The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/white-trash-avalanche2.mp3[/podcast]white trash avalanche2

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Today walking on the beach north of Camano Head a few miles, I found my first Tsunami Radioactive Debris, a plastic bag with Japanese lettering.  So …. I thought here comes the onslaught, litter drifting thousands of miles, all the terrible detritus of that tragedy rolling and tumbling across the wide Pacific to arrive finally on our pristine doorstep.

Won’t be long, I figured, before all us beach combers would need a Geiger Counter and a crash course in reading Japanese.  Everything from rusting Prius’s to entire houses broken into their original components, all laying down on the sand like a garage sale from Hell.  Sure, a lot of us South Enders would sift through the spoils, maybe set up a Mother-in-law unit out back by the edge of the nettle forests, nice for the missuz’s old lady, a few extra roentgens  of background radiation, no worse than daytime TV screens.  Plenty of stuff for the weekend teenagers to build something a little more architectural than driftwood forts, maybe 3 story kid condo units, outfit em with cabinets and furniture and square dishware, sort of a Tokyo Motel.

A few hundred yards further I found a rusting washing machine cylinder.  And another ways down, some casing for the washing machine.  I looked for Japanese labeling, but nothing readable.  Quarter of a mile later, I stumbled on the washer case, pretty new looking.  Kenmore, it had on its instrument panel.  American.  Probably not radioactive, probably not from the tsunami, probably rolled down the bluff a week earlier if my forensic litter skills are still up to date.

I guess the alarm bells of all that tsunami debris are fair warning for the coastline here to Alaska.  But me, I’m more worried about appliances tossed off the front yard of my neighbors’ places down the bluff, landslides of steel and plastic hurtling toward me in a white trash avalanche.  All I can ask, I guess, is holler down a warning!!  Seems like the neighborly thing to do…. That, or just take it to the dump like the north enders do….Might save a few lives.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/audio-the-high-price-of-infamy.mp3[/podcast]audio — the high price of infamy

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I just finished my latest – and last – interview with a documentary filmmaker doing another take on the Barefoot Bandit saga.  Nice enough woman.  Dedicated.  Skilled.  She’s spent a year doing this and plenty more work to go.  It’s not HER, it’s just that after 50 interviews with reporters and film crews and book writers, you just get tired of it.

If you ever wondered what a famous person’s life might be like, try just a peripheral taste of it.  Telephone calls, cameramen in the yard, reporters from France, magazines from England, film crews from Canada and Brazil, Newsweek magazine writers tromping the woods, Wired magazine guys peeking in the outhouse.  Sure, it’s amusing for awhile.  Hilarious even.  But how long do you want the gag to go on before it’s in your throat???

Fifteen minutes of fame should be all most of us need … or want.  Beyond that your life gets co-opted.  The paparazzi of the news media will call and call, no taking prisoners, no taking NO for an answer.  It’s their job and you’re just a paragraph in their Big Story.  Trouble is, you’re a piece of hundreds of the same story.  At first you think you can control the spin, but pretty quick you realize you can’t.  Editing, revision misquotes, all of it slipping away on shifting sand of pseudo-notoriety.

Today I hope I’m calling it quits on this Colton mythology.  Seems old, but the Hollywood movie is still on its way.  So is the Canadian documentary.  And the one shot today.  The South End String Band can hardly stand to play the song we wrote.  Although…. We’re talking about a Free Colton! Concert.  Not really advocating getting him out of jail — just no admission charge to the gig.

Be careful, is all I’m saying.  You want 15 more minutes of fame, better get yourself a publicist and an unlisted number.  I don’t have either ….

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/audio-dreams-for-sale.mp3[/podcast]audio — dreams for sale

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Half the South End is For Sale.   Three quarters of the neighborhood have real estate signs out by the driveway, everything from WindyRear Realty to Reflux Realty.  They used to hold open houses on the weekend, but after 3 or 4 years, I guess even the optimism of a realtor starts to look like a horny snake courting a garden hose.  Or vice versa.

Some of the homeowners have given up too, bought haciendas in Arizona or trailer court lots in Nevada.  They come motoring back in their 40 foot mobile homes when the asphalt starts to melt down there and the gila monsters stay under the rocks all day.  I guess they’re the optimists, folks who figure the housing bubble will eventually swell up again and they’ll get the million dollars they thought the place was inflated to back in the carefree days before October 2008 when the betting stopped and the banks had to show their cards.  House of cards, it turned out, one very bad bet.

We’ve gone through the Boom and Bust cycles on the South End many times since I lost a wheel on the Conestoga and decided to stay put.  Folks find out the neighbor sold for twice what anybody dreamed somebody would pay and next thing you know, everybody figures they can sell now and retire like a dot.com executive.  Signs sprout up and proliferate like nettles in chicken manure, eventually they DO sell or the sellers give up and we return to normal.  Although … normal may just be more of those selling binges than living our lives, hard to say.

The realtors do fine most of the time.  Commission coming in, commission going out.  Rita, down at WindyRear’s North End office, tells them when they’re ready to get rich, come on back, she’ll sell their dream house for 50% more than they paid.  There’s ALWAYS another house — the real dream is making money.

Personally — and nothing against the wisdom of Rita the Realtor — I don’t care how much my bank account would swell, I wouldn’t want to end up in a trailer park in Nevada.  I don’t care how good the air conditioning is.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/AUDIO-FREE-SPEECH-AT-THE-ASYLUM2.mp3[/podcast]AUDIO —FREE SPEECH AT THE ASYLUM

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So okay, we got these folks who set up shop outside the Stanwoodopolis Post Office and prop up posters of the Prez with an Adolph Hitler moustache and wait for hostile reactions.  They’re not Nazis or Republicans and they sure aren’t Democrats unless they’re monumentally disappointed.  I’ve got pals who became so infuriated with this deplorable mockery, they jumped right into the fray, sounding off and ending up at High Decibel.

All I can figure is this is the reaction they’re hoping for.  Kind of the political equivalent of the church that goes around the country protesting at the funerals of fallen soldiers with signs saying GOD HATES FAGS  and BURN IN HELL SINNER.

Bring in the clowns.  Hire some serious psychiatrists.  Consult the Talking Heads on PBS and Fox.  But this seems like Goofball Inchoate Rage to me.  Go down to the sea and rifle ping pong balls into the wind with messages like Your Mama Isn’t!!  or The Chinese Are Still Inscrutable!!  Or Doctors Are Torturers!!  Let the current take them to all the beaches of the world.  The new message in the bottle is this:  IF YOU FIND THIS, MAIL IT TO THE UNITED NATIONS.  EXPECT BLACK HELICOPTERS TO FIND YOU.

I’m no paragon of sanity myself, I’ll grant you.  I believe we all skate on a thin layer of reality that can crack and shatter any time, plunging us who knows where into what dark depths.  But I try not to encourage my fellow travelers to venture out into the unsolid middle.

There seems to be a vicious perversity afoot, a loathing that wants all of us to pitch into chaos, flail and fight with ourselves.  The goblins are among us.  If I had an antidote, believe me, I’d offer it.  My only advice is turn the other way.  Don’t make eye contact.  Fall down and play dead if necessary.  Short of that, avoid mailing letters down at the Post Office….

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/audio-grange-gig.mp3[/podcast]audio — grange gig

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