The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

One of our newspapers gives the Covid stats county by county each and every day. For a long time our county, Island County, had 11 deaths. A few weeks ago it surged to 12. Uh-oh, we thought, the spike has finally hit, time to hunker down even more, avoid all outside human contact, wear a mask even around each other. But then, miraculously, a few days later the number of deaths returned to 11. This week the number suddenly shot up to 13, a percentage rise that looked like Brazil or what’s about to hit Sturgis, South Dakota after the Harley Rally. We started locking the doors, bolting windows and avoiding each other.

The other day I noticed the death toll had reverted back to 11. You can imagine the toll this roller coaster ride is taking on our mental equilibrium, which, in my case at least, was already suffering plague vertigo. What I suspect, and I’m sure my conspiracy theorist cronies will agree wholeheartedly, is that the dead are rising up, returning to life and possibly being secreted away to some Deep State laboratory for further study or horrible experimentation. Or both!! That, or the Covid virus is something that escaped from government labs working on a plague that makes zombies of its victims, probably Republican zombies if my guess is correct.

That’s right, the Undead are going to vote! Mail in, walk in, whatever it takes. And worse, they’re no doubt among us now, infecting the population, killing them then bringing them back to life. Or some semblance of life. Republicanism is the new Zombie-ism. If you don’t believe it, check Qanon for proof. It’s all there, the quotes from doctors at the Z Lab, statistics of the death toll’s shrinking totals, the irrefutable studies by bots in the think tanks, all of it. Don’t just believe me, believe the Q!

The GOP convention is ongoing now. The President promises huuge surprises. I hate to give you a spoiler alert, but … no one will die very long of Covid under his watch. He has the Lazarus Cure, far better than any vaccine that would probably cause autism or worse. The newly undead will be forever grateful as should we. No doubt he’ll have their vote. Undertakers, maybe not.

Suppose you woke up one fine morning and discovered the place where you live was actually an insane asylum. You could tell yourself all these fellow inmates were the crazy ones, all those nutjobs raving half the night, even the caretakers with their whacky conspiracy theories, they were the mental defectives, they were the stark raving mad. Not you. No, not you.

The world is a slippery place, a quicksilver concept of shifting realities, one day this the next day that. Some of us put our faith in religion, some in science, some just go with some kind of viral flow that seeps across the internet like a brain eating plague. People believe what they want to believe these days. Virtual reality is perfect for the folks who feel beleaguered by the old reality. Dreary jobs, dead end careers, bad marriages, deferred dreams, kids who didn’t turn out well, who knows? The world wasn’t what they’d hoped for, wasn’t what their leaders told them it would be, wasn’t fun, wasn’t easy, wasn’t much of anything the ads promised. All lies, all broken promises, all just bullshit.

The government, the corporations, the politicians, even the movie actors, phony phony phony. Who ya gonna call? Who ya gonna trust? Who ya gonna believe anymore? Somebody’s to blame, right? Somebody must be winning while you’re losing, right? Somebody’s got the power, the money, the secrets. The game is rigged, you know that at least. Maybe the Masons, maybe those Rosicrucions, maybe the Jews, maybe Hollywood, maybe the welfare queens, maybe the immigrants, maybe the Democrats, maybe the high tech CEO’s, maybe, just maybe, all of them. There’s a conspiracy going on. To keep you down, to keep you pacified, to keep you from finding out what is really what. Q knows. Q anon has the news. The President, that king of conspiracy theorists, tells you they’re good Americans. But he doesn’t, wink wink, nod nod, know very much about them.

Suppose one fine morning you wake up and discover the insane have taken over the asylum. Find out YOU were the enemy. And all along you thought you were the sane one. Maybe, you think, there actually was a conspiracy. The loonies were planning how to do this all along. One state senator at a time. One Representative. A Governor here, a Supreme Court judge there. The President himself. One fine morning you wake up and everything has changed. Everything. And you might find yourself asking who really is the insane one.

The ladies at Jolene’s Gift and Boutique were eating their bag lunches in a corner of the back storeroom they’d converted into a break room. Microwave, coffee maker, mini-fridge and a small TV hooked up to a crummy antenna they’d mounted on the back of the building and run a coaxial hookup thru a window. Since their usual soap opera wasn’t on for another 5 minutes they were watching CNN’s coverage of Trump’s tax returns.

“You imagine losing 900 million dollars?” Alice said, munching her cucumber sandwich. “How many lifetimes would it take to make that much?” Shelly laughed, put her iced tea down and pretended to do the math. “Oh, too many if you mean ours? Maybe with plenty of reincarnations.”

From behind her cup of coffee Katie volunteered, “My Jim could lose that much at the casino in a year too if he had it when he walked in. Heck, he may have lost nearly that already. I sure don’t see a paycheck these days. Goes to the tribe.”

“White man’s guilt,” Alice observed with a smirk.

“Maybe he can write it off as a loss,” Shelly suggested. “Isn’t that what Donald did, gamble and lose?”

“Or a charitable donation to the Indians,” Alice tossed in. A commercial for the Washington Lottery came on with improbable timing, its snappy slogan appearing at the end: You cannot win if you do not play. Katie groaned. “Jim should have that tattooed on his fat ass.”

“More like you cannot lose if you do not play,” Shelly suggested, taking one final gulp of her cold coffee and considered pouring a fresh cup, then decided her stomach was already upset.

“You suppose he really is rich?” Katie asked aloud.

“Jim, you mean?” Alice asked and laughed.

“The rich don’t pay taxes,” Katie muttered, “so I guess he must be rich.”

“And the best part?” Shelly moaned, “ it’s all perfectly legal.”

“He claims he’s the only one who can change the laws because he knows how to use them so brilliantly. Brilliantly, he said,” Katie added bitterly, switching the channel to the Young and the Resentful.

“We must be dumb as rocks,” Alice pronounced. Katie got ready to go back to her register. “I might vote for him, though.”

“Dumber than rocks,” Alice reiterated.

“He got rich, didn’t he? And we’re working for minimum wage.”

Shelly got up too. “And we pay taxes.”

Alice turned off the TV. “Dumb as rocks.”

About 45 years ago I lived in a rough part of Seattle and Gomorrah, vacant lots, drugs, gun running, white slaving, stolen goods sold door to door, my introduction to life in the urban ghetto, quite a wake up call for a young idealistic hippie. A few streets over from my house was a block on Yesler Street and 12th where the cops not only patrolled but parked for long stretches to surveil a notorious tavern that called itself a club, not a bar. One day, walking by, I came across a guy with an airbrush painting the warehouse wall facing that gin joint. I asked him what was up and he told me he was painting a mural the length of the block on that concrete block wall. When I heard that I shook my head and said man, they’ll deface that before the paint dries, but he only smiled and said he didn’t think so. ‘They’ll appreciate the art. They won’t touch this.’

I wasn’t an artist then but I thought this yahoo had been eating fairy dust to think the animals down on that block wouldn’t graffiti up his monumental work in a day or two. 25 years later, when I paid a nostalgia visit to my old haunts, that mural was as vibrant and unmarked as when he painted it. Trust me when I tell you that made an impression on me. When committees would ask if I thought my own murals would be vandalized, I would tell them this story. They were about as convinced as I was back then talking to my anonymous artist.

Twenty years ago I became the project manager for the new Visitor Center on the island when our contractor finally got weary of dealing with us artists and went back to his day job. We put sculpture and art on the grounds, built a small Center with a modern design and dropped a 15 foot by 15 foot stained glass window in the front. Folks would drop by to chat with me that summer, about half just wondering what we thought we were doing, who was paying for all this crap, why were screwing up the rural character of their bucolic existence. Bottles were repeatedly tossed against the building and the glass, pellet guns put holes in the mural, a couple of our sculptures were stolen. My faith in the prophesy of that muralist long ago was a bit perforated too.

So yesterday when I went over to measure the broken window some vandals had smashed, intending to put a stained glass panel in as a replacement, figuring, I guess, that my little library in the old 60’s telephone booth would be vandal proofed if it had more art in it, not just literature, imagine my disappointment to discover the door had been shot out and another large window too. Needless to say I didn’t bother to measure anything other than my despondency. Today I’m thinking about my muralist down there in the ghetto and his art that still resonates nearly half a century later. My own mural at the Visitor Center sports bullet holes and cracked panels and the building itself has been kitsched up with posters of animal butts and adolescent humor. I tell myself someday those posters will come down and the Sculpture Park we built will be honored by the citizenry. I tell myself that as I just finished a 21 foot long mural for the island’s new Administration Building which I’m donating. This is the 20th donation of glass murals, something I do to bring an aesthetic to the island and to the area. That’s what I tell myself. And some days I even believe that. But not today. Today I feel like Don Quixote, not just tilting at windmills but moronically building them. And no, I don’t know what I’ll do with that smashed up Little Library of mine.

The South End Little Library has suffered more than its share of indignities since its grand opening a year or so ago. Vandals the first week tossed books from their shelves in the GTE repurposed phone booth, burned a few, then painted obscenities on the glass windows. Bringing literacy to the denizens of the backwashes here, I realized as head librarian, was going to be no easy task. But really, book burning? It wasn’t as if the burnt volumes were controversial. One was a child’s book about a rabbit and … well, it was hard to decipher through the burnt cover. So who knows, maybe a gay rabbit. Or a rabbit that used curse words. Or an atheist rabbit. Or these illiterates just didn’t like rabbits.

A few months ago the shelves were pulled out of the booth and the books strewn across the lawn to spend a soggy night in the rain before I discovered the mayhem, too late for about six dozen books. For a week I closed the library, put up a sign that the closure was due to vandalism, then debated with myself whether to restock the shelves. No good deed goes unpunished down in this neck of the dark woods. Ignorance is bliss, they tell me, and maybe I was trying to bring my own brand of religion to the unwashed masses who already had Trump to worship.

My little park, a five acre tract with some nice firs and cedars along its trails, is a magnet for garbage disposal, midnight trysts and miscreant hidey-holes. We’ve had broken glass strewn across the parking area, camouflaged pits dug back in the woods with sharpened sticks waiting for unwary hikers, staging areas for stolen goods hidden in the brush, used condoms tossed nightly. Trees and shrubs I’ve planted have been dug up and stolen. Sculptures have been swiped, grills purloined, rocks thrown into the grassy areas to make mowing a shrapnel nightmare. Being the head ranger has been a study in negative human behavior.

So when I went over a few days ago to mow and found the window of the library smashed out with a bottle, I can’t say I was very surprised. No doubt the work of anitfa, left wing radicals and those pesky anarchists tired of looting the urban swamps. Federal troops would likely be mobilized to help me guard this place now, good news. Although library use would probably hit rock bottom. Price you pay for Stormtroopers protecting the Homeland, I guess.
After mowing I went home, got rakes and brooms and returned to clean up the mess. Sure, I grumbled, I whined, I shook my fist. But what are you gonna do? Indeed. Right now I have a hole in my little biblioteca where the rain and the wind can come through. I’m thinking maybe boarding it up rather than replace the glass for future missile throwers. Paint something on it maybe. You know, see if art can soothe the savage beasts on the barbarian South End. I know, fat freakin chance.

The Flatheads were parked at the Diner, their vintage machines waxed and gleaming in the packed dirt parking lot. They meet every Wednesday morning, rain, shine or engine check warning, slide a few tables together, then hold court as they argue after-market carburetors and auto body strategies. And, of course, politics du jour. The rest of us customers either avoid Wednesdays or else come for the show as a willing audience. I count myself in the latter.

Today’s improv started out with a lively discussion of Jerry’s newly purchased ’50 GMC 5 window pickup, original paint, completely stock, nearly immaculate except for a small rust hole in the left quarterpanel. The Flatheads debated whether Jerry should leave the original paint alone or go for a new spray job, an old argument between the purists and the car show enthusiasts.

But somewhere between the spray booth boyz and the ‘let er be’ crowd, the conversation veered without warning into the deep ditch of this year’s elections. Fairlane Frank, a proponent of two tone Fords, had tossed a fork with a clatter on to his half eaten chicken fried steak, splattering white gravy across the formica DMZ. “Trump’s no Republican,” he growled in a mouthful of rage and food. “He’s hi-jacked the whole party.” Pat, proud owner of a 1972 Gremlin and recipient of countless jeers and guffaws, cheerily suggested the time might be right for a 3rd party. “The Know Nothings,” he suggested as a name.

And so it began…. Bel Aire Bobby retorted that we already have that party, opening up a wild round of just which party qualified before Brenda, coffee pot in hand, said, “Maybe you boys should stick with 4 barrel carburetors and dual hemis, leave the politics to the professionals.”

Frank started to object but Brenda stared him down with her headlights on high beam while she poured seconds and thirds. “Frank, I’m makin minimum wage here. No benefits, no insurance, no 401-K. Now my kid needs an operation. Trust me, you don’t want to get me going on politics.” And with that, she whirled to the next table. None of the car guyz said a word for a full minute. Like the man said, all politics is local. But when they left, the tip from the boyz, usually measley, was enough to buy Pat’s Gremlin and pay for a paint job to boot.

When I first moved to the Left Coast, I had a yearning to get myself a motorcycle, learn to ride, then set myself free on the byways of the Cascades. Being poor, I bought a used Honda 350 that hadn’t run in years, wouldn’t start and looked like it was ready for the crusher. I paid $100 for the piece of junk, hauled it back to my house in the ghetto and pushed it down the basement stairs where I could spend some quality time diagnosing why it wouldn’t start over the winter months.

By summer I had the problem solved and so, with the help of my roommates, I hauled it back up and out to the backyard, kick started it into an oily smoke idle and admired the thing in the full light of a Seattle sunny day. Now all I had to do was figure out how to ride it. I called the police and asked what kind of temporary license I would need to take it for some learning spins on their city streets and was told it was illegal, no temporary licenses were to be had. I said how am I spozed to learn how to ride. The sergeant said it wasn’t his problem.

So right from the start I became an outlaw biker, stalling my crappy bike on half the shifts, careening down the mean streets of my neighborhood, searching for large empty parking lots to practice sharp turns and fast starts. Trouble was, my clutch didn’t shift right and every so often the engine would shut off in mid-travel for no apparent reason that I could diagnose. On one of my ventures I came across a fellow biker working on his Harley at Seward Park, tools spread on the parking lot and so I thought why not ask an expert about my clutch problem. He was hard at it in his Joker leathers with his tattoos bulging as he strained to his work, a fellow outlaw. I interrupted him to ask about my clutch dilemma. He looked at my battered scooter and said — I can remember it clearly to this day 40 years later — ‘Get the fuck away from me, man.’ I took it to mean us real bikers fix our own bikes without outside help.

On the way back to my ghetto house I was idling at the red light on Jackson and 23rd when a menacing group of black gangbangers roared up beside me on both sides, about 15 or so, all revving their Harleys as we waited for the green so that I thought I was inside a Boeing 747 engine. I didn’t think this was an initiation test. And I didn’t think it would end well either. The light, after what seemed like an hour, turned green and we all popped our clutches, ready for a tire burning, wheel skidding jackrabbit start … and my bike died right then.

I suppose a lesser man, a man not accustomed to the outlaw biker life, might have been embarrassed. A lesser man might have thought the laughter and catcalls from the black Banditos was too much endure. A lesser man might have junked his prized Honda 350 and succumbed to the temptation to buy a Vincent Black Shadow and show these hooligans who really ruled these mean urban streets. But me, I pushed my spray painted motorcycle ten blocks back to the basement and sold it a month later. For $100. My easy riding days had come to an end. There was nothing more to prove, I guess.

If there was a place worse than homelessness itself, the While-a-While was it. Ancient RV’s, rusted out Winnebagos, Airstreams down on their axles — they all came to die, slowly sinking into the wetlands, grass up to their pitted aluminum windows that seldom opened anymore, a muddy trail leading to the communal restrooms and showers which occasionally all functioned but not usually.

In the summer the While-a-While offered tourists and fishermen some spaces, most without power, for $25 a night. Half the permanent residents had come and for reasons best left for late night binge talk, they ended up trapped there. Milt came 20 years ago in his reconditioned Cortez, a heavy 20 foot industrial RV built when gas was 24 cents a gallon but was now too much for Social Security retirement if he wanted to actually drive it somewhere else. And now it was a rusted relic, flat tires, busted front axle, long dead battery. Milt lived there with his menagerie of cats, half of them feral, all of them breeding like rabbits. Residents who’d ventured inside claimed the place smelled like one giant litter box over a gas burner.

Most inmates of the While-a-While gave Milt a wide berth. If familiarity bred contempt, with Milt it bred outright hostility. He was a hermit now among enemies, most of whom he’d alienated over slights so small they never really understood they were slights and so they concluded the man was a total asshole, a near universal assessment at the trailer park. If you were a dog owner, too bad if they growled or chased Milt’s feline herd. If your politics were left of Genghis Khan, too bad, you were a hopeless radical. If you drank or used drugs, he wrote you off. So what if he’d done more of those than half the park in a quarter of the time — he’d reformed, rehabbed and now was righteous as a born-again preacher.

Maybe we all end up where we deserve at the end of our ropes. If so, the poor souls consigned to the While-a-While probably wished they could have a do-over. But they were there, not to while awhile, they were doomed to quite awhile. With Milt as a neighbor.

My brother and I were comparing notes on our mutual maturity this last visit. I guess we both inherited some genetic predisposition toward hair trigger tempers, something we both thought we had made some progress on holding in check, but of course, we have our stumbles. He was telling me his latest, a sad little story of a woman who didn’t quite make it through an intersection before the light turned red, leaving her blocking the pedestrian crossing.

My little brother was the pedestrian she was blocking. He shook his head sadly before continuing, obviously embarrassed at his behavior at the ripe old age of 64. I cut into his recounting to guess that he had walked across this miscreant’s hood just to teach her a lesson. Which, I told him, I had done once or twice, but you know, when I was less temperate than my mellow self is now. But no, he didn’t stomp across her hood. Instead he walked around behind her car and then, beyond helping himself, he smacked his open hand on her trunk, something I’m sad to say I’ve done plenty of times.

But … this time the lady, startled at the apparent collision from behind, hit her accelerator and plowed into the car in front of her. Day ruined. Car too. My brother said he just put his head down and walked away as fast as possible, feeling like a total you know what. I did know what.

I said my last road rage I had a tailgater crawling up my bumper for a few miles. I tried slowing down but the driver wouldn’t take the hint and inched even closer. This, of course, infuriated me to righteous indignation and finally I’d had more than enough so I hit my brakes without warning, expecting to give my too close friend a little driving lesson that might back him off for the rest of the trip into town. Except instead of braking, the little jerk lurched out into the oncoming lane.

This, like my brother’s anecdote, is an example of Unintended Consequences. People can be hurt or killed, vehicles can be damaged or wrecked. Lessons may or may not be learned. Our combined ages, my brother and I, are 138 years on this little planet. If we both got as old as Methuselah, we probably will still be telling these stupid stories. “So this woman rolls out into the hallway in her wheelchair, see, and blocks my way into the cafeteria and all I meant to do was give her cart a little bump, then next thing you know….”

Now that we’re living lives totally encumbered by the restrictions of Covid-19, I have been forced to adjust, to adapt, to make the best of a crappy situation. What else can a stained glass artist do? I can’t have an audience of wheezy sneezy art fans standing around my table while I cut glass into exquisite shapes and form them into designs that dazzle the peanut gallery, now can I? No, in case you were hesitating there for an answer.

So I took a page from the sports folks. I’m cutting out cardboard life size figures to arrange around the studio. There’s a cute one of Kurt Vonnegut, waving with a thumbs up. Another of Stormy Daniels, which I can’t tell you about if I want to save my marriage. Barack Obama is smiling from the corner and Robert Duvall is sitting on a horse waving hello. Bruce Springsteen has his electric guitar and Bob Dylan has a harmonica. Both are looking pretty damn interested in this new panel I’m working on. Bonnie Raitt is winking at me. You bet I want to cut glass with her.

America’s pastime has to be enjoyed now at a safe distance. Meaning nowhere close to a stadium. Same will be true of basketball, hockey, football and lawn bowling. Why not art? Every time I cut a piece of glass I have the soundtrack of American Idol and WWF Smackdown blasting approval, just like the baseball stadiums. And if by chance I cut a piece poorly, a groan goes up from the sound system that can be heard across the highway. I need to set up a live feed and a podcast, but money is, after all, an issue, and don’t get me going on lost product sponsorships, I know I’m losing out bigtime.

What this pandemic should teach us is how to adjust to the changing times. Sure, I know no potential client will walk through my studio doors for months, years even, but if baseball can survive with non-paying cardboard cutouts filling its stands that don’t buy tickets, I should be able to withstand a drought. Hell, I don’t have employees making 20 million dollars a year. Not even 20 dollars an hour. My payroll is definitely survivable is what I’m saying. I just have to figure out how to monetize this art show.

Course, that’s always been the problem, hasn’t it? I have artist pals who paint a picture, print 50 to 500 copies, sign half of them as Artist Proof, then sell them online for a nice hefty profit. You think anyone is interested in a 2-D rendition of a stained glass window??? Think again, muchacho. I even thought about making a coffee table book of my public glassworks, full color, annotated, nice layouts, signed even by the artist himself … until I calculated the printing costs, delivery charges, the website hosting and realized each book would cost more than my unemployment checks.

I’ve always maintained no one goes into art to get rich. But none of us realized the phrase ‘starving artist’ might be accurate either. Today I’m making a cardboard cutout of Warren Buffet. He’ll be holding a large check in both hands. And you know, don’t you, whose name will be on it. It’s a start….