The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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I used to raise peacocks.  You ever seen peacocks strutting thru a South End shack yard, it’s sorta otherworldly.  They brought an elegance that was indescribable to our backwash palace.  You ever HEARD one of these exotic creatures, you might reconsider classing up the bottom land.  They got a scream like a child being tortured.  I guarantee the neighbors will wear out 911 with their calls of mayhem and madness at your place.  Course when I had the peacocks, we didn’t have neighbors.  No, they didn’t move away because of the noise, they just hadn’t discovered the fabulous South End yet.

      My peacocks, no offense to you Bird Huggers out there – my peacocks had a head about the size of a big martini olive.  And inside that head they had a brain the size of, well, a pea.  My peacocks were not bright.  They made a chicken look like Albert Einstein.  They thought my Banty hen, who’d hatched their eggs, they thought she was not only Einstein, but their mama and God too.    Don’t ask me what I was thinking.  My brain isn’t real big either.  Although I’m pretty sure who my mama is but don’t ask me about Pop.  I’m like the peacocks – I just go on faith.

     I had the peacocks a few years until Mama Banty got picked off by a Wily Coyote.  They wouldn’t come back to the henhouse after that, so they roosted in the cedars every night.  Dumb or not, they figured out the climbing ability of a coyote.  Finally they decided to go looking for Ma.  The Police Blotter in the Stanwood Gazette – and this is the Gospel Truth – would report on their progress north.  Peacock sighting at Dahlman Road.  Peacocks seen gathering at Sunnyshore.  Eventually they found a chicken surrogate ma up by O-Zi-Ya.  O-Zi-Ya is Southendomish, meaning, I think, Ornithological Orphanage. 

Sometimes I miss those little pea-brains.  Although I can sleep longer w/o an alarm clock that sounds like a nightmare.  I wonder, though, if I’d kept em, if the South End mighta stayed, oh, I don’t know, less developed.  Maybe forced the new neighbors to move north instead.

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We just got back from a trip to the Great Smokeys. No, not the ones out in the Appalachians, the ones all over Washington State, the Great Hazies. Got home and turned on my computer only to discover it had died. Ordinarily I don’t grieve for machines that have given up the ghost, but you maybe know yourself that a goodly part of your life resides in those PC’s and Macs. E-mails, files, photos, news, all the digital connections that keep us tethered to the outside world.

Sad, really, since our outside world here is pretty much all we used to need. Another day or two of internet withdrawal and it will be again, trust me. So bear with me, or not. I know blogger loyalty is probably not high on anyone’s list these days, and if you need to move on, I’ll try not to feel too spurned. In the computer world, you trip, the folks behind you will trample you to death. I understand that. Which is why I’ve hijacked the mizzus’ machine to type in this message.

But now I have to turn my attention to computer repair. Always iffy, always dangerous, always scary. Yesterday I managed to reach into the motherboard, changed a cmos battery, rebooted … and nothing. Today I go in with a hammer. We’ll see soon enough who’s boss here. Although … I think we all know how this movie ends. Cyberspace … where nobody hears me scream.

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A man can only take so much of this summer heat. Naw, not the actual temperature outside. The constant coverage by the news media giving advice about not locking your kid in the car when you go in for your liquor purchase, wearing sunblock, drinking fluids, staying indoors, taking cold baths. I can’t take it anymore. Even Trump gets backpage coverage behind the weather. I mean, c’mon, it’s not an oven out there, it’s a hot summer day. Take a swim, take a shower, take a break, man.

Which is what I’m going to do. We’re driving over the mountains and into some REAL heat, triple digits with air quality alerts from the fires burning in British Columbia and Montana and our own state’s conflagrations. Beats listening to the caterwauling from the hyperventilating meteorologists, that’s for certain.

Anyway, if you’re not passed out already from heat prostration, let me offer my own advice. Go right now to the refrigerator and grab yourself a cold one. Sit back down and scroll thru some back posts with frequents trips to the refrigerator or, if necessary, to the nearest air conditioned grocery store with beer coolers. And don’t leave the pooch or the kid in the car while you run in. Do keep drinking fluids. And go easy on these sketches, maybe a couple per adult beverage. I’ll be back when the temperature comes down. Or my own beer supply runs out. God help us all.

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Our stove lost a burner awhile back and although usually I would try to fix it myself, I decided the old girl wasn’t worth even the cost of a replacement burner. So when the oven started overheating by 75 degrees at 350, burning whatever we baked, I guess I could’ve replaced the gizmo that substitutes as a thermostat but isn’t a thermostat, another 50 buck item, about 40 bucks more than the stove is worth. A house call by an appliance repairman has always been out of the question, the closest one being about 50 dollars away. Once I tore down a clothes dryer right on the sidewalk outside the appliance dealer’s shop in downtown Mt. Vernon. When I couldn’t figure out how to install a newly purchased used part, Tim the Repairman came out and mentored me. Figured, I guess, anyone this desperate or poverty stricken or stupid, probably needed compassion and help both.

One of my bandmates, Monika, said she was purchasing a gas range and I could have her fairly new electric one for free. I offered to pay her, but she insisted. So yesterday I borrowed a dolly from a neighbor and drove over to pick up my almost new Frigidaire ceramic top electric stove, happy as a dodo over my good fortune. Free is my favorite price.

So I got the stove on the dolly, strapped it in with not one, but two ropes, then headed for the truck. Monika’s porch was really narrow so I went to wheel it around and go down the steps, but I misjudged the edge, dropped one wheel over the step and … lost the stove down the stairs. It landed with a bang and the sick sound of glass breaking. The glass was the ceramic stovetop.

Of course I was pissed at myself. Of course I felt like the kid who broke his best Christmas toy taking it out of the package. Of course I loaded the wreckage into my truck and drove the ruined stove home. Of course I googled up replacement tops and yeah of course they were way expensive. Of course I googled used ones on E-bay and they were a fortune too. So of course I went straight to the dump and paid $22.50 to dispose of my now useless range.

I went to Craigslist looking for a cheap stove. Not free. But hopefully cheap. Found one, but never got an answer from the seller so after an hour or so I drove 40 miles north to the used appliance store, bought a stove for $275, drove it home, dragged it into the house, dragged the old one out, loaded it into my truck and headed for the dump. The nice lady in the booth said, “Didn’t you bring in a stove already today?” I said I had heard there was a two for one sale. She was having a bad day too so her sense of humor was greatly diminished. Before she could say $22.50, I handed her $22.50. “I guess you know where to drop it,” she muttered. I nodded sadly. You could probably guess that when I got home the cheap Craigslist stove seller had sent me an e-mail saying the thing was available and gave me directions to her place, a couple miles from where the used appliance place. This is what is called in common parlance, insult to injury.

We are now in possession of a pre-1999 white electric, no electronics, coil top stove with the old 3 prong cord that fits our 3 prong receptacle. Everything works well. By my reckoning our free stove only cost us $320 plus the price of gas. This is runaway inflation in anyone’s book. Free, like those patriots with the American flag flying ragged on their 4×4 trucks like to say, isn’t free.

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Little Jimmy was off on another of his Paul Revere speeches while the denizens of the Downrigger Lounge at the Yacht Club were hauling up the Happy Hour specials before the 6 p.m. cut-off. Little Jimmy believed, based on extensive reading, that the world economy was headed for fiscal apocalypse. The Great Recession was only the first pealing of the doomsday bell about to toll.

“Get out of the stock market now,” he advised, bolstered by two gin and tonics. “Get gold and silver. Credit cards are a joke. Banks won’t open, nothing’s good but cold hard cash.”

Little Jimmy most likely had a stash buried someplace. “God help him if Alzheimers hits first,”Ralph said loud enough for Jimmy to hear. “Go ahead and laugh. It’ll be dog eat dog when the Crash comes.”

I got neighbors who believe – who hope, actually – Armageddon is coming. I got some who stockpile guns and ammo. In case Anything is coming. I got friends who keep pantries full of food and water. For the Pandemic. Or the earthquake. Or the attack of the zombies. Hell, I don’t know what to make of this spreading anxiety, but it’s floating up from the swamps down here. Jimmy says that’s one of the Signs, public unease.

When I was 10 years old a friend of the family built a fallout shelter in his basement. For after the Atomic War, he told me. Radiation everywhere, chaos, panic —- only those who planned ahead would survive. “Can we stay with you, Malcolm,” I asked, figuring, sure…. “Your dad didn’t plan for this,” he said sternly. “You see that rifle in the corner?” I noticed the gun propped next to a 55 gallon drum of water. “That’s to keep folks OUT. They’ll realize too late what’s what and I have to take care of my own. See?”

“You’d shoot us?” I asked incredulously. He said he’d have no choice. That night I mentioned this to my father, the father who hadn’t done much planning for the end of the world. His face darkened. All he said was, “Malcolm’s got too big a mouth. You have to learn not to listen to him.”

“What if he’s right?” I asked. My old man shook his head. “That would be a world you and me wouldn’t care much to live in. Malcolm would be welcome to it. Now go to bed and don’t listen to damn fools anymore.”

Little Jimmy was on to the collapse of the E.U. Then all the dominoes would go next, world wide panic. The North Koreans had just launched an ICBM missile. Fallout shelters will be back in vogue soon. I left a tip for Cindy, our waitress, and a half finished beer. I wonder sometimes if Malcolm was disappointed nuclear war never came. Little Jimmy sure would be.

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