The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

It’s not uncommon down here on the much maligned South End to be at the leading edge of the breaking wave. So far ahead, actually, that those trailing behind misunderstand us. And of course misunderstanding leads to mistrust and mistrust leads to avoidance and avoidance leads to contempt and contempt leads to fear and fear leads to hatred. We artists understand this implicitly. Or at least we like to say that is why our work is reviewed with such negative criticism. We’re just ahead of the Curve. We’re misunderstood. We’re too sensitive for this world.

Redemption sometimes comes too late to do us much good. Down here, we’ve been stigmatized for our handicaps and ostracized most of our lives. We’ve been badly misunderstood, isolated from the island mainstream and treated as third class citizens. Maybe it’s too late to help most of us, but in light of the medical community’s latest findings, we can at least take some cheer that we were victims of ignorance.

Branded as shirkers of work, lazy lay-about and shiftless men of leisure, we now have the full backing of the AMA that ours was a bona fide, certifiable physical affliction, not some bogus hypochondria intolerance to work. Just recently the Institute of Medicine called for a review of the malady we South Enders have lived with most of our lives, one that heretofore was considered, not a disease, but a psychosomatic condition. Those who have never known its symptoms easily viewed us as whiners and misfits, slaggards and sloths. We were treated as psychological lepers, shunned by our newly arrived neighbors and subjected to their silent scorn, just as those with depression and anxiety were once similarly abused before science substantiated the underlying root cause. We suffered silently, secure in the knowledge that we were victims of a disease little understood or studied by the medical community.

Until now. What previously was diagnosed by our decidedly non-medical neighbors to the north as chronic laziness or chronic fatigue syndrome has now been deemed a true physiologic pathology deserving of a proper name: Systemic Exertion Intolerance Disease (SEID), a crippling affliction most of my buddies and me have lived with for years with little sympathy from our mizzuses. Well, guess who’s going to have to apologize now, eh, little Miss Critical?? And, with a kinder gentler healthcare system in place, maybe now we can get the care and treatment we need … and even a sizeable disability check to help us cope with our difficult lives.

So next time you feel see a South Ender balking at work or employment, maybe you’ll show a bit of compassion. All I can say is you better hope this isn’t contagious.

I was doing a little supper shopping today at Island Foods up the road. Had my little baby cart half filled with about anything that didn’t seem double-the-price and fell in behind a lady whose overflowing groceries indicated a resident who didn’t worry much about little things like prices or specials or coupon discounts. If she’d been sporting a mink coat, I wouldn’t have expected less.

Tina, the checkout clerk on register #4, the one labeled ‘Utsalady’ as a nod to our island’s sketchy history, was scanning items faster than a TSA agent on meth. She turned to Marie Antoinette and said in her usual cheerful greeting, ‘How you doing today?’ By this time Zsa Zsa had a smart phone in her bejeweled ear and ignored Tina as any High Lady would when an impudent commoner affronted her status. M’lady was now occupied with a conversation about the horrific traffic resulting from a fender bender we’d both apparently passed earlier. It had been a terrible inconvenience to her schedule for Tea Time.

They say time is money, but they don’t say it on the South End. Tina, who lives half a mile north of me in a small ghetto subdivided with a zoning variance that made some commissioner’s friends rich, well, Tina makes minimum wage plus a buck. Time, I seriously doubt, is mostly money to her. It’s a bad back, varicose veins and a wrist brace for her carpal tunnel syndrome that will soon doom her fabulous career. Half the people she checks out never say boo to her. A quarter are on their cellphone. A few are just unfriendly like she was price gouging them.. And the rest don’t see or hear her, she’s just the checkout girl.

Tina has a husband, Billy, used to be a contractor before he crushed a disk in his spine that ended his career. He gets some disability and between that and Tina’s largesse, they make the payments on their double-wide, but barely. It’s a scrape every damn month, but I’ve never heard her complain. She’s glad to have this job. “You have a nice day!” she smiles to Her Majesty who’s still chattering on her cell. Tina turns to me and asks happily, “How’s it going, Skeeter?” If she and I weren’t happily married, I swear to God I’d propose to her on the spot.

Don’t ask me why … but this last week I decided to do something radical. A late life crisis maybe or a mild case of heat stroke, but I decided to lose a few pounds, try to regain my girlish figure. Or if nothing else, lose my Milwaukee Tumor, that midriff bulge that threatens my pants wardrobe by expanding another inch. I know what you’re thinking — what’s radical about this?

What’s radical about this is that I’m not running to my doctor for GLP-1’s like half this country. I’m just eating less, drinking less and exercising more. Okay, so it’s only been two weeks, not really enough to earn me a sponsorship from Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig, if they even still exist in this era of weight loss pills, but I’ve dropped ten pounds already and my trousers aren’t so tight.

In America we all think we’re overweight. Me too. Course … a lot of us are overweight, one of the reasons why we have an increase in diabetes and heart attacks. Our self-image suffers, probably a major cause of depression or at the very least a reduction in happiness. Our movie stars and models give us inferiority complexes and our doctors tell us these excess pounds will kill us but they don’t say when.

These new wonder drugs that decrease our appetites, for food, for drugs, for alcohol, even for joy, turns out they’re great for addictions and depressions too, quite a happy surprise for Big Pharma and anyone who bought their stocks. Not to mention all the millions who lost weight. And who knows, maybe we’ll all be happy anorexics before long, the fast fat foods will go bankrupt and the price of groceries will plummet once the demand drops in half. Probably then our role models on stage and screen will be voluptuous and rotund, content to eat and drink heartily.

Meanwhile I got a few more pounds to shed. Me and the rest of this selfie nation….

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.”

Over a month ago I made the soonest appointment I could with the Dep’t. of Licensing to procure an enhanced driver’s license. In the time since, a buddy, my old partner of the Piranha Brothers, asked if I would join him for a sailing adventure into the San Juans. He was going for two weeks but, rather than cancel my appointment, I said I would only sail for a week, then catch a ferry home. Which is what I did, a little heartbroken not to finish the trip with Cap’n Joe. Weather was good, temperatures were warm, the seas fair. Looks like a great week coming up to be on the waters of the Salish Sea.

This morning, the day after leaving the voyage, I traveled 40 miles to the DOL office for my interview, got there 15 minutes early and found a small group of muttering fellow citizens staring at the CLOSED sign above the posted hours that told us today they opened at 8:30. My appointment was for 9. It was 15 minutes to 9. Some people sat in their cars waiting to see if anyone would show up and open the doors. One of the men said he figured the closure was due to budget cuts, probably give that money to housing for the poor. Pretty obviously he thought the poor should be left on the streets.

At 9 one of the group googled if by chance there was another office nearby or if maybe this one had moved. Indeed, there was a DOL office a mile north and a few of us jumped in our rigs and drove up there, only to find that office issued tabs and not enhanced or regular licenses. The secretary told me, yeah, lots of folks come to them when they find the office closed and yeah, that office has a history of insufficient staff.

So, being an optimistic idiot, I drove back to the other office hoping to find an OPEN sign with a full or even partial staff, but found instead another cluster of incredulous and pissed off folks, one who’d taken time off work, another whose license had expired, some who had driving tests scheduled. All pretty incensed, all shaking their heads, most blaming government.

When I got home two hours and 80 miles round trip later, I found an email sent exactly 5 minutes after I’d left the house informing me my appointment was canceled and … sorry for any inconvenience. Do Not Reply to this message, it informed me. I think I understand now why these are sent without any possibility of a reply. And I’m starting to understand why people hate the damn gummint.