The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Back awhile ago I bought a new truck, the first and only new one I ever had. Being the proud owner of a brand spanking new Toyota Tacoma, I decided to stick with the oil maintenance schedule and let the dealer put genuine Toyota filters on and good synthetics in. The first oil changes were free, but once I’d had a couple, they charged me. As I recall, about 45 bucks. Even washed the rig for free. Little by little, of course, the cost started inching up, five more bucks at first, then a jump of 20. Inflation. Maybe that supply chain issue around Covid. Who knows, I just paid the dealer.

At around 50,000 miles my nice service lady took me aside to let me know my water pump was going out. Really? I asked. I haven’t noticed any fluid leaking or funny noises. She assured me that yes, really, but they could schedule a replacement for a bit over 600 dollars. I said thanks but I’ll handle this myself. You’d think, I said ruefully, that a brand new truck would get more mileage out of a water pump. Says something about Toyota, I guess. My service lady didn’t really care for this line of talk.

I have driven Toyotas practically my entire adult life. And the reason I buy them, used, new, battered or pristine is that they seldom break down, even up to a quarter of a million miles. One that had about 170K on it, I actually had to replace the water pump. So it wasn’t like I expected the things to last my lifetime. But this one, on inspection once I got home, was fine. At 120K it still is. Needless to say, my trust in my dealer plummeted.

I had my oil changed by my scamming dealership yesterday. The last one had cost me 80 dollars, but a few months later it had ratcheted up to 105. I guess that supply chain problem never really got fixed. Or maybe too many people refused to have their perfectly good water pumps repaired for them to clear their terribly slim profit margin. When I paid, the dour woman who has been scowling at her desk for as long as I’ve owned my truck told me my credit card would be charged an extra 3%. Piddly, I know, but … just another notch down on my opinion of the place. The free coffee was so watery, I had had to throw it down the drain, and trust me, I’m not fussy about coffee when I’m on the road.

I paid my 105 plus the 3 plus surcharge. When I got to my truck at the far end of the service parking area, I saw that the free wash job was apparently no longer part of their goodwill package. The little sticker they usually affix to my windshield, the one that is supposed to remind if the Needs Service light on my dashboard somehow burns out, was tossed on the dash where it almost went down into Area 51. The usual mileage they want me back is 5000 miles before the next oil change, but when I looked up the lifespan of synthetic oils, the consensus is 10,000. Can’t be too careful, I suspect my service lady would say. When I stuck the reminder sticker on my windshield myself, I happened to notice that the next recommended service was only 4000 miles, probably just a typo, right? I’m wondering if the service light was downsized too to pop on at 4000.

Geez, if you can’t trust a car dealer in these tough economic times, who can you trust? My next oil change I’ll probably do myself. Right after a good cup of my own coffee.

I was having coffee at an old friend’s house yesterday. Doreen and I go back to when we both drove school buses on the island some 35 years ago. Doreen’s husband and she divorced years ago so it’s okay to visit now that the paranoid yahoo’s out of the picture, good riddance, we both agreed over our mugs. Doreen had the TV on when I arrived and left it on while we sat at the kitchen counter, some morning talk show with folks I didn’t know interviewing folks I didn’t know about personal subjects it was impossible to imagine anyone caring two cents about.

Doreen had aged since our Bluebird bus days. Not that I look like a high school yearbook photo, but she looked particularly haggard. Too many years of two pack a day cigarettes, hard liquor and hard living. Life on the South End isn’t a bed of lilacs for all of us, hate to be the one to crack the idyllic image. “So how’s things?” I asked anyway, wishing I’d declined her invitation at the grocery parking lot, old friends or not.

Doreen’s house leans back into the woods of the island’s interior, skirting gone green with gutter-splash mold, curtains drawn in the daytime, and it gave me a whiff of depression before I rang the doorbell. “Making do, Skeeter,” she answered. “Just hanging on day to day.” Lives of quiet desperation, I guess. We clinked cups. The coffee was bitter but drinkable.

Out in the livingroom the TV was laughing, things were good, folks were happy. Not a single painting hung on Doreen’s walls, just empty drywall, a dull pallor in lamplight. Her bookshelf was nearly empty, just a couple of paperbacks standing sentinel, a Library for the Uninterested. The sink was full of yesterday’s dishes, pots and pans crusted, glasses unemptied. An ashtray sat on the counter, full of butts. She dumped it in the garbage when she got our second cup. By then we’d exhausted our shared memories, the colleagues who had died, some still around but lost to us now after three and a half decades.

“Good to see you again, Doreen,” I said. “Anytime, Skeeter,” she answered. Both of us knew we’d settle for parking lot hellos here on out, but I was probably the only one who felt bad about it.

Back when the neighbors had dairy cows, we used to get our milk direct from the udder. Unpasteurized, no growth hormone, no antibiotic whole milk. Course, back then we were told by the FDA and the food scientists that this would increase our chances of heart disease and diabetes. But …! If we took a baby aspirin a day, we could lessen those chances. Sort of like driving over the speed limit but wearing a seat belt. You get in a wreck, you might survive.

You’re as old as me, you maybe remember 5th grade food pyramids. Meat and poultry up at the top, high in protein, fruits and vegetables down toward the middle, candy and pop taboo. In the 60’s we learned sugar was poison and alcohol too and so was red meat and ditto on salt. We started drinking skim milk, substituted saccharin for sugar and oleomargarine for butter. Skip the eggs, pass the fiber.

This week I read a study showing that people like myself who drink high fat milk have decreased heart disease and less risk for diabetes. Fats, it turns out, aren’t all bad. Aspirin a day, so they tell me now, isn’t maybe so good for you if you aren’t already at risk for a heart attack. Butter is better for you than margarine. And too little salt, well, you need salt. You want to live longer, drink a glass or two of wine every day. And even if you don’t live longer, you’ll be happier.

I got friends who won’t eat fruit unless it’s in a pop tart. Some others wouldn’t eat broccoli or cauliflower unless you waterboarded them first. My brother thinks 1% milk is cream and it would kill him in a week. I know folks who won’t go within a country mile of an egg, might as well be lobbing grenades to the heart. Food, I think more and more, is a faith based religion. Easier just to eat Cheetos and Snickers bars with a couple of vitamin supplements, all the nutrition you need right there in a pill.

Me, I always figured the fresher food was, the better. The more natural, the better. I like my food grown on a tree or coming up out of the ground. I like meat that grazed in a grassy pasture and I love fish that swam wild in a river and I’m crazy about seafood that wasn’t farmed. Hell, I like all kinds of food, at least the kind that isn’t dried out, chopped up, reprocessed and flavor enhanced with enough preservatives to last past a nuclear war. Is it good for me? I think maybe so. The doctors and the health specialists, the scientists and the FDA, well, some years yes, some years no. Hard to say for sure anymore. So I’ll just stick with the tried and true, food made by nature, not by labs. Call me old fashioned. Call me outdated. Call me past my expiration date. But … call me for dinner.

We got a lot of folks on the South End making a living the hard way, meaning, they don’t work. In the pioneer days when I first scratched out a meager existence in these played out nettle farms, people survived on piece work here, odd jobs there, some bartering, some horsetrading, the usual indolent country skills. But the new folks, they do some of that, but mostly, due to some serious drug maintenance problems, they got more pressing issues. You want to maintain a heroin addiction, you probably aren’t going to commute to McDonalds and take a job as fry cook. No, it’s easier if you just steal what the neighbors got.

This is more or less what I left the city to escape. No, not jobs or employment. Neighbors stealing from neighbors. What was really sad back then was how the poor folks stole from the poor folks. Easier, I admit, to slip down the alley and come in a nearby backdoor than to drive up to the white folks’ suburbs even though the pickings would have made it more than worth the effort. Course then you have security alarms and motion sensitive cameras and a police force that patrols those tonier neighborhoods. Me, I had Dr. Gonzo.

Dr. Gonzo was a refugee of the Humane Society, part boxer, part hound of Baskerville, a fearless brute of a dog who had been abused by its previous owner who was, judging by her reaction to men, male. If you happened to be a black male, she ratcheted up her snarls about double the decibels. And if you were a fat male, she was nearly unmanageable. Frighteningly so. But if you were a black and fat male, she wanted to hurt you. She probably wanted to kill you. My assumption is her abuser might have fit that exact description and it might explain why she ended up at the pound. Her tormentor probably realized he wasn’t going to cow her and one of them had to go.

She was well known to my neighborhood. It was also well known my house wasn’t usually locked. Not with Dr. Gonzo inside. You wanted to walk in, maybe see if my TV was worth stealing, have at it and good luck. Men knocked on my door and I’d say, kicking a snarling growling Gonzo back behind me, come on in, why dontcha? “Naw man, let’s talk on the porch here,” they invariably replied. And invariably they would want to know if I’d consider selling Gonzo to them. “Maybe you’d like to get to know her better,” I’d suggest, opening the door a crack to let them see Gonzo trying to get her snapping jaws through and I’d say it doesn’t look as if she likes you, man. “How about you breed her, sell me the pups?” And I’d shake my head sadly, naw man, she’s been spayed.

I didn’t have much trouble in that high crime neighborhood even with the 10 units next door that were nothing but a breeding ground for drugs, gunrunning, sex trafficking and fencing. Still, it seemed, I don’t know, a corrosive atmosphere, a breeding ground for cynicism, a hard place to practice peaceful meditation. For both Gonzo and me. So we packed it in, bought a 1910 shack up here on the South End and made a new start, both of us. She died some years back, broke my heart. But at least she never lived so long she had to see the ghetto boys living next door once again.

Let’s state rightchere at the beginning, the internet world is a dangerous place. Hackers, scam artists, digital thieves, fake ads, phishing expediters, you name it, the sharks are in the kiddie pool, all ready to clean out your bank accounts, your stock portfolio, your retirement funds. You really can’t be too careful.

Or can you? Nearly every site you use now wants to verify your good self. If you want to log on to your account for, say, making a ferry reservation, you need to prove you’re you. For your protection, dummy! You want to check your mail on Yahoo, they need proof you’re not some nosey relative. Sure, it takes a few more minutes to log on to about anything, but hey, the corporations and the government want you safe. They care about you and your privacy. They really do. Sure….

Me, I’m not so sure. When I try to log on to some account and my friends in the suites of New York ask for a second verification, either on my cellphone or my email, that works when I’m hanging around home. On the road, not so much. I don’t have a cellphone so Option 1 is useless. Half the time I’m trying to log on to my email so naturally the corporate CEO’s of Yahoo aren’t going to fall for my trick of sending it to the account I’m trying to access, they’re not stupid. So for my protection, I’m locked out. At least until I go home. Something of an inconvenience for this traveler.

The protectors of my identity usually want even more. They want to make certain I’m a human being. They have a box which actually asks me to state that I’m not a Robot. Then, just to be 100% accurate, they want me to identify with human eyes the boxes they’ve created which might have a car or a bus or a CEO in them. If I answer correctly, I’m allowed into the inner sanctum of my own site. If not, up pops another matrix of boxes, name the ones with a person committing suicide, say, one who’s given up hope of ever accessing that all important Home Depot website without the necessary clearance. Of course, by then, it’s probably too late. If you’re like me and you try to retrieve information from the government agency that tracks suicide related multiple verification deaths, good luck, chances are you’ll wind up another statistic before they let you in.