The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The latest study on teen usage of electronic devices found that they spend over 9 hours a day texting, gaming, video watching and net surfing. And this is when they’re not in school. I can only assume teenage crime rates have dropped to near zero. When would they have time to shoplift? Or to plan a robbery?

Any way you slice it, this is one helluva lot of time spent on social media and the rest. More time than school, more time than … well, anything. Except maybe breathing. This is good news for Apple, Google , Samsung and Facebook. To call it a national epidemic, well, let’s not be Alarmists. To think of it as a national addiction, c’mon, we’ve had TV for most of our lifetimes.

One of my neighbors yesterday told me he’d bought a cellphone. I said say it ain’t so, Joe. Not you! He grinned the way a convert to Jesus grins, sins washed, iniquities atoned, born again, fresh start, brave new world. He told me the great deal he got — meaning I should haul right down and get one too. Just spreading the Good News, I guess, proselytizing the ignorant. You better believe I’ll be checking under the bed tonight for alien pods.

Join the Hive. Accept the Borg. Sign up on Facebook. Carry a cell. I’m the Last Holdout on the South End now, an anachronistic curmudgeon with one foot in the 19th Century, still got a phone plugged to the wall of my cave. Outside the cave I’m disconnected. Satellites can’t reach me, friends and telemarketers can’t call me, the mizzus has to holler or just let it go til I stroll back in. At the grocery store I have to make decisions without outside help. Do you want the pitted olives or the unpitted, honey?

Sure it’s lonely, course it’s eerily quiet, damn right it’s a life of isolation. Just the way I like it.

Am I legend? Naw, I’m just a living fossil, that’s all.

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When I was a young guy I used to think a bit about Death, capital D. Kind of a melancholy waste of time, I finally decided. You spend much time on the subject and pretty soon you’re down the dark alleys of heaven and hell, God and Satan, reincarnation and ghosts in the attic. I finally decided that there are some things in this world I’ll never understand, probably plenty I won’t even imagine, worlds beyond witnessing, universes within universes.

I decided reality is more than enough. Lately I’ve been talking with friends who are taking classes in Mindfulness, whatever that is. They tell me it’s a focus on shutting down their thoughts long enough to pay attention to the world that isn’t our own jabber. Used to be we would sit in a lotus position and chant OM, the original sound, the first noise, be still, be aware, be here now. Be mindful, I guess.

Swami Betty was over the other day, I guess is why this is on my mind, mindful or not. Betty is forever searching. For answers, for cures, for God, for something to fill her life up with meaning. It’s not a bad quest, you ask me, but it’s not my quest. I’m not looking for answers any more. In fact, I’ve even quit looking for questions. The world isn’t a puzzle to be figured out, at least not one I’m going to have any luck solving. I’m no Zen detective.

Betty’s husband died a year ago and her kids are estranged. She asked me last week, over her fungus tea she grows in a gallon jar on the kitchen counter, some concoction that she’s been keeping alive for ten years or more, while I had a cold beer, if I believed in God. We were out on her back porch, sitting on the rickety steps that led to her gardens, and the sun was full on our faces, the bees were humming as they slipped flower to flower, the world seemed plenty full to me. Betty wants to believe, but what kind of deity kills her husband and lets her children abandon her as an eccentric old South Ender? She’s a bit adrift and I know I would be too.

“Well,” I said, “ I would hate to run into God if there was one. I could do a better job dreaming up a world than that cruel fool. I’d ask what was He thinking? Just what the hell was he thinking?”

Betty chuckled. “Tough guy, huh? Kick his ass, maybe?”

Well, in the end we came to the usual conclusions. Just a couple of old friends sharing a porch, idling away our brief time in this hard old world. Life, I think, is more a music than a riddle. And if maybe shutting up for awhile, if being mindful or quiet helps us hear it, I guess that’s fine with me, just don’t ask me to whistle the tune….

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I do my fair share of tree cutting, I’ll admit to it. The trees I fall seem hopelessly defenseless maybe to the uninitiated newcomer to the woods and forests here on the not quite civilized South End, rooted as they are when the chainsaw revs up and the first cut for the back notch is made. But those fresh immigrants from the cities and suburbs they fled would be wrong, amigo. Trees have been here longer than us, longer than the indigenous Southendomish tribe who feared the spirits behond the safety of their open beaches and shorelines, longer than the fauna that evolved from earlier flora. Their DNA is more complex, their lifespans are far greater and their size makes midgets of the largest of us.

Long after we’ve gone extinct or left or a greener pasture on another planet in another star system, trees will reclaim what we took. They’re here for the long haul and they know how to play the long game. Even though I replant 10 times what I cut down for firewood, they know I’m not their friend. You might think only the alders would count me as a mortal enemy since I only cut them, but the firs and the cedars, the maples and hemlocks, they’ll always side their arboreal kin. I get it.

Last year a maple sheared off and smashed our wellhouse. This was after an old hemlock did the same and crushed my boathouse. An accident? you’re probably thinking. Not me. They could have fallen 330 degrees away from these buildings, but no, they hit them dead on. Bad luck, you’re figuring? Yesterday I came down the trail and toward the wellhouse I’d rebuilt. The same maple dropped another limb the size of a tree aimed right at the new building. At first I thought it had missed by 8 mere inches but after bucking up limbs and trunk, I noticed part of the wellhouse had been whacked hard enough to move it out of plumb, snap the corner post and send siding flying.

If I thought my trees had exacted enough revenge, I was badly mistaken. Evidently there’s no truce and no peace plan. I may have to stop using firewood for heat … but I suspect it’s too late for that.

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It has come to the Crab Cracker’s attention that a petition to boycott Halloween this year has been circulating since summer. Supported by Pastor Paul of the Little Church of the Stingless Nettles, it decries demon worship, gross-out costumes, sugar gluttony, crass commercialization and yoga, particularly Hot Yoga, what the Reverend calls Satan’s Sauna. The anti-goblin signatures numbered in the many dozens.

The Mabana Institute, the South End’s not quite non-partisan think tank, has been conducting its own polls regarding Halloween this past month, according to Prof. Lawrence Glewkose, former director of the American Candy Lobby and now a permanent board member of the Institute. Prof. Glewkose reported that in their admittedly non-scientific poll of children at South End Elementary, 69% were in favor of Halloween as a national holiday while 11% supported having 2 or more Halloweens a year. 11% of the survey responders believed Halloween was already an ongoing event 365 days a year, judging by the proliferation of zombie movies and candy machines and their siblings’ Goth wardrobes. 9% couldn’t read the survey.

According to Joan Hypoglyseemly, spokeswoman for the Pro-Diabetes Foundation, anti-Halloween sentiment is based on  superstition and fear of high fructose sugar perpetuated by the ignorant and the dietary obsessed. “What these people need,” she suggested, “is a Paleo diet exorcism followed by the first ten episodes of Walking Dead.

Prof. Glewkose, unmoved by her sense of humor, suggested she might consider removing her witch costume next interview. Needless to say, Halloween started early on the previously zombie-free South End. According to a Stanwood General Hospital nurse, Prof. Glewkose will recover from his bite wounds, but probably not in time to take his kids Trick or Treating this year.

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A full month of Sunday sermons leading up to Halloween, Pastor Paul preaches mightily against the demonic holiday, pounding his pulpit with his leatherbound copy of the King James version of the Lord’s scripture. “Blasphemous!” he hollers to the assembled congregation. “Devil worshippers! Beggars in obedience to Beelzebub!” Pastor Paul unleashes a stream of caustic invectives to the steady tattoo of his Bible slapping the plywood podium.

“This unholy holiday,” he exhorts, “is an affront to God himself!” In every pew and folding chair, the Little Church in the Ravine’s dutiful members hang their heads and avert their eyes, probably half with kids who’ve already bought skeleton costumes, Star Wars regalia, vampire teeth and wolfman masks. Hypocrisy be damned, they’re not about to tell little Jimmy or Brenda they can’t join in the national gathering of candy, c’mon, they all wandered the streets of their own childhood with a grocery bag or a pillowcase to collect their bribes. No harm done.

If you don’t count cavities and a spike in dental fees by Christmas. The era of juvenile deviltry has long passed into faded myth — even the elders never followed up on the threat of a trick. No outhouses were moved back six feet, no buggies were parked on a shed roof, no bags of dog pop were set on fire on the offenders’ porches to be stamped out after the doorbell was rung and the goblins had fled.

Pastor Paul, unfortunately, every year thinks he’s preaching to the choir, but most of the squirming congregation think he ought to lighten up a bit. Fun is fun and dressing up like a zombie doesn’t make the kids prefer human flesh over Snickers bars and Milky Ways and whatever high fructose treats the suburbs of Stanwoodopolis are parceling out mostly before dark. Even the kids and their parents know the vampires come out after sundown when, hopefully, they’re safely home spoiling an appetite for a healthy dinner. Paul, of course, thinks those parents are boiling up eye of newt soup with a dash of bat blood and who knows what hell broth added too. Same recipe as last year….

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