The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Back in 1977 I bought a HUD repo house in the ghetto of Seattle. First house I ever owned and so, being a neophyte, I thought maybe I should go whole hog and get a dog too, a companion, a man’s best friend. I always had a fondness for boxers so I looked in the paper, found someone selling pedigree boxer pups and went over to take a peek at the litter. One of the little guys was far and away the most active so unfortunately I picked that one. I named her T’Ashi, which I was told by a Sioux Indian I shared a Greyhound bus and a bottle with a few months earlier, meant ‘friend’.

T’Ashi made the Energizer Bunny look like a rabbit on tranquilizers. She was a bundle of mindless energy with legs like pogo sticks and a brain the size of a pea. A dumber dog I never saw before or since. If I threw a ball out into the Sound, she would go under to find it and if she didn’t find it, would stay down until I rescued her. Not many animals lack even the minor brain activity required for self survival.

Couple all that energy with a love of chewing, you got a recipe for mayhem whenever I left her alone in the house. She chewed through drywall, she chewed through closet doors, she pretty much chewed through a post in the basement that held up the two stories above. I drove nails into that post when I discovered it eaten a quarter way through and T’Ashi chewed through those. In despair I took her to a dog training class where the woman with the German accent told me, when I mentioned I didn’t think T’Ashi was trainable, that all dogs were trainable by her.

Great, I thought. Maybe she can save my house from being nibbled to death. Four weeks later she told me not to come to classes anymore. My beloved brainless dog was incapable of learning. In defense, I had tried to tell her. But now I was tethered to the monster I had brought into my new home.

Some months later I threw in the towel. It was the dog or the house. I put an ad in the Seattle Times: Pedigree boxer free to good home. I got plenty of calls, but when I asked if they planned on leaving the dog alone in their house, I patiently explained that that would not be a good home for T’Ashi. Not for long, anyway. People tried to argue with me, but I was firm, I was stubborn even, I was trying to protect them from themselves. A week of declined offers to take my dog for free left me thinking suicidal thoughts. And then Linda Rae Starr called.

“Would you be leaving the pooch home when you go to work?” I asked and was surprised and ecstatic when she said she wanted a dog that would NEVER LEAVE HER SIDE. “Come on over,” I said. “T’Ashi is yours. You got the perfect home.” I told her why that was, told her she was eating my own home down stud by stud, nail by nail, every time I left the house. “I’d never leave her,” Linda Rae Starr told me sweetly. “I’ll take her everywhere with me.”

Linda Rae came right over to what was left of my ghetto house. I gave her dog food and dog toys and dog dishes and dog leashes, everything she needed. “Just one thing,” she said right at the end and I felt my heart crash into my guts, figuring she was backing out at the last minute. “What?” I whispered.

“I’d like to change her name, if that’s okay.” My heart soared, my mind spun dizzy little circles of joy. I told her she could name T’Ashi anything she wanted and she clapped her hands, put T’Ashi in her beat up car and the last I saw of the two of them was when they drove away. I did call Linda Rae up a week or two later, just to be sure, just to relieve my guilt at inflicting a hound of hell on her. “Oh no,” she said in response to my concern, all was well in the Starr House. “Cleopatra and I go everywhere together. I thought maybe you wanted to take her back.”

I assured her that was not my intent. “Cleopatra is yours, Linda, forever and ever.” Linda Rae thanked me again and again. And I thanked her. Again and again. And still do…..

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“Start the hearings, alert Fox News, file the subpoenas, investigate the cover-up!!! Niger Niger Niger! Where was the Sec. of State and what did he know and when did he know it??? Why couldn’t the President remember that dead soldier’s name? What’s he hiding? Who is he shielding? Look at the evidence, it speaks for itself. Niger! Niger! Niger! Lock em up, these people who are responsible, LOCK EM UP !!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Clyde is on a tear down at the Pilot Lounge in the Yacht Club. He just ordered his 3rd pint of microbrew and half the bar is telling him to shut up. The Pilot Lounge is not known as a bastion of liberal radicalism since most of the time, if there’s no local sports game on the 3 TV’s, Fox News offers us patrons their fair and balanced opinions. Clyde tries some days to get the televisions turned to CNN, but he’s spitting into a serious gale. Best we can hope for is Al, the usual bartender, turns them all off so we can drink in peace. Al is off tonight and his replacement is Benny, a taciturn old friend of the owner’s who subs in emergencies.

“Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi!” Clyde hollers, not once but three times in a voice that drips sarcasm. “They couldn’t get enough of that, but Niger, where’s the outrage, where’s the investigation, where’s their justice for those dead soldiers?”

Benny drags a bar rag across some spillage, grabs the TV channel changer and finds a sports station, then turns the volume up past Clyde’s. The assembled drinkers cheer and clink glasses. None of us know much about hockey, but hockey it is tonight.

Politics has ruined too many of my evenings down here. If we had another watering hole within driving distance, I’d switch taverns. But I suspect it’s the same up north and the drive back through the sheriff’s prowl cars isn’t worth the gamble. So hockey it is tonight. At least until I finish this half a pint and head for the sanctuary of home and hearth. “Niger Niger Niger!!” Benny is singing softly to himself when I drop my glass on the bar he’s still wiping up. I know I’ll be humming it too all the way home. Where the hell is Niger?

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Tea Party Ted moved away from what he called the Socialist Union of the South End back when that commie Obama was elected President of the still United States. He and his angry wife packed up kit and kaboodle and moved to Scottsdale, Arizona where the weather and the politics were more to their liking. Some of the scalawags in the Flatheads, our vintage car guyz, still get virulent e-mails from Ted, sometimes ten a day, that they’re kind enough to forward to the Enemy. That would be me.

I’m not sure whether they think I’m some Fence Sitter that can still be swayed to the Trump Camp before the gulags are instituted by some imagined regime that will ‘cleanse’ the South End’s radical heresy or if they just find Ted’s wild e-mails amusing in a whackjob sort of way. Amusing is not how I receive them, but then again, I don’t discourage my pals from passing on posts from the alt-right.

It’s important — or so I tell myself — to keep a finger on the pulse of these fire breathers in order to understand what makes them so damn angry. Ted was a government employee at the top of the pay grade system. Meaning, he gets a near six figure a year pension and total medical coverage, what us South Enders refer to as Made in the Shade. He doesn’t like government, he wants Obamacare killed, he hates the welfare system, food stamps and Medicaid for the poor. Taxes are theft, people who disagree with him are elitist boobs, the Federal Reserve is a plot to kill capitalism and white genocide is ramping up.

I won’t even mention his opinions on immigration, minorities, women, gays and transgenders. He’s a white guy. An old white guy. And it pisses him to the gills that his white Caucasian nation is morphing into a polyglot melting pot mess of people not much like himself, people who are inferior, potential terrorists, job stealers and poor. He wants these others gone. He wants his country back. He wants to make America great again.

All I know for sure is he helped make the South End, if not great, one small step better. By leaving. Arizona, you’re welcome to Ted. And his mizzus. And all the other Teds on his e-mail list. You know, except my buddies and me. And Ted, keep those cards and letters coming in. Maybe some more folks will come down and join you.

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The President recently tweeted that the American public is finally wising up, high praise for us dweebs out here in the hinterlands. He’s talking about a survey that shows how few people believe the news media is truthful. You know, media like the New York Times, NBC, the Washington Post, CNN. Wow! I remember reading Orwell’s 1984 as a kid in high school and being chilled by Big Brother’s revisionist history. The Ministry of Truth needed entire departments to rewrite past events to make current events fit into what preceded them. “It’s a beautiful thing, the Destruction of words. …. Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?” Easy, just change history.

These days we don’t change history to match our beliefs, we just say facts are lies. Ignorance is Strength. War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Faux news, fake history. Trump and the alt-right have managed to convince the public the truth is whatever they want to believe. Fox News, fair and balanced. Facts? We don’t need no stinking facts!! The President is a liar but plenty of folks think the press is fabricating stories to defame him. He would like to pull the broadcast license of NBC. He’d really like to shut down most of the news media and replace it with the Ministry of Tweet. Big Brother is in office right now.

If Big Brother had a real agenda, we’d be in a sinister world of trouble, but thankfully the Donald is only interested in self-aggrandisement and increasing his brand’s net worth. If he had any ideas or ideals, we’d be in deep doo-doo. He’s no neo-con and he’s not much interested in policies. One day he’s against this, next day he’s all in. Only a craven empty suit could flip flop one hundred and eighty degrees then announce that he always believed the flop. Newspeak for Dummies. Rather than change yesterday’s headlines, just convince the proles the headlines were lies, a helluva lot easier. Ignorance, once bliss, is now strength. Truth, once the thing that would set you free, is now a shackle.

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Back when I first got off the Mayflower south of Utsalady, I hitched my fortune to an unlikely looking piece of bottomland which had a shack, a large shed (or small barn depending on your agricultural perspective), a chicken coop, doghouse and a pen for some rabbits. Better than raw land, I figured. But not by much ….

Those early years I mostly hunkered down and tried to stay warm. Some folks would just look at this and shake their heads. Can’t say I blame them, but looking back now 35 years, I’m glad I bit it off. Occasionally I’d get friends coming up to see the estate. We were all pretty much layabouts from our days driving school buses in the Big City, not big dreamers, just slackers getting high on getting by, or so the song goes…. We were an aimless bunch, lacking in ambition and drive, plenty short on cash, but optimistic the future would play out all right for us. Why? I couldn’t say, just that a good positive attitude might, in the end, carry the day. I guess we drank the Kool-Aid —- or if we hadn’t, we were more than willing.

Some of those weekends, come nightfall, we’d load up the VW bus and motor into town, figuring to catch some Stanwoodopolis night life. Rudy the Banjo King played every Saturday night at the Hotel, but once was plenty and so we went to the other side of town to see what the Sportsman and the Sundance and the East Side had to offer a half dozen of us thirsty revelers. First tavern up, the Sportsman, we ordered schooners of tap beer. A minute later every barstool was empty and we were alone with the scowling bartender. Couple of beers, some pool, we moved next door. Our absentee barstool pals were all there, waiting, I guess, for us to bring the party.

We bellied up to the bar, ordered pitchers and watched our fellow revelers finish their beers and head for the door, about half a dozen fellas exiting. Was it something we said? The bartender took our money, but offered no clues. An hour later we were at the East Side, little shotgun of a place, shuffle board half its width. The locals kindly gave us their stools, tipped their hats and left. Once again.

Some places the drinking establishments are lively, a democratic conviviality. Alcohol has its negatives, but for loosening up inhibitions, it’s tried and true. I’ve lived here now 40 years. I’ve been to every drinking establishment that’s come and gone, lived and died. The mizzus says you can’t judge a town by its saloons … and she’s a historian … but I say you can. I could live here longer than Methuselah on scotch and soda and I tell you what, it’s way more fun to drink alone. Which is what we got in spades down here on the South End.

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