The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Just up the road from where I buy my homegrown eggs, being too lazy to raise chickens anymore, there’s a sign that says: URIGANDA. I suspect it’s Hindu, roughly translated: Dead End. You wouldn’t know it was there except there’s a constant stream of traffic in and out and it IS the last place on the dirt dead end road. I figured at first just another house going up, tradesmen going in. But I was wrong. It is, in actuality, a commune.

More factually, it’s a chain commune. They have franchises down near Seattle and Gomorrah, but rumor on the dirt street is that they’re hoping to feed the flock with what they grow up here on the South End. Their neighbor, a goatherder and cheesemaker met them and offered her expertise, but they’ve retreated back into the nettles for now, no doubt googling info on Nubians and Alpines and hybrid goats with milk yields in gallons, not quarts. Today’s communes, I’m fairly certain, aren’t consulting Whole Earth Catalogue or Mother Earth News for hippie bargains or tips on how to build a greenhouse out of discarded shower curtains from the local thrift stores.

I don’t know one small thing about them to pass on as juicy gossip. They haven’t taken over the county government like the Bhagwan down in Antelope, Oregon back in the ‘80’s. They don’t patrol the perimeter with armed paranoid zombie members. They don’t poke their heads up much at all. Seems to me they came to the exact right place for the exact same reasons as the rest of us refugees from corporate America. They just like to flock up more than us apparently.

I say welcome to the party! And good luck to you folks no matter what flavor Kool-Aid you prefer. Life’s a winding road and I guess we’ve all looked for a good roadmap or an intuitive GPS to help us navigate the shifting terrains and the dirt road potholes. Like us, you’ve found a detour. Hopefully the South End will prove more a destination than a wayside, but remember, there’s always another Path if this one proves too difficult. Worst case, you can do like a lot of us who arrived with starcharts in our heads and dreams of spirits guiding us. You can always become an artist. And if that doesn’t cut it, Windy Rear has plenty of room for another real estate agent.

I guess we’ve all seen these folks at the freeway entry ramps with their mournful mendicant faces and their homemade signs that say they’re looking for work or money or food or a kind word and can you help, God Bless! They stand like stoic poster children for the poor, the homeless, the forgotten losers in the economic gears of a capitalist machine. They don’t seem to be on drugs or carry a bottle in a paper bag. They seem like us — okay, like me — just a bit down on their luck.

Myself, I’m a sucker for a panhandler on the sidewalk. I’ll empty my pockets even if I KNOW it’s going toward the purchase of the next bottle of Mad Dog 20/20. Maybe it’s the suspicion that there, but for the grace of God, go I …. Some wrong turns, a round of bad luck, an accident, a disease, you name it, that guy with the glazed eyes, the bad breath, the shabby clothes — he could be me. On my dark days, I think maybe he IS.

But the folks on the freeway ramp, looking like the one at exit 205 or 216 or, well, all of them, I have this uneasy suspicion they all work for an outfit run by some smooth operator registered with the State of Washington as Legitimate Beggars, Inc. or BumsRus, LLC or just Freeway Freeloaders.com. The signs are hand scrawled but they seem remarkably uniform like they were copied from a foreman’s template or made down at the home office.

Maybe it’s that I’m enclosed in a steel and glass vehicle, window up, eye contact minimal, that makes me more critical than I am with the guy on the street asking for spare change. They certainly don’t look like they’re flush with income. They never look anything but gaunt and underfed. They seem Totally Authentic and yet … I never roll down the window, I never dig for loose change or a spare buck, I never quite see myself working that intersection.

Course, when they’re finally standing by Elger Bay Store, hands out, signs lettered in the same printed childish script, maybe they’ll melt my heart. Then again, we got plenty of needy down here now. They just don’t stand all day at the closest busy intersection. Maybe why they’re still needy…. They just need a little organizing and we got plenty of artists who could help me with those signs.

I happen to live in a blue state, one of those states the Trump Regime has declared war on, sending troops into our cities, defunding programs previously put into law by Congress, declaring us enemies that he hates. Obviously his actions and speeches have done nothing to bring the country together. In fact, he seeks to divide us further to give himself autocratic powers. The legislative branch of government has abdicated its purpose and most of the Supreme Court decisions have given the executive control over funding that the Congress has allowed him. That same Court has made it clear that illegal actions committed by the President are no longer deemed illegal, just further executive authority. He has weaponized the Dep’t of Justice, pardoned his cronies, used his office to shamelessly enrich himself and his family and targeted universities and the media with lawsuits and mafiosa extortion tactics. If it looks like dictatorship, it smells like dictatorship, chances are it is or will be soon a dictatorship.

We’re boiling the frogs here. Water right now is hot but not quite full boil. Sure, we can wait and see if the temperature goes down but every day another erosion of the Constitution should convince us this bully in the pulpit intends to keep the heat turned full throttle. Immigration thugs roam our cities fully masked, legal citizens are being pulled off our streets and sent to prisons in third world countries, our military is blasting purported drug cartel boats out of the water without any proof of illegality. This week he lectured global leaders at the United Nations, regaling them with his own prowess versus their stupidity and ineptness. He called our generals from around the world to attend another speech of his to regale his own prowess versus Biden’s and Democrats’ stupidity then demand they lose some fat. Not bureaucratic fat, their fat. Not his fat, mind you, theirs.

Most of the world and half this country are struck numb with the imbecility of this boy king, a petulant, grievance-ridden despot who, through the power of unlimited money to bring his own party to his will lest they be ‘primaried’, has proven to the rest of us that the guardrails protecting the Constitution and our democracy have failed. Like Ben Franklin warned at the Convention when the rules of the road for a nascent America were drawn up, good luck, if you can keep it.

I don’t recognize this country anymore. If we are going to be at war with the federal government, maybe we should consider a Separation. If we are deemed the enemy, let’s act like the enemy, not simply roll over with a white flag. Personally I’m sick and tired of that fat Fuhrer’s boot on my neck. I vote to secede.

Back in the days when we wrenched on our cars — NOT for the love of vintage automobiles, but because we were too poor to have someone else repair them — we had just come back from the Rez junkyard where we’d pulled an automatic tranny out of another ’64 Impala half sunk in the swamps. Muddy nasty work, but you do what has to be done…. By late afternoon we had that transmission cleaned off and bolted onto our own Chevy up by the barn, and now the moment of truth had arrived so we fired up the Impala, ignored the bucket of parts with the ‘extra’ bolts and nuts and do-hickeys, dropped it off its jacks and headed up the road.

For the first mile we drove slow, feeling for sloppy shifts, listening for odd noises. Two miles up we hit 50mph and now terrible noises rose through the floorboards so we pulled over and crawled underneath. Sure enough, a few bolts were missing where the tranny connected to the bellhousing, no doubt those ‘extra’ parts back in the bucket by the barn. We cursed, we spit, we finally laughed at our stupidity, stuck our thumbs out and waited for a ride.

Joe Frittitelli swerved to the shoulder in his big Exxon Valdez of a cruiser, said hop in, boyz, and we squeezed between Joe and his girlfriend, all four of us in the front seat the spaciousness of a Montana wheatfield. A mile later Joe had to urinate ‘like a racehorse’ and since the driver’s door was no longer functional, all of us slid out the passenger side and waited while Seabiscuit relieved himself, then we all rolled back in across seas of amber grain. He dropped us on the roadside by our place, then sped off in a purple haze of half burnt oil.

We retrieved the lost bolts, hitched back to the crippled Impala, installed them and an hour later we were back at the shack, Jack, celebrating with some cold ones. A month later I’m working my job as weekend graveyard orderly down at the Everett Pain Motel and run into Joe at 3 AM wandering the desolate hallways. “What’s up, Joe?” I asked.

Joe, it seems, had been cleaning his gun late that night, pulled the trigger and lo and behold, the unanticipated bullet in the chamber was now embedded in his girlfriend’s brain. I had just taken her to the Cat Scan but hadn’t recognized her. She was comatose but alive. It was, needless to say, a long night. The police were convinced he’d shot her intentionally. I was convinced he hadn’t. If he had, he deserved an Academy Award.

She stayed up in ICU on life support for two months. Alive, I guess, but not really. Last we heard they moved her to a facility that cared for the comatose. Joe was never charged. He got cancer and moved away, where, we heard, he died. And …. not to sound too cold hearted or unsympathetic to the victims here, our Impala died too. The tranny was no good and we didn’t want to waste time or money on another bad one. I don’t think we wanted to meet any more neighbors either. Maybe it wasn’t so much we were dirt poor back then — as much as life seemed just way too cheap.

If you wander back through our woods beyond our old shack, you’ll pass into a ravine where the trail is lined with bleeding hearts and periwinkle, sort of a path into our own worldly heaven. It meanders around past the Nesje farm, then turns uphill through a nice stand of fir and follows the pastures over to the east side of the island where it eventually pops out at Guitar Bob’s place near the Tyee Store and the Art Gallery. I used to keep a couple of miles of trails cleared where I ran every morning in moccasins, carrying a sickle to slash at the always intruding berry vines and nettles. The woods back there stretched unbroken clear to the Head where nobody much went but us kids, young and old. And maybe the Barefoot Bandit.

I would find old homesteads long gone and I’d collect their heirloom plants to bring back to our homestead. Daffodil Hill was an acre of golden flowers every spring, escapees from someone’s ghost garden. The old house was long gone, just a shadow of myrtles to mark its passing. I’d carry a gunnysack and a small spade, dig a few hundred bulbs each spring, then plant them back home, mostly in the woods where it was too dark for them to prosper. Kitty’s grave and old Dr. Gonzo’s too are marked with them up by the shelter I had in the hemlock copse where sometimes I slept at night only to wake up with slugs sliming my hair.

You walk over to Tyee Store now, what used to be woods, but got clearcut twice since I started making trail, you would find the old farm that must have stretched from the west side to the east a century ago. In a clearing off Tamarack Road was an old cabin, covered in ivy and the ivy was up in the firs, a ruined cathedral of green reaching to the treetops, dark and forbidding like dreams covered in kudzu. Just before you got to the blacktop by the store there was another house, mostly just a foundation and some rotted walls fallen in on itself.
A telephone line still stood where the driveway must’ve been. And an outhouse which was pretty much intact. The last logging operation they pushed the house into a pile with a bulldozer and that’s still sitting there in the pasture now, covered with blackberries. The outhouse they left, leaning into its past. Even loggers get nostalgic for what they’re taking away, I guess.

Sometimes I think I’m like that, an old fool growing even older now, even more foolish, looking back over his shoulder more than where he’s going. And these stories I’m telling you, they’re like that outhouse with the telephone line coming in off the highway, its dryrotted pole waiting apprehensively for the next winter storm. We’ll all be gone soon, that much is true, maybe the only thing. And someday someone else will wander this way, wondering who planted Daffodil Hill and where did they go, those people who once lived here not so very long ago, the pioneers who lined their dreams with bleeding hearts and left clam shell trails going nowhere now, the folks who maybe thought their outhouse was a telephone booth, who left a few clues for the next stories of the once wild South End.

Folks are sometimes surprised to learn I actually went to college. It could be they’re surprised I could get in, much less graduate. But mostly I think they don’t understand why someone would go to four years of advanced education so he could work blue collar jobs half his life. Kids nowadays go to a university, they’re going to come out with a debt that looks mountainous right out of the starting gate. They’re probably not gonna look for a minimum wage job and a cheap apartment above the TV repair shop the way I did. Then again, I didn’t come out of college in the hole. In fact, I rolled out with enough money in the bank from working 30 hour a week jobs while going to school that I figured why work at all for awhile? That, for you ambitious young’uns, was the first mistake.

You can learn to like not working for other people. Or, in my case, you can learn that on top of hating to work for other people. I took summers off, then I took spring and fall off. Mostly I would work for two or three months, give notice and take a long well-deserved vacation traveling around the country. Which is how I found Washington State and the Olympic Peninsula. I vowed to move out, buy a slug farm, cultivate mosses and ferns, make a new life in the foggy temperate rainforests. I didn’t quite make it to the coast, but … close enough for me.

I guess if you graduate with a degree as versatile as an English major – coupled with a second major in Sociology – your options for careers are pretty near exponential. Meaning, you can work most of those jobs folks with MBA’s from Harvard probably aren’t applying for. Nowadays the young student is more likely to take a degree in business or international studies than American Literature given that tuition costs aren’t the 250 dollars a semester I had to dole out back in 1968. 500 bucks a year. 2000 for the whole she-bang. Don’t ask me why I didn’t get a PhD for that kind of money. I should’ve. Except I was itching to see the country and I had a 1962 Rambler and I was fed up with schooling.

Life looked like an open road, let me tell you. And … it was. For awhile. But you quit jobs the way I quit jobs, pretty soon your resume tells any prospective employer you may not stick around real long. Hard to imagine why a young buck like myself wouldn’t want to make a career out of kennel worker at the local dog pound, I know, but oddly, employers value loyalty and longevity, even if it paid $1.75 an hour back then.

And pretty soon even a will-of-the-wisp worker like myself realizes the job market is evaporating faster than the icebergs polar bears are sailing. Combine that with the less than rosy employment opportunities of the South End, you maybe can see why entrepreneurism works for some of us desperate dead end graduates. Which, looking back now from a few decades of a so-called career in art, it did. Sure, it could’ve turned out tragic. It could’ve been a cautionary tale for my friends to tell their kids. ‘You want to turn out like Skeeter, go ahead, keep flunking math in your senior year, see how you like living hand to mouth in some hellhole.” As it turns out they keep their kids away from me about the time when college applications are due. You don’t let them play with a happy artist when what they need is to buckle down and make some serious Life Decisions.

I hear a lot of talk these days that history and literature and the fine arts are a waste of time for a college to offer. Not worth the high tuition when you rank it against potential earnings. I think that kind of thinking is too sad for words. That kind of thinking is right out of the mouths of the folks with no imagination and no use for one. Speaking for those of us with ‘useless’ degrees, I can say my education didn’t end back in 1972 when I missed graduation ceremonies. What I learned was learning is a lifetime endeavor. It didn’t end with a job. It didn’t end at all. You ask me, whatever that cost, it was worth every cent.

Psychiatrists this week announced the discovery of a new mental malady: Sluggish Cognitive Tempo Disorder. This apparently is a sub-order of Attention Deficit Syndrome and is sure to raise a controversy in the medical community as to whether it is really a proper psychopathological disorder. Apparently it is characterized by slow learning, chronic daydreaming and lack of interest in the world around the victim. Patient, I mean. What we used to call Stupid before we became more touchy-feely and enlightened.

No doubt the next step is a pharmacological breakthrough, something akin to coffee, but not as potent as crystal meth, and hopefully (unless you’re the pharmacology company) not overly addictive. Bring the patient back to reality gradually, no point trying to make it TOO interesting. This is great news for the South End, you no doubt realize. All those artists and musicians have been struggling for years with stargazing, cloud watching, daydreaming and other similarly wasteful idle pursuits. We just didn’t have a name for it, but now, thanks to psychiatric research, we not only have a name and a diagnosis, but possibly the hope for a cure.

With counseling and the proper drugs, we South Enders can imagine the day when our idyllic but lachrymose lives are given new leases. Jobs, responsibilities, duties and a focused commitment to meaningful undertakings. Finally we can put down the banjos, drop the paintbrushes, store the blank canvases in the cellar and look forward to normality. We can drive to our satisfying new job at Boeing, we can balance a checkbook, we can scan the TV guide for exciting new programs, we can do all those things the rest of you take for granted, but for us were always far far away.

It is undoubtedly a New Day down here. We’re going to take that sluggish cognitive tempo we’ve been sleepwalking with most of our adult lives and kick it up a notch or three. Multi-task! We’ll be able to juggle half a dozen activities at once while making appointments on our new cellphone for job interviews and doctor visits and financial planning and car repairs and ….well, I get goosebumps just thinking about it. The future is wide open, just like my eyes, and I trust you’ll understand if I don’t finish this, but hey, I haven’t got time for literary nonsense now. It’s a big world out past the garden and I’ve got to make up for lost time so if you’ll excuse me, I have to go march to a similar drummer ….

A few years back while we were still living in our hundred year old shack, I was at a graduation dinner for a friend and her family. The seating arrangements worked out in a way that I was at the far end of the long table and even further down was my friend’s aunt who was obviously peeved at the prospect of an evening with no one else to talk with than my miserable self. This lady had actually stayed a night many moons prior at my shack, before even the mizzus arrived some months later, and so she knew first hand what my socio-economic status was, somewhere near the bottom.

In the intervening years she had married a man closer to the top of that status, a high mucky-muck for a major corporation who sat on no fewer than 7 board of directors for other major corporations. And in full honesty, was a nice guy when I met him, despite being filthy rich. In the course of our shared exile from the rest of the dinner party we chatted amiably about this and that, talked about the divergent paths our lives had taken and eventually grew pretty comfortable with one another.

At some point past dessert she mentioned that her two high school boys had taken a vacation to some southeast Asian country I had never heard of, which they loved and which she suggested I make plans myself to go touring. At the time a trip to Wisconsin was about as far as our budget would extend, something she might have surmised but obviously didn’t. Later she waxed nostalgically about the guided fishing trip to Alaska, a weeklong safari with their own chef and a fabulous lodge. Only cost about 10,000 for the week. She told me in all earnestness we needed to take that trip too. I said it sounded wonderful. She no doubt assumed I would be on the phone to my travel agent as soon as possible following a quick call to our broker.

My point in all this was how, in only a couple of decades, this woman who had stayed with me in a shack where the mice kept her awake all night gnawing on the walls, could lose sight of what it was like to be … well … poor. We can all drop what we’re doing and jet over exotic lands. We can certainly afford a guided fishing excursion with our own chef in tow. The gulf between her wealth and our poverty had disappeared. We still stay in touch. She and her husband are very nice people and very generous to their niece. They just seem to have lost touch with us unwashed masses. Even though they had been here themselves once.

On a recent encounter at their niece’s wedding, one catered by a restaurant hours away in Portland, I asked about the house they had bought in Pasadena and been restoring for the past few years. At some point I asked, gee, this is a long shot, but this isn’t the Greene and Greene arts and craft house you see in all the architecture books, is it? No, they laughed, we’re the house next door. Probably a modest neighborhood, I’m thinking. In a galaxy far far away….

1. START THE DAY BEFORE NOON

At least on work days. The other five days, sleep in. You earned it.

2. LEARN HOW TO READ
Writing is no longer essential, but … the successful South Ender can tweet, twitter and text, even if spelling is marginal.

3. LISTEN TO OTHERS
Especially on Facebook and other social media. Keeping track of friends’ and enemies’ likes and dislikes is an invaluable tool in the South End toolbox. Decision making is easy, just see what the herd is doing.

4. WORK AT LEAST ONE HOUR A DAY.

No matter how severe the hangover, the lethargy, the ennui or excess hedonistic activities. Work isn’t ALL bad.

5. WORK OFF THE GRID

No South Ender worth his or her salt works in order to pay half his or her income to the IRS. Barter heavily with your neighbors and friends. Crab, clam, trap, fish, hunt or grow it! Food is free and food is fun! If you buy your dinners, food is neither.

6. LEARN TO REPAIR

Your own car, truck, toaster, wellpump, toilets, etc. You can’t barter or sell busted stuff and repairmen cost an arm and a leg per hour PLUS that service fee to drive half a day to and from your hell-and-gone address. Knowing a few handyman tricks can save you another part-time job at the fast food joints 50 miles away.

7. MARRY UP!

Chances are you’ve embraced an aesthetic lifestyle. You artists and musicians need supplemental income and unless you plan to work full time low paid minimum hour jobs, a second salary is essential. Marry one.

I got a wild hair this spring, no doubt from lack of legitimate work, and decided I’d build myself a banjo. I play one so I’m familiar with the basic form. Bunch of strings, thingamabobs to hold em to the end and more up at the top so you can tighten or loosen em. I mean, even a banjo, it helps to be in some kind of tune. It’s got a round pot made of wood and some have a round brass metal piece on top of that to give it a ‘ring’. Banjos have a skin head or a store bought plastic job pulled down over the pot and you need some kind of gizmos to hold it down tight and better yet, to be able to tighten it up like a drum. Then there’s a neck that has the fretboard and the peghead and this has to fit up against the pot and something has to hold it at the right angle so you aren’t playing strings about half a foot off the fretboard which makes playing a lot harder than it already is.

I don’t mean to make it sound complicated. I mean, early banjos were made out of gourds with some catgut for strings and a stick neck and you just wailed on that thing like beating a drum. Banjo! Not exactly as complex as a harpsichord or a saxophone. Seems doable. Seems like a person with the right attitude and a little nerve could just go at it and a few days later might come out the other end with all his digits intact and an instrument that would sound at least okay, if not totally tolerable to most listeners.

I think life is a little like that. Meaning, sometimes you have to wade out into the water. It isn’t as deep as you think and worse case, you can dogpaddle. Too many of us think we’re going to drown, just flounder out there when the bottom drops out and then flail until we’re worn out and finally just sink down into a watery grave. Why risk it? Why take a chance when there’s all this dry ground to stand on and just look at the beach and the water from a safe distance? Well, lots of us do just that. I mean, I don’t mountain climb and I don’t race Formula Ones. Some things do seem risky.

But … nothing ventured, nothing gained, my old man used to tell me. Course, he never figured I’d apply that to a career in art and he probably felt bad for steering me down a rutted road. I remember when I told him I was building my own house. The silence on the other end of the phone was all I needed to comprehend his horror. Poor Karen, he was thinking, or so he told me later when he and Mom came to visit and view this construction debacle firsthand and he fully expected some plywood lean-to drafty as a chicken shed and leaking the first rain. Instead he drove up the drive to find a two story house, sturdy and durable and handbuilt with slate floors, mosaic tiles, curly maple staircases, stained glass transoms and sidelights, custom made doors, brick fireplace, handcrafted furniture, birdseye maple cabinetry, hardwood floors, cedar paneling on the interior walls, cedar on the exterior. A nice house, perfectly comfortable. Took two years to build. Best years of my life.

Did I know what I was doing? Not really. Sometimes a purpose and a little faith in yourself will carry the day. Most things in life aren’t rocket science. Although that seems to be changing. Too often we’re just afraid of failure. I guess I’m not. It seems like it’s one way to learn what you need to learn to be successful. And anyway, sometimes they’re not totally different. That’s what art taught me. You have to be your own judge, finally, even if other people will be too.

So … I’m making banjos. Some play well, some not. Some sound sweet, some not. Some are beautiful, some are a little like your kids, beautiful maybe only to you. Could I sell them? my friends ask, wondering I guess, who needs this many banjos. Well, that wasn’t my original intention. But then again, when I started making stained glass, it wasn’t going to be my career either. It doesn’t really matter. I’m not going to build houses for a living. I’m probably not going to be a banjo luthier. What I’m doing is what any kid does, just following my nose, trying stuff out, seeing what’s fun and what isn’t. In the meantime I get to live in my house. I get to play my banjos. And hopefully my life will be my art. It’s about all I can ask.