The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Back when I first came to Seattle and Gomorrah, I had a buddy who lived in a dive apartment that was going to be sold and remodeled. They were tossing the old 1940’s era refrigerators the junkies and alcoholics had used for decades and my pal asked me if I wanted to go in with him on the capitalist venture of hauling, cleaning and selling these vintage frigidaires for fun and profit. Not being employed and in full possession of a half ton Chevy pickup, I said sure. And by that afternoon we owned 60 reefers of various stages of mold and decomposition.

I had access to a garage none of my six roommates used, so we stored them there after a couple days lugging them down 2 or 3 flights of stairs near downtown, then hauling them up to the university district where I rented a room in a house full of students. Each one got cleaned, disinfected and plugged in to see if it still worked. They all did. Tough units, those old Kelvinators and Frigidaires. Not particularly efficient, but they’d run until the next century if you asked them to. All we asked them to was run for the 30 days we offered as a ‘quality assurance guarantee’. If we’d been savvier biznessmen, we would’ve offered a 2 year service plan like Sears. Course, Sears is in about the same shape today as some of those refrigerators were back then.

Our ‘advertising’ campaign was simple in those pre-Craigslist times — we put flyers on telephone poles.
$30 30 DAY GUARANTEE FREE DELIVERY CALL THIS #
The Freon filled appliances sold like hotcakes, mostly to little bistros and coffee shops and student renters and our friends. I kept one for my room after my roommates started stealing my beer and food from the communal fridge. Then I locked my room. I guess they were young communists, share and share alike, mine is theirs. They weren’t bad people, but I learned why communism doesn’t work unless the others do and you don’t.

By the end of a month we’d sold every last unit. We made about $800 dollars each, more than I made the entire previous year, maybe two. My buddy said maybe we should’ve grabbed the stoves too, but by then it was too late and our experimental entrepreneurism came to an abrupt end when demand outstripped product. Probably lucky for both us Appliance Kings.

START THE DAY BEFORE NOON

At least on work days. The other five days, sleep in. You earned it.

LEARN HOW TO READ
Writing is no longer essential, but … the successful South Ender can tweet, twitter and text, even if spelling is marginal.

LISTEN TO OTHERS
Especially on Facebook and other social media. Keeping track of friends’ and enemies’ likes and dislikes is an invaluable tool in the South End toolbox. Decision making is easy, just see what the herd is doing.

WORK AT LEAST ONE HOUR A DAY.

No matter how severe the hangover, the lethargy, the ennui or excess hedonistic activities. Work isn’t ALL bad.

WORK OFF THE GRID

No South Ender worth his or her salt works in order to pay half his or her income to the IRS. Barter heavily with your neighbors and friends. Crab, clam, trap, fish, hunt or grow it! Food is free and food is fun! If you buy your dinners, food is neither.

LEARN TO REPAIR

Your own car, truck, toaster, wellpump, toilets, etc. You can’t barter or sell busted stuff and repairmen cost an arm and a leg per hour PLUS that service fee to drive half a day to and from your hell-and-gone address. Knowing a few handyman tricks can save you another part-time job at the fast food joints 50 miles away.

MARRY UP!

Chances are you’ve embraced an aesthetic lifestyle. You artists and musicians need supplemental income and unless you plan to work full time low paid minimum hour jobs, a second salary is essential. Marry one.

If none of these suggestions work for you, plan on moving soon. Life on the South End is mostly for those with alternative-fact occupational schemes. If you landed here thinking this was just a suburb of America, get yourself a GPS and head back to the mainland. Not guaranteeing jobs necessarily, but at least the possibility exists out there in Trumpland when America’s CEO brings them back. And those of us who stay, well, we could use the extra elbow room. Good luck to ya!

Fiscal Phil lives up north of me in one of our many gated communities. He owns a few rental houses down in Seattle and Gomorrah, bought when prices were pre-Amazon and the town was driveable, now worth fortunes. We’ve been friends since before the War, the Iraq ones, and so occasionally I drive through the gate after telling the guard who I am and who I’m visiting and he pops up the wooden swing arm that has STOP stenciled on its side in case us barbarians can read.

For as long as I’ve known him, Fiscal Phil has been convinced the world economy is on the verge of Total Collapse. Trump’s election only confirmed his paranoia. “The Dow just broke 20,000,” I offered as cheerful counterpoint to his apocalyptic vision, but he only shook his balding head sadly and placed his coffee cup in the built-in expresso machine he’d custom installed. Beans got ground, the grounds got pressed, water was steam injected and a few moments later he had a fresh cup, Starbucks on demand.

“Two years, Skeeter, that’s what I give the market before the Crash. I’ll be out before it does,” he said, an old prediction. Predictable as that perfect cup of joe, he rattled off his strategies for survival I’d only heard 100 times, everything from Krugerrands in his safety deposit boxes to raw silver buried in some hidey-hole in the back yard. A few thousand bucks in cash. Food stored in the basement, enough to last longer than a Mormons storehouse. Phil still has his Y-2K stockpile: generator, barrels of water, gasoline. “Doomsday,” he always intoned at the end. “It’s going to get ugly, Skeet, you better prepare yourself.”

I mumbled, as I always did, that things didn’t seem too bad. Pretty good, in fact, and Phil, true to form, shook his head sadly. “Survival of the Prepared. Don’t be a victim. What’ll you do when the money’s worthless and the food runs out?” he asked, less concerned for my welfare than for proving he was ready.

“Probably come over here, Phil. With a gun. Survival of the Most Well Armed.” Phil, never big on humor, especially the dark variety, looked shocked. Next visit, I knew, he’d tell me about his new arsenal. Dog eat dog. I guess I got two good years at least.

My parents, when us little sprouts were growing up, never made much of a fuss over us. If we got good grades, they nodded approvingly. And if we didn’t, they told us to buckle down and smarten up, school wasn’t some game. They never came to our sports events to watch their star kids play and we were glad they didn’t because, well, to be honest, we weren’t stars. We were just your basic kids, vanilla, ordinary, okay.

When they became grandparents, however, things changed. Their grandkids, my god, they were Einsteins, they were football stars, they were just all around Wows. My friends who have grandkids have those same kids, all of them the smartest, best looking, most talented brats you ever had the privilege to hear bragged about. I don’t know, maybe if I had kids, they’d be superheroes too. But I didn’t and I bet they wouldn’t be if I did.

When I look back at my childhood (okay, the early years, not the present years), I drifted through sandlot baseball games, marbles, some fights, some homemade soap box derby races, all the stuff we hoodlums did back in the halcyon days of Eisenhower’s America. I didn’t think I had to be a genius. Or a basketball star. Or a movie actor. My folks didn’t push us munchkins out into a competitive universe with a prescription for failure by convincing us we were God’s gift to the free world. We were encouraged to try stuff, everything from track and field to chess to debate clubs, but they didn’t come down and play soccer mom and get into fights with the coach or the parents of our opponents. They’d ask how it went and if we got our butts kicked, they said better luck next time. These weren’t life and death competitions.

I worry that we’re trying too hard now. Sure, we’d all like to think that the fruit that fell near the tree is special, the sweetest, the tastiest, the fastest growing, the most flowers. But I suspect we just set the kids up for disappointment. Ballet. Dropped out. Lacrosse. Never really liked it. Cheerleader. Couldn’t do a head stand. Choir. Had a tin ear. Academics. Got a C+. Life. Just normal.

My folks accepted normal. So did we. What they wanted for us was happiness. It’s not a bad wish. In their own hands-off way, they taught us how to get there.