller and definitely accelerating.  The question I got, rocking to an older rhythm, is what the hell was the point of saving time if everything got speeded up so fast all our free time is gone?  Well, I could waste more time on this, but I have to hurry up and update this blogsite.