The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

We got a lot of folks on the South End making a living the hard way, meaning, they don’t work. In the pioneer days when I first scratched out a meager existence in these played out nettle farms, people survived on piece work here, odd jobs there, some bartering, some horsetrading, the usual indolent country skills. But the new folks, they do some of that, but mostly, due to some serious drug maintenance problems, they got more pressing issues. You want to maintain a heroin addiction, you probably aren’t going to commute to McDonalds and take a job as fry cook. No, it’s easier if you just steal what the neighbors got.

This is more or less what I left the city to escape. No, not jobs or employment. Neighbors stealing from neighbors. What was really sad back then was how the poor folks stole from the poor folks. Easier, I admit, to slip down the alley and come in a nearby backdoor than to drive up to the white folks’ suburbs even though the pickings would have made it more than worth the effort. Course then you have security alarms and motion sensitive cameras and a police force that patrols those tonier neighborhoods. Me, I had Dr. Gonzo.

Dr. Gonzo was a refugee of the Humane Society, part boxer, part hound of Baskerville, a fearless brute of a dog who had been abused by its previous owner who was, judging by her reaction to men, male. If you happened to be a black male, she ratcheted up her snarls about double the decibels. And if you were a fat male, she was nearly unmanageable. Frighteningly so. But if you were a black and fat male, she wanted to hurt you. She probably wanted to kill you. My assumption is her abuser might have fit that exact description and it might explain why she ended up at the pound. Her tormentor probably realized he wasn’t going to cow her and one of them had to go.

She was well known to my neighborhood. It was also well known my house wasn’t usually locked. Not with Dr. Gonzo inside. You wanted to walk in, maybe see if my TV was worth stealing, have at it and good luck. Men knocked on my door and I’d say, kicking a snarling growling Gonzo back behind me, come on in, why dontcha? “Naw man, let’s talk on the porch here,” they invariably replied. And invariably they would want to know if I’d consider selling Gonzo to them. “Maybe you’d like to get to know her better,” I’d suggest, opening the door a crack to let them see Gonzo trying to get her snapping jaws through and I’d say it doesn’t look as if she likes you, man. “How about you breed her, sell me the pups?” And I’d shake my head sadly, naw man, she’s been spayed.

I didn’t have much trouble in that high crime neighborhood even with the 10 units next door that were nothing but a breeding ground for drugs, gunrunning, sex trafficking and fencing. Still, it seemed, I don’t know, a corrosive atmosphere, a breeding ground for cynicism, a hard place to practice peaceful meditation. For both Gonzo and me. So we packed it in, bought a 1910 shack up here on the South End and made a new start, both of us. She died some years back, broke my heart. But at least she never lived so long she had to see the ghetto boys living next door once again.

Ben Whitaker up at Mabana Financial Services calls me up every 6 months or so to inquire over beers at the watering hole next to his office if I would like to consider a few opportune investments he’s uncovered. I tell him if I’d have put my money on the micro-beer company, the one we usually buy their beer at our usual tavern, I’d be set for an easy retirement.

“Well, that right there is what I’m talking about,” he told me.

“What?” I ask, “you mean I missed the boat on an early retirement?”

“Naw,” Ben says, “you missed another golden opportunity. But give me a few minutes — I’ll even buy the beers — and I’ll set you on a path to fiscal sanity.”

Ben talks like this, just can’t help himself, and maybe his clients don’t get the implication that he’s just diagnosed them with fiscal insanity. Or in this case, me. But I like Ben and I like even more that he usually buys the beers, probably writes our tab off as a business expense, no doubt it’s legitimate, and I have noticed he always asks for a receipt. “Is the tip a write-off too?” I asked one time and got his stock answer: “everything’s a business expense in this line of work.” I can only imagine what the Big Boyz, the corporations and their hired guns the accountants and tax lawyers, what they declare as business write-offs, maybe why I pay more than some of them.

So after Ben orders our IPA’s, ever the optimist that the alcohol will soften me up for his newest sales pitch, he leans across our corner table and practically whispers, “AI.” He says, “Artificial Intelligence can make you rich. Guaranteed. Stock market is on fire, Nasdaq’s going through the roof, all of it driven by AI. Jump in Skeeter, the sky’s the limit. You’ll hate yourself if you sit on the sidelines.”

Ben had a couple of hot prospects, so he claimed, said I’d be on Easy Street no time flat, very little risk. “Be a pain to change addresses, Ben. Stationary, business cards, drivers license …”

“Go ahead and laugh, but you’ll be missing the chance of a lifetime.”

“My lifetime is almost run out, Ben. More money isn’t going to give me more years. I’ve got a nice little nest egg, no debts, Social Security, Medicare. I might be on Easy Street already, Ben. Why would I gamble that on the bet I could make it even easier?”

Ben’s heard this every pow-wow for years but it’s hard for him to imagine someone who wouldn’t want More, it’s practically un-American to him. At least un-patriotic. When we finish our 2nd round of beers I offer to pick up the check.

“Naw,” he says with a laugh, “this one’s on the IRS.”

So I’m sitting in the South End Clinic filling out paperwork they lost the last and only visit many years ago … when a young guy comes in with what he tells the receptionist is a very bad cut on his hand from work. His hand is wrapped in a dirty handkerchief held in place with duct tape. The receptionist explained they don’t do that kind of emergency — he’d need to drive himself to the next clinic down the road in Stanwoodopolis. About 10 to 15 miles.

But wait … did he have insurance, she asks. He did, but then he was told the clinic about two pints of hemoglobin away wouldn’t accept the insurance he had. Could he drive 15 to 20 miles further?

Healthcare, at least from my seat in the waiting room, seemed hazardous to this guy’s health, if he even makes it the 40 mile drive before blacking out at the wheel. No one asked him how bad the cut was, whether fingers were missing, if a transfusion was necessary. I know it’s not an emergency room, but it is, supposedly, a part of the health care system.

My brother, back in our days together in college, wanted to be a doctor … until the night he did a drunken back flip and hit the radiator in his dorm room with his head. His roommate ran him to the University ER where he sat for a couple of hours with other patients bleeding and vomiting and oozing fluids. By the time he got stitched up he had changed his major from Pre-Med to Don’t Know. Probably good to learn he was squeamish around pain and blood before he interned.

Sitting my turn at the South End Clinic, I know how he felt. Trouble was, I was a patient. On the South End we’ve always relied more on Self-Reliance than health insurance. But sadly, the time comes to all of us when we need outside help. Course, chances are good they’ll tell you to go further on up the road. Keep the gas tank full is what I’d suggest. And carry a tourniquet.

Art Center Hubbub

One of my buddies asked me, after about our 2nd pint, why Stanwoodopolis wanted to build an Art Center. Hadn’t we artists done enough damage already? Mostly he was joking, tweaking me as usual, but on some level he really did wonder why we would spend 13 million dollars on a building for art. I’m sure he’s not alone. There are plenty of folks who not only could live without art in their lives, they’d prefer it. Ralph is one of these. He just doesn’t need it. His life, if you asked him, is full and I’d be the last guy to suggest he could make it fuller. Especially after 2 IPA’s on empty stomachs.

Ralph isn’t the first — and won’t be the last — person to ask why we want to build an Art Center in Stanwoodopolis or anywhere else. I make my living doing public art, parking large glass murals in new public architecture. You bet I get angry taxpayers asking why their hard-earned money should be spent on art. And so, over the years, at countless dedications, I’ve had to justify adding art to the architecture the Ralphs think are just fine without extra flourishes. For a new elementary school in Kent in front of hundreds of kids and their teachers, I gave this explanation:

People ask me all the time why do we put art in schools anyway? Why do we spend money on pretty little do-dads and frills when we could buy more books or hire more teachers? It’s a good question. When I first met with the art committee for Panther Lake here in Kent, we were in the old school. It was falling apart and pretty ugly. But now you got a new school. Which is drop dead gorgeous. Beautiful architecture, state of the art teaching equipment, books and computers. I’d be willing to bet you buckaroos learn better in this school than the old school.

But the last thing we add to all this is ART. Some folks don’t value art very much, but I’ll tell you what, art is all about a couple of things. One, it hopefully makes your school a more interesting and beautiful place. And if it’s good art, it makes you look at it and wonder about it. It makes you realize there are other ways of seeing the school, of seeing the world.

I hope when you look at the art, it makes you want to wonder what it is, what it means, what maybe the artist meant. Good art makes you think about it. It isn’t just pretty, it’s different and it asks you to examine it.

I called the glass murals we put in Panther Lake the Metamorphosis Series. You know, like tadpoles turning into frogs, or caterpillars making cocoons then coming out as butterflies. They both change into something totally different. It’s a little miracle, really. I built a pond where I live just so I could have a place for the frogs to lay eggs and hatch into tadpoles and then grow into adult frogs. Amazing.

But the REAL DEAL is that you guys are the tadpoles. You guys are going to change as you learn and grow. Who knows what you’ll be, right? I didn’t know I’d learn to be an artist. But I did. What we want for all of you is to understand that life is WIDE OPEN. You can be whatever you want. We want you to see this school and your life as full of opportunities and options. We want you to explore and be curious. What we want you to SEE, what we want you to understand, is that the one real art is making YOUR own life. You get to create yourself. But to do that you have to see what possibilities there are out there. You have to develop your IMAGINATIONS and your CREATIVITY.

And that’s why we put art in, to give you some small idea of what your imagination can do. Not so you can become artists like me necessarily, but so you’ll bring art and imagination to WHATEVER you want to do. So you’ll make everything you do more interesting, more unique, more YOU. And if you can do that, I guarantee, you’ll turn into a butterfly and you’ll learn how to fly and that’s really why we put art in schools and libraries and all the other public buildings we can, not just for you kids, but for us big kids. We all need to grow wings.

Well, maybe if Ralph and I had ordered another round … I might have laid this on him. But we called it a night before I could get up on that pulpit. Sure, we might have flown home on new wings but instead we just drove our beat up rigs back home, saved beating our wings.

I was in the South End Trader Jimbo’s the other day looking for those hard-to-get-down-here items in their Land O’Yuppie aisles. Somehow I got waylaid by the organic pine nuts. Organic? Are we growing pine trees in nitrate infused woods now? Further down the aisle I found gluten free kettle corn trumpeting stuff that never had gluten in the first place. Not only that, they were guaranteed nut-free. The products, not Trader Jimbo. When I turned the corner, drove past the chutneys and the soft cheeses, I discovered Aisle 6, the no preservative, no additive, no GMO, no growth hormone, no antibiotic, no gluten, no soy, no MSG, no transfat, no caged animal row. About middle of the aisle there were three cans in a pyramid. Cave water. 12 ounces for $10.95. I took all three. Just so the row would be immaculate for a moment.

A friend of mine has a futon mattress that contains organic cotton. Softer maybe, like his head. Course I grew up with virgin wool — as if I care what the sheep do at night. These are dangerous times. Who knows what’s in those nettles I’ve been brewing beer with? They don’t come with an organic certification and what with acid rain precipitating out from Chinese pollution, I may be toxifying myself inadvertendly. My entire garden may well be a seeping cesspool of multi-syllabic compounds from the prevailing winds of Seattle and Gomorrah or contaminated from the tailings and runoffs of the South End industrial era. Natural? That’s no longer a designation to give anyone peace of mind. No government certification for natural, pal.

They tell me our water has elevated levels of natural arsenic. The neighbors on water systems filtrate for that and other minerals. We’re on our own well. Which means just that, we’re on our own. Forget worrying about contaminated nettles in my homebrew. The water’s got poison in it.

So where do you go to find the purity we so desperately seek? Where do you retreat to escape the toxic leaching of modern society? And where can a yahoo go to avoid the steady drip drip drip of new warnings, new labels, new GMO salmon species, new BMO milk products, new irradiated foods, new afflictions? The South End??? Sorry, we got the bio-hazard tape across the road now. No wonder people are signing up for the Mars mission. Even if it is one way only.