The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Used to be Midlife Crises came when we were shocked to realize youth had lost its bloom and wouldn’t be coming back. Although … guys bought red sportscars and their wives dyed their grey hairs and considered plastic surgery. A new set of wheels or breasts usually didn’t work — truth was, what they mourned was the end of dreams. The corporate man was never going to backpack Europe or write the Great American Novel. And his trophy wife was not going back to college for a degree in sociology. Even if the kids were….

But I’m seeing friends who are going through a different crisis, the one where mortality is closing in and so is the realization that their life was mostly mortgaged, maybe even subprimed and now the equity seems puny and someone else may actually foreclose on it. They’re retired, time is not on their side and may never have been, and now the prospect of another hard winter is really bearing down. They think maybe a move might help. Go south, go back to their hometowns, look for a second childhood or adolescence, start over and see if the dice come up Lucky Sevens. They ask me: do you think I’m nuts to do this? And I say sure, (as if I got anything against being nuts)  but … if you’re not happy here, with what you got, with the life you made, I’d take a roll of the dice too.  Plus, it’s America.  We’re supposedly the adventurous, the brave, the pioneers.  We leave the known for the unknown.  We let optimism be our guide.  Complacency is the enemy.  Reinvent yourself!  Nothing ventured, nothing gained.  Go west, young man!  At least …. that’s what we tell ourselves.  Even if most of us have settled for a secure banality.

So maybe  it’s the winter of our discontent. Friends are dying, not a lot, but a start and our turn is in there somewhere. The community volunteerism isn’t working, the house has a leaky roof and the deck is rotted, retirement is surprisingly BORING, the walls are closing in and the trips to town are maddeningly uneventful. It’s as if the life we thought we’d built on sturdy foundations is sliding toward the bluff in incremental but steady tectonic lurches. We aren’t going to be rich and famous, money didn’t buy us love, religion was dumbed down to an embarrassingly blind faith devoid of anything resembling much more than a hope for another life in the after-world or prayers for winning the Lotto. We’re adrift, unmoored and untethered, and definitely uneasy.

I know. This is how I felt when I came here. For you pilgrims, be of cheerful heart! Sometimes the grass IS greener. Occasionally you CAN start over. Dreams DO come true in the once upon a times…. And happiness may actually be just over the next hill, the one you won’t find if you don’t go looking. Good luck!

Every year I say the same thing: next year I’ll downsize our garden, maybe grow one tomato plant and a row of peas, toss in a row of greens for salads and call it Good. And every year, as sure as the plums blossom and the nettles rise up from the dead, I haul out the old rototiller and start planting two months too early. The pea seeds are gonna rot and the lettuce won’t come up, but I’ll plant again in a couple of weeks, about when the cherries bloom. Same as last year, same as the year before, same as every year since I moved here 37 years ago.

Who’s kidding who? I can buy vegetables WAY cheaper than most of what I grow. They practically give you potatoes by the time I’m digging ours. They even taste better than my scabby ones. Corn? I did quit corn last year. But I’m thinking maybe one token row would be tasty come fall. I can grow mutant squashes here to Stanwoodopolis, but I’m not real big on squash although maybe I should reconsider seeing’s how easy they are, sort of a fruiting kudzu.

And of course it’s a battle with slugs and snails, cabbage moths and cutworms, scabs and aphids, deer and rabbits, weeds and crows. We all want to eat, I guess. When they vote me in as God, I’ll do it different. Maybe just do it like the plants, grow on sun and air and water and dirt. Us animals turned Paradise into a Jungle. Tastes good, but kind of brutal at times.

It’s a lot of work, this gardening. But then, so is shopping. Bump cars with folks in a hurry, the parking lot mayhem, self serve registers trying to find the bin number for organic cauliflower not the Monsanto cauliflower, the bag choices, the plastic store card they swipe to track your buying habits, coupons and sales gimmicks. It’s a jungle in Safeway too.

And anyway, I didn’t move to the country to watch bad TV, I hope. I don’t kid myself — I’m not growing food here so much as I’m trying to get back to some Roots. I’ll have to share it with the vermin and the predators, the pests and the worms. Like always, I’ll have to learn to live with the neighbors, two legged, four legged, no legged or practically invisible. After all, we’re all in this thing together.

This week there’s a viral video of Brad Pitt fighting Tom Cruise on top of a building, fists flying, feet kicking, punches given and punches taken. What this is is an AI creation. One you or me or the other countless viewers could never, in the past we once inhabited, tell was not real. If seeing is believing — and it probably still is — we’re in trouble. A brave new world of trouble.

Because now the virtual world will look every bit as real as the one you once knew. For awhile the gullible will take every photo, video and political interview as gospel, those are the actual people, they saw it with their own two eyes, same as they did with every clickbait ‘news’ story. But eventually it will dawn on them — and us too — that none of this is certain. Everything will be suspect. You won’t necessarily believe your own eyes. Or your ears. That song that sounds like Dylan, maybe not….

The actors and screenwriters who watched Tom and Brad duke it out on an urban highrise rooftop are just the canaries in the deep hole where reality dropped below the ground. Their jobs will be the first casualties but not the last. AI can duplicate anyone’s voice, now it can generate anyone’s doppleganger. That phone call you got from your best friend? That message on Instagram from the President? Maybe it’s not him.

If you distrusted mainstream media before, hoo boy, you’re going to love the next wave. No need to believe anything but what you want to believe. The rest is bogus B.S., fake news, propaganda, no point even trying to sort fact from fiction. For the people or the countries who want to sow misinformation, what a godsend! Welcome to the anarchy of ideas. By the way, neither Brad or Tom won the fight. AI did.

I got a buddy who claims he was the first Owner-Builder on Camano Island. The year was 1977, the same year I bought my shack. I met him 13 years later and we ended up building 3 sailboats together, one for each of us and one for his pal the building inspector who became my friend too. Ironically, I may be one of the last Owner-Builders in Island County. I don’t think my permit was ever signed off on so I may well be the last official O-B.

I guess maybe they figured the codes got too complex for us amateur housebuilders, all those R-factors for insulation and E-glass in fenestrations and X-factors for our marriages. Or maybe it was this: a permit for an Owner-Builder was next to nothing, something like $50 when I got ours. The county might’ve done the tax-factor and realized us hippies were costing them revenue. Maybe some of us built our own palaces to save the permit expense, but I would’ve paid full freight just for the right to build my own place the way I wanted. A few hundred bucks wasn’t gonna stop me.

I spoze we can still build our own Xanadu, nothing to stop us. Just have to disclose that a rank amateur threw the hammer and ran the saw, flashed the windows, shingled the roof, installed the electric and plumbing and if you’re the prospective buyer, best beware!!! The people at the county sheds told me I’d be a Total Idiot to apply for an Owner-Builder status. Boy, he read me like a book. A comic book, I’d bet.

By the time I got our permit, us Owner-Builders had to meet the same codes as any fly-by-night contractor, go through the same inspections, all the rigamarole as the Big Boyz. In other words, the government here doesn’t allow for hippie shacks or slam-bang cabins. We got to build our parents’ suburban homes. Might explain why kids just stay with their folks now — why bother building the same damn place twice?

Two days ago we emerged from an accidental banishment from civilization as you know it. Two weeks with no internet, no streaming services from Prime or Netflix, no emails, virtually cut off from the Outside World, an electronic Black Hole where no messages came in and none went out, truly a dystopian glimpse into a dark future, post-apocalyptic. Sure, it was a nightmare, a stark reminder of life without constant bombardment of newsfeeds, sports scores, crummy movies, Epstein files, kitty videos, advertisements for new pharmaceuticals and unwanted spam. Okay, a nightmare the first day or so, but … once the withdrawal symptoms settled down and the methadone of walks on the beach or time spent with a banjo in my hands supplanted the previous addiction, ya know, time slowed down, books got read, the doomscrolling stopped and life seemed a tad more, for want of a better, if cliched, word, Real.

Try to imagine life before TV. Life before radio. Life before electricity even, which we also lost for four days after the windstorm blew out phones and internet and power. No podcasts, no Instagram, no Facebook, no Netflix bingeing, none of the usual stimuli that we amuse ourselves to avoid boredom. Just the bare minimum of entertainments. Hobbies, dinners with friends, walks in the woods, playing music. I know, why go on living?

If you want to fall into dangerous nostalgia, lose the internet for a few days. It wasn’t so long ago, really, before home computers, cellphones, I-pads and a plethora of electronic digital devices crowded out our old routines and replaced them with constant clickbait. Time-saving, we all thought when these toys arrived, little imagining they would gobble our hours and days. Who has time anymore to read a book? Our concentration wouldn’t allow for much more than a paragraph or two now. The thought for most of us of having a long conversation with our spouse, well, isn’t that why they invented TV?

Most of us wouldn’t want to return to those idyllic days when we had to fill the boredom in our lives with something of our own making. Too damn hard and getting harder by the nano-second. But if the time ever arrives when you too lose your umbilical to the digital world, you might just find that it isn’t the hell you imagine. Look back at your life pre-computer. It wasn’t that hell either….

When I was just out of college — we’re talking the early ‘70’s here — I wanted to join a commune and be a hippie. I know, a little late for the show, but better late than never, I figured. And anyway, I didn’t want to work so that narrowed my options down to very few. Bum, artist or hippie — or, in my case, all of the above. So a few of us went up to an abandoned farm in Northern Wisconsin and set up shop in an old Polish farmhouse, no indoor plumbing, a couple of electric outlets, a handpump out in the yard and a falling down outhouse.

Rick and I were the two males in the encampment so we he-men took it on ourselves to construct a state of the art outhouse. We found some lumber in the barn — which we learned later, much to our embarrassment, belonged to Ernie, the son-in-law of Felix, the farmer across the road — and armed with hammer and hand saw, we set to work. Now maybe you know how to go about outhouse construction, but Rick and me didn’t have Clue One. We were like Cro-Magnons who’d heard rumor of wheels but had never seen one in action. We knew you needed walls, roof would be good, a seat with one or two holes and of course one in the ground. That last one we figured out okay, but the rest, they were real headscratchers.

Somewhere on the 2nd or 3rd day we’d nailed together some boards, hoping, I guess, inspiration would carry the day. Eddie, our other next door neighbor, who’d probably been laughing himself sick watching from across the field, finally took mercy on us wanna-be hippies and brought over his extension cord, a skilsaw and his cousin Tony who lived in Chicago but had the house down the dirt road we all lived on. Rick and I managed to do just enough to make nuisances of ourselves while Eddie and Tony slapped up our new shithouse in no time flat.

We all sat around afterwards, all us men, drinking cheap beer, warming ourselves in manly companionship and camaraderie, pleased as punch like all masculine carpenters at our ability to erect cathedrals and skyscrapers with our own two hands. So okay, civilization rests on shaky assumptions. Nevertheless, you’d have been pleased too to have an outhouse, not the woods.

When I moved to the wilds of Northern Wisconsin as a high school kid, the Big Deal was to letter in sports. They had, for a school out in the swampy boondocks, a reputation for winning teams, particularly swimming and tennis. Maybe there just wasn’t much else to do for us future paper mill workers.

A buddy of mine was a helluva swimmer. Won state championship when he was a junior, set records when he was a senior. We all figured he’d go on to collegiate swimming, probably try for a shot at the Olympics. Every morning before school, every afternoon after, he’d be in the pool. The kid was half porpoise. The future, through his swim goggles, looked bright. After graduation we both went off to seek our destinies, John to win awards, me to figure out what the hell I was going to do with my life, a 50/50 proposition. It pays, in case you hadn’t noticed, to decide on directions early then stick to it. Tiger Woods started at 3, kids nowadays probably are doing laps in the womb.

A few years after leaving for our separate colleges, I ran into John. “Still swimming?” I asked, expecting new gills and a long rundown on trophies, awards, scholarships, endorsements from nose plug sponsors.

“No,” he said matter-of-factly, “I quit it. Gave it up.”

“Seriously?” I asked, wondering if he’d been hurt maybe, but no, he said, just wanted to live a life, not just live in chlorinated pools, training for a shot at the Olympics.

The Olympics are going on this week in Rio de Janeiro, the world’s best athletes competing in beach volleyball, ping pong, target shooting, side pocket pool, mudwrestling, horseshoes, every sport imaginable. I’m betting John and I are two of the few who don’t follow the Games. He’s a professor now in Idaho, I’m still wondering what to do with my life. But … I suspect our lives are more interesting than the ones of those dedicated to some sport only the very few will ultimately succeed at. It’s easy enough to be a Loser in this specialized world without taking on the longest odds possible. John, well, he’d be surprised to hear it, but he’s always been a hero to me, a man who could walk away while he was ahead.

Rita Jansen, ever since her husband died a few years back, volunteers at the South End Senior Center’s thrift store. Beats sitting at home watching stupid talk shows, she says, and it keeps the emptiness at bay. For awhile anyway. And … it supports the Senile Center. Which offers her a whole new gang of friends to keep her company, a good bargain for the Center, a good deal for Rita.

She was working as cashier one day when I came through with my newfound used shirt and found her working a crossword in the Crab Cracker, our local Pulitzer-less bi-weekly tabloid of events, calendars, tide tables, poetry, ads and all things local. Including a crossword puzzle. ‘Whatcha got there, Rita?” I asked. “You so desperate you got to read the Cracker?”

Now, in full disclosure, let me admit here I write for the Cracker, have since issue #1, not worth maybe what the first Superman comic just sold for, but going on now something like 15 or 16 years. Rita, taking my money for the 2.75 shirt, declared how she loves the Crab Cracker and me, a hopeless wiseass, asks what in hell do you like about that rag, nothing in there but goofy humor and ….

Before I can finish she says again how she really loves the Cracker and I of course ask what in there could she possibly love and she says, “I’ll tell you what. I love that Skeeter Daddle guy.” Just so you know, once again, full disclosure, I’m that Daddle guy. But I say, hells bells, Rita, that’s crazy, he just writes weird stuff.”

“He’s funny, that’s why,” she tells me. So around we go, me making cracks about this Daddle kook and , geez, Rita defending me. When I’ve finally had enough of this hilarity, I blurt out, “Rita, I’m Skeeter Daddle.

“Oh right,” she says and hands me my change. “You wish ….” Just as the next customer rolls up to her register. So I pocketed my coins, took my used shirt and unceremoniously left. They say fame is fleeting. In my case, it’s flown the coop.

I’m standing at the bar in the South End String Band’s latest hangout after the last couple of dive bars closed. If you want to know why they closed, consider I’ve been here five minutes already, enough to write this much this far. The bartender watched me walk in, the fry cook apparently doesn’t serve liquor to people with a hat so here I stand, still scribbling in my notebook.

Ah … here comes my bartender now to take my drink order.

Oops, no, she’s going to serve the guy who followed me in three minutes after I came in, a regular, surely that justifies leaving the occasional customer to stand another few minutes while they catch up on gossip. There are four of us total in this shotgun alley of a bar. Trust me, only one of us ever leaves a tip. Oops, make that none of us today….

This particular tavern has always been a rough joint. Bikers back in the day, crack users next, meth heads for a time, now just down and outers idling away their afternoons, their evenings, their lives. If you are an aficionado of such places, a connoisseur of the hard drinking, chainsmoking denizens of these inns that the Liquor Board keeps on its permanent Watch List, you can’t really get upset with miserable service when the bartender cops an attitude. After all, the whole place comes with attitude and isn’t that why you come in the first place? You want brass and ferns, muted conversations, white wine in a stemmed glass, the hushed tones of incessant cellphones (‘Excuse me, I have to take this.’) and bartenders who enquire occasionally if you’d care for a refill or a ‘freshening’, you definitely leave town.

There’s some kind of ruckus among the three regulars down the bar but it ends as quickly as it ignited, too early for more than verbal violence anyway. My bandmates eventually arrive and after a short wait Charlene takes their orders. My glass sits empty, but just as she wheels suddenly I try to signal for another beer since she didn’t connect the empty glass with a possible refill. She strides away without turning. My kind of place, I realize, and sure, I’ll leave a tip.

Says here in the newspaper I read every morning, the one nobody believes is telling the truth, that 1 in 6 of us have taken some kind of pharmaceutical to relieve the anxiety of modern living. And here I thought TV, marijuana and alcohol were doing an adequate job.

Never hurts to supplement the relief. These are tough times and when the going gets tough, the tough turn to medication. I confess I haven’t consulted my primary physician yet about my stresses. Soon as I get a primary one, maybe I’ll see what he has on his shelf for Trump Dystopia or Faux News Phobia. Gonna take some powerful mood-altering meds to bodyslam those back down on reality’s mat. “Take two of these and call me in the morning. Avoid television news programs and get a little more exercise, Mr. Daddle. Wouldn’t hurt if you canceled those newspaper subscriptions either.”

I need a new drug, Doc. One that won’t keep me awake. One that won’t make me itch. One that won’t knock me out. A drug that doesn’t come with 50 side effects, one of them being suicidal ideation. Write me a prescription for the blues….

I tried immersing myself in work, even though it meant standing in a cold shack in a winter coat waiting for the woodstove to do its magic, usually about three hours after putting a match to the kindling. Yeah, I should’ve turned the radio to music, not news stations, but addiction is hard to kick. There must be a methadone for politics, Doc, something like that drug they give to alcoholics, the one that about kills the user if he takes another drink, give him pause next time he opens that bottle or turns the dial to BBC.

But the weather has turned Siberial and I couldn’t feel my feet half the morning. Where the hell is Global Warming when you need it? I retreated to the house here where I’m tending the fires all day and half the night. Stopped the subscription to two papers and downsized to the Seattle Times and the ever-newsless Stanwood Gazette. Helped a little, but what news filters through, from Aleppo to Trump’s latest tweet, chills me further. What I need, Doc, what I need as soon as possible, is a new drug.