The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Just this week a researcher looking for a substitute antibiotic found a thousand year old recipe for eye balm, no doubt one of Merlin the Magician’s potions passed down witch to witch. The formula for this consisted of garlic and herbals and bile from the belly of a cow. I think eye of newt was optional. The whole concoction was aged in a brass or copper vessel for exactly 9 days, full moon or not. Our intrepid researcher followed directions precisely and at the end of 9 days, applied the ointment to petri dishes of various strains of disease-causing bacteria. To her surprise, the stuff killed MERSA, the staph infection nothing we have in our medical arsenal can touch. Killed it 90% dead. If we can keep from adding it to chicken and livestock feed, or prescribing it to every patient with a runny nose or a mild headache, maybe we can stop MERSA for a few years until it develops immunity to fermented cow bile.

Down here on the pharma-centric South End, our labs will soon be scouring medieval manuscripts, Egyptian hieroglyphs, shaman’s diairies, sorceror’s journals and Sumerian tablets for the lost cures of our less advanced civilizations. Jimmy the Pestil is working out in his detached garage with puddle water growing strains of fungus gathered from his clogged gutters. He claims it kills lots of things, but nothing like SARS or E-bola. His cat nearly died drinking some nasty vetch with floating fungus, but that didn’t stop his neighbor’s wife Sarah from ordering up the recipe in hopes it would, in small but regular doses, cure her husband Hal’s erectile dysfunction if she added it discreetly to his coffee every morning.

Why not? If our scientists have to resort to alchemy and the potions of wizards back in King Arthur’s time, what have we got to lose? Bubble bubble, boil and trouble, put a fire under the iron kettle and start stirring in nettles and the saliva of wild rabbits, let it age a few days, take notes and give it to the neighbors for their ills. Every night on the Boomer News, the pharmacies are offering their own remedies for everything from twitchy toe syndrome to roving eye disorder, then they spend a minute or two warning us of the side effects, everything from psychotic episodes to jaundice to death. If ever the cure was worse than the disease, half of these are. Let’s face it, Jimmy the Pestil’s potions couldn’t be half as bad. Plus, with a little blind faith, the placebo effect should cure most of what ails us. I know Sarah thinks so, judging by her smile lately, and that’s good enough for me. The rest of you, go ahead and consult a physician. Or your local sorcerer.

Some of the boyz down at the Marina got to talking about that Ma Day Studio Art Tour that’s been building steam since before the turn of the century, hauling traffic in for 25 years and now has expanded not just to 3 days instead of the original 2, but 2 weekends instead of 1. Before long, Cap’n Jack worried, it’ll become the Mother’s Day to Father’s Day Art Tour, an entire month of traffic backed up from the South End Diner to the Stanwoodopolis freeway exit, all those art lovers and their U-Hauls for carrying back their purchases to Bellevue, Seattle and beyond. They remember when the Tulip Festival was just a small bulb in the imagination of the growers …. before cars eventually outnumbered the flowers. And it makes em nervous.

It should! The South End Economic Development Council holds secret meetings at ReFlux Realty, scheming to sell properties to art aficionados who, in turn, will become artists themselves in the primordial paint soup of the South End, buy easels and brushes, learn raku, break glass and build stained glass panels, sculpt auto wreckage and ultimately double, triple, who knows, the size of the Tour. It’s a self-replicating Beast. And when they all begin to starve through overpopulation, they’ll still need to pay those mortgages on their dream studios. The only other ‘jobs’ here, of course, are real estate agents. So the vicious circle completes itself. More artists, more art, more wannabees, more starvation, more real estate agents, more sales, prices rise, properties subdivide, underwater mortgages swell …. and so the bubble becomes bigger than the egoes of the artists who planned this Tour back in the 90’s.

Some of the Marina layabouts wanted to stop this in its tracks before there was no turning back. Keep the missuz from going studio to studio Mother’s Day weekend. Course, the Tour was planned from the Get-Go to be their default escape from marital duties. Let Ma go traipsing through the art while they’d watch some ballgames. And now, 25 years later, they’re only starting to realize the true price of their mistake. Too late, guyz!! Way too late now!

The old adage — when life gives you lemons, make lemonade — is certainly true on the South End despite the fact that citrus is in short supply in our Banana Belt of Global Warming. Won’t be long, but in the meantime we have an overabundance of nettles. Stinging nettles! Stalks that reach 7 feet high by late May. We got a jungle full of the monsters.

So every spring when the fresh stalks reach a foot high or so, we garb up with gloves and go harvesting. We eat the greens the way we’d eat steamed spinach, but what we’re really after is that lemonade. Without the lemons. I’m talking, of course, about our infamous spring tonic: Nettle Beer. Folks accustomed to our exaggerations naturally think we’re pulling their leg yet again. Nothing could be further from the truth this side of political e-mails. We brew the stuff, we age it and oh yeah, we quaff it too. Probably goes a long way toward explaining our artistic propensities down here. Reality, whether it’s brewing or job avoidance, definitely skews away from the top of the bellcurve. It may even be true that the consumption of nettle ales cures a lot of what ails us, but the studies of South End longevity vs the Chablis drinkers of the polar North End , while statistically significant over the short term, are still out on the long term.

Anecdotal evidence certainly bears scrutiny if Old Lady Kirby is any example. She makes a concoction that resembles nettle beer in name only, its primary ingredients having neither malts or hops. She calls it Tonic. I got other descriptors for it, but then I’m a confirmed Believer in the Barley and adjuncts like mango and ginger and lemongrass tea leave me scratching without the nettles. Nevertheless, I will say for a woman of her advanced age, she’s a spry old gal. I’ve seen her and the mizzus two-stepping up a storm a few nights at the Hotel to some band a third their ages. Oh, I know, it could just be the clean living of the South End, but … I suspect those nettle beverages clean out more than the cobwebs.

The other day I heard a New Yawk chef rhapsodically praising battered fried cicadas. Crispy, subtle tongue tones, environmentally woke. He could scarcely contain his newfound enthusiasm and now that we’re about to experience cicadageddon with a double hatch on the east coast, well, what better time to introduce a new menu item? Sure, he said, some folks have a natural aversion to the alien-looking critter, but, he said, we eat lobsters and shrimp, fellow arthropods and consider them exquisite delicacies. As a Dungeness crab connoisseur myself, I couldn’t agree more.

But … we have plenty of guests who wouldn’t anymore stick a morsel of claw meat in their face than they would a spider, another fellow arthropod, I don’t care how much seasoning or beer batter you fry them with, just not gonna do it. Too creepy, too disgusting. Give them a pink slime hamburger any day, greasier the better, the meat aged to just shy of putrefaction. McDonalds sells em by the billions.

Course I got plenty of friends who won’t eat most vegetables. Couldn’t get them to eat a Brussell sprout without threatening them with a gun. And some who eschew fruit, forget chewing on an apple. But something with 20 additives, you bet, the sweeter and saltier and fattier the better. There’s just no accounting for taste. Kinda makes you wonder why half of us are obese and diabetic.

I’m betting those cicada crisps are actually tasty, plus high in protein, all natural, no GMO’s, no transfats and gluten and nut free. If General Mills or Frito Lay could figure out a way to rebrand these insects, something more appetizing than Crispy Cooties, you know, more on the line of Nature’s Nuggets, they’d have a shot at cornering the market for bugs. But you and I know they wouldn’t be able to leave it alone. Add the salt and xanthan gum, monosodium glutamate, plenty of artificial coloring, high fructose corn sugar and enough preservatives to keep it all fresh for a decade, package it in a Styrofoam box, advertise it on kids’ tv programs then sit back and watch the profits roll in. Those cicadas are gonna wish they’d stayed hibernated another 17 years.

The Monk was uptown last week making his once a week shopping trip. You live down on the South End, you schedule your trips to town as infrequently as possible unless you’re driving a Prius or you’re one of the new folks who couldn’t tell you WHAT the price of gas is and couldn’t care less. The Monk drives a beat-up Ford 150 pickup that gets about ten miles to a gallon of gasoline, about two gallons to town. It runs, barely, and if he could afford something better on his Social Security, he’d gladly own a hybrid, buy better food and probably become a howling environmentalist.

He was squeezing melons over in the produce section. No, not organic melons. Did I mention he was scraping by on Social Security? The Monk buys what’s on sale. The Monk eats on the cheap. The Monk — I’ll give him this — cooks his meals from scratch. The only Hamburger Helper he’d dream of is himself. He’s not much for boxed anything, he doesn’t care how long the preservatives will keep it edible. He makes his own spaghetti sauce, his own salad dressings, eats mostly fresh. He’s not exactly the poster child for Good Health and Living, but he tries. “You are what you eat,” he tells me. The Monk is about half broccoli.

He was squeezing that melon, I think I mentioned, when this guy comes by him with a parrot on his shoulder. The Monk stops squeezing his melon and holds a hand up to Long John Silver and his bird. The Monk, maybe I haven’t mentioned, is not exactly Live and Let Live. He’s ornery and he’s opinionated and he doesn’t suffer fools with parrots lightly. “What the hell, Bluebeard?” he asks the man with the bird. “That some kind of Service Animal?”

“It’s a parrot,” Sinbad replies, smiling, probably pleased his antics haven’t gone unnoticed. “I KNOW what it is,” the Monk says. “It’s a damn disease carrying bird in my food store. You need it to locate the crackers for Polly here?” Well, one thing led to another, the manager finally came down to the produce section and the Monk demanded this pirate wannabee goofball get that flu-bearing bird away from his chard and his tomatoes. The manager, noticing Cap’n Hook didn’t even have a basket, much less a cart, sided with the Monk and asked if he could leave his bird back in his car. Or his schooner.

“You believe that shit?” the Monk asked me when I dropped by when he was unloading his groceries from the truck. “These are tough times, Monk. Them that died be the lucky ones. The rest of us, well, who’s to judge?”

He gave me a dark look from over the melons. “The Monk, that’s who.”