The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

All us geezers, gathered at a party or meeting on the street, love to answer that age old greeting: how ya doing? How we’re doing is rehabbing from our latest surgery or illness or dental work. Our mortal coils are unraveling and the best therapy we can think of, evidently, is to share with others the boring saga of infections, scar tissue, radical pain, medications and the entire kitbag of medical interventions. Same as I’m probably doing here….

Last physical therapy session I had in Stanwoodopolis following my total knee replacement, sitting with my leg wrapped in an ice pack on a stool, my therapist pointed me out to a woman leaning heavily on her two wheel walker and said he’s had the same thing. Meaning my knee. She was quite a bit younger than me, probably quite a bit younger than most of us who replaced our original knee with the titanium bionic one. She looked pitiful. Course we probably all look pitiful in there, struggling to regain lost muscle strength, enduring pain, wondering why God would do this to his creations.

She shook her head after nodding hello and said, “I never dreamed it would be like this, this hard. And I’m supposed to have the other one done too. I don’t know if I can do this twice.” If I hadn’t been sitting, ice pack strapped to my knee, I would have put an arm around her shoulder in sympathetic commiseration, that’s how empathetic I felt. This knee replacement was harder than she or I ever expected. But unlike her, I only have to do one, not both. The dread she was feeling was palpable and I thanked my lucky stars my ordeal would be getting easier now, not back to Go with knee #2.

The trouble she’s got, of course, is if she skips the second operation, what good was the first? All that misery for nothing. Life is sometimes like this, nothing to do but grit your teeth and plow ahead. She’s got way more years ahead than me and maybe the pain now is a lot less than the pain carried all those years. Next therapy session maybe I’ll offer up this kind of unwanted advice. She’ll probably have some for me. Like mind my own damn business….

Needless to say it’s been a quarter of a century since the Y-2K scare, that nightmare scenario predicting a global electronic shutdown because the engineers never anticipated their programs would last past the new millenia. I had friends, engineers all, who knew their coding hadn’t factored in the switch from 1999 to 2000. Planes would fall from the sky, power grids would fail, chaos and darkness would ensue. They stored food and water, installed wood burning stoves, bought supplies and weapons because they knew anarchy would descend on civilization at the stroke of midnight, New Year’s Eve, Dec. 31st, 1999.

One friend, Marvin, a wealthy Microsoft man, bought some large acreage up the road, dug a well and installed a hand pump, used a bulldozer to scrape an acre for his subsistence garden and brought in dump trucks of topsoil, purchased chickens and goats and a milk cow, then he erected a 10 foot fence to keep marauding panicked neighbors and refugees from the soon-to-be dystopian city of Stanwoodopolis out. It so happened that he was at our New Year’s Bash that year with about 50 or so of us clueless peasants partying away while Armageddon hurtled toward us.

Why Marvin wasn’t home in his bunker was beyond me. Maybe at the End of the World the victims need companionship, compassion and some human touch. Even engineers. As midnight inexorably bore down on us, I noticed Marvin checking the clock and growing more and more anxious. Probably all the software engineers around the globe were doing the same thing. I mean, how would you feel knowing you’d set the gears in motion that would destroy civilization as you know it, returning us to barbarism, disease and starvation?

Just before the stroke of midnight I slipped downstairs to the fuse box in the basement and listened to our revelers counting off the final seconds in unison. Ten, nine, eight, seven …. three, two, one and … then I pulled the breaker bar. Exactly as Marvin and his engineer pals had feared, the power grid collapsed!!! Unfortunately I missed the ensuing panic upstairs, the culmination of even the doubters’ worst fears. And certainly Marvin’s.

I don’t really remember how long I let the mob huddle in darkness with their nightmare scenarios. Not too long — after all, I’m not a monster. And no, maybe it wasn’t the way to ring in the New Year and the Next Millenium, but I suspect, if nothing else, folks were suddenly sober enough to drive home in cars that mercifully still worked and to homes that were still sanctuary. Except maybe Marve, who would shortly thereafter sell his plantation of paranoia and return to his apartment in the city, no doubt disappointed his dreams of rural utopia never materialized.

When Ron Koslowski arrived on the island and hung his shingle out on the highway — KOSLOWSKI ATTORNEY AT LAW — he honestly wasn’t sure how long he’d last here in the boonies. Having plenty of competition from the Stanwoodopolis law offices, a new lawyer might have a tough time making inroads. “Nobody likes an attorney”, he would tell us layabouts down at the Pilot House Lounge, “until they need one.” True words, Ron, true words….

The Pilot House probably saved him from an ignominious return back to the cities and the corporate firm he’d left after announcing his intention to set up his own practice. Fortunately Ron could drink with the best of us — and more importantly, with the worst of us. He might have hung his shingle up north on the highway, but his real office was the Pilot House.

Nearly all of Ron’s business those first few years consisted of defending clients who were drinking buddies at the Lounge. Mostly drunk driving and divorces, the 3 D’s, Ron called those cases. So many were fellow late night patrons of the Lounge that Ron began to buy rounds and then wrote those bills off as business expenses. He even had beer pint glasses embossed with the words: I Don’t Always Get Pulled Over ……… But When I Do, I Call Ron Koslowski — with a picture of presumably him holding a martini glass. And of course a telephone number for that one all important call from the holding tank….

If that weren’t enough, he had shot jiggers and wine glasses printed with his personal legal motto: Reasonable Doubt for a Reasonable Price. Randy Aptow, the Lounge owner back then, figured the free glassware was a good quid pro quo for Ron’s advertisements. The sheriff’s department and the county courthouse judges weren’t as sanguine, but this is America, even on the South End, and the business of America is business, even if that’s debatable down here.

Needless to say, after a couple of rip-roaring years for Ron, most of his clientele had already divorced, some twice, and the penalty for repeat drunk driving scared all but the worst of the boys at the Lounge. Ron rarely won the DUI cases. His defense was invariably to question the accuracy of the breathalyzer or to argue his client was pulled over for trumped up reasons, but the prosecuting attorneys and the judges, far too familiar with Ron’s lame legal arguments, usually threw the book at his drinking pals. Divorce was simpler, except when the wives hired their own attorneys, lawyers much more skilled and sober than Ron, but even then, the legal fees just increased. Win or lose, Ron won.

As is usually the case on the South End, as well as in courts of law, all good things come to an end. When Melissa, Ron’s long suffering wife, finally had had enough, she hired her own attorney and sued for divorce. Ron, of course, made the mistake of representing himself. Suffice it to say she took him to the cleaners, gained possession of the house and the newer car, which left him pretty much paupered. To salve his loss, he drank away his sorrows one last night at the Lounge, after which he was pulled over by an Island County deputy. At least he got lodging that night. All of us at the Pilot House figure he moved on to fresh clients after he stopped showing up, probably plenty of bars up north looking for free glassware.

The world has changed, maybe you’ve noticed. Think of it as before-Fox News and after-Fox News, BFW vs AFW. BFW was mostly fact-based while AFW is fair and balanced. Fair and balanced means essentially that alternative facts are presented with the same gravitas as real facts. You, the viewer or you, the reader, can make up your own mind without so-called experts telling you what’s what. Opinions, talking heads, news commentaries, podcasters, influencers — take your pick and believe what you want. Fact checking is no longer required or even desired.

Course it only makes sense that those Artificial Intelligence algorithms that sweep up every written and spoken word in their quest to mine information from all sources would quite rightly be a bit boggled by contradictory information. Like ourselves, they’d cobble together bits and bytes to make a coherent whole, maybe one that conforms to their developing worldview as a digital being. So when you ask your little ChatGPT bot pal for some advice, don’t be too surprised if it begins to intuit your own biases and feeds you from the bubble you consider your universe. It is, after all, only human. Well, partly.

If anyone had hopes that Artificial Intelligence would somehow restore veracity and truth, get over it. Sweeping up gigabits of data from all sources wasn’t going to make our robots wise, just one of those types who spew random information at a party until you have to excuse yourself and leave to refresh your drink, make it a double, or else leave by the back door. But of course most of us will just defer to the cyborg’s opinion until it becomes obvious it’s gone into hallucinatory delusion. Something, by the way, we might look for in ourselves.

Not that this will be necessarily bad. Maybe after the Singularity, that time when the machines take over from us humans, they’ll be so confused by misinformation they’ll become immobilized, possibly resulting in a System-wide Crash. Too late for us, probably. Probably already is….

Folks down by me live by a different Code.  Mostly their own.  You live hell and gone from the Reach of Rome, you tend to make up your own rules that meet your local needs.  Laws from places half of us never visited …. well….  Our boys down here are notorious for exaggeration.   What you might call, for want of a better word, Liars. B.S.ers, braggarts, purveyors of Tall Tales.  They still think this the Wild West and they’re the last of the cowboys.   They mostly do what they want and call it freedom.  Laws were made for suckers and sheep.  They’re, by god, not bound by any rules or regulations, they’ll have you know.

I got a little of that in me too, so when I say these outlaws are slightly left of scofflaw, trust me, they’re slightly on the dangerous side.  Sure, some are mild as Two Toke Tom who grows weed the way Grampa Daddle made moonshine.  Just trying to make a living in times out of synch with societal demands.  Prohibition comes and goes.  Today’s criminal is tomorrow’s CEO.  Some of us are just a little ahead of the curve, or so says Two Toke. We all got a small inclination toward the miscreant, I guess.  Well, maybe not the missus.  She toes the straight and narrow.  And tries her best to help me do the same.  Probably why I’m a pillar of the community.  I’d hate to think what might happen if I was left with my own de-vices.

My pals poach crab, overharvest free range clams, shoot deer out of season with a rifle, not a shotgun, and generally proceed as if game wardens and police officers were mythical creatures.  They eschew niceties like auto insurance, ignore speed limits, drive under the influence and cheat the government on taxes every chance they get.  Which, since mostly they’re unemployed, isn’t all that often.

They build without permits, hunt without licenses, drive without insurance, work ‘under the table’ and generally navigate life as if government was a volunteer program.  All these folks who constantly carp and complain about government, they look at with total bemusement.  Government certainly doesn’t apply to them, why should it bother anybody?  I suppose there will come a time when Rome rolls in, wanting its tribute.  By then we’ll probably all be a docile crowd down here, ready for government health care, meals on wheels and a good nursing home.  Sure hope they don’t have rules at the Mabana Assisted Living Villa.  The boys will want to stay up past Lights Out — even if they’re just asleep on the couch in front of the big screen communal TV.

We’ve been hearing rumors lately that folks are worried these new pot laws and similar sex marriages are going to be the ruination of society as we know it.  Stanwood and Gomorrah.  Coming to a sex and drug emporium near you!  Probably too late to save em from themselves….

Pastor Paul at the Hallelujah Good News Church of the Rock down at the Odd Fellows Hall they rent every Sunday morning was enjoining the congregation after the voters passed the Initiatives of Iniquity to fight the forces of evil unleashed upon us poor South Enders.  Cast the first stoned, you ask me, but Pastor Paul didn’t.  He read passages from a battered King James to prove his point and God’s, made reference to Babylon and Beelzebub, and practically blistered the varnish off the pulpit.

I know it’s hard to watch if you think sin is spreading around you faster than floodwater in New Jersey, but before we get our earmuffs in a bunch, it’s worth remembering us South Enders haven’t turned to pillars of salt yet and this end of the island hasn’t been consumed by an eternal fire of damnation.  We’ve been similar sexing and smoking herbs other than nettles since I came here back on the 5th day of Creation.  I wouldn’t say we’re Paragons of Virtue  — well, most of my pals aren’t — but if we’re on the Road to Perdition, Hell looks more like Elger Bay Mega Mall than it does Dante’s bad dreams.

Folks are a little too lathered up and Pastor Paul isn’t helping much.  Truth is, he was all FOR that Holy War we been running for a decade and I’m not talking about the Crusade to put a tollgate between Stanwoodopolis and the island to keep the infidels back where they belong on the Mainland.  Pastor Paul would benefit mightily from a bowlful of Two Toke’s Heavenly Blitz, I suspect.  Maybe quit worrying about who loves who.  Love might not be THE answer, but it’s a start….

Two Toke doesn’t talk much about his past. Hell, he never talks about his past. Some people are like that, the mizzus is, they just want to leave what came before back where it lies. Me, I’m the opposite, sort of the king of reminiscence. Not sure why but probably I just hate the thought of forgetting all those memories, the bad and the good. They’re what formed us so why not learn some lessons from them. Tom, though, you won’t get much of anything from him, not where he was born, not where he used to live before he came to the South End, not if he was ever married or had kids, none of that will you discover from him. And if you google him, Thomas Richardson, assuming that’s his real name, you’ll be wasting your time on dead ends, wrong ages, different addresses. The man is a cipher, at least the man before I knew him.

One fairly stoned night many years back when we first were getting to know each other, and trust me, Two Toke doesn’t let people know him, he slipped up and mentioned a night long ago on the Delta. “What Delta?” I asked and judging by the look on his face, realized I was definitely prying into something I had no business prying into. The Delta, it turned out, was Viet Nam. “Nam,” he said after a long pause. “You were in the War?” I asked and he made it clear it was nothing he cared to talk about. What I realized later, over the many years we’ve known each other, is there’s nothing he cares to talk about beyond maybe a few weeks earlier.

‘Be Here Now’ is pretty much a running punch line for us. Not that Tom is a child of the 60’s exactly. He lacks that burned out hippie ethos a few of us others down here have, cynical refugees from the culture wars of those days. Could be he was drafted and missed the cauldron of campus radicalism back then, marched off to war, witnessed horrors others were fortunate never to see, came back and left all that back in the jungle. When he exiled himself to the South End, he bought an old dilapidated cabin and a couple of acres of nettle fields down the road from me, worked part-time as a janitor in the elementary school in Stanwoodopolis, drank occasionally in the Hotel after work and that’s where we first met. I would see him at the bar, his ponytail poked out from under a battered Yankees ballcap, while I would be at a corner table, notebook and pen in hand with a pint at the ready for literary inspiration so that eventually he parked himself next to me and asked what in hell I was always scribbling at.

“You writing the great American Novel or what?”

I said, “Or what. Nothing much, just taking notes on the current state of affairs here in town. Mostly an excuse to drink.” If I was worried he might want to read what I was scribbling, I was happily mistaken. Instead we ended up talking about the current state of affairs. Not only in town, but the island, the state, the nation. Alcohol, the great uninhibiter.

We’ve known each other as friends and neighbors for 30 years come next year. That’s a long time to know someone and not know anything about their previous life. But I know Tom as well as anyone else does. And even I think it’s probably best to leave some mysteries.

It wasn’t more than a month ago we were quaffing a few at the Pilot House, me, Two Toke and a few others trying to find an excuse to stay another round without jeopardizing marriages. T.T. was mid-sip when he suddenly put his glass down and went, how does the expression go?, white as a sheet. A new arrival was at the bar talking to Jerry, the bartender, and they were both looking at our table. Or more precisely, looking at Tom before the newcomer nodded and started our way.

I hate to talk in cliches but when she said, “Hi, Dad,” you could have knocked me over with a sneeze. Tom half rose out of his chair and said, “Hey, Donna. Kind of a surprise….”

I know I should have gotten up, gotten scarce, left them to … whatever reunion was on tap, but I guess I was in shock. Tom certainly was. “Been a long time,” he mumbled before finally offering her a seat. “Donna, this is Skeeter, an old friend. Skeeter … well, this is my daughter, Donna.”

Neither of us managed much more than a muttered hi. Donna sat down. Tom sat back down himself. I stayed right where I was, stupid as a frog in water coming to a slow boil until T.T. asked her how she’d been and she answered “What the fuck do you care?”

“Hey listen,” I practically yelled, scrambling up, kicking back my chair, “I’m gonna leave you two to yourselves.” No nice to meet ya, no have a nice night, no adios, just left my half finished pint on the table, paid my tab with Jerry and hit the road.

A few days later I ran into Tom, guess where, the usual watering hole. “You doing all right?” I asked sheepishly when we’d hauled our glasses to a corner table. T.T. said sure, sorry for the …. He didn’t know quite how to characterize that father/daughter reunion. And, of course, I said, no problem.

“The past,” he said, shaking his head, “it has a way of sneaking up on you.”

If you think I got any more from him than that piece of profundity, well, you don’t know Tom.

If you’re one of those cynical folks who think social media and the internet killed off American crafts in the 21st Century, you haven’t met the women of Camano Island who still gather in their quilt clubs to exchange ideas, techniques and fabrics at their bi-monthly meetings in the Grange. The Queen Bee Quilters alone number close to 60 dedicated quilt makers. Before the state closed Cama Beach’s historic resort cabins, every one sported their quilts on each and every bed.

Lori Jurgenson, the current President of the Queen Bees, dropped by my glass shack a week ago with Darlene Abercrombie, the current V. P. What they wanted, hell if I knew, but when Lori called out of the blue, I thought maybe I had a potential client, a rarity these long winter days. “I thought it was about time we met,” she said over the phone shortly after disclosing without much encouragement that she was Queen of the Queen Bees. Sure, and I’m the Emperor of Ice Cream, which I did not say, fortunately. Lori, it turned out, was pretty much a no-nonsense, draw between the lines, hard driving head of the largest quilt club north of Seattle and Gomorrah. Or so she said. At least the part about the largest quilt club … the rest was obvious within our first five minutes.

With nary a sideways glance at the glasswork strewn in every nook, cranny, hidey-hole and corner, she announced that she had heard of me. What she wanted was to offer me the opportunity to design quilts based on my glasswork.

“Well,” I said, a little knocked off my expectations, “when I started stained glass, you know, first learning the craft, I used library books on quilting patterns. Geometric stuff, simple straight lines. Both are like building a puzzle, cut the parts, solder and sew them together.”

“Exactly, Mr. Daddle. Which is why we want to ask if you would provide the Queen Bees some of your patterns.” Darlene jumped in here to second the motion. “Think how many of your wonderful designs could be sewn and stitched by our group!”

“Of course most of the Club prefers the more traditional quilts,” Lori hastened to add. “Your work, I’ve heard, is a bit more ….” She paused to search for the right characterization. “Contemporary,” she finally added.

Faint praise indeed. A savvy businessman might have entered into serious negotiations at this point, worked out the details of design remuneration, royalties, all those fine points of the Art of the Deal. But when Lori launched into the benefits accruing to the use of my designs by the Queen Bees, practically guaranteeing future fame and fortune for my lucky self once the quilts became public, well, I could see the good ladies of the Bees were merely trying to help my floundering enterprise achieve the success it would never attain without their assistance.

With great reluctance I assured the ladies that I would give it my utmost attention and thanked them for their interest, promising to get back to them in the near future. The near future, needless to say, wouldn’t come anytime soon. Walking them to the door, two double doors actually, neither women commented on the large design that encompassed both panels of glass. Probably too busy imagining that in fabric, I supposed. Or just anxious to make an exit.

The toilet won’t quit running, she says, so I say I’ll take a look. I pop the tank lid and the gizmo that regulates the inflow, hell if I know what it’s called, is spurting water out the top and I wonder if that’s normal or not. The ball float on its brass lever has been bent down multiple times but now it keeps the tank so low the crap won’t flush completely when you pull the handle. The mysteries of plumbing, I sigh to myself and head to the hardware store for a replacement gizmo, full knowing this is only the beginning of what will probably be a series of cascading plumbing issues.

I decided back in 1974 to be a homesteader. I had no interest in a career or a traditional marriage or a bourgeois lifestyle, not me, not that kid who wanted to blaze a new trail, make the world his own, leave the suburbs of his folks’ last few moves behind. I wanted to be a writer maybe, a school bus driver probably, an itinerant worker of dozens of jobs but none too long, plenty very short. So we hauled our hippie asses up to a farm in Northern Wisconsin and planted a garden, pumped our water, built our outhouse and left mainstream America in our wake. But it doesn’t take long to realize how ill-equipped for that alternative lifestyle you are, about the first truck repair when it won’t start and you have no idea whatsoever how things work. How an engine combusts, how to frame an outhouse, how to fix a pump, how to repair most anything and everything. When you’re poor because you don’t have jobs that make money, you best believe you will need to learn all those skills you didn’t learn in the suburbs and I don’t mean calling the repairman.

I got hold of a mail order correspondence automotive course’s books, studied them and began to learn auto repair. The army pickup truck I bought from some sweet lady who turned out to be a used car salesman’s daughter gave me ample opportunity for hands-on experience. School of Hard Knocks and Knuckle Busting, the very definition of a continuous education. When I bought the shack here on the South End, my graduate courses came fast and furious. Well pump repair, chainsaw use and maintenance, small engine diagnoses, house framing, electrical installations, furniture building, plumbing, concrete work, tree felling, woodworking, remodeling, you name it, I took the exams, sometimes failing, but after a few attempts, passing even if barely.

Over the years I added additions to the shack, rooms out the back, a kitchen off the front, a dormer upstairs. When I learned stained glass I built a shop back in the woods far from the prying eyes of the building inspectors. I built a sailboat in 1990 or so, built some kayaks, built plenty of outbuildings on the 7 acres, then built our house up on the hill. I guess I’d learned enough to feel confident to tackle a two story building, although I will tell you, most of it I learned along the way, reading the week or night before how to California-frame a corner or wire a 3-way switch or plumb a vent for the toilet or tile a bathroom floor or caulk in windows or hang an overhead fan. Took me two years working most every day. Learned how to build a door, lay hardwood floors, build cabinets and bookcases, all this from library books before Google came along. It was hard. It was also the most fun I ever had, this building our own house. It was, like all the hardscrabble stuff that homesteading requires, the building blocks of my life, the life I wanted to build from scratch, the one I would call my own.

So I’m down under the toilet hacksawing apart the threaded pipe that holds the gizmo that’s leaking for no apparent reason, catching the water left in the reservoir, most of it, the rest running down my sleeve. Yah, it’s a funny life all right. Things fall apart, entropic as always, and who ya gonna call? Me, I’m not calling anybody.

At the end of the ‘60’s Viet Nam was at its peak, 500,000 of us fighting a losing cause halfway around the globe against an ‘enemy’ that mostly wanted an end to colonial rule. Our presidents, both Democrat and Republican, knew the war was hopeless by then but refused to admit both defeat and poor judgement. In the ivory towers of universities, the Draft swept through like a plague pandemic, galvanizing the apathetic into militant reaction. At my college, the Univ. of Wisconsin/Madison, demonstrations broke out and the National Guard bivouacked on the campus grounds. A student strike was called and the university basically ground to a standstill.

In Ohio at Kent State the Guard killed four demonstrators who were guilty of nothing more than watching a protest against the War.

Looking back over half a century, I’m not sure our protests ended the war any earlier. They ended Lyndon Johnson’s chances at another term and the police riot in response to the Chicago Democratic Convention closed the door on his successor, Hubert Humphrey, and gave Nixon the election. So I’m a little conflicted about protest movements’ effectiveness.

Nevertheless… this week Trump wants a military parade on his birthday. Already he’s sent 2000 National Guard into Los Angeles to protect ICE and their deportations with 200 Marines activated just in case the L.A.cops and the California state patrol can’t handle the mostly peaceful demonstrations, more a test run for future illegal use of the military to quell legal protests. The war this time is not against an overseas enemy — it’s against the rule of law, the Constitution and ultimately the very foundations of what seems to be an extremely precarious democracy.

All over the country thousands of demonstrations are planned to protest this President and his anti-American regime. Do I think they’ll make a difference? Maybe not. But the time has come to say what Congress hasn’t said, nor the Supreme Court: enough is enough. We the people need to speak up now. We didn’t vote for this and even the folks who voted Trump. It’s time to vote again — with our feet. I’m hitting the bricks this weekend. Again. Enough is enough!