The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

With Halloween cranking up full volume in stores right after Labor Day, Pastor Paul down at the Little Church in the Ravine made it his mission to warn the South End about a holiday devoted to Devil Worship and the celebration of Evil Spirits.  He’s been pounding the pulpit three Sundays in a row now and we still got three more before Fright Night actually arrives.  No doubt he’ll need chiropractic work on that right hammering hand.

Most of the congregation is my age, meaning they remember when Halloween really was a spooky affair.  Outhouses got moved a few crucial feet back, wagons got disassembled then reassembled on the shed roof, burning bags of dog poop were set on fire in the driveway.  Trick or Treat was no idle threat.  Now, of course, the only Trick is the one played on us by the candy industry.  Like most every holiday, holy or not, Halloween’s been popularized, commercialized and sanitized.  Now they’re profit industries.  Economic engines.  Job creators.

I haven’t seen a kid in a skeleton outfit come knocking on the shack door in decades.  Pastor Paul is maybe a bit overwrought about the flock’s grandkids serving as Spawn of Satan when maybe we ought to worry more about the little tykes dressing up in $50 Star Wars outfits, becoming subjugated Slaves to Obesity.  The poor little high fructose sugar beggars haven’t got the foggiest clue what Pastor Paul is worried about.  And their parents, who’ve driven them to the lucrative candy-rich suburbs of Stanwoodopolis, mostly worry about child predators and sewing needles stuck in apples.

Nowadays Halloween ends before dark and the security lights come on.  Hardly matters with Mom and Dad sitting shotgun in their SUV idling by the curb….  Now, I’m not advocating we go back to the days of cruel tricks.  But it did encourage some creative thinking.  Although maybe this is what Pastor Paul is railing about.  He’s got a steep hill to climb down here on the South End, is all I know.  That, or he should look into Exorcism as a second profession.  Be a cash crop down here.  And not just around Halloween.

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Little Jimmy was preaching at the South End Marina’s Pilot House Lounge the other night, carrying on about the upcoming elections. “It’s like we got two Halloweens,” he was orating to about 8 of us layabouts who weren’t quite ready to go home and face the music. “One with goblins and then the one we vote for spooks, no treats.”

“Yeah,” Biker Bob threw in, pounding his Bud bottle on the formica table, sending suds onto the pulpit. “And then you got 4 more years of Halloween every damn day.”

Some of the boyz, especially after more than a couple, don’t much believe in the democratic system we got. “Throw em all out, I say,” says Ralph from behind the bar where he’s filling in for Joey, the usual weeknight bartender and referee. Joey never takes a side in a political discussion, wouldn’t say Gerrymander with a mouthful, which explains why the place stays open in these partisan times we live in and the Stanwoodopolis Gazette isn’t half obituaries of patrons shot in the parking lot.

George next to me sits pensively peeling the label off his beer bottle before venturing, “You mean everybody but YOUR guy, don’tcha Ralph?”

“Oh, my guy’s okay,” Ralph agrees, wiping his hands on a dirty apron. “He voted to kill that Gun Bill this year.” Ralph’s a big NRA fan, something he usually espouses this side of the bar most nights until Joey tells him to pipe down. Ralph can get pretty agitated without much counter-argument even. Argue with him and he can get scary as Halloween in an Ebola isolation unit.

Half the place votes for their guy, it turns out. The other half are too disgusted or apathetic to even vote, especially mid-term. They’d vote if they could vote out the president, but nothing’s going to change, why bother? they think. So Ralph’s vote should count double, a fact that makes him happy. And me … I take the point about a prolonged Halloween in the Land of the Brave.

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I came of age in the 60’s. Meaning, I didn’t trust government. Johnson lied about the Gulf of Tonkin, Nixon lied about pretty much everything, the FBI murdered the Black Panthers, legitimate governments were overthrown by the CIA, all of this playing out while me and my hippie cronies were smoking dope, being tear gassed and growing increasingly paranoid. In the 70’s, after McGovern was annihilated by the Nixon win, followed shortly by Watergate, I gave up on politics and moved to a ramshackle farm in Northern Wisconsin with some fellow dropouts, only to discover the Posse Comitatus were our fun and scary neighbors. You can run but you cannot hide.

Fast forward 50 years. I find myself run to ground on the tail end of a skinny ass island at the edge of the American continent. My boat is moored down at the bulkhead and the furthest I’m going these days isn’t far at all, not with the Pacific Ocean as my moat and two oars for propulsion. I’m here in an America I no longer recognize. Maybe I never have. I taught history to 8th graders for a brief time back in my more radical daze so trust me, I’m not one of those people with illusions about some of our darker past. But the older I get, the more I realize that America, despite its sins and its flaws, is a grand experiment, a rowdy wild place where individuals can thrive, where the outliers can become success stories, where non-conformity is tolerated and sometimes even heralded.

It has room for transgenders, neo-Nazis, punk artists, heavy metal musicians, the avant-garde, tattoos, skateboards, the KKK, poets, hedge fund managers, Fox News, illegal immigrants, you name it you can probably find a mailbox for it here. Maybe it was just complacency, possibly old age, but I had sort of made my peace with America. I could accept the mixture of the good with the bad, the greedy with the philanthropic, the cynical politicians with the working stiff. We could find cures for AIDS in Africa and then fight a war in Iraq over weapons of mass destruction that we knew didn’t exist. We could shoot unarmed black men in our cities and still try to lift people out of poverty. It wasn’t black and white, good or bad, right or left. It was America, kind of crazy, fairly whacked, ready and eager to try something new and different, ready to retreat to the bunkers and close off the borders. It was evangelicals and Jonestown, Elon Musk on acid, Donald Trump grabbing genitalia, American Idol and Wheel of Fortune, it was John Glenn in space and Ollie North in Nicaragua, it was Dirty Harry and the Peace Corps, throw in the Hubble Telescope and bunker busting bombs, Hiroshima and the Panama Canal, internment camps and children’s hospitals. We’re the bully of the world and the culture most emulated. Go figure.

We may not be the greatest country in the world, that shining ‘city on the hill’, not even the nation that protects its most vulnerable … but we are the most experimental, the most daring, the craziest bunch of yahoos on the planet, for better and often times for worse. We did, after all, elect Donald J. Trump as our Leader. It’s been a long strange trip. And I would claim for the record, maybe these times aren’t really much stranger than they’ve always been.

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Down at the forward thinking South End, we were New Age before it became Old Hat.  Herbal remedies?  You bet!  Nettle-opathy has been practiced in the hollows here since old Ma Wexler applied a poultice of the fresh stingers to her Erectile Dysfunctional husband’s non-working parts and boy howdy, things livelied up at the Wexler homestead after that, let me tell you.

Nettle-opathy is a country cross between acupuncture and herbal cure-all.  Apply a few fresh spring leaves to the correct chakra, you can cure everything from shyness to arthritis, halsitosis to insomnia, hair loss to memory loss, seasonal affective disorder to major depression.  You won’t have time to think of much else other than that panacea tickling your chakra.

We’ve been brewing medicinal nettle tonics about since Prohibition forced us to seek alternative medicines.  We got hefe-nettle, nettle stouts, IPA’s, nettle bock, all available in a handy 12 oz. dosage.

Aromatherapy?  Sure.  We got everything from burn barrel poly-blend to chimney cedar to compost leaf mulch/food scrap.  A few minutes of olfactory stimulation, you’ll forget most of those insignificant cares and woes that nag your good mood all day long.

Hypnotherapy.   You want a spell put on you, just wander down to the South End Hotel and belly up to the bar, listen for awhile to the whoppers these old time fishermen spin over a few bottle bass.  You’ll be buying Penn reels and downrigger gear and a boat and motor too — you’ll be broke but if fishing doesn’t cure what ails ya, god help you.

In all honesty — full disclosure here — this New Age stuff, old to us, is really mostly a placebo.  But then, isn’t that the New Medicine now?  And really, who cares so long as it works.  Not our fault the South End itself is really why we live longer, smile more, work less and basically just have most of the answers to life’s tough riddles.  Placebo?  You bet.

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The immigrants are coming, the immigrants are coming! An army of Central American refugees are marching toward the southern border, hordes of desperate families, women and children, with, so says the President, terrorists hiding among them. And zombies! Yes, zombies!! The zombie apocalypse is here!!!

Well, it’s maybe not quite the apocalypse. Just another Halloween day in what has become a permanent state of fear in Trump’s America. Pipe bombs are showing up on everybody’s mailbox from Robert De Niro to Joe Biden, George Soros to Obama. The conspiracy theorists are screaming ‘false flags’, meaning the Democrats are sending these to scare up votes for the midterms. Everyone is suspect. Everyone is guilty. Lock em up, lock em up! Unless they’re up for a Supreme Court position. Or they’re the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.

We’ve got to Do something! We’ve got to be on Full Alert! We need to drill off the Arctic Coast and we need to build intermediate range hypersonic nuclear weapons. We need to tear up treaties and stop trusting our untrustworhy allies. We need to build a Wall and we should definitely start constructing fallout shelters in every home. We need to listen to Fox News and we need to pack the courts with fully vetted conservative judges. We need to trust the president and believe what he says and stop fact-checking every damn statement. The times are dangerous and it’s far more important to Act than to quibble about small inconsistencies.

The immigrants are on their way. Voter fraud is rampant. Welfare cheats are everywhere. The Moslems have taken over Detroit and imposed Sharia Law. There are pederast rings in pizza parlors run by Hillary Clinton and her nefarious cohorts. George Soros is paying for that invading army of immigrants. Wake up, wake up before it’s too late! If it’s not already….

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A lot of us snowflakes out here in the New Wilderness keep asking ourselves how a guy like Trump ever got to be president. We just find it hard to believe that fellow Americans could vote for a guy who acts more like a third world dictator than a spokesman for the Land of the Free. So we figure they must be stupid. Or deplorable. I admit, I think that way most days.

But the truth is more prosaic than profound. Donald Trump is a rich guy. He thinks in terms of money. It’s the only coin of the realm, the one thing that matters, the driving force behind everything else. Money is power, not vice versa. He can no more understand some schmuck who would willingly work for a capped salary in, say, government than he could imagine squirrels building skyscrapers. Public service is not only alien to the man, it’s idiocy. Who the hell would give their lives to some agency in a vast bureaucracy where the most they could possibly make for salary is chump change in Trumpocracy? Bright people should be making millions, if not billions. Salaries are for Losers!

Trump is John Galt. He himself may never have read Atlas Shrugged, but he thinks he’s one of those self-made men, a Captain of Industry (or at least real estate) who drive the economic engines that make life at least tolerable for the Little People and make the country great. Again, if necessary. Morals, virtue, decency, forgettaboutit, a Real Player works the system to bend it to his will. Call it arrogance if you’re a wage earner or a salary man, but this is how big league capitalism works.

The folks who vote for this Atlas, well, I’m not psychologist enough to really understand. It would be easy to say they want money too, even the crumbs, and they hope those great coal mining jobs are coming back, or the textile mills will start up again, or at the very least he’ll keep immigrants from stealing all those high paying jobs. He’ll crank up the economy, he’ll keep the women in their place, he’ll cut off welfare to the cheats and the lazy, he’ll turn back the clock to Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller’s time.

Money talks and some folks listen. Maybe they think they’ll win the Lottery. They did, after all, buy the Powerball ticket.

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