The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

My pal Joey who’s been laid off now, oh, about 15 years ever since the recession hit back in Ought Eight, has turned from cynical to bitter. Used to be he hated his employer for poor wages and lousy benefits, now he hates the government for no wages, no benefits and no jobs, not even ones he hates. He spends a lot of his day e-mailing buddies, myself unfortunately included, screeds against the President and Congress (mostly the Democratic side, what he calls socialists and traitors and worse) rather than look for work.

I always wonder why he doesn’t spend his bile on Wall Street and the banks who sent the economy on a wild ride of greed, which finally plummeted to terra firma, crashed and burned and pulled the economy into the smoldering crater with them, but I guess you got to blame somebody.

“Joey,” I say. “Now that you’re a dyed-in-the-wool Republican, how come you don’t become a Job Creator? Be the capitalist you dreamed of being? Start a bizness?” Joey looks at me with pity and shakes his head in disgust. “You and this damn government, Skeeter. You’ve set up regulations and roadblocks. Too many taxes. How’s a Little Guy like me gonna get off the ground? It’s like running a race carrying a 50 pound concrete block. Guaranteed to fail.”

“Too small to succeed, that it?” I can’t help saying. “They all started out small, Joey.”

Joey’s exhausted a long stretch of unemployment compensation. He’s pulling 401-K retirement money too early to live on and that ticks him off, all those penalties. Michelle, his wife, works part time at Jolene’s Beauty Salon, but even with tips, she’s barely clearing minimum wage. Course, Joey’s against raising minimum wage because if he ever did start being a Job Creator, that 50 pound block holding him back would be 60 pounds.

Joey’s never going to work again everybody but Joey knows. He’s retired at 55, another casualty of the Recession, and for his remaining years he can aim his wrath at the illegal immigrants who take the jobs he might have wanted, at the government which ended his unemployment compensation with only two extensions, at the IRS for taxing his 401-K withdrawals, at his old employer for sending jobs overseas, at the people on welfare who’d rather take a handout than look for work, at the women who’ve joined the labor market….

The American Dream withered on the vine for Joey and his fellow victims. He doesn’t have Clue One why it all went wrong, but he’s angry and he’s scared. I don’t know how many Joeys are out there, but too many, that’s for sure. The party’s over for them. Now all they got is the Trump Party and that one doesn’t look like much fun, not for Joey and certainly not for the rest of us. Even on the South End, anger is contagious.

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Back when I first came to Seattle and Gomorrah, I had a buddy who lived in a dive apartment that was going to be sold and remodeled. They were tossing the old 1940’s era refrigerators the junkies and alcoholics had used for decades and my pal asked me if I wanted to go in with him on the capitalist venture of hauling, cleaning and selling these vintage frigidaires for fun and profit. Not being employed and in full possession of a half ton Chevy pickup, I said sure. And by that afternoon we owned 60 reefers of various stages of mold and decomposition.

I had access to a garage none of my six roommates used, so we stored them there after a couple days lugging them down 2 or 3 flights of stairs near downtown, then hauling them up to the university district where I rented a room in a house full of students. Each one got cleaned, disinfected and plugged in to see if it still worked. They all did. Tough units, those old Kelvinators and Frigidaires. Not particularly efficient, but they’d run until the next century if you asked them to. All we asked them to was run for the 30 days we offered as a ‘quality assurance guarantee’. If we’d been savvier biznessmen, we would’ve offered a 2 year service plan like Sears. Course, Sears is in about the same shape today as some of those refrigerators were back then.

Our ‘advertising’ campaign was simple in those pre-Craigslist times — we put flyers on telephone poles.
$30 30 DAY GUARANTEE FREE DELIVERY CALL THIS #
The Freon filled appliances sold like hotcakes, mostly to little bistros and coffee shops and student renters and our friends. I kept one for my room after my roommates started stealing my beer and food. Then I locked my room. I guess they were young communists, share and share alike, mine is theirs. They weren’t bad people, but I learned why communism doesn’t work unless the others do and you don’t.

By the end of a month we’d sold every last unit. We made about $800 dollars each, more than I made the entire previous year, maybe two. My buddy said maybe we should’ve grabbed the stoves too, but by then it was too late and our experimental entrepreneurism came to an abrupt end when demand outstripped product. Probably lucky for both us Appliance Kings.

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I got an e-mail awhile back from an old girlfriend from my high school daze.  How she got hold of me is no mystery since it’s how a lot of folks get in touch these days now that we’re all on the great data bank of the internet.  She probably could’ve gotten my driving history, my credit rankings, my employment information, my political affiliations and hopefully my marital status with a few clicks of a keyboard.  No accidents, no tickets, no job, no credit rating, no kids, no tea party memberships.   One wife.  Happily married.  Very happily.

We had a nice and cordial correspondence in which, in a few paragraphs, we filled in the years since we held hands in my folks’ Buick and smooched in the woods near our place before I had to trundle off to my job on the second shift at the Coca-Cola Bottling plant in Northern Wisconsin.  She would soon be off to college while I would be two more years getting out of my hellhole high school.  She was really my first love, a platonic affair that was something we both could look back on and smile at, if not laugh out loud for how sappily sweet and innocent we were.  Outside the Amish community, those relationships are as unlikely now as a horse drawn carriage.

I don’t think she had any interest in one of those Facebook affairs or anything like that.  You know:  look up an old flame and see what they’re doing now that maybe we’re lonesome or divorced and the kids have moved on and our parents have died.   Send a few photos to see if we’ve grown a bad paunch or lost our teeth or maybe our smiles or gone to seed and old age.  If not, maybe make a date for dinner or drinks, fall in the sack, fall in love, give that 45 year hiatus a kickstart and see if our adolescent judgement was still okay.

Happens everyday on the internet.  Nothing to smirk about either, you ask me.  Love is a commodity in short supply these days and I wish folks the best at finding it, whether it’s a seedy bar or an e-mail to that kid they dated back in the good old days who went off with old so-and-so and found out 20 years later it was a bad marriage.
But it is odd to have the distant past come around the corner at you.  A sort of ‘what if?’ moment.  Not just what if for some imagined life with someone you knew when you were sweet 16 and never been kissed, but all the forks in the road, all the imagined possibilities one choice made unfeasible for all the others.  I am not immune to such flights of fantasy, having gone back to find a love thought lost, hoping beyond reason she would not be married, would not have kids, would not have a life real enough to make any fantasies of mine dissolve like a cold fog in a summer sun.  No, if anyone understands the impulse to go back, to take the fork not taken, you bet it’s me.  It is a rare thing to backtrack, to see the mistake and go back for a possibly well-deserved rejection, then to have it fall the way your mind’s eye imagined it, corny and uncynical, an old Hollywood love story nobody could sell today.

I’m fairly certain my childhood squeeze isn’t looking for anything more than some spark of nostalgia, a small suspended friendship from across the gulf of years, a gentle reminder that we parted friends, no hard feelings either, and went off to live lives totally apart and different from the other’s.  She does, after all, have a husband, kids, grandkids, a complete life in a small town near where she was born.  Teaches Sunday School at her church, goes to her kids’ weddings, just retired from her job even though her husband still has a year or two.  She’s not looking for a romance novel here.  Although the missuz may not be as certain.  And I’m not looking for a bodice to rip.  Unless it’s the missuz’s….

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My old man is turning 98 this month and we’re moving him from his house to an independent living apartment. Okay, I know, not much of a birthday present but here I am, back in Wisconsin to help my brother haul furniture and pack dishes, sell a car and sort through a lifetime of accumulation. We had hoped to call a thrift store and have them pick up what wouldn’t fit in his new apartment but Covid killed that plan.

Plan B is to box a few decades and deliver who knows how many years to Goodwill or St. Vinnie’s. Assuming they’ll even take donations during these plague times. If not, we’ll haul it to the nearest landfill.

If you’ve never sorted through the lives of your parents, you maybe can’t imagine the endless possibilities of nostalgia, sorrows, regrets and memories laying in wait among the claptrap and the photographs, the letters and the bad art. None of us three boys want much of anything the folks accrued over nearly a century. Which says more about what children of the Great Depression spent money on than it does the difference in theirs and their kids’ tastes.

Our folks weren’t collectors of art or antiques or even their own parents’ stuff. They bought cheap or not at all, making it easy to discard at this juncture. But … the family photographs, old albums of aunts and uncles, great grandparents and family vacations, who takes those? Our little brother, the only one of us with kids, doesn’t want them. I’ll take a few but when I bite the big bullet, they’ll go to the burn pile and another family history ends up the way most do, letters lost, names forgotten, memories fading like the photo chemicals in the albums, sad but true for most of us. This trip will be a lesson in accepting that we’re not famous people, we better just live our lives and be thankful for that.

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There’s nothing like reading about the future in the morning paper to wake you right up to Full Alert. This morning, buried among the scintillating stories of the Prince of England’s funeral and more mass murders, was the article about the company here in Washington state that was deploying its mobile lasers to prowl the agricultural fields at speeds up to 5 mph zapping weeds. I know what you’re thinking, probably those Jews in outer space that start forest fires in California, but let’s leave that for the Qanon folks to chew on when they get tired of wondering how the Donald never quite managed to penetrate the Deep State and the assault on the Capitol ended with him retreating to a mansion in Mar-a-Lago.

Part of the article concerned the plight of the poor strawberry pickers and the field workers whose low paying jobs might disappear when Artificial Intelligence Machines could pick apples or harvest cucumbers. Hello? I guess the writer thought maybe we should go back to the happy days of slavery and resume picking cotton by hand. The laser weeders would eliminate the need for pesticides, but hey, maybe that would cut down on oncology doctors. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not excited about a future of drones taking away good paying factory jobs or self-driving vehicles eliminating taxi drivers and Uber folks.

Now I know lasers don’t kill, people kill. And I suspect drones will be given all the protection the NRA can muster for their 2nd amendment rights to keep and bear arms. And if one of the weeding machines runs amok, well, that’s the price we pay for freedom. Just another unfortunate incident of malfunctioning technology, frequent but nothing that should be considered grave enough to ban automatic lasers in our suburbs when dandelions are taking over the fescue.

I was on the campus of the Univ. of Wisconsin in Madison, my old alma mater, down near the cafeteria I used to work at for 3 years, watching these little R2-D2’s at the intersection waiting for the students who had called in their pizza orders to come and pick them up. Pizza delivery folks must be weeping. But at least the boxy white drones weren’t armed with lasers. No tip, buddy? Try a small burst from the rear laser then, maybe you’ll remember next time. And have a nice day, kid.

My suggestion? Carry gratuities at all times. You don’t want to piss off a laser armed drone when they all start to ‘carry’.

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