The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I was minding my own business in the Pilot House Lounge and Bar — or at least tending to my beer and scribbling away in a notebook I always carry — when a guy I didn’t know parked at the table next to me with a cup of coffee. Army fatigue jacket, butch crewcut, aviator sunglasses hanging from a strap. Probably ex-CIA or retired corrections officer. He had his back to the ballgame on the bigscreen TV over the bar, apparently more interested in my antics. I tried to avoid eye contact, watched a bunt down the first base line, but he didn’t need a cue.

“Whatcha think of that drilling ban in the Arctic?” he finally asked. I looked up from my great American novel, took a slow sip of suds and studied him for motives. He didn’t offer anything obvious. Just a guy in a bar, a student of politics, no doubt.

“Okay with me,” I said non-commitedly. And waited. “You rather have nuclear?” he countered. His coffee sat untouched. I sighed. Here we go …. “Okay with me,” I said again. Cap’n. Klink nodded.

“How about those Muslim terrorists, you okay with that?” I put my pen down. Slid my notebook to the edge of the table. Took a slow sip of beer whose taste seemed metallic now. Why me, Lord, why me? We were alone except for Jerry wiping down the bar that didn’t need wiping. The batter took a called strike. I looked at my inquisitor, some bridge troll out for a holiday.

“We don’t get too many down my way on the South End,” I finally said. “So you aren’t bothered?” he sneered.

“Oh, I’m bothered,” I said, feeling the blood rising. “I’m bothered right now.” He finally sipped his coffee and smiled. Now he was getting there. Strike two to the batter on the TV. I smiled back, hoping to cut off his air supply. It did — he dropped the phony grin. “Whatcha think of us white males turned into second class citizens?” he fairly snarled. I laughed out loud this time. Jerry looked up. Behind him a baseball landed in the outfield stands. I left my beer half finished and stood up to go.

“Try not to be a victim, friend. Especially if you’re white and male. Doesn’t leave much for those terrorists to take from you.” Jerry waved so long and gave me a quizzical arched eyebrow. The pitcher put a baseball in the manager’s hands and headed for the showers. Me too.

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I read the other day that the most trusted news organization in America was … are you ready for this? … ta-da … Fox News. 29% of respondents said it was the network they trusted the most. 22 % cited CNN and the CBS/ABC/NBC lamestream media stations polled at 10% or less. If you go to partisan opinion, 58% of Republicans trusted Fox the most with 3% of Democrats. Democrats went with CNN at 32%.

Down here on the black and blue South End this shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it did for me. My folks watch Fox pretty much all day long. They think of it as news when I think of it as opinion based right wing fear mongering. Course my folks think Obama is worse than Attila the Hun, that he’s not an American, that he’s a Muslim terrorist and god only knows what else this Pretender is capable of, being a hater of the country he is trying to destroy from within that only the talking heads of the most trusted news station can prevent.

Maybe we should’ve expected this. After all, even science has become a political football. Evolution, the Big Bang, Global Climate Change, they’re all suspect to the folks who trust political opinion over political fact. A recent poll showed educated Republicans’ belief in these scientific theories diminished radically the MORE education they had. Democrats’ beliefs rose with additional education. Now, maybe I’m deluded here, but I always felt like facts mattered and science was something we Americans embraced. You got a theory on how things work, you put it to the test, run some experiments, see if there’s validity. At least that’s what I was taught in my public school system.

Apparently we don’t buy that baloney anymore. The Senator who heads up the committee on the Environmental Protection Agency walked in last week with a snowball to show how global warming was bunk. God, he said, was the only power capable of changing the weather. Says so in the Good Book. Case closed.

Now, I don’t mind a difference of opinion. Put your facts on the table and I’ll put mine there and we’ll see whose add up and whose don’t. But when I have to argue against the Word of God and you got the only correct interpretation of His point of view, well, the argument is pretty much moot, isn’t it? Might as well go debate the Taliban or Isis. And, no offense, it’s getting harder and harder for me to tell the difference between the religiously righteous, whether it’s us, them or the heathens.  Next year I expect the Fox News Network to declare themselves a church and apply for non-profit status.

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I got a lot of friends who are O.C.D., obsessive compulsive disorder folks, what we on the South End call Anal. Harsh word, anal, so for our purposes here we’ll stick with OCD. Don’t want to offend anyone, but linguistics can be a two edged knife. My pals suffering from OCD are mostly engineers, but they don’t see their symptoms as suffering. Or a disorder even. In fact, they would argue that the orderliness they demand of themselves is quite possibly the panacea for the problems the rest of us have. Course, they don’t factor in the fact that the problem I have is mostly them.

But let’s be fair. The new psychiatric diagnostic description for myself is: S.L.O.B. Seriously Lacking Obsessive Behavior. Poor toilet training as a kid, I guess. I don’t have to wash my truck every damn week. I don’t wash it every year some years. I accept that the universe is falling apart, what we call entropy down here in the South End Scientific Community. It’s just how things work. They go to hell in a handbasket and if you want to spend your life pushing rocks up a hill like Sisyphus, be my guest. They’re going to make a nice rock wall for yahoos like me when they end up down my way at the bottom.

I don’t make my bed. I don’t clean my windows. I don’t dust my shelves. I don’t edge my lawn. I don’t stack my firewood in nice rows. I don’t organize my files. I don’t follow directions. I don’t even look at the damn directions. I don’t follow a recipe or write one down either. I mean, why? The next batch of bread or homebrew or the next meal will be different, maybe better, maybe worse. C’est la vie, amigo! Routine is the killer, lists are for someone closer to death, order is for the delusional, life is chaos and the sooner you accept it, the better off you’ll be. So yeah, I’m SLOB.

I’m sure there’s a pharmacological cure for my ailment. But hey, I’ve got a pharmacological cure for lots of my ailments, why add one that might have side-effects for the others? In the final analysis, I suppose there’s a nice equilibrium between me and my OCD cronies. They draw in the lines, I draw the rest. When it works, we got a great little homeostatic community. When it doesn’t, well … we’ll find out what happens when gravity hits anti-gravity. Probably sounds like my banjo…..

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Being a card carrying South Ender, I’m a little mistrustful of fiduciary institutions. I don’t bury my savings out back in the nettle field, but I’m not real happy keeping it in the bank’s mattress either. I hear we’re coming out of the Great Recession after, oh, 7 hard years, but what I think is the folks who had enough money to play the stock market, they’re doing fine. The Fed dropped interest rates to near zero so if you happen to want to make money with the money you already got, you pretty much had to invest in the market. If you’re like me, you just wanted to play it safe after that same market dropped 40 % back in the Dark Days of the subprime mortgage collapse.

Fool me once, shame on you … fool me twice, well, I’m not happy about my options. If inflation kicks up, that money in the bank will start to dwindle. But … I learned a hard lesson about the stock market I won’t forget real soon. So when I went into my current bank, one of those Too Big To Fail conglomerates, to deposit a check awhile back, my friendly teller looked at our account and asked if I’d care to talk to one of their investment advisors. “You might want to consider something that would make more interest than your savings and checking account,” she said.

It’s wonderful to have my bankers concerned for me, it really is. Why would I ever think they were a predatory pestilence? So what if I have friends who’ve lost their homes or are even now fighting with their banks who for years have threatened them with evictions and mortgage default? Obviously they just want me to succeed. Good people, good hearts. I said, “You mean sit with one of your brokers who would suggest stocks and bonds for me to invest in?” My teller smiled beatifically. I was tuned in. Just a few keystrokes and that money sitting safely in our no interest account would electronically transfer to the Wall Street hotshots and earn us who knows how much money compounded annually over multiple years. Capitalism, what’s not to like?

“This bank,” I said, “no offense, but you folks played fast and loose back before the Recession. Bad loans, subprime mortgages, collateralized loans, hedge fund bets against your own investors. You and the other banks and the investment firms drove the economy into the dirt. And you want me to walk over and talk to your advisor? You guys are like a casino, take a cut on every hand and you win whether the rest of us do or not. Good racket, but I’ve got to pass this time. My gambling days are about over.”

No doubt I have an asterisk by my name when their computer logs me in, one that means Willing To Stay Poor. When the Fed raises interest rates — and it will before too long — we’ll see how the stock market does when financial cowards like me can make money by saving money, not gambling it. Until then it’s a bull market all right and my friendly little bank is raking it in but not loaning much out. Maybe that’s why we bought the property next door. We didn’t bury our money there, we just bought the hole to put it in.

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