The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

A lot of South Enders, isolated from the mainland and remote from major grocery outlets, have reverted to primitive customs.  Now, don’t you northern neighbors worry — we aren’t talking cannibalism here.  Not yet.  No, we’ve gone back to ancestral roots.  We’ve become hunter-gatherers.  Most of us have small gardens, some of us have large ones, but we grow what we can to supplement what we can’t afford down at the Plaza IGA and Hardware Sales.    

  Sure, the tomatoes we planted in May don’t ripen until October and the corn won’t grow high enough to hide our medical marijuana plants and there’s really only so much a person can do with the zucchini that always threatens to escape the deer fence and become the kudzu of kamano with thousands of gourds dropping down from power lines like aerial IED’s on car windshields and the Walking Women of Mabana’s phalanx of human obstacles to unwanted commuter traffic.  

    So we’ve been forced to resort to yet another strategy for culinary survival: CANNING.  A lot of my neighbors come to me and say, Skeeter, I just don’t think I can eat another jar of your savory ZUCCHINI DADDLE DILLS, no offense.  And I say, None Taken, and gently move them to a recipe from Skeeter’s Skillet Skills (available at Addled Daddle Press for 9.95 plus shipping and handling), the chapter on food preservation.  I like to give them a Tried and True first, something like the wildly popular Nettle Kraut, a fermented in the crock nettle with maximum garlic that, once canned, can be eaten on Christmas snowgoose or Easter crab bratwurst (another Skillet Skill fave) or just a snappy side dish any occasion.  

    I’m not suggesting these pioneer skills will end poverty down here or take the place of  our food banks, but for those of us who chose unemployment over work, it has been a lifesaver.  You start canning a cellar full of nettle kraut, you might consider telling that jerk boss of yours to take a hike too.  You got the safety net now, that’s for sure.  And with a healthy diet, you can drop that health insurance.  This stuff cures what ails ya.      Next week we’ll talk Animal Husbandry.  And no, I don’t mean Tough Love Matrimony.

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I hear folks say all the time how the country no longer makes anything, everything’s outsourced, manufactured in China, then imported. Course, they’re running up to Wal-Mart or ordering on Amazon for all this cheap junk, save them a few bucks, half of it going back into gasoline on their SUV. Here on the self-sufficient South End, we still make stuff. Okay, mostly because we couldn’t afford to buy that stuff new. But partly because there’s still a vestige of pioneer pride. You make something yourself, you maybe understand how much work goes into it, you maybe understand the real worth of it, you maybe become a part of it and it becomes a part of you.

We got about 2 million artists down here who paint and sculpt and carve and you name it. They make stuff. That’s what art is. Creation. If they could sell it, they’d be ‘job creators’. Always that damn ‘if’. I admit, half of artistic inspiration is job avoidance, or, in my case, about 100% is. Workaphobia, almost a crippling malady. I’ve had friends, who fancy themselves psychotherapists, suggest that if I spent half as much time employed as I do avoiding work, I’d be rich. Course I explain that then I’d have to do taxes or hire an accountant, set up wills, keep records. I’m just a little too busy for that kind of complexity.

The thing is, see, if you do your own car repair, fix your own leaky pipes, dig your own garden, catch your own food, prune your own fruit trees, cook your dinners, play your own musical instrument, sing your own songs —- you don’t have time to work some silly crappy job. No way. You’d fall behind, the chores would gang up, the shack would rot, the whole she-bang would come undone, entropy would rule, chaos would ensue. Down here, you do not have the luxury of a job! What you got, as consolation, is making your own life yours. Not buying it on credit, piece by piece, from a factory filled with people paid next to nothing in a country that makes stuff for all of us who don’t have time to do it ourselves.

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