The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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.

You maybe have been a little too busy lately with texting and Facebook updating, Google searching and e-mailing, to pay attention to the world accelerating at the speed of algorithms. You probably don’t remember exactly when you got your first calculator (I got one back in 1975) or your first computer (we got one in, oh, I’m guessing, 1988 or thereabouts). The point being, not that you can or can’t remember the date, but that it happened in recent history, it happened in our lifetime. And in the few intervening years, it became an integral part of modern living. It changed everything. It is, just as the invention of the spinning jenny and machinery was, a revolution. The world will never be the same.

Now we take it for granted. Only took a decade, maybe two. Future Shock, just as Toffler predicted, is here, picking up speed, faster than we Cro Magnons can possibly adapt to the changes. Oh, sure, you can send twitters, you can e-mail, you can download movies on your TV, easy as pie. And if it’s hard, the kids can show you how. My parents, not so much. They’re a bit too calcified in the Industrial Age to manage much more than the basics. Try to explain trickier navigations, they’re boggled immediately. The old man keeps a set of directions for operating his TV that his grandson wrote down for him five years ago. Oh yeah, he uses it every time he wants to switch from cable to DVD.

Everyone now, except me and two other Neanderthal knuckle draggers on the planet, carry a cellphone or a tablet or an I-pad everywhere they go. They’re ‘connected’ to the hive in ways that were unimaginable ten years ago. I don’t know if the world has shrunk so much as it has become denser, jammed with data and information, more coming in at the speed of light. If our attention spans have truncated to about 20 seconds max, it’s little wonder, we have to move on to the next new incoming. The world, once external in our early years, is now internal, virtual, digitized and flying at us at incredible speed.

If you’ve been around kids the past decade or so, you know they no longer live among us. They might be in the same room, sleep in the beds upstairs, mumble occasionally when they enter or leave the house, but no, they’re already gone. The Pied Piper of PC and Apple have taken them to a different place, one where you and I won’t be going. You might have learned a few tricks, but they’ve internalized the circuitry. They learned from the machine and the machine is how they think now. Eventually they will add chips to themselves, apps, all that stuff they carry in a box now but will soon be inserted into their physical body. You think tattoos or lip rings are invasive, you’ve got some shocks coming. It’s a brave new world, old timer, and we’re the last of the humans.

Retirement’s a touchy subject down at the Diner. The Flatheads, those vintage car guyz, they found a way to make retirement work, just build a garage, heat the damn thing and stay out there dawn to dusk or even later working on their latest ‘restoration’. They could give seminars in Golden Year Living if they had that kind of ambition, but like I said, they’re retired fellows. Like myself for the most part.

No, it’s the poor sap who thought that once he’d accumulated his pension nest egg, he’d be set. Kick back, putter around the house in his sweatpants all day, maybe give the mizzus advice on housekeeping and cooking, sit in the car while she went grocery shopping, help her balance the checkbook finally. The Good Life. Well, for him….

Quiet Billy is going on 65. The boyz at the Diner catch him on his lunch break where he rolls in daily for his usual, grilled cheese on rye, side of potato salad, cup of whatever soup they serve that day, cup of coffee, one refill. Billy manages the South End Water Association, monitors the pumps and tanks up the hill from Windyrear Realty, takes care of line breaks in the mains, monitors the readings for monthly usage. Retirement could be in his future, but Billy doesn’t think of that as an option. He thinks of that as a living burning Hell.

A few months ago Quiet Billy came down with the flu. Laid him down hard and beat on him with coughing fits, body chills, sweat fevers, headache and the urge to die. His mizzus, Betty Lou, not the warmest of women on her good days, shook her head at Billy lounging around under a blanket by the third day and insisted he ‘man up’ and get his butt back to work, he was driving her crazy. She had better things to do than serve him oatmeal gruel and listen to his constant coughing. “Die if you’re going to die, but do it quick or get back to work. I haven’t got time for this nursey nursey stuff.”

Billy had caught the flu from Betty Lou who had taken two weeks sick leave and expected him to wait hand and foot on her until she had recovered. Compassion, apparently, wasn’t high on Betty Lou’s list. Or reciprocity. If Quiet Billy had ever entertained fantasies of a contemplative retirement, puttering around the house, plunking on his favorite guitar half the day, that week with the swine flu or whatever killer crud he had, well, that pretty picture got folded, spindled and crumpled into a wad. He told me over the last of his potato salad one mournful lunch that he wanted to work until the grave. The sad part of that, the really sad part I mean, is Billy hates his job.