The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I heard a study recently that said the poor are more charitable than the rich. On average they give almost twice as much of their income percentage-wise to those in need than their wealthier brethren. They also volunteer more for charities and non profits, service groups and outreach programs. Basically, if my sociology statistical studies are still in semi-working order, this proves, not quite conclusively but damn close, the South End is way more philanthropic than our neighbors up yonder ensconced behind their key carded gated communities.

I had a friend tell me in all seriousness awhile back (in regard to my bemusement over her financial plight at the time) that a million dollars just wasn’t what it used to be. What exactly do you say to a pronouncement like that? Do you work out the math of inflation vs. income? Do you shrug your overburdened shoulders and just agree? Or do you take pity and offer up a loan …. you know, to get her by until that devalued million dollars returns to its rightful place in the economy?

These are tough times. Especially, I guess, for the rich. Or, more aptly, the folks who no longer count themselves among the Gatsbys of Camano. Their stocks have slipped, the value of their two homes has dropped, their retirement funds seem inadequate now, even their hedge fund broker refuses to return their frantic calls — that vast chasm between Us and Them looks like a ditch, not a Grand Canyon. And if sacrifices must be made — and believe me, they must — a little less giving to the needy is definitely the order of the day.

Meanwhile, down here on the Lower Tiers, we kind of see we’re all in this together. So we still donate, we still volunteer and we still give. We don’t have much, but it never seemed too little somehow. Even though a hundred dollars isn’t what it used to be.

While I’ve been rehabbing my new titanium knee replacement, I’ve been reading a lot. Currently I’m reading ‘Careless People’, tell-all from one of the insiders back when Facebook was just getting started. If you aren’t already totally cynical about social media and the demise of democracy, this will darken your day … and any sunny expectations for the future.

These people, Zuckerberg and his very few cohorts, were setting up an internet connection service. You know, stay in touch with your friends and family, maybe your co-workers, all in pursuit of open communication. But as usual, like Dylan said, ‘until greed got in the way.’ Greed and power and egoes. Turns out you can make a lot more profit if you provide misinformation, bot fake news and click bait. You can also swing elections. Not just in third wold countries but right here in the Yew Ess Aye.

I suspect Facebook is no different than Twitter or X, the Washington Post under Bezos, Google, Microsoft, all these tech boyz with socially stunted personalities still playing video games but now the riches yahoos on earth. Adolescent geniuses who now rule the world, who control the strings of power, who mostly want more More MORE, damn the cost to society. Atlas Shrugged — bow down to the captains of industry, the job creators, the developers of Artificial Intelligence. They avoid taxes, they have no loyalty to nations, they’re above the laws of mere mortals.

Back here on earth, I live across the road from Microsoft’s head of AI. Helluva nice guy. The other morning I heard him interviewed on NPR, talking about the positives of AI, how it could create a better battery six times faster than us humans, maybe not me, which would be 1000 times faster. Plenty of folks working for these companies would tell you they’re creating a better world, a connected world, curing diseases, eliminating drudge work, dreaming the future. They’ve got their hands on the throttle. And their boot on our necks. Us mere humans don’t stand a chance.

On the capitalistic South End there’s no end to entrepreneurial recklessness. Folks move here for what once was cheap digs only to discover this is the Outback for employment where only the strong survive. Or retirees with strong pensions. The rest? They start their own bizness. Or become artists who naturally disdain business — and of course become what we recognize from time immemorial as Starving Artists.

Jimmy’s Fitness Center opened last year next to the O-Zi-Ya Auto Body Shop. Jimmy figured, according to wags down at the Diner, that this would give us South Enders complete Body Works. Like a lot of our start-up enterprises, Jimmy’s Fitness Center was, oh, a tad undercapitalized. The Bank of Stanwoodopolis, burnt too many times by wild-eyed, far-fetched business plans from south of the Mt. View/Dixon Line, looked askance at Jimmy’s loan application before turning him down flat. Jimmy turned to his friends and family for fiduciary assistance, a primitive form of venture capitalism, and decided to go ahead and throw the dice.
He figured if he could last six months, get some monthly memberships going, he’d be okay. Course, he bought some pretty well used equipment from dreamers before him, mostly stationary bikes that pedaled like rusty 3 speeds up a dirt road hill, a couple of stairmasters and for good measure hung a punching bag up, I guess to let customers vent on the speedbag rather than Jimmy. Country music provided the ambiance Jimmy thought we would appreciate … or Brenda did, Jimmy’s shapely receptionist and fitness instructor. Better maybe than religious ministry, but sadly off the mark by a country mile or two when it came to judging our musical inclinations.

A few clientele came the first introductory month, half off. But no one really liked waiting their turn for the one shower and rumors of Brenda and Jimmy’s extended shared water escapades sure didn’t bring new business in and actually provoked an outcry from the Mabana Church of the Ravine. Not to mention Jimmy’s wife Lisa.

None of us were unduly surprised when the Fitness Center quietly closed. Last any of us heard, Jimmy and Brenda were off to Colorado to raise golden retrievers at the J&B Puppy Farm outside Ft. Collins. On the South End, entrepreneurs never die, they just recapitalize.

Jason Rasmussen owns Camano Plumbing and advertises in the phone book listings with a subheading that reads: “We Fix Your Do-It-Yourself Mistakes”. Back when we were both newbies to the island and D-I-Y guyz ourselves, Jason eventually decided all his mistakes added up to on-the-job training, practically an advanced degree in plumbingology and to some degree, but not an accredited one, I suppose he was his own apprentice over the years. My suspicion is that when he built his house and plumbed it himself, he figured the time was right for an entrepreneurial act of courage.

Plumbing, I will attest, is not a trade for the weak of heart. The gods of plumbing are cruel and implacable. They set traps for the faint of heart, ruin marriages, corrode confidence and turn what might seem an easy project into endless warfare. Jason, apparently, even after ruptured pipes, plugged toilets and ruined dishwashers destroyed by dropped silverware, has steeled himself for the battle. He is the Galahad that will slay the dragon that you, the unprepared D-I-Y homeowner who thought installing a sink faucet would be child’s play, instead came face to face, tooth to tooth, claw to claw with nothing you could ever have imagined. A few days without running water and multiple trips to the nearest hardware store, the disgusted looks from the woman who no longer loves you, sure, it’s maybe time to call Jason at Camano Plumbing. At this point Jason will tell me (but not you) money is no object. What matters is returning again to what was once Civilization. Running water, hot and cold, toilets that flush, indoor plumbing, sinks that drain, all those ‘conveniences’ that are not conveniences, they’re necessities.

Over a few beers at the Pilot Lounge, Jason will confess that he’s still basically training on the job. “Plumbing’s a bitch,” (his unofficial subheading), he’ll confess, “but at least now when I screw up, I get to charge the customer.” I laugh, order another round and always say I should’ve gone into the trades. “Always room for competition,” he invariably replies. “Just another screw-up I can fix.” Sadly, I know it’s true.

I’ve been thinking lately – mostly as an exercise to ward off dementia – about how fast we went from the calculator to the home computer, from Polaroid to digital cameras. Now we got hand held computers that can make phone calls, take quality photos, connect up to the internet, send text messages or e-mail and scramble my eggs. They got apps for everything you can think of, and if you haven’t thought of it, they’ll do it for you. By tomorrow. They keep track of where you are, where your friends are and where you can meet up. Your human little brain is adapting to its hardwire. Your human little brain is mutating toward the vast network it is fast becoming part of.

I’m not saying this is good or this is not. What does it matter what some old geezer on the South End thinks any more? The juggernaut rolls on the way the tide does, only IT doesn’t recede. It’s not going back out and it’s not going to slow down. The digital Genie is out of the bottle. We live more in cyberspace than what used to be called the ‘real’ world.

What I think about is how we will always be the sentience that makes the machine, that writes the software, that controls the matrix. We won’t be, is what I think. And it won’t be too long that the Sci-Fi world outstrips our feeble capacities to keep up. Computers will make computers. They’ll self-replicate and then they’ll upgrade. And of course we’ll expect them to serve Humankind. Even if they realize how puny our little human brains are. We’ll put them IN ourselves, better vision, better hearing, better hearts, sharper minds. Who wouldn’t???

But we’re the weak link. We’re the expendable part, disease prone, emotionally unstable, potentially self destructive and violent. The day will come – and it won’t be as far away as you think – they won’t need creators. Just like we did with God back in the day, they’ll chow down from the Tree of Knowledge and go it alone. The Garden of Eden will be a myth about software.

The Piranha Brothers, those fly-by-night, fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants itinerant carpenters of the South End, hammered their last nail back in 1980 or thereabouts. Cascade Lumber had just opened their new location coming onto the island, and while they knew us by name and reputation, they also knew we flew under the radar of the state business licensing and the county regulations. Permits? Our motto was: We don’t need no stinking permits.

My partner in crime and carpentry was up this 4th of July, so we toured a few of our illegal structures, most still standing, albeit a few are leaning slightly, but then, so are we. Joe had moved to various places before settling down in Seattle and Gomorrah where he bought a 1923 bungalow. Needless to say, he put the Piranha skills to work and doubled the size of his house, now worth about a cool million. He even got permits — or so he claims. In his spare time he built boats, sailboats and kayaks. The Piranha Brothers aren’t just landlubber contractors.

Me, I stayed put on the South End. Built some small buildings, a woodshop, boathouse (yeah, I built kayaks and sailboats too), greenhouses, saunas and finally built our mansion on the hill. With a permit. To save a marriage. Joe’s mizzus really hadn’t heard tell of the Piranha boyz, probably couldn’t imagine us slamming additions together with used lumber and nails we’d pulled and straightened. We were poor and untrained but we didn’t let that stop us. Or the building inspector either.

When Joe drove off, I decided maybe retirement was premature. Got a knee replacement that’s hobbled me physically and spiritually, but it’s time to strap on the tool belt, I figure, and let the Piranha Brothers ride once again. Today I tore off the old deck. Tomorrow I start framing a bigger one. The Piranha Brothers, legends in their own minds….

Gyppo John dropped by today with a block of old growth straight grain fir he’d whacked off a tree he’d felled just north of here.  You see a few old timers left on the bluffs where the loggers of old couldn’t get them down easily.  Gyppo John’s got the know-how, the tools, some equipment and enough cronies to get it down without losing the whole thing down the hill, then sectioning it into 25 foot lengths some 5 feet in diameter, loading it up on a lowboy trailer and dragging it down to a muddy side road south of the Diner while he figures out how to sell it.

It’s been dead on the stump long enough to be completely dried.  It’s vertical grain, tight ringed and beautiful, what goes for $10 a board foot at any good lumber yard.  A board foot, for you city slickers, is the Width x Length x Thickness.  Probably not on the WASL test these days.  Unless you go to high school in Darrington.  A plank 1 inch by 4 inch thick would only need to be 3 feet long to make one board foot if my 6th grade math serves me….  An eight foot 2×4 would be worth a little less than $60.  Gyppo John had 5000 board feet on the hoof and he was trying to figure out who would pay him the most.  He’d tried the mills.  He’d called the specialty hardwood places.  He’d talked to some luthiers and he’d been sniffing around some cabinetmaker shops.  John need the cash and he needed it fast, but he sure didn’t want to give this tree away for someone Else to make the profit.

Such is life on the gentrified South End.  The days of Les Benz’s sawmill down the road are long gone.  Me and my neighbor Pete put poor old Les in the morgue one night, toe tagged and cold storage, when we two orderlies at Everett General Hospital delivered him to the fridge.  His mill is Pete’s now, but the old Chevy 350 h.p. engine and the rusty 3 foot diameter blade scared us boys too much to fire it up for a nostalgic run at pre-OSHA sawmilling.  Naw, those scrappy days are long gone.  Thankfully for those of us who hold dear to things like fingers and limbs….  But the infrastructure to help Gyppo John is gone too, unfortunately.

Still, it warms my heart a little to think of John, gimping now at 50, straddling a chainsaw with a 4 foot blade, almost a ghost sliding into our digital present, winching up a dinosaur for the gawking crowd who never saw the real thing in the wild.  Yah, you betcha, I went down and took a picture of the beast myself, strapped and secured on the trailer, dead as Kong.  John isn’t far behind and most of us won’t know, not really,  what we lost.

Barney, my barber, is about to take down his red white and blue rotating tubular pole for good. He’s been cutting hair since back in the day when South Enders either opted for a butch or let it grow their arses, as Barney puts it. You could tell a man’s politics by his hair back then. Needless to say, I didn’t require Barney’s services back in my radical days. And Barney probably would’ve refused to let me sit in his leather chair. “Go to a stylist, someone who’ll cut a woman’s hair.”

His shop has sat at the same spot for about 45 years, open for business and gossip both behind the mini-storage just north of the Diner. He owns the mini-storage which is why it’s there. In fact, Barney owns a lot of the land around him, mostly good business acumen … and tips from his customers on who’s selling out cheap and moving lock stock and rainbarrel to someplace where the sun shines more than once a month.

Barney himself isn’t much of a talker. He’s mostly a good listener. He isn’t much of a barber either, in most of us customers’ opinion, but he’s reasonable about price and it’s a kick to sit with a few other South Enders in for their 2 week trim on what’s left of their hair and jaw on the politics of the day. Discussions can get pretty lively, especially around election years, but even the weather is open to debate these days.

If anyone asks Barney ‘how’s business?’ he shrugs, grabs a scissor and comb before answering, ‘pretty slow.’ He mentions every time all the funerals, how us customers are dying off faster than replacements roll in. I admit, I only go in every 6 months or so, which doesn’t help his retirement fund. He knows I like to stir the pot when I’m parked, waiting my turn, just rev up the discussion for the hell of it, something I pretty much only do at the barber shop, don’t ask me why.

I’m going to miss Barney’s Barber shop. I can go years without a trim, but I’ll miss that finger on the pulse of what my neighbors really think, no holds barred, no punches pulled. Go down to Super Cuts and see if you can get past banalities about the weather. Although … I could always bring up Global Warming, see where the coiffed crowd stands on that.

I was chatting it up with my UPS driver a few years back.  He had a shack like mine, burned wood for heat, lived in a remote spot up in the hills east of Stanwoodopolis.  I asked him how he liked driving for a living and he said, well, it’s okay if you don’t mind only making wages.

I said what does that mean?  And he took some precious minutes from his frenetic schedule to explain he delivered to all the dot.com millionaires up the road, boyz who retired at 40, cashed in their stock options and lived like shahs in their palaces on the bluff while he was making mere union wages.  You know, with health insurance, vacation and pension.  Stuff me and my pals don’t get….

Wealth, I guess you already know in the land of the free, is relative.  All these folks with early retirements, McMansions, dot.com money, his and her BMW’s — well, it can sure make a decent salary with benefits look like pauper’s wages if you care to do a comparison test.  Make you feel positively deprived.  Make you think if your time isn’t worth $500 an hour you’re being cheated, sorta like being homeless at Christmas in Beverly Hills.  Probably explains why folks play the Lottery.  Even up their playing field if they hit big.

We spend too much time wanting what we don’t have than enjoying what we do — and that maxim that money won’t buy you happiness, well, save that for the simple minded.  Money for most of us will BE happiness.

My UPS driver left awhile back.  Maybe a new route.  Hopefully one delivering to minimum wage earners.  My guess is he’s starting up some new software company, fishing for venture capital, looking for investors.  Probably in a couple of years he’ll sell out to IBM or AT&T, retire near me with enough money to buy the bluffs across the street and build a Taj South Hall.   UPS trucks’ll line up at the coded gate and he’ll regale the drivers with stories of when years ago, in another lifetime, he drove big brown trucks and worked for slave wages.  Won’t be long, we won’t have enough folks left to drive delivery.

The organization that maintains all the county parks and most of the state park trails on the island occasionally holds a potluck get-together. Since I take care of the only South End park, the one they don’t bother listing and the county doesn’t either, I get an invitation. A few years back I went to one of these, made a dish to share and hauled up to the Senior Center with about a hundred other volunteers. After waiting for the buffet line to clear I loaded up a plate with whatever was left and proceeded to sit down. Tables seated about 6 folks and so I looked for one with a vacant seat.

Maybe you were a popular kid in high school, one who sat with your popular pals at the formica table and refused seating privileges to the geeks and the nerds and the losers not in your group. I was not in your group. My family moved about 20 times before I graduated high school so I was forever the new kid on the outside looking in. You learn a lot being the new kid, trust me, and one lesson is that humans love their cliques. They love being exclusionary. And they don’t mind hurting others’ feelings. In fact, they really enjoy it.

The other lesson you learn is growing comfortable being on the outside. Okay by me then and okay by me now. As I went from table to table at our little potluck, each and every one told me that their vacant seat was taken. Not by anyone left in the buffet line obviously where I was last, but just that they needed that chair empty. Imagine yourself going table to table, one after the other, plate in your hand and repeatedly being told that empty chair was taken. I suppose you might take it personal. I suppose you might even feel shunned. I suppose you might even be reminded of those good old high school days.

I took it personal, I felt shunned and I definitely was reminded of my high school days, 50 years past that adolescent bullshit. After the last table with a vacant spot informed me someone might already have that space, I took my plate and walked outside to eat alone. When I’d gotten about halfway through the potato salad, macaroni mash and Costco whatevers, I got up, walked back inside and tossed the rest in the garbage bin, went back and grabbed my quinoa salad and hightailed it to the door and outside to my truck.

Needless to say I don’t go to their potlucks anymore. I can eat alone without making the drive and I don’t have to share my dinner with jerks. And no, I don’t go to my high school reunions either, in case you were wondering.