The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I suppose police are like health insurance, you don’t need it til you need it. But I have to say, I try my damnedest to avoid them at all costs. Not just because I figure they have better things to do than mess with the likes of me, but because the few encounters I’ve had have been fairly unpleasant. When I reported stolen items a couple of times, they made it very clear that 1. my items were gone forever. And 2. they wouldn’t waste their time filling out a report. Once they even told me they knew who it probably was that stole my stuff, but petty theft wasn’t high on their To-Do List.

I get it. We don’t have a lot of deputies on the island and we certainly don’t have many who bother with the South End. You know what? That’s okay with me. The little crime we have isn’t all that serious, unless driving 50 in the 35 speed zone is heinous to you. Drugs, domestic abuse, petty theft, that’s what we have down here and if it means living without heavy police intervention, fine. When we do have something serious, they call in the SWAT teams, folks who know how to handle felons on the loose. Or neighbors’ girlfriends who go after their low life boyfriend with a gun. The cops here work traffic. I sleep about as soundly now as I did when none were on duty after midnight the first years I came here.

So the protesters on the streets of America have been crying Defund the Police. At first I thought the terminology could have been better. Maybe Re-Imagine the Police. But defund is okay too. Take the money, redistribute it to social agencies, mental health professionals, specialized drug intervention units, shelter for the homeless, all those things cops shouldn’t be doing anyway. And when we’ve defunded half the police force, take the ones who are left, the ones who want to be part of their community as peace keepers and protectors, and train them in those skills. What we have now are heavily armed military minded personnel with way too much testosterone jamming their brainpans. Which they’re encouraged and which is undersupervised. They’re headbangers first, Officer Friendly maybe never.

Are they racist? Sure, some of them. But mostly they’re stationed in the poor parts of town to keep the citizens there under control. Black folks, white folks, everybody who’s down and out. Is there more crime there? Sure, poverty breeds crime. So we garrison the centurions where trouble is most likely to break out. Is this the best way to go about pacifying the crime zones? You ask me, putting a cop on foot who knows the ‘hood, knows the shopkeepers, knows the troublemakers, knows what’s going on and … here’s the deal … knows how to deal with this as a fellow member of the community, his community, chances are he or she can smell trouble and nip it in the bud. Is this liberal snowflake bullshit? Sure, some of it, but we’re learning this month that Stormtroopers tossing gas grenades and shooting rubber bullets is a symptom of something much more troubling going on in law enforcement. Wouldn’t bother me one bit to try something else for a change, look at a larger picture, maybe see if crime isn’t more of a social disease that can be cured, not beaten with a baton.

Down at the Little Church in the Ravine the congregation is gearing up for the End Times. Pastor Paul comes from the Cotton Mather School of Preaching, meaning, he intends to scare the holy bejabbers out of his flock, wake them up before it’s too late and lead them into the nettle-less valley of righteousness. He’s offering Salvation, take it or leave it. Woe unto those who don’t take it ….

Jimmy the Geek’s mizzus listens to these sermons Sunday after Sunday. She recently volunteered to minister to the Little Lambs of Jesus, the youth group that meets an hour before the late service, and Jimmy, an electronics engineer down at the Boeing plant, is at a complete loss what to do about her evangelical fervor. “She wasn’t like this when we got married,” he told our decidedly profane group of sinners gathered at the booths beside the pool table in the Pilot Lounge. “I’m not real religious, ya know, but I agreed to go to church with her. It’s almost a cult what they got down there in the ravine. I didn’t know we’d be drinking Kool-Aid instead of grapejuice.”

“Armageddon, man,” Two Toke pronounced over a tough 8 ball side pocket. Which he missed by a country mile …. Chalking his cue thoughtfully, he commiserated with Jimmy. “Scary stuff, Revelations. Mark of the Beast. Four ponies of the Apocalypse. I been listening to midnight radio lately. Biden’s the anti-Christ and the Middle East is heating up. The Russians are coming in. The Pandemic is the Sign of the Second Coming. Anytime now, they say.”

“Pastor Paul predicts Iran will get the bomb in a year and that’s the End. Jenny believes this stuff,” Jimmy blurted. He waved his empty pint glass at Vic, tonight’s fill-in bartender. Jimmy wasn’t going home soon, it was obvious to all of us and by god we were going to stick with our pal til the glasses were broken or the bar closed. South End Sinner’s Code. “What am I gonna do? I already said I won’t go anymore and now she’s teaching Sunday School too?”

Robbie stopped mid-shot, pointed with his cue and said solemnly, “Call her bluff, buddy.” Jimmy shook his head. Robbie continued. “Give her a year for the End Times to happen. When it doesn’t, time to reassess. Check and mate, dude!”

Jimmy took Vic’s refill the way a pilgrim clutches sacrament. Robbie slammed the 6 ball into the corner pocket with a bang, left himself an easy 2 ball on the side. “That’s what I would do,” he declared.

Two Toke could see his own End Times if Robbie hit the 2 ball. “Easy for a man with no wife, Rob,” he smiled, maybe put a little Doubt on the table. “Faith’s a funny thing. Hard as hell to argue it …”

“Damn, Tom, you want Jimbo to start stockin food and guns?” Robbie eased the 3 into the side with a soft sweet stroke. The 8 ball waited, hard cut, but Robbie was hot, all the confidence in the world. Two Toke groaned, leaned on his useless cue. “No,” he muttered, “I just want him to save a marriage.” Jimmy nodded mournfully. Robbie cut the 8 ball and we all watched it roll half a mile down a long green to the far corner pocket, hang for a breathless second, then drop with a dull clatter.

“End Time, Tom” the shooter laughed and Two Toke slapped a new set of quarters on the felt. If any of us thought we’d solve Jimmy’s problems tonight, it would take more beers than Vic would serve.

A couple days ago I was wandering the garden, something I do a lot more now with the pandemic lockdown, and caught sight of a weirdly shaped bird nest in last year’s bean trellis. Elongated with an offest hole at the top, what I took to be an oriole nest. Having never seen an actual oriole nest, I was pleased to find one and planned to keep it with a few other nests collected over the years. One, a hummingbird nest with two very tiny eggs, I took after realizing the parents weren’t coming back. This oriole nest I carefully cut away the twigs holding it to the bean fencing and mounted it in my shack near the hornet’s nest and a few other museum pieces.

The next day we were inside the studio and Karen kept asking, what is that noise? I didn’t hear anything but she kept asking anyway and finally I went back into the room she was standing in and holy orioley, the noise was chirping coming from that nest! I’d stolen the nest AND the babies! I not only robbed the cradle, I took the cradle too. Orioles are fairly rare in these parts so I felt terrible, guilt-ridden over probably bringing them to near extinction, something akin to killing the last pterodactyl. I felt bad. I felt like an idiot. The nest looked old and I’d just assumed it was last year’s nest. What a moron. What a fiend! Nature is cruel, it sure doesn’t need help from me.

Without much hope of success I took the nest back to where I’d stolen it, reattached it to the bean trellis and hoped, without much reason to have any hope, the parents would return to their offspring. I’d always heard if a bird nest was disturbed the adults wouldn’t come back to it, probably something I heard on Fox News or Breitbart, but what else could I do? Put a notice in the newspaper: Lost Oriole Chicks, Need Good Home? Probably get some coronavirus survivalist who would take them for food, one more layer in the new freezer filled with locker meat.

Well, I went out the day after I’d rehung the purloined nest, not expecting much, but … sure enough, out hopped the mom and I noticed the pop jumping limb to limb in the fir tree behind her, both watching the creep who’d stolen their prodigy, maybe see if he was monstrous enough to try it again. He wasn’t. I don’t suppose they appreciated a parents’ day off while I babysat the kids. No, I don’t suppose they did.

‘If you decide to leave civilization, expect to live without its comforts.’ I don’t know who said that but they were absolutely right. We live down at the bottom end of a skinny island 17 miles from the bridge that connects it to the mainland and all things modern. Shopping malls (before they started closing), restaurants and taverns (before Covid shut them down, schools (before they went virtual), theaters (before the plague hit), all those amenities folks took for granted until the Coronovirus Epidemic of 2020.

I feel sorry for folks, I really do. But … we got our own problems. Down by us we live across the great digital divide. Meaning we finally got DSL internet, not the old dial-up, but because our ‘provider’, and I use that phrase loosely, doesn’t deem it worthwhile to provide better fiber optics this far from Rome, we have very slow internet. Better than the old dial-up, okay, but nothing like you might have expected from the promises our provider made when Ma Bell was broken into Baby Bells. If we try to watch a movie streaming over Netflix, the buffering is nearly as long as most commercials on TV. A two hour movie becomes three hours. Plenty of time to make popcorn, grab another beer (or three), check our email (which is now even slower), use the restroom (even mop and clean it), do the laundry, wash the dishes and take out the garbage. We get a lot done watching a movie we probably won’t even like.

The mizzus ran into the ‘provider’ yesterday, some guy in a truck from the new outfit that bought the old outfit, now called Zipley. What a name! You just know the service will improve. Fast internet? Sure, zipley. The name says it all. She wanted to know, confronting this poor schmuck with the toolbelt laden with every electronic gizmo hanging from his waist, when we’d be getting better internet. He was busy, he told her, hooking up ‘cross cable’ and didn’t really know when, if, why, or how faster internet would be coming to the wild South End. And … he was a little too busy cross cabling to chat with her further. So much for anything remotely resembling zipley.

I don’t know doodley about most things technical. If I can’t fix it with a wrench or a screwdriver or just pounding it on a table or throwing it on the floor, I have no real comprehension. Black boxes are just that to me. Magic electrons, ethereal waves, wifi, routers, servers, providers, very large monthly bills. The mizzus knows this stuff and believe me when I tell you she didn’t like some macho yahoo with a toolbelt talking down to her like she was the little woman at the service desk of a car repair shop telling her her whatchamacallit was acting up and maybe she should sit quietly in the waiting room and read a woman’s magazine until the repairmen had finished. Somebody was cross cabled all right. The trouble was, it was probably us. If you think Zipley implies something speedy, forgetaboutit. It really means zip up yer lip, Lady.

I call my old man every day who just turned 97, about 40 years since his date of retirement at 57, to check in, see how he’s doing. When I ask him what he did today, he invariably says Nothin. He reads a little, watches some news, naps, takes his daily mile walk, makes himself meals and watches movies at night. It’s enough for him, no complaints, no depression and no whining. Life is what it is and he’s not a man with regrets and he’s not someone in search of ‘meaning’. Those who say an unexamined life isn’t worth living haven’t met my old man. Those who say that, you ask me, are full of shit. And I’m one of those who does examine life. I just don’t think it raises me to some higher spiritual plane — if anything, it just overly complicates things.

Today he asked me, as always, what I did today. ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘pretty busy. Pretty important stuff.’ He perks up, never really remembering I pull this on him half the time. ‘What’s up?’ he asked, ‘you working on that new glass project?’

‘No, no,’ I reply. ‘That’ll wait.’ He’s talking about a mural I’m supposed to be designing for a Washington Art Commission 1% project. ‘No’, I told him, ‘I was building a scarecrow for the garden.’ This flummoxes him, like usual. ‘What for?’ he wants to know. I say ‘I don’t know. Something to do. The garden needed a watchman maybe. Liven the place up if nothing else.’

My father and I share pieces of our world every day — as does my brother who lives near him. We all 3 look at it differently, maybe everyone does. But what we have in common is that this is what it is. If there’s something More, fine, write back when you find it. But this is plenty. Personally I suspect folks would be happier if they made a scarecrow once in awhile and let the philosophers decipher the rest.

How long, Lord, how long? We’ve been quarantined in this hellhole of the South End now for, who knows anymore, how many weeks, months, possibly years. Same old same old, rinse and repeat. The world has shrunk to an area about the size of a dog’s fire hydrant loop. Trail to the beach, walks back in the woods, the weekly drive to the grocery store with masks on and empty aisles, my path to Tyee Store that’s now closed. Last week I whacked the blackberries back and mowed down a barricade of snowberry bushes, sickled the nettles and salmonberries, all to keep that trail open, you know, just in case the Tyee Megastore ever opens its shuttered doors again. It’s a Sisyphean joke on myself is what I think, but … it adds another mile to the perimeter of my confinement.

Today in a burst of energy, spurred on by a need to Escape, I hacked my way into the back of our property. We only have 7 acres of prime nettle territory, not what you might call an estate, certainly not a vast area of unexplored terrain. And yet … there are places that we rarely traverse, fern shrouded, blackberry brambled wildernesses we just leave for some future shopping mall or an array of condominiums when we depart these mortal coils. Don’t ask me why I decided today was the day to open a path into that heart of darkness. Blame it, I guess, on the Covid. If I can’t go anywhere but here, then by god, what we need is more here.

I started with a sickle, whacking and slashing fern fronds nearly head high, mowing down elderberry and salmonberry and nettles, bucking up old deadfall with a chainsaw, moving logs with a peavey. Inch by inch, foot by foot, yard by yard, my freedom expanded into the jungle. I felt released from my Covid chains, if only by a short trail. I was in unexplored habitat where not even the deer ventured. Lewis and Clark hadn’t passed this way and who knows, maybe not even the natives.

I’m still cutting trails, a couple more already. Eldorado awaits possibly. Or the remains of a deceased civilization. Possibly a blackberry shrouded temple. So far, though, I’ve only stumbled across an old bottle dump, the Barefoot Bandit’s lair and a family of illegal immigrants. I suspect I’ll make important archeological discoveries when I start tunneling. Probably next week. Hopefully I can use the illegals for most of the gruntwork.

Here’s a bumper sticker to replace the maskless yahoo I ran into at the local grocery store last week’s DON’T TREAD ON ME. How about DON’T BREATHE ON ME. With schools scheduled to return to the classroom in a month and with the country spiking in 40 states after nearly half a year of contagion that for awhile seemed to be settling down, we can’t get a federal commitment to fighting this Covid plague. We can’t even get a straight answer from the Man in the High Tower whether we should wear a mask or not. He certainly won’t. When Congress authorized payments to facilitate more and faster testing for the virus, the White House blocked its implementation. What the President wants is for the states to battle this out on a local level. Local control, better results. Although when it comes to authorizing federal law enforcement on the streets of Portland, inflaming the situation, federal control is better.

If you’re confused about what this Administration’s policy is, join the club. If you think there is a policy, wake up. Even Republican governors, mayors and legislators are alarmed. When the White House team of rivals attacked Dr. Fauci as being wrong most of the time, even the dumb refused to be dumber. Despite the President’s reassurance that this epidemic will just fade away, a beautiful thing to watch, it won’t and everyone outside the Bubble knows it won’t. When he tells Fox News in an interview this weekend that eventually he will be proven right, even his most ardent admirers wiped the smile off their maskless faces. The man may be more of a menace than the disease he refuses to fight.

History will not be kind to this President. And as the election looms, neither will his former friends and allies, his enablers who watched in studied silence as blunders and buffoonery circled like hungry vultures overhead. Why rock the boat when it was sailing high above the waterline with an economy that made millionaires of their fellow stock investors? Sure, the folks in steerage were making minimum wage bailing water, but the unemployment rate was low, surely an optimistic sign.

But now the economy has bottomed, primarily the result of ineptitude on the bridge. The captain is morphing into Queeg, mutinies on all sides, paranoia driving him to listen only to his inner voices and the pipsqueak Kushner. No one can be trusted, maybe not even Jared. Rumors are circulating that the officers are against him. Fox News has turned softball interviews into perplexingly hard questioning. He claims to be one of the highest IQ people on the planet, acing, in fact, his recent medical intelligent test. Chris Wallace, the Fox interviewer told him he too had taken that test. It asked them to identify a picture of an elephant. Wallace didn’t ask the President if he’d gotten that one right, but the rest of us on the S.S. America know, the correct answer is it’s what’s in the room at the White House.

In the 1300’s when another round of bubonic plague was sweeping the floor of civilization, a marauding army of Tartars set siege to Caffa, a port city on the Black Sea. The citizens there, fearing contamination, refused to surrender to the infected army so the Tartars, mightily piqued at this unseemly lack of camaraderie, catapaulted some of their dead over the battlements of the walled city. Velkommen indeed.

A friend of mine was in one of our local grocery stores recently on the wild and unwalled South End, a provisioning locus for State Park refugees fleeing the plague cities of Seattle and Gomorrah and a quickie mart for us residents who ran out of beer or wine and dreaded the nightmare run five miles north to the IGA. Not a mask on a single employee. When the manager was asked why not, given the Governor’s edict that all retail shops and all citizens should wear one, she was told the staff had medical exemptions. ‘How many employees do you have?’ she asked and was told, with a straight face, 27.

I suppose we should applaud our local retailer for hiring the sick and the infirm. Although I wonder what maladies, besides Covid, they might be harboring at that cash register. This past week’s editorial page in our local fishwrapper featured an angry letter from a local man who claimed it was against God’s will to wear a mask. And furthermore, it was unconstitutional to infringe on his personal, and I suppose, God’s freedom. I can only suppose the Constitution has some bill of rights not to wear masks. Or shoes or shirts. Or pants. We apparently have the right to infect our fellow citizens. God’s will be done.

These are tough times in the Land of the Plague. Partisan politics takes precedence over sound medical advice and in those places where the Lockdown was lifted and the partying commenced, the virus has proven immune to political debate, surprise surprise. Other countries have managed to contain the contagion, but here, we subscribe to the Don’t Tread on Me, I Can Do What I Want philosophy. So much for the idea that we are all in this thing together. Better to let the virus run its course and the survivors can carry on. Another few months of this and I expect to see catapaults launching the dead over the gated communities.

This is Year One in the Plague Era. If you follow the death reports, the daily Covid cases, all the statistics from all the states, you can monitor the slow and inexorable spread of the virus. If you’re holed up in your Covid cocoon with only the weekly grocery run wearing your mask and your shields, you have plenty of time to read plague predictions, even time to research pandemics throughout history. It’s a frightening read. Millions dead of bubonic, AIDS, smallpox, cholera, flu, you name it, it ravaged the civilized and uncivilized world.

Occasionally I peek at the coronavirus stats for the world, the nation, even the counties of my state, Washington. My county, Island County, for the past month or so had a death toll of 12. A few days ago we were listed as 11 dead. I figured a misprint, checked the following day and the day after, but nope, 11 dead now. This is great news for those who think the plague is a political prank or a liberal hoax. Even better news for those who believe the President when he claims the virus will just fade away. Not only will it fade away, the dead will return to life!!

I love magical thinking as much as the next superstitious anti-vaccine yahoo, believe me. I want to throw my plague mask in the trashcan and go back to partying with my pals down at the local watering hole. If I get sick, so what? Survival of the fittest, right? Except, I don’t want to believe in Darwinism, none of that scientific hocus pocus baloney you get every day in the fear infested media. And if I die of this disease, well, a chance in 12 I’ll return to the living, how’s that for statistical analysis? And don’t get me going on zombies. Nobody is talking zombie here.

All I’m saying is, like the President, let’s be optimistic. This thing is headed in the right direction. Be of good cheer. Stop doomscrolling. Stop worrying. We’re going to be fine and even the dead will be home soon. Count on it. But stop counting.

If you thought the Kung Flu came from China, like your President does, maybe it’s time to wake up. If you thought the Chinese Flu was developed in a lab or came from some so-called ‘wet’ market in Wuhan, forget about it. The truth is out there, as they used to say on the X-files. The truth is stranger than fiction. Or, more to the point, fiction is truth and truth is fiction and the folks on Facebook no longer argue which is which. Who cares, really, when we’d rather have interesting lies than boring truths.

You think this comet Neowise showing up in our solar system at the same time as the coronavirus was a coincidence? C’mon, think about it. UFO’s are circling the planet like bees around their disturbed nest. The government knows all about this, but they’re keeping it secret, as always, lobbing you misinformation about Russian election interference and Twitter hacks to prevent us citizens from asking too many questions. Like where did this comet come from? And why is it here? Who sent it and what do they want? Remember when the European Space Agency landed on a comet a few years back? What did they find there, eh? And why didn’t they let us in on that secret?

I looked at this comet a few nights ago. If that tail doesn’t look exactly like a sneeze loaded with coronavirus hurled across a crowded room by a maskless contagion superspreader, I don’t know what does…. Aliens are out there, my friend, and trust me on this, they are not your friend. They are planting the seeds of destruction in our atmosphere even as you sit there blithely reading this, unaware of extraterrestrial dangers. They have sent the Messenger of Death in the form of celestial bodies that we ooh and aah over, little suspecting we are being washed by plague mists continuously as the comet streaks over our heads. And you thought chemtrails were frightening! You thought vaccines were scary!

Another existential threat, can’t you see that for what it is? This isn’t pixie dust, pal, this is space plague. Oh sure, they’ll find a vaccine for it, you can bet your supplemental health insurance on it. But what’s really in it? Antibodies from another galaxy, that’s what. Go right ahead, let these enablers shove a syringe in your arm, but don’t come crying to me when your body starts to grow scales and your appendages begin to double. Don’t say I didn’t try to warn you.