[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/audio-retirement-for-dummies.mp3[/podcast]audio — retirement for dummies
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I got a lot of retired neighbors. You see em walking the dog 17 times a day or mowing lawn 3 times a week or driving to town 2 times a day. They’re not acclimated yet to days on end, empty as a TV, that they have to fill up every morning all over again.
Retirement, as I’ve known since I took mine at age 27 or so, is no easy job. Folks wait most of their lives to get to that stage of life, not really imagining the reality of it, just hungering for a cessation of their hellish jobs. They think VACATION! Years of it. They think a really long weekend. Drink a few beers, watch some ball games, clean the garage. They don’t think of what happens when the garage IS clean, the ballgames aren’t on everyday, and a few beers becomes incipient alcoholism. Their wives do. They never imagined, though, that retirement meant having to share the house, share the days, share their old privacy.
I know: I should write a Self-Help book on Retirement. Save some marriages, save the neighborhood, even save some lives. Get rich doing it too. But … as I said, I’m retired. Not exactly looking to start a career at my advanced age. Probably be Chapter One. Or my epitaph.
Retirement’s a tricky act. It’s not really institutionalized indolence. It’s actually learning how to create your day. Day after day. Week after week. Year after …. Okay, you get it. But a lot of my neighbors don’t. Course, they don’t have my advantage of many decades of trial and terror. Mostly terror, sure, but you spend as much time as me figuring out Time Management as an Art Form, you got a leg or three up on the poor schnook who stops the 8 hour, 5 day a week regimen, bam! And then hopes to just live out the remaining years in the Lazy Boy with a remote and a faithful missuz who maybe isn’t ready to be a 24 hour maid service or an indentured servant. Gonna be trouble, guaranteed! Gonna be stress, high blood pressure, the inevitable heart attack. For some of them, retirement might be a little more ominous than a trip to Maui. If boredom doesn’t kill em, the missuz might.
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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/audio-south-end-pipe-dreams.mp3[/podcast]audio — south end pipe dreams
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On the environmentally sensitive tree hugging South End, we’ve been exploring our many eco-options, everything from syntho-fuel to marital marijuana. Maybe it’s post-guilt syndrome, that remorse we all feel down here after decimating our old growth nettle stands. We can’t walk the woods without grim reminders every stump slowly rotting into swamp and history, the springboard marks still visible where our forbears stood above the impervious wood at ground level to fell the mighty beasts with crosscuts and grit. The very heart of our South End culture got loaded and shipped to markets on the east coast and Japan.
Nettle paper, vertical grain nettle boards, nettle veneers — all lost. As well as the nettle based civilization built around the mythic plants that cast their great shadows from the farms of Elger Bay to the forests of the Camano Head. Baskets were woven from the fibers, herbal remedies were made from the leaves, shacks were built from the lumber. Nothing was wasted. And, of course, now there is nothing. Just the stunted 8 foot third growth forests of stinging splinters, prickly reminders of another great civilization on the skid road.
Shaky Jake, once a fishing boat captain until the salmon too were decimated, has become practically an environmental evangelist, preaching the need to re-green the South End. For a time he ran Canadian Bud through the Border Patrol, but after 9-11 there were too many Coast Guard speedboats with bow mounted heavy machine guns for his profits to match the risk. Now that marital marijuana is about to be made legal, he has visions of hydroponic forests, hemp byproducts and the possibility of the South End rising from the blackberry covered ravines to take its rightful place on the forefront of the Green Technologies the President is advocating to take the place of carbon based fuels.
Nobody has the heart to tell him his dreams are pipe dreams. But worst case, the stuff might make great gasoline. High octane, anyway….
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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/elger-bay-institoot.mp3[/podcast]elger bay institoot
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Folks are always a little surprised to learn that the South End is home to a school of higher learning, figuring, I guess, that a brackish backwash with virtually no commercial potential, with no public schools even, might be likelier to have a minimum security penitentiary than a college. For awhile we had the Tucson School, an unaccredited mail order degree factory run out of Nate Benson’s basement for a few years before enough irate students complained to the state attorney general. Nate did get his opportunity to attend a minimum security prison, but not around here. He graduated in 3 years with good behavior and no one has seen hide nor hair since, but late at night I notice TV ads for university degrees that sound vaguely familiar.
The Elger Bay Institoot of Aesthetic Enlargement has been training young artists for nearly 25 years now. Half the graduates end up staying here and some become instructors themselves. The pay isn’t great, but considering the graduates who don’t teach are making far less, it beats the options. President Otto Vermouth runs a pretty tight ship, near as any of us unwashed masses can tell and nowadays you can find art plastered everywhere from Tyee Store to Jolene’s Beauty Salon and Boutique. Even the Marina and Bait Shop sports watercolors and bird sculpture. It’s practically a Louvre down here, although sadly I won’t say most of us have really had our aesthetic consciousness blown up too large. The Mabana Body Shop has an egg termpura of one of our more infamous graduates, Safari Jack. Jack says it’s worth more than Roadkill Ronald’s 1964 Mustang convertible, fully restored, but right next to it is a 2003 girlie calendar Ronald must like as much as that egg tempura of the Clamdiggers. Most of us like it even better, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder and Miss July 2003 fills the eye, believe me.
The Institoot has classes in everything you can want to study art-wise. Right now they’re running Winter Classes. I thought about taking something myself, stained glass maybe, but it cost a bit more for the supplies and anyway, I figured I’d lacerate a finger or an artery and my literary ambitions would be ruined.
Maybe in Spring session I’ll take Figure Studies, if they can squeeze another voyeur in. Jerry Cochran’s wife models for the class. She’s no Miss July, but it seems safer than stained glass anyway. At least until Jerry finds out where she’s been moonlighting….
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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/audio-new-age-medicine.mp3[/podcast]audio— new age medicine
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