The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Down here in the start-up labs of the South End we’ve been printing DNA. Got ourselves some sterile vats full of 4 major amino acid groups, hooked em up to a 3-D printer, ran a USB port to a laptop and went to work experimenting with interesting combinations. Make our own stem cells with unusual variations of chromosomes, another year or two, you’ll see Wal-Mart offering kits for the kids. Make your own sibling! Puppy in a test tube! Fun for the whole family!

Course we’re still working out the bugs, literally sometimes. South Endomex Technologies made a fast mutating paramecium that ran rampant in the dumpster behind their lab a couple months ago. Two or three cats lost more than their allotted 9 lives before Billy Brandon, the night manager, noticed clumps of matted fur behind the building and alerted Frank, South Endomex’s project manager next morning. “Looked like they’d been turned inside out and twisted,” he whispered before giving notice.

Kind of a wake-up call, I guess. They double bag unwanted recombinants now, no point taking unnecessary chances. Not that anyone’s very worried. I mean, what are the odds of escaped life forms surviving in the hostile environment of the nettled South End? Humans barely eke out an existence, what chance does an unstable pile of amino acids have?

Still, always good to err on the side of caution even if the government hasn’t gotten around to clamping down on the profit motive with overly burdensome regulations.     Yet….     Which only makes us all that more inventive. Time, after all, is not on our side. But judging by the influx of venture capital, the potential is nearly unlimited. Forget Silicon Valley. This here is the Next Big Thing. This is the new Garden of Eden, a chance to get it right this time. You want an apple, Adam? Tart or sweet? Red or yellow? With or without seeds? Just punch a program, Big Fella, no need to disobey orders from On High. But … maybe keep an eye out for any odd looking worms. Still got some flies in the ointment….

My old construction partner, boat building mentor and former roommate nearly 50 years ago is sailing up today from Seattle and Gomorrah to pick me up for a second run into the San Juans, that snooty archipelago that refuses Camano entry into its ritzy island club. Our last adventure ended in a flipped sailboat, my prized Pelican, the S.S. Pterodactyl, off the shores of Lummi Island. We did not drown, but we were more than slightly embarrassed to be rescued by the Coast Guard and other boaters, after which we hightailed it to solid ground near Bellingham.

Undeterred, bent but not broken in spirit, a great deal older and probably no wiser, we’re off again in his 15 foot sailboat, cramped quarters but we’re not Mark Zukerberg who needs 3 mega-yachts to boost his puny ego. No, we have what we need. And hopefully calm seas, a steady wind at our backs and stars to steer us by. Cap’n. Joe wants to cruise for two weeks. Me, I have one week before I have to return to shore duty.

Enjoy some time off yourselves from these Daddle diatribes. We both deserve the respite.

Smith Blar

I guess since all my cronies are throwing in the towel and taking retirement on schedule, it’s only reasonable I’ve been getting calls from the Mabana Financial Services asking if I’d like to come on down to their lavish offices overlooking the Port of Mabana and discuss fiscal strategies for my upcoming Golden Years. Ho ho, would I ever? Course, like I tell Ben, the head honcho down at MFS, it’s a little like saddling up the horse that ske-daddled when I left the barn door open back in my earning years. Earning years. Old Ben loves expressions like that.

I said I’d talk to him, but only over beers down at the newly opened Bar 282, named after our zip code’s last three numbers, probably some numerology factoid that becomes apparent deep in the cups. Better, I suppose, than 666, what the Little Church in the Ravine refers to it as. So if Benjamin and I are going to discuss finances, what better place? At least that’s what I told him when he asked, why there?

We got through the first two schooners okay, managed to navigate around my Social Security numbers which, admittedly, were poor, a reflection of my life as a fiddling grasshopper while my neighbors labored as productive ants. My mistake, at least from the vantage point of an old grasshopper, but I wouldn’t change anything even if I had a time machine. Ben commiserated the way a funeral director would offer comfort to the bereaved, not totally heart-felt, but what his job calls for. What’s he gonna say, you deserve poverty, Skeeter? Instead he mentioned annuities, aggressive equities, municipal bonds and a dozen other financial instruments. Instruments. I kid you not, that’s what he called them. Like something in a fiscal orchestra and he, I guess, was the maestro.

By the 3rd beer we were both convinced it was hopeless. I wasn’t going to catch up to Warren Buffet, not in the remaining years, not if I worked until I was 300 years old. “Ben,” I said, “I appreciate you trying to help. But you can’t prime a pump if you don’t have water.” Ben shook his head wearily. “You change your mind, Skeeter, drop by and we’ll strategize some more.” I haven’t been in since, but I might go for another beer with him. Maybe some of that high rolling fiscal firepower will rub off. That, or I could trade a few of my banjos for a couple of his instruments.

Judge Jack was kicking himself. Down at the South End Senior Center a sculpture they’d thought had been donated 12 years ago was now in Limbo. The donator’s brother had seen it there, seen it for the first time, and since they had owned it when they ran their restaurant into a backwash bankruptcy, he now wanted it back. The Center had grown fond of the carved basswood dolphin over the years and they were more than reluctant to give it back. Statue of limitations, apparently….

What to do, what to do??? Turn it over to an arbitrator, of course, some poor sap who would willingly step into the vise. Who you gonna call? Judge Jack. And Jack had said naively, sure, he’d mediate. Now he regretted it. No King Solomon decision here, he soon learned to his dismay. Someone was going to be sorely disappointed and he would take the fall, maybe lose a friend. “Let em flip a coin,” Two Toke Tom advised. “The Gods of Fate, my friend. Better than the judicial system, you ask me.” Two Toke, naturally, thought a septic system was superior to the judicial, having been harassed for most of his so-called adult life over recreational preferences and underground agriculture. Two Toke was legendary for a life of minor cannabis crime and he was a man who held a grudge.

Judge Jack sipped his latte thoughtfully. Tom was usually in geosynchronous orbit a bit too far out to take seriously, but he had a point. Flipping a coin might be the way to go. Nobody right, nobody wrong, no judge hung on his own petard. Just bad luck calling that head over tails. Way of the world. Keep the dolphin, lose the dolphin. Jeez, who cares when the Middle East is collapsing into sectarian war? Just art, after all and Judge Jack knew better than most that art in corporate America was worth about what bitcoins were on the South End. And sinking fast.

Flip a coin and walk away. “How you gonna rule, Judge?” Tom smirked over his coffee. Jack shook his head sadly, shoved his mug into the center of the table. “Refill?” Brenda asked, holding the coffee pot, working the tables. Jack said mournfully, “Hell if I know, Brenda. Come back in five minutes. I got to give it more thought.”

Tom fairly howled. He slapped the table. “Hit me again, Brenda.”

My shack has ghosts. Poltergeists. Gremlins. Whatever you care to call the little demons that are turning my lights off intermittently, then turning them back on. I don’t really believe in phantasms, but I know my lights are flickering off, then going off completely, then later suddenly snapping back to life. It’s disconcerting, I do know that.

I pulled the breakers outside, replaced them and for awhile, they seemed to work. But only for a day or so. Now the lights are turning themselves on and off again. It’s driving me batty. Yesterday I tore into the walls, jerking out switches and outlets, looking for a loose wire, a faulty switch, a connector come undone. So far nothing…. Now more lights are turning themselves off, turning themselves on. I was convinced there was a logical explanation, but more and more I’m starting to wonder.

I wake up every day to strange stories in the news. Sexual harassment, Russian probes, Senatorial races with a bigot and child predator, lies and faux news, it never ends, just drives me crazy. The nation seems stuck in a reality meltdown where paranoia reigns and obvious lies are uttered without embarrassment. I need meds. Lithium, valium, anti-psychotics, whatever it takes to reduce the brain-fever. The truth is flickering on and off. The news is driving me insane. Faux news, real news, on and off, on and off, day after day.

Today the lights in the house went off. I checked the fuse box and nothing was amiss. No breakers were OFF, but the power was. To half the room I’m in right now. Half on, half off. I’m sure it has a logical explanation. I’m sure an electrician could explain this phenomenon in a nano-second. The truth is out there somewhere. But somewhere isn’t here.

I shut off the power entirely to the shack finally. I turn it on when I’m down there working, but I’m afraid to keep it on when I leave the building, something might spark and the place will go up in flames. I should probably do that with the news, just turn it off, but I’m afraid the country will go up in smoke if I don’t pay attention. Am I crazy? Are we all going crazy? Maybe I need to turn off all the lights once and for all. Before they turn themselves off. Except that seems illogical. Doesn’t it??????????