The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Dead Doug, one of my few pals in college, was an employee of mine at the University Food Unit where we met, the guy who would only work cleaning grills, the worst job in the joint but one where he could work late … and more importantly, alone. Doug was a geeky gangly partly androgynous character, quick to be offended, a too–sensitive-for-this-world kind of guy. We were friends in a contentious, squabbly sort of way, two odd ducks wandering campus late into the night, arguing politics and religion and life, puppies, really, not quite paper trained.

After college Doug moved to Nowhere, Iowa, aka Parnell, on a stint for VISTA, Volunteers in Service to America, our indigenous Peace Corps. When I visited, it was like traveling to a foreign country, one where corn was the currency of the realm. After VISTA he took the night clerk job at a motel on the interstate ten miles away from the basement he rented from the landlady above ground. The town, pop. about 40 or so, rarely set eyes on Doug, this 6 foot five ghoul with dark sunken eyes, as xenophobic a character as Dracula.

So when he was elected mayor I probably wasn’t the only one surprised. But when he died two years later, I probably was. An attorney contacted me based on letters I had written over the years, said he thought I ought to know Doug had passed. I wrote back asking what he had died of and received an ambiguous reply.

AIDS was my guess. I suspect Doug was their first gay mayor. Although … he may have been one of many closet executives in that strange little hamlet surrounded by miles of corn in every direction. His attorney said Doug had left me something in his will, maybe the keys to a motel room, but later he wrote to inform me the ‘assets’ had been fully depleted to pay for his legal work. My guess was he’d need the assets to pay for his own health care. Just a guess….

If you want to light a bonfire down at the South End Diner, bring up the subject of homelessness, no quicker way to warm up a cup of coffee without a microwave, trust me. Two mornings ago the boyz were slamming down chicken fried steaks, curly hashbrowns, four egg omelettes and something called ‘the works’, which, by god, really was. Everything from bacon to eggs to ham slices, cheese and vegetables, all slathered with white gravy. Add the toast buttered heavily and what you have is a heart attack waiting around the corner. ‘The Works’ is the favorite for my pals. Wash it down with four or five cups of java and between shovelfuls, the conversations are caloric.

Four Finger Fred was wiping gravy off his tobacco stained beard before he pushed back his chair contentedly and asked our little group of sociologists how many homeless people they knew down here on the South End. “Why you asking, Freddie?” Two Toke wanted to know, hoping maybe to head off what he knew was coming. “Because,’ Fred said, ‘the County is conducting a survey, that’s why. First they’ll run the numbers, then they’ll inflate em, next thing you know they’ll be busing drug addicts up from Seattle to our island, taxing us for free housing, probably build them a damn house.”

“There was a guy once who lived in his car south of Tyee Store,” Little Jimmy said. “Cops finally ran him off.” Fred shook his head, “He’s long gone now, Jimbo.” Two Toke set his fork down and pushed his plate back plenty agitated. “What’s it to you, Fred? Folks fall down on their luck, you what, you want to run em off the island?”

“I don’t care where they go, Tom, just so long as they go. All I’m saying is there isn’t a problem here, why go looking for an expensive solution?”

I said I had met a woman this summer who was watching the eagles’ nest with me down at the Head, nice lady standing on the bluff when I walked up. When I asked if she lived around here, she told me she didn’t live anywhere and when I asked the obvious follow-up question, she said she lived in her car, moved around place to place. Her husband had left her and taken up with her sister and when their mother died, her sister had stolen her inheritance and her husband kicked her out of their house.

“Oh right!” Fred howled. “What a story! Skeeter, you are the bleedingest bleeding heart in the world. I bet you let her stay in your yard. I bet you gave her money for a motel. God, what a sucker….”

A better man than me might have done that, I was thinking. Might have asked, at least, if she needed anything. Food, money, whatever. But mostly we just talked and I listened to her troubled stories. She had some ‘mental issues’, she said. She was working to get her share of the divorce, maybe her share of her mom’s will. Fred might’ve been right, it could have all been fiction. But … I’ve known some homeless folks down here, living in the woods, hitchhiking to town, working odd jobs for food and beer and cigarettes. Harmless folks, folks down on their luck, folks with mental issues. Fellow South Enders. That’s what I told Fred anyway, who sarcastically replied, “What am I supposed to do about it, Skeeter? Throw money at your loser friends, buy em a house, what?”

“I don’t know, Fred, but what I really want is for the rich to shut up. I want you to stop your whining, that’s all. We got it made, why begrudge the poor?” Fred, of course, just laughed. “Brenda,” he called to our waitress, “how about a refill for all of us. If they haven’t got enough for the coffee, it’s on me.” Brenda rolled her eyes before coming near us with her thermos. “Just add it to the tip, Big Spender,” she muttered. Fred, of course you know, doesn’t leave tips.

Unless I miss my guess, most of you out there in Blogland are dreading the coming New Year. You’ve had a dose of impeachment hearings, you’re sick to death of politics, you’re probably already making a New Year Resolution NOT to watch MSNBC or Fox News this next year. You’re like the moth that vows NEVER to fly toward the candle again.

But you will. The impeachment trial is coming, the 2020 elections will heat up, Rudy Giuliani will never go back to his coffin even in daylight. A dystopian grimness has spread dark wings across the land and the warring tribes huddle by campfires in their separate valleys of darkness. A minister from our island mega church up north walked into the Tyee Store a month ago wearing a red Make America Great Again cap and immediately found himself in a verbal joust with Charlie, a self-appointed gadfly for the store. I’ve known Charlie for 40 years, back when he was a bit more spry than the arthritic old codger he is today, but I couldn’t have told you his political leanings although I would have guessed he was a Trump man. Apparently he isn’t. What that makes him, I would hate to hazard a guess.

But he took umbrage to that hat and apparently he felt called upon to berate this new customer. Shyness was never one of Charlie’s personality traits. He’s opinionated, he’s aggressive, he’s a fixture down at the store. Like a lot of South Enders, maybe too many, he’s what we call a Character. For good or ill. The good chaplain, evidently unfamiliar with our ways down here, declared he had the right to wear whatever he damn well pleased on his righteous head. Charlie begged to differ.

Well, one insult led to another and the argument spilled over the milk coolers, past the condiment shelves and onto the café tables. Charlie, I suspect, already thought America was great, or at least good enough. He didn’t need some outsider telling him it wasn’t. Finally the debate became so heated that the store personnel asked the reverend to either take the hat off his head or take his business elsewhere. Charlie, of course, offered to help him with that decision.

The man of the cloth, mightily pissed now, revealed that he was, indeed, a minister and that the store would sorely rue this day when his flock was informed of his mistreatment down here in the sin-socked South End and Gomorrah. Boycotts were hinted at not too subtly. Business would suffer from this iniquity. The wrath of Trump lovers would visit misfortune on our heads. So saith this man of the Lord.

Obviously he didn’t grasp that business was already suffering. That misfortune was something we were accustomed to. That voodoo quasi-religious threats were more comic than something to be taken seriously. That we would probably do just fine without the congregation thronging down to the Tyee Store for their cigarettes and beer. I don’t know if the coming year will make America great or if it will make America a poorer nation. But … I do know this: The South End doesn’t need anyone to tell it anything either way. So we’ll probably skip the resolutions and just muddle along in our little Shangri-La-La.

I been making lately, down at the Diner’s restroom, a sociological study of commode values. Oh, I know, you’re thinking my god, can’t we just leave well enough alone? But I’m an Observer of all things South End and I don’t intend to leave a stone unturned or a bathroom unscrutinized. What I been noticing is this: a lot of the boyz won’t touch a seat or a flush handle. They’d rather leave their offerings for the next occupant than risk some ugly herd of germs jumping onto their ungloved hand, apparently because they either won’t wash them or they don’t think there’s enough anti-bacterial power in the washroom hand soap.

I used to think South Enders were pretty salty fellows, tough as galvanized roofing nails, but apparently not. Maybe all this chatter about Bird Flu Pandemics has created a backlash response: CHICKENITIS. I think it’s got to stop, men. I think you got to step up to the plate — or the bowl — and put your Big Girl Panties on and just be as courageous as you can be. If the seat is in the Down position, for Pete’s sake, wrap your little hand in toilet paper and put it in the Up mode – don’t whiz through the hole and leave the next Sitter a splattered seat. It’s unworthy and it’s Piggish, not to mention Priggish. Jeez, fella, were you born in a damn outhouse?

And when you’re done, flush yer mess!! I KNOW your mama trained you better than this. Even a dog kicks a little dirt over his scat so Man Up, you little wusses. You’re giving us South Enders an odorous reputation. Although … I will say, the womenfolk might start appreciating a seat that’s left Up instead of one defiled and Down.

Every year we have folks who say they didn’t get an invitation to our little she-bang party, wring out the old, ring in the new. The truth is it’s an open invitation. We don’t much go out of our way to send out invites, we just assume if you have heard about it, you got the word. Anyway, this year you folks who need a notarized letter from us, well, this is it. By all means haul down here and help us and a few other South Enders drown our griefs and hope for a better Nuevo Ano.

Here is your New Year 2020 Invitation

So you’ve been wandering in the Wilderness these past couple of years, cast out from civilized norms, wondering where your country went, asking yourself if there was something more you could’ve done. And the answer is Of course there’s something more you could do. You could come to the annual South End New Year’s Party at Karen and Jack’s, a refuge from the storm and Stormy, a balm for self-imposed exiles waiting for the opportune time to return without asking for asylum. You been in the Asylum. Two years. It’s time to take back the Next Year. It’s time to breathe the free air of the South End. It’s time to be Optimistic once again. It’s time to Occupy America.
So haul on down to Karen and Skeeter’s annual New Year Bash, bring a dish, bring a bottle of cheer, bring a friend or two. You know the drill. 4015 S. Camano Drive. 2019 starts here.

The wag who said the only certainties in life are taxes and death never dropped into the many real estate offices on the South End for a ‘free’ map. An earthquake could separate us from the rest of the Civilized World and no matter the land values, real estate would be the Real Show. If a nuclear explosion ended most life as we know it, there’d still be cockroaches and realtors, both equally adaptable to any environment.

Not that I’m suggesting they’re equally unsavory. I can list a whole lot of professions more detestable than a land and home salesman. But most of those are SOME kind of salesman, from snake oil to stocks and bonds. And it’s not that I think they’re inherently dishonest or greedy. Most are good folks and most are poor as me. It’s just that there are so damn many of them. They’re more prolific than us artists who apparently breed up every holler and down every ravine. So many …. none can make a decent living competing with one another. The folks who moved here either become artists or realtors because there’s no other employment available within a tank of $4 a gallon gas.

So now we got 17 flavors of real estate, everything from ReFlux Realty to Windy Rear, all vying for the same properties. Which, if you’ve lived here more than the time it takes to close a mortgage, means about a third of us are selling, a third are buying and about half must be the realtors. Drive down the island and it looks like more For Sale signs than mailboxes some years. It’s too bad the signs aren’t painted by the artists — we’d become the Art Island practically overnight, famous up and down the Sound.

But don’t tell the realtors – it would only draw more Art Lovers hoping to buy a small studio. And in a year or two, they’d become real estate agents themselves. It’s a vicious circle and we need to break the cycle. Although … I’ll worry more when the realtors start painting tourist art.

H&H B&B

Down in the economically distressed hollers of the South End, many a man (and almost as many a woman) has turned to desperate measures to keep from falling into the abyss of full time employment. We’ll try damn near ANYTHING before looking for a job. And essentially, isn’t this what capitalism is all about?? The god-given right NOT to work? Course it is! We’d rather kill ourselves laboring for ourselves, we’d rather go broke and hungry trying some bonehead endeavor, we’d rather jeapordize our mental and physical health before we’d take a job doing something we hate 20 to 40 miles away from hearth and home.

The Hearth and Home B&B was Earl’s idea, but Patti signed on too. It was that or welfare, she figured, so why not humor Earl. She did make it clear, though, she wasn’t going to do all the cooking and cleaning, buster – he’d have to make beds and clean toilets. Earl hemmed, Earl hawed, Earl said he’d have plenty to do setting up the website and handling the reservations that were certain to pour in, that and ‘cuting up’ the place so the old farmhouse would look more quaint than shacky, but in the end, Earl, desperate to escape the horrors of real employment, signed on to bathroom duties and bed making, figuring, if I know Earl, he could wiggle out of those before too long.

Home and Hearth Bed and Breakfast spent a small fortune on web designs, on yellow page ads, on fancy signage, stationary, all the rigamarole of business start-ups not imagined at the outset, took a second mortgage on the property, then waited for the tourists to pour in from the smog-sickened cities. “Charming turn of the Century Farmstead. Spectacular views of orchards and fields and Mt. Baker in the distance.” The orchards were overgrown and played out, the field was impossible to mow, the farm equipment didn’t look rustic, just rusting, and Mt. Baker was barely visible on the best of days. H&H B& B lasted about 6 months before Patti took a job cutting hair at the salon beneath the real estate office. Earl soldiered on, but finally he found work at Boeing 45 miles away. It’s a long commute, but as Earl says, there’s great views of Baker and the Cascade Range on the way. And home is like a vacation at a B& B. Only he doesn’t have to make the bed or clean the toilets anymore. Patti figures it’s a pretty good trade-off.

Spies R Us

This week the Hot News is this: The Government Is Spying On Us!! Turns out they can check with the phone companies, get a few billion of our numbers we called and using algorithms, figure out who’s been calling Bin Laden. Or their mom in Keokuk. Folks are up in arms. My neighbors are afraid to use their cellphones. Down at the Diner, there’s talk of Big Brother and the necessity to maybe get MORE firepower in their arsenals. GTE Johnny, who used to work in telecommunications, said we ain’t seen nothing yet. “The government knows when you were born, when you got divorced and probably when you’ll die,” he pronounced ominously over his newspaper headline that read: White House Defends Spy Activity. His veggie omelette coagulated while he warned us poor victims what was coming, everything from cyber surveillance to space cameras so powerful they could read the Diner menu from the Hubble.

“There’s no more hiding,” he whispered, although we all knew the hidden microphones in the salt shakers were picking him up Loud and Clear, transmitting his seditious comments to a Cray Super Computer a mile deep under the Rocky Mountains where it was being transcribed, collated and filed in the vast data banks the National Security Agency maintains. Even as Johnny finished, we could imagine storm troopers loading up the black helicopters, GPS set on Camano’s South End, instructions given to breach no resistance, possibly take no prisoners.

“The damn government!” a few soon-to-be-gulag residents shouted over their biscuits and gravy. “Intruding in our private lives. What’s next?!”

Oh, I don’t know. Credit card monitoring? Facebook statistics? Google info gathering? Grocery store scan cards to track our grocery preferences? Yahoo monitoring of our internet so they can customize our ads to maximize profits? Rental car companies using GPS to check our speeds and locations? Cellphone interceptions by crooks and hackers? Security cameras in every store, mall, streetcorner, bar and restaurant? Corporations mining our meta-data to tailor their sales pitch. Phone companies that record every tweet, twitter and text?

If the boyz at the Diner want privacy, well, they should throw away their credit cards, ditch their cellphones, soak their computers in the bathtub, don’t drive, don’t go to town, don’t talk out loud. Do like the Barefoot Bandit — only don’t steal the planes. You think government is spying, welcome to corporate and social networking. You gave Facebook everything you got. Whadja think??? The damn government, as always, would be the last to get this stuff. The NSA shoulda maybe joined Facebook a long time ago. Or YOU shouldn’t have….

Ma and me got this notion back when she first arrived by mail order – hoping for a new start, a New Land, an employed suitor, only to find herself at the tail end of an island where jobs and work were non-existent – to start our own little business. Being a librarian, well, an unemployable librarian unless she wanted to commute to hell and gone, she considered a used book store. We dug around a little, looked into renting a space above some shops in downtown Stanwoodopolis and made inquiries. They wanted a three year lease, no escape clause. We worried the elderly would never make it up the stairs. Or the lazy either. And we fretted that the illiteracy rate of Stanwoodopolis might spell our doom the first year and we’d owe two more years of rental on the dust bunnies.

Our next entrepreneurial investigation was to start a nursery, maybe buy some land, plant a few botanicals, grow the business organically. Meaning, it would be a slow return on our investment. But hell, we weren’t hedge fund managers, we were managers of hedges. We’d do it the old fashioned way, work hard, be frugal, build the business step by step.

We needed a few acres and a water source. Down on the South End there were plenty of acres, not much water. We didn’t have the money to buy a parcel AND dig a well so we looked for land with springs, something we could dam up a little stream maybe and use it to irrigate in the drought months, and sure enough, we found a place a mile south, got the asking price – about $15,000 for five acres – then called the County to make certain we could operate a nursery.

The nice folks at the County said they didn’t know. We could if we lived on that five acres, not sure if we didn’t. I said we sort of need to know if we were going to buy the land and get a loan to start up operations. They said they just couldn’t say yes but they didn’t want to discourage us by saying no either.

I won’t say we had a real firm business plan developed, just some seedlings of ideas really, mostly like the kind that die off for lack of money. Or water. Or a county closing us down when word got out we were operating an Illegal Flower Operation. In the end we didn’t buy the land and we didn’t go into debt and we didn’t corner the nettle market on the South End. We did manage to make a Go of it here, we worked various jobs, we stayed together. I’m kinda glad the County wasn’t more helpful. I’m real glad we never asked about a marriage license.

Some of you out there who stay abreast of fake news coming in 24/7 probably already got the word. And the word isn’t good. Impeachment. I know, you’re tired of it. You’re sick to death of it. And I hate to be the bearer of bad news for those of you who finally turned off your computer, dropped out of Facebook, said you’d rather drink rat poison than listen to one more MSNBC or Fox News commentator drone on half an hour about it. You’d rather go and listen to the South End String Band than endure that.

Yeah, I know. But sometimes you can’t put your head in the sand. You can’t plug your ears. Sometimes a story is too Big, too important, too … life changing to ignore. They’re impeaching Santa Claus. I couldn’t believe it either. The jolly old guy was ratted out by Donder and Blitzen, probably pissed they had to work every Christmas when Santa could have contracted to Amazon Prime. Quid Pro Quo, they claimed. Santa wouldn’t know a quid from a quo, but that’s no defense. The elves had the lists of Naughty and Nice, but Santa had them sequestered before the subpoena came in. Might’ve saved his bacon except Mrs. Claus admitted that yes, the presents for the kids were conditional on their good behavior. Quid … pro … oh no!

I can tell you, the North Pole will be a litiginous place this season. Fa la la? I don’t think so. Next year, if I don’t miss my bet, even the naughty kids will get gifts. Nobody said this was a fair world. And if I were the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy, I’d be afraid. I’d be very afraid.