The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

If you were to wander into half the South End’s garages or tool sheds or the artists’ studios, you’d find what a good entrepreneur would need to start a Second Hand Shop. Course most of that stuff came from the 2nd hand shops that flowered and wilted down here where capitalism came to die. Half of us layabouts and slackers were searching for a livelihood that required little or, preferably, no work. After all, we didn’t migrate here looking for jobs or careers. Telecommuting came a little late for us.

No doubt there are other backwashes, box canyons, dark sides of mountains and swamp country where dreams go to mutate, but hope springs eternal on the South End, nourished by the compost of failures lost and forgotten. If you know where to look, buried behind a nettle jungle or peeking through a blackberry barrier, you can still see a sign for DONNA’S KLASSY ANTIQUES, one for SOUTH END COLLECTIBLES, paint mostly gone and posts rotted, JERRY’S JUNQUE over a building gone to powder post beetles, collapsed into weeds and a twenty foot cedar growing through a hole in the roof.

Dirty Dan’s Trash Emporium opened last winter. Recently emigrated from the wilds of Tacoma, Dirty Dan is really Dan Vandiver, newly divorced from wife and job, a refugee from a past life same as the rest of us, figuring he can parlay his IRA’s against his alimony payments, maybe make a Go of things here in the outback of the island. Covid put a stake in the heart of that fantasy.

Timing, the philosophers will tell you, is everything. Location location, the realtors will argue, is everything. Luck, I will counter, is the joker in the deck of the best laid plans. Dan … well, Dan had three strikes against him from the start. A kindred spirit is what Dan is, no shame down here in failure. The graveyard here is filled with Dirty Dans. Welcome to the club.

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