The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Big Walter should be a happy camper now that his preferred candidate, Donald J. Trump has won the 2024 election. But he’s not. Ever since the returns came in that fateful night, he’s been positively morose most mornings at the Diner. When Little Jimmy approached his table the morning after, decidedly hungover after drowning his disappointment in bathtub — or at least a wash basin — of Jack Daniels, to offer a not totally sincere congratulations to Walt, he expected a huge guffaw and outright derision over voting for a Loser. Instead he received a nod and a token tip of his coffee mug in sad salute.

Jimmy wandered over to sit with me and a very dejected Two Toke Tom, who by the way he gulped his coffee, hadn’t slept much watching the bleak returns half the night. “What gives with Walter?” Jimmy asked us. “You’d think his guy lost, the way he’s acting.”

“Beats me,” I mumbled. “Maybe just a sore winner.”

Two Toke poured half a pound of killer white into his coffee, stirred viciously until some of it dissolved, then slurped up half the cup in one swallow. And groaned audibly. Apparently he and Jimbo had both washed their disappointment last night. Me, I felt like I did the night Reagan won. Or actually it was the single malt scotch that won. I didn’t need to relearn that lesson.

TT held his sucrose coagulated mug up to catch Brenda’s notice for his his 4th refill, which she accommodated with the admonition, “that’s the last one, Tom. You’re at overdose Level 4 already.”

Jimmy asked her after ordering the Heart Attack Special what was up with Big Walt. Brenda set her order pad on the table, leaned in out of Walter’s hearing range and said, “He was hoping they’d need the militia to overturn the crooked election when Kamala won. He thinks he’s the Camano area chapter of the Proud Boys. Now that it’s all over without the shouting or the shooting he’s disappointed. “

Well, you just can’t please some people. Maybe next election they’ll get another shot at it.

I got a pile of friends who claim to be envious of my so-called Lifestyle. Get up when I want, work for myself, do what I feel like doing, live off the calendar and my wits and off the beaten path. Who wouldn’t like that? Unless we factor in the poverty, the hand-to-mouth, the lack of pensions or retirement. There’s a reason hippies became extinct and it has nothing to do with an asteroid slamming Earth.

As the mizzus will gladly attest, I took this road — this choice? — because I don’t play well with others. And certainly not managers, supervisors or most any other bosses. I didn’t like the city. I didn’t like most jobs. Okay, all jobs, any jobs. And since poverty never scared me, the Path of Least Resistance led to here, a place remote and cheap, and not surprisingly, a backwash without much opportunity for employment.

Perfect! All I had to do was learn a few skills. Carpentry, plumbing, electrical, truck repair, subsistence living. Education — it never really ends. Something they neglect to teach most of us in school. The School of Hard Knocks doesn’t need a post-graduate program. Tuition’s not exactly free, but it’s reasonable.

Folks who claim to be envious of my lifestyle really aren’t. They didn’t have the appropriate skill sets. If they did, retirement would be easy for them, a hippie vibe with a fat income guaranteed. Who could ask for more? But … like I always say, it takes more than a little while to learn bohemianism. And if you’ve spent most of your life paying for insurance policies to protect yourself from the vagaries of existence, chances are it’s too late to become a latter day beatnik. Don’t feel bad, you’re probably the Lucky Ones.

Maybe some of you were a little busy scanning the local Help Wanteds in the Stanwoodopolis Gazette this week and missed the post on X calling for resumes for the new Government Efficiency Panel headed up by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (not a real swami). If so, there’s still time to apply. I’m not sure how many high IQ small government revolutionaries there are out there, but I can bet not too many are looking for 80 plus hour work weeks for an efficiency department that starts out with not one Director, but, efficiency be damned, two. Two heads are better than one, right?

Label me cynical but somehow I suspect salaries for the position won’t compare to what a genius entrepreneurial type might earn in a start-up. Or a hedge fund. Hey, all you bored high IQ retirees, the government is looking for you anti-government types hoping to fill the long days with assignments to seek out new inefficiencies and lost departments, to boldly go where no bureaucrats have gone before.

Sure sounds like fun to me. Of course, I lack the high IQ requirement. And that 80 plus hour work week is fairly anathema to a guy who hasn’t worked a full time job since 1974. Although maybe I could fudge the curriculum vitae to make that part time graveyard shift as an orderly in a hospital two nights a week back in the ‘80’s sound a bit more work obsessive. Okay, maybe not. The revolutionary requirement seems a little out of reach too, even though us old hippies like to think we had a bit of the radical in us, at least back in the ‘60’s. Not so much these days, although … this last election percolated my blood.

I wish the Bright Boyz all the luck in the world bringing the government to heel. And even though I won’t be sending in my job application I would like to offer some advice from the South End peanut gallery. Start at the top, guyz, I think you have a low IQ lazy golf-playing yahoo you might want to take a good hard look at.

When I was about butt high to a bumblebee, we lived in Mississippi. Then we moved to the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina to live in a ranger station back in the Pisgah National Forest. Some years later we headed further south and moved to the hill country of North Georgia. I lived in the Deep South from the time I was three until I was thirteen. You never lived there yourself, you can’t really imagine what the South is. It’s different, is what it is.

My best friend in 6th grade invited me to come along with him to his grandparents’ for a day on the farm and a Sunday dinner with the family. I said sure and we all rode in Tom’s dad’s station wagon into the red clay country south of where we lived. Once we arrived Tom and I headed into the pasture to explore the countryside, getting admonitions from his folks to be back in an hour for supper, supper being lunch. All I remember of that walk was being chased by the biggest meanest bull I’d ever seen. Tom said Run! and boy we sure did. I’ve never thought of cattle as benign ever since.

So later at the dinner table, after grace, we told the assembled family how we narrowly escaped death by Brahma as we hunkered down to eat okra and cornbread and ham and pickled beets and so many vegetables from the garden it looked like a pantry from the Garden of Eden. I may have noticed the grandfather glaring at me, kind of a contemptuous stare, but I tried not to, just ate my food and complemented Tom’s grandmother and thanked them all for inviting me for lunch. Supper, I mean. Somewhere about the first round of dessert he pointed a fork over my direction and asked, “Boy, where you from?”

“Dad, don’t start up now,” Mr. Vandiver, Tom’s pop cautioned. The old man said he was just askin the boy a question, and he turned his gaze on me again. I felt my apple pie turning to cement in my mouth. “I’m from Gainesville,” I said and he shook his head no. “You come from up north with that Yankee accent,” he corrected me. “Yessir, I do. I lived in Mississippi, North Carolina, California, Michigan and I was born in Maine.”

“A Yankee,” he muttered, “in my house. Never thought I’d live so long to see the day …”

That supper table got real quiet real fast. Tom’s father was shaking his head sadly but he wasn’t about to add much to the conversation, not at his own father’s house. Later on the long ride home he told me he was sorry it turned out this way, but Gen. Sherman had marched through those hills 100 years ago burning and pillaging and some folks had long memories. His father was one.

You think maybe another fifty years later, folks down there might have forgotten the War. But you would be wrong. They don’t fly the Confederate flag because they forgot the damn war. Some of it might be racism, plenty of it is resentment the North fought them and won, even more is that they think a way of life, a cultural heritage was stolen from them that left them poor. I have no doubt there are more than a few places still where no Yankee has crossed the front door in a century and a half. And just like the bulls, I give them a wide b

In 1973 I worked at a dog pound in Madison, Wisconsin. What we called a Humane Society. We adopted 40 % of our mutts … meaning, we killed 60% of the animals, the correct euphemism being euthanized. The national average was 25% adopted so we patted ourselves on the back. My minimum wage job was to clean puppy cages and help kill critters. Let’s just say it’s a short career track unless you’re a practicing sadist, which I am not.

In fact, I adopted three dogs myself, maybe not a big deal if I lived on a country estate with acreage for the hounds to chase rabbits and deer for days on end, but I lived in a second story one bedroom apartment over a TV repair shop. Hard to believe now, looking back. No, not three dogs in a small apartment. That there used to be TV repair shops. When’s the last time you remember fixing a television rather than buy a new one?

One day at the pound they needed me to man the front desk, something I’d never done previously, something that might just lead me up a rung on the promotional ladder. I asked what was expected of me up here at the front door and was told I would direct folks to the kennels where they could inspect their future pets. Beats shoveling shit, I thought.

My first encounter with the public was a woman bringing in her old dog and its 4 new puppies. “I can’t take care of these,” she said, pointing at the little wiggling pups in a cardboard box. I asked if maybe she might’ve considered spaying as an option. She shook her head. “Costs money,” she answered. “So you want to leave the mother too? Hasn’t she been with you awhile?” I asked. “Yeah, I’m tired of her too.” Oddly, this pissed me off.

I picked up the phone to our intercom. “Larry,” I said, “fire up the incinerator. We got five to torch.” My dog whisperer seemed suddenly alarmed. Shocked even. “You gonna just kill em?” she cried.

“Whadja think?” I said cruelly. “You think people are lined up for an old dog and her litter?”
About this time Larry emerged from the back, looked at the box of pups and asked, “These?” I nodded. Larry looked at the woman with measured contempt, picked up the box and went into the back where I knew he’d unload them into the puppy cages. He’d be back for the mother shortly. I started filling out the paperwork the way a guard at Dachau would, dispassionately. Name. Address. Reason for wanting your pet killed. Basic stuff.

I guess the woman called later to see if her dogs were toast because Mike, my supervisor, called me into his office. He explained — patiently — how our job was not to judge, our job was to take in unwanted animals so they weren’t drowned in pillowcases in the lake or shot behind the barn. “We want them to bring them to us,” he sighed, painfully aware I was unfit for further front desk duty.

I lasted a few more weeks. Larry lasted a month. There are, I’ve learned, some jobs that aren’t a good ‘fit’. My trouble, of course, was that was pretty much true of all jobs.