The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Capitalism succeeds because it combines two primary drives in the human brain: greed and the urge NOT to work for someone else. On the South End most of us tried our hands at employment but came up a little short. Short of a work ethic, short of money, short of tolerance for a Boss. So we did what most desperate, unemployed people do. We started our own business.

Any good STARTING YOUR OWN CORPORATION FOR THE COMPLETE IDIOT book will tell you under-capitalization is the main harbinger of Failure in 90% of startups. Obviously none of us down here bought the book, probably couldn’t afford it. “It takes money to make money.” Page 2, Chapter 1. Folks just figure, I guess, they’ll buy a couple of yaks, breed em, then sell the little yaksters to a clamoring public. They don’t really factor in the yak feed, the vet bills, the yak barn and the yak fences. And they NEVER factor in the publicity campaign to create a viral fever for WANTING or NEEDING a yak. Maybe many yaks.

The other thing they don’t calculate in is how much work self-employment entails. Without overtime. Without benefits. You’re supposed to trade off working for Cap’n. Bligh in return for slaving 80 hours a week for Mr. Wonderful, yourself. Course Mr. Wonderful isn’t issuing paychecks at the beginning. He has yak bills to pay before he pays himself and the debts are growing deeper than yak droppings out in the barnyard.

So it’s little wonder us entrepreneur types, us Job Creators, us Captains of Industry, end up broke, disillusioned and depressed, our dreams shattered, our shacks mortgaged, our divorce rates sky high.

But! By god, we’re South Enders and South Enders don’t quit! Well, okay, we gave up on our capitalist fantasies of entrepreneurial riches. But we stayed true to our vow never to work for the Man again, never to be a cog in the well-greased machinery of some #@*&!!^# company, no sir! If we have to live poor, so be it. If we have to live by our wits, even if that’s a SERIOUS disadvantage, okay. And if anyone out there is looking for a very nice herd of cute yaks, I think we can help you with YOUR dream.

Don’t ask me why but many years ago I went on a fast. No solid food, only liquids. It wasn’t that I wanted to lose weight or purge toxins, just decided to see what fasting would be like, go without for a few days, experience a yogic mind over body experiment maybe. Mostly I was hungry the first couple of days but that subsided although I sure thought excessively about eating. I told myself it was good to deny myself that pleasure, actually that necessity, but I never intended to fast longer than a week, if that.

Once, earlier on a solo summer’s road trip back in 1976, I lived on a few nuts, some raisins and a handful of Triscuits. By the end of that 3 months, down from 175 or so to 135 pounds, all fat gone, I was just a skinny 6’2” 26 year old who could hike barefoot and run across gravel. Maybe I was training to be a Buddhist monk or something, but not consciously. Mostly I was testing myself but hell if I could tell you for what.

This past month I’ve been doing something similar, stopped drinking, cut way down on eating, quit the homemade bread, exercised more and dropped, so far, 27 pounds, nearly a pound a day. Maybe I just want to lose weight, maybe go on the wagon awhile, maybe just prove to myself I have the will power to push limits. I am, after all, an old man of 76, easy enough to ease into geriatric complacency, stick to old habits and routines and tell myself it’s too late to change much of anything anyway.

Besides, life is good, no need to upset the apple cart looking for an imagined bruised one. Next thing you know, I’ll be planning a pilgrimage to some Holy Land, Stanwoodopolis or Smokey Point, find myself a Zen Master, take a vow of silence, live in a cave and meditate all day long, write koans and listen to the sound of one hand clapping.

On the other hand, maybe I just wanted my pants to fit without buying a wardrobe one size larger, no need to turn this into a metaphysical quest. And sure a lot cheaper than paying prescription prices for Ozempic. Big Pharma has enough profit already.

Down at the Norse Village in Stanwoodopolis the liquor store has sat shuttered ever since the voters of Washington decided we should get government out of the business of selling alcohol. Actually most of the Norse Village is pretty much out of business. Got a Dollar Store and a laundromat, all of it anchored now by the ever resilient Uff-Da Shoppe, purveyors of fine Scandihoovien knick-knacks.

I noticed recently the Chapel of Praise has moved into the vacated liquor store. We all know it’s not the building that’s important, it’s the Spirit that moves inside. Or spirits in this case. But … ever since I moved here in 1977 the only liquor store in town was this building and this location. And now it’s a House of God, a concrete block sanctuary for folks the liquor store probably brought to their inebriated knees. With a bottle, now a hymnal.

Bernie Slivovitz, my neighbor down the highway, is a newly minted convert. He’s been pretty religious about his AA meetings at the toxic mold county-run Blue Building, formerly the Senior Center, every Thursday night and now he’s washed in what he calls the Blood of the Lamb. Sounds like a meatpacking house to me, but I don’t make light of Bernie’s newfound salvation. His drinking cost him more than a couple of jobs plus a wife and his kids still won’t talk to him, they aren’t as forgiving as Jesus. They think his sobriety, like always, is as temporary as the rain and wind stopping in November. The wagon he’s riding, driven by Jesus or Bobby Ryder, his best friend who takes him to the grocery store after the last DUI, will knock him to the ditch sooner, not later.

Maybe so, but Bernie’s doing okay so far. A little righteous for my cynical tastes, but hey, you think you found the Right Path, you hate to see your pals and family wandering, lost and forsaken. The road is narrow, Bernie’s pastor tells him. And for those who stray, get ready for the Big BarBQ in the sky.

“It does seem strange,” Bernie confides to me one day last week over a cup of black coffee and his ever present cigarette, “to attend services in the old liquor store. But ya know, the Lord moves in mysterious ways.”

Being a South Ender, I couldn’t agree more.

Haunting the near empty halls of our island library, I ran into an old friend, a retired librarian no less, both of us latter day bibliophiles in an era of Tik-Tok, short news blurbs, gaming videos, Facebook and all media non-literary. These days in the New Dark Ages feels like the few of us remaining are a small cloistered secret society, the last of the letter writers, book readers, newspaper subscribers and fact checkers — monks passing one another in the abbey, pausing for furtive conversations, careful that no one is listening.

After the usual How Ya Beens and Whatcha Been Up To Latelys, we slipped into politics, the War, the tired singsong of spectators watching a losing ballgame. Just before we threw in the towel and forfeited, she asked if I knew what kept her awake at night, what frightened her the most.

“Global warming?” I guessed, picking the first existential threat to our species that came to mind. Gee, so many options these days … we could go on until the library closed and still need to continue our list at the tavern next door, finally adding alcoholism to the dozens of societal ills that hide in our closet of anxieties.

“No,” she said, “and anyway, it’s really climate change, not global warming.

“So okay,” I asked, “what spooks you the most?”

And she said, “That Trump will interfere in the elections this fall,” whispering.

And here I was worried about the Iran War, the Android Apocalypse, global warming or however you want to label it, new Pandemics, nuclear holocaust, major droughts and wildfires, ginormous data centers coming to the South End or just about all of the above, now too big to fit in my little closet of night sweats. Not that further subversion of our short experiment in democracy isn’t alarming, but I still have hopes we’ll right the ship this Administration is busy drilling holes in its hull. Call me an optimist. Or call me an idiot.

I guess we all have our worst fears. All I know these dark days, there’s plenty to choose from.

One of my last public art commissions was for the new high school here in Washington State. This was during Covid, meaning our meetings were virtual on Zoom. My original proposal was for two 60 foot long murals, one at the entry, the other facing the main highway. Both were approved by my committee but subsequently overridden by … well, I never knew. The administration maybe. Or a school board. But as we say in the biz, back to the drawing board.

But first the project manager had to tour me through the building again, hopefully choose alternative sites which, oddly enough, weren’t plentiful. When we entered the library on the second floor, there were sidelights at the doorways and over the main entryway just below. About when we decided these might be appropriate sites, the librarian, curiosity aroused by intruders in her fiefdom, strolled over to inquire what we were up to. The project manager informed her we were considering placing artworks here in her biblioteca.

Now you might think this would be cause for some small excitement, possibly even mild interest in what sort of aesthetic enhancement … but then you obviously have not dealt with that public that is so prominently spotlighted in the nomenclature of Public Art. Our librarian, alarmed now at this invasion of her sanctuary, asked, “Why do we want this?”

Indeed. Why do we put art in our new buildings? Before I could posit a possible explanation, my project manager beat me to the punch. “Because,” she stated matter-of-factly, “we have 1% for art money and we need to spend it.”

Simple as that , no further justification, no fancy hyperbole on my part, just basic economics, skip the rest. Sure, I wanted to ask why my librarian thought books mattered, why maybe she became a librarian in the first place and not an accountant or why in god’s name did she think a philistine should be allowed to teach our kids.

Nope, I kept my mouth shut and drove home sadly, considering lopping off an ear. Art … mostly for the thick-skinned. Public art … only for us crazies.