The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

CLICK TO HEAR —-making big money

Folks sort of pity us South Enders down here at the remote dead end of the island.  They think our shopping options are pretty near zip, almost like living in Russia at the end of the Cold War.  I admit, Tyee Store’s shelves aren’t Trader Joe’s, stocked to the roof with multiple selections and competitive pricing.  But they don’t flood us with advertising and buying gimmicks either.

We’ve all been inundated with ads all our lives.  Billboards, TV commercials, junk mail, newspapers, radio stations and now a virtual tsunami on the internet.  Hardly a dark hollow you can crawl into you won’t get some shrill ad coming at you one right after the other.  No wonder people go into debt — we’re addicted to wanting things.  We’re hooked on consuming.  New car, new clothes, new hairdo, new electronics, new every damn thing in the world.  The whole country runs on it.  No wonder Christmas is the national holiday, goes two or three months now.  If we stopped buying down at the mall and did what us South Enders do, shop at the Thrift Store, America would go broke in about a week.  Hedge fund moguls would have to buy their suits used at Goodwill.  We’d drive around less buying junk so oil companies would slow down their drilling and car companies would make bicycles.  Food would get grown in gardens, not flown in from Tinbuktu or made in a factory.  Families might turn off their gigantic TV’s because nothing would be on after all the sponsors disappeared and maybe parents would eat their meals with their kids again.

People would get to know the neighbors instead of surfing the Web for good deals on replacing appliances that work perfectly okay now.  They might even repair stuff that broke instead of tossing it down at the dump.  Maybe we’d learn to read again instead of updating our Facebook page, maybe our attention spans would expand and flowers would grow lush in our yards and weather would improve and we’d be happier and paradise would spread across the land and we’d all laugh and play on our very own South Ends.

Right…..   Then again, we only got so much South End room left.  Sorry.  I’m afraid you addicts will just have to make do.  Go to the Mall and see what they got on sale.  Hey, and good luck to ya.  You wouldn’t like it down here anyway.  Bad selections for consumers.  It’s true, though, you can’t buy happiness.  If you don’t believe me, google/shop that.  Poor selection, no sale price…..

CLICK TO HEAR—south end historical preservation league

Historic preservation on the South End is slightly different than other places.  Most areas restore an architecturally significant  building  — the way folks did in Stanwoodopolis with the Odd Fellows Hall  — or you fix up a fancy theater or tidy up the old Pearson House, maybe rehab a train station.  Tie a little history to art, throw in a chamber orchestra, occasional theater group, poetry reading — get some volunteers, apply for a grant, hey, we’re halfway there to creating cultural identity.

Down by us we’re toying with a campaign to save the Tyee.  The Tyee Store, I mean, an iconic example of 70’s minimalist architecture done in masonry block painted a classic mildewed white with a low sloping shed roof blown off once or twice, and a fully functional outhouse.  The store owners weren’t real happy with our ad hoc group to save the Tyee, but considering they’re losing money hand over fist, we plowed ahead.  Jack Gunter had already restored the adjoining garage to its present pristine glory, proving that expensive restoration isn’t always necessary for the South End Historical Preservation League.

But it was the EPA that finally derailed our high hopes of creating the Tyee Opera House and Expresso Stand.  It turns out those rotating rotisserie deli dogs with their infra-red warming oven carbon tracking for decades, well, apparently it created a super strain of E-coli no known agents can destroy.  It was like a culinary meth lab and if they can create bio-suits secure enough to withstand the new strain of unearthly bacteria,  they might have a 50/50 chance of burying the place in glass and concrete like a South End Chernobyl.  That, or the Defense Dep’t. is interested in expanding it as a toxic agent lab…..

We South Enders are in no danger, we’re told, somehow building antibodies to the superbugs, but we sure couldn’t expose outsiders to the pestilence.  So… for the time being our cultural aspirations are on hold.  But don’t you all worry.  We won’t be stopped.  After all,  the Elger Bay Store has that early ‘80’s shotgun stripmall architecture that will be stylish in, oh, a decade or so….

CLICK TO HEAR AUDIO — voting for god

I saw a segment on CNN the other night for a poll that showed American’s approval of … God.  He got a spare 52% job approval score.  Probably up a few points since the flood during Noah’s time.  The President got a bit less.  They didn’t give ratings for the Devil, or Hitler, but let’s assume they would be lower, hopefully substantially lower.

Somehow it’s troubling that the Lord God Almighty gets rated at all, much less gets tepid scores in the most religious industrialized nation on earth.  He is, after all, the All Knowing, the Creator, the Whole Enchilada.  And we puny humans give him barely a thumbs up.

Some talking heads came on later to analyze the data. Tsunamis and starvations probably didn’t help the Lord’s ratings, they said.  Bad recession either.  If He can create the cosmos, why not some jobs?  Raise up those poll numbers, if nothing else.

Maybe God doesn’t worry about his approval ratings.  Hard to believe, I know.  Most of us seem busy fixing up our Facebook accounts so we’ll look interesting and exciting and sexy to all those network ‘friends’ we barely know but follow their every movie or book or grocery store escapade.  Mostly I think we must be supremely bored or insecure to care what people we barely know do or think about us.  Maybe we ought to get on with our lives and skip the vote for prom king or queen, move right on to adulthood, build a life worth living without giving a hoot in hell what the Facebook friends are buying or reading or recommending.

Course, here I am giving out probably unwanted advice.  Just what you want to hear, right?  Next I’ll be telling you what I read and my favorite recipes and where I went this morning.  Like you should care?

Oh, and God, if you’re listening with that omniscience of yours, could you maybe put the brakes on this 3-D movie craze?  I’m not saying it’ll ratchet up your approval ratings, but, hey, it couldn’t hurt.  You might even consider Facebook.  Think of it as a cheap computer church.  Just don’t take it personal when we don’t ‘friend’ you.  Kinda busy here….

CLICK TO HEAR —porous borders

Down at the South End we got some pretty porous borders.  Immigration’s starting to put a burden on our social services network and I got to tell you, it’s tearing a hole in our delicate social fabric too.  We got right-wing conservatives yelling to build a Seawall around the whole island 20 feet high and guarded by killer dolphins.  And we got left wing hippie yahoos screaming bloody murder to give the whole crowd amnesty.

It’s a tough issue for us in the land that says bring us your tired, your teeming masses.  I don’t think they meant just Ellis Island when they put up the Statue of Liberty.  Probably Camano too.  But this latest influx, well, we’re all alarmed.  We’re concerned.  Most of us are up in arms.

Every week they roll across the borders, bringing strange customs and odd dialects.  We tried, at first, to welcome em in, boil em down in the melting pot, make em one of us South Enders.     But they kept to their own.  Set up communities within our community.  Made it clear they wanted to be left alone, not assimilated.  A lot of em locked the gates — it’s America, after all, you can be unfriendly if you want.  But then came the Gated Communities, the guard stations, the checkpoints.

And pretty soon all our jobs were going to servicing THEM.  We became gardeners and housekeepers, handymen and servile artists.  We got all the low paying service jobs for these rich newcomers, these dot.com millionaires, these Boeing exec retirees.  Our pride and our way of life dried right up.

I’m not saying we ought to stop this immigration completely, but I think we’re reaching a dangerous tipping point.  Maybe some quotas would help  — you know, no more than one millionaire a square mile.  Keep the property values in reach of our kids and make it possible to live out our lives here without becoming indentured servants.  Write your congressman.  Put a stop to unchecked immigration.