The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Most of my friends are left wingers. Imagine my shock to learn from the President in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination that they’re not the innocent, normal, patriotic pals I thought they were. No, it turns out ‘they’re vicious and they’re horrible’. And worse, they’re my buddies. How was I to know they were probably the most likely people to turn to violence when politics didn’t go the way they wanted. Out there on social media the news (at least to me) was that they were the most likely to use assassinations to get what they wanted. And what they wanted, according to Mr. Trump, was more transgenders, more open borders, more men in women’s sports. Sick, just completely sick, the President says, evil people. Horrible people. Vicious people. Terrorists. And worst of all, they’re my friends.

I doubt that a single one of my buddies have a gun. Not that they couldn’t run up to the Sedro-Wooley gunshow this weekend and pick up an assault rifle or two. Probably have to sign up for some shooting practice, spend some time on the shooting range wherever one might be. Gotta buy ammo. Maybe go on some Proud Boys’ websites or other white nationalist podcasts to learn how best to take on the ‘enemy’. Those guyz have guns galore and they know how to use em. Not too many left wing vigilante groups or terrorist cells, far as I know, but hell, I didn’t even know my friends were radical crazies bent on destroying America. So they might have secret organizations I’m not aware of. They sure haven’t asked me to join one, that I do know (just in case the FBI is reading this).

What else I do know is I may be guilty by association. It’s the Red Scare all over again and I’m now in the crosshairs. Along with my former friends. And most likely all Democrats in the Congress. Today I’ll probably run into town and purchase an American flag to fly out front. A big flag. And maybe a couple to fly both sides of my pickup. The truck I’m going to sticker up with Don’t Tread On Me decals and a Confederate flag or two so no one will mistake me for a leftwing radical, no sir, just your average good ol boy rightwing NRA Trump loving South Ender who wouldn’t hurt a fly. Which I can’t say the same for my vicious commie friends. Former friends!

I meet folks all the time who have jobs, careers, full employment, financial security, the whole economic enchilada …. but who don’t really like what they do. My parents called that ‘Reality’. Lucky for one of their rebellious kids, at least. I had a buddy’s kid tell me recently – at age 12 – he wanted to be an osteopathic surgeon. ARE YOU KIDDING ME??? At age 12 I wanted to be a cowboy.

I mean, where’s the romance here? The adolescent will toward some kind of schoolkid passion? Some ideal of a calling untethered to adult notions of a proper career. Where’s the deep seated urge to … I don’t know, just do something fun, something for the helluvit? Mom, Dad, I got an announcement to make. I’ve been thinking pretty hard lately about what I want to do with my life. I’ve been turning it over and over in my head, you know, between updating Facebook and worrying about my acne, and I’ve finally come to a decision. Osteopathic Surgeon. Whaddaya think?

My folks might’ve been relieved I no longer aspired to Cattle Punching, but somehow I suspect they would’ve rolled their eyes and said, wait a few years, why don’tcha? You’ll find something you love. Course, trouble was, I did. I went through a number of career explorations. Restauranteur. Metro bus driver. Teacher. Substitute teacher. Dog pound kennel worker. Hospital orderly. Furniture stripper. School bus driver. Stained glass artist.

Oops. Stop the film. Rewind to stained glass artist. This is a career? This is what you went to college for? This is what you want to do? And expect to make a living??? Have you considered, oh, osteopathic surgery maybe. Or dentistry?

You could’ve knocked me over with a feather too. Sometimes life’s detours become an interstate. Occasionally passion will override the sensible and the safe and the sane. I know my friends who have impressionable children don’t want the kids near me for fear of contact contamination, but … I know this: life is way more fun, way more meaningful, way more worth living —- if you pick the life you love, the wife you love, the job you love, than if you choose the route that’s most lucrative.

Although …. I think those routes ARE the most lucrative — even if they don’t make much money. My folks might not agree, but at least they can rest easy knowing I didn’t become a cowboy. At least not a real one.

Only takes an hour to cross over the I-5 partisan boundary and another to leave the blue state altogether where Trump/Vance signs as large as small billboards still declare total allegiance. We’re in Winthrop, ersatz cowboy town where we ate our ice cream cones as fast as possible in 104 degree heat while sitting on saddles, not stools, overlooking the Methow River. A fellow tourist decided we were so cute on those saddles, me a Roy Rogers in a beat up hat and the mizzus a modern Dale Evans, that she asks to take our picture. America, land of anything goes. More or less.

We’re lodged in a cabin next to the city’s new library so I walked in to peruse the joint before heading to 3 Finger Jack’s Saloon to quash the heat and thirst of a day’s tire-melting drive up through the ‘dry side’. Nice enough library. Air conditioned. Friendly staff. The usual.

Drifting by the newspaper racks I looked for a Seattle Times maybe or a Spokane Spokesman Review, but the only one they had was the Okanogan Chronicle so I pulled my pony up to a hitching post and began to read the news of the day out here in the Great Outback. Their Grange getting a new HVAC was big news, top of the fold. Bigger was a million plus grant to build Okie a new library, maybe as nice as this one. By page 3 and 4 they’d covered some old local history and a few fluff pieces about flower arranging and other crafts. 5 and 6 had some generic state news and finally, near the back but before the comics and weather, two articles of national import, one, Sen. Cantwell hoping for more money to fund the Weather Bureau, this being the land of wildfires, and the other something of no significance whatsoever, near as I could tell.

I suspect Fox News rides the range all to itself out here and if PBS or NPR still exist, they won’t for long once the funding dries up. If even the library won’t carry subscriptions for the NY Times or WA Post or even a Seattle paper, it’s probably time to check our guns with the sheriff, stop kidding ourselves and skedaddle on home, we’ve lost the range war.

Pushing my loaded grocery cart up to the checkout aisle this morning, I bumped into an old neighbor from yesteryear hunched over his own small cart, no groceries, just cashing in some card for cash near as I could tell. The cart was for leaning on since he could hardly walk. “I’m all stoved up,” he said when the how ya been’s were over. “Got arthritis. Taking insulin for my diabetes. Hard to get out of bed in the morning.”

Keith’s three years younger than me, meaning, he’s an old man. Long hair, wild beard, pushing 300, 350 pounds, sleep apnea, quit drinking 10 years ago. He’s living in the duck shacks on the Skagit delta. Last time I was there, there was no power, water had to be hauled in, heat was firewood. What you got back along the dike was total privacy, a wilderness oasis only a couple of football fields from the highway and two or three miles from the interstate. He said his woman had left him and so had the subsequent ones. As he so eloquently explained concerning his now preferred bachelorhood, “the price of pussy has gone too damn high.”

Same old Keith, a happy redneck Norwegian, mostly angry at the world but at least able to laugh at his own miseries. His son, he said, died awhile back and when I asked how, he shook his shaggy head. “Heroin. Od’d.” The kid had been riding his motorcycle, evidently had spilled gas on his pants and the muffler ignited it. Burned him terrible and they medi-vacced him to Seattle, skin grafts and finally oxycontin for the pain which he became addicted to, subbing heroin and fentanyl when he was discharged, a too familiar story. His daughter lived not far away, north of Seattle, but he hadn’t seen or spoken to her in years.

For half an hour we stood by the liquor lockup at the end of the checkouts and caught up the past 20 years, mostly a chronicle of friends and acquaintances who’d died. Heart attacks mostly. Most fairly young. Most bad diets, no exercise, too much boozing. Whoever said the good die young didn’t know our buddies.

I finally said I gotta get going and reluctantly he wheeled himself with the cart as crutch out the side door. A yellow lab pup was in the driver’s seat of a late model Toyota pickup, a leather muzzle mask over its mouth. “Chew’s everything. Steering wheel, upholstery, anything.” “Well,” I said, “good to have a companion.” “Yep,” Keith said, “I just wish he wasn’t a chewer.” “You can’t have everything, I guess.” Some of us, though, don’t have much of anything….

This past week I had a small argument with friends regarding the Tax Man, the Internal Revenue Service, no doubt universally hated and recently under orders from the Prez to drastically cut staff. Probably most of my fellow citizens are happy as punch those government workers will be getting their pink slips. But not me. I figure the less auditors looking at the returns of the ultra-wealthy and the corporations, the less revenue is pulled in and eventually us peasants will be asked to make up the slack. Call me cynical and send me to bed without my supper of gruel.

My friends’ point of view was more on the order that the IRS was a vast network of mindless computers searching for the mistakes the accountants they had hired had made, probably necessitating the dreaded audit. They asked, in fact, did I trust my own accountant. They no longer had faith in theirs, not after their last audit, and wondered if we’d ever had one ourselves.

Hell, no, I said, I don’t trust our accountant!! Our accountant is me. He runs the numbers for our personal taxes and for my business, fills out mucho forms, everything from Self-employment tax, Schedules B, C, D and X, the 1040, Schedule 1 and a couple more I don’t remember —– oh right, our rental property, no longer rented.

My friends were gobsmacked we weren’t red-flagged. I kind of am too, tell you the truth. But … here’s the thing. Nearly every year the IRS informs us we’ve made an error on our tax forms. And except for once, maybe twice at most where they billed us a hundred or two hundred bucks, we get a fat check back for a thousand here, 4000 there, 7000 last year and this year 1600. They even pay us interest!

So my take is that these IRS employees are looking after us, they’re definitely on our side. They could have kept their algorithmic mouths shut and we’d never be the wiser. Instead, they restored my faith in Government. Although … I can’t say it did for my friends. Like I tell em: do your own taxes — they’ll take pity on the ignorant, the math-challenged and the poor. You’ll be way better off and … you’ll have a new friend.

Given that there’s a dearth of tourism down at the South End, it was a gobsmack and a half when Bert and Betty Amundsen opened up their retro auto court two miles north of the Head, not very far from the Diner, but not far enough to escape the patrons’ sneering gossip. The Siesta Motel de La Sur opened for business the year of the gas shortages when Jimmy Carter advised wearing sweaters and turning down thermostats. Tyee Store only sold gas to its regular petrol customers and even us locals were told to take a hike. Good luck to the auto court crowd…..

Course, the auto court never got a crowd. The Flathead Vintage Car Boyz howled among themselves over black coffee and chicken fried steaks and eggs. “Shoulda opened a B&B,” Cadillac Fred would say and Studebaker Ralph would fire back “Sunset Motel de Muerto”.

The Diner could’ve used the extra business. Big Larry, the grillman, had been here long enough to remember the days of Cama Beach Resort, Camp Diane, Indian Beach and a lot of others further north, folks pouring in to fish big Chinooks and escape the fumes of city living. “Might be a shot,” he said. “Nothing else, we can put up the shirt-tail relatives who visit…”

Bert and Betty lacked what you call marketing skills in the dark days pre-internet. They put a listing in the Stanwoodopolis Yellowed Pages and tacked signs on trees all the way down the island. SIESTA MOTEL DE LA SUR 15 MILES. TEN. FIVE. ONE MILE TO SIESTA DE LA SUR! If you know where to look you can still see a weathered plywood board being digested by fir bark, maybe a ‘ESTA MO’, or a ‘SI TEL’, or just a mysterioso ‘5’. The four done bedroom cottages fell into disrepair and Bert and Betty fell into heavy drinking and serious debt. They lost the place to the bank and moved away without so much as an adios. Last I heard the old motel was being converted to rent to artists as studios. Most of us already got studios in various stages of disrepair. Still, hope springs eternal down here. Everywhere maybe but the Diner where comedy trumps optimism.

For awhile in this year of Trump 2.0 I thought I’d lost my sense of humor. Again. Turns out, my funny bone had left me, gone in search maybe for a better host. Or, worst case, been deported to some third world prison without cause, without a hearing, without even a phone call to let me know what was going on. Who knows?

I know this — I spent too much time looking for that bone, mostly because the times are grim and every damn day brings another outrage, another corruption, more craziness and a few more steps down the rabbit hole where up is down, lies are ignored, greed is worshipped and everything is some kind of ‘deal’.

If you can’t find humor in this … well, you’re left with a slow rolling nightmare. C’mon, in another year, another reality, this would be darkly comical. Elon and his DOGE boyz searching for ‘woke’ references in order to cut those departments’ funding. A billion here, a billion there, no problem balancing the budget to make room for tax cuts for the rich. Fire all the folks at the Kennedy Center for the Arts and make Trump the Czar of Culture? You can’t see the hilarity in that? How about RFK for head of the Health Department? Or a flat earth believer for NASA? Donald on Mt. Rushmore or better yet, bigger than Chief Sitting Bull on the mountain nearby, carve a new mountain big enough for that colossal Ego?

This is all laughable stuff. You know, if my funny bone hadn’t taken an early exit. Not that I blame it, the dark humor had maybe gotten a bit too dark. Still, we should’ve stuck together, worked things out, kept the light on — or at least flickering.

I suppose I’ll have to look for a replacement. Ebay or Craigslist. Wanted: Used Funny Bone, not too brittle, must have loyalty. Room and Board provided. Drinkers okay.

Hopefully my old sense of humor will see this and take pity. Not that I want pity. I need laughs.

Right about quittin time a friend dropped by for our weekly beer and pow-wow, a routine we’ve maintained for the past dozen years or so. Second beer in, he launched into a familiar lament where he thinks maybe he ought to take up his art again to supplement his day job, the one he can’t give up since he never paid into Social Security, just got paid under the table, a tactic too many of us on the South End employ, no pun intended.

And as usual I say sure, sounds like a good idea, just not sure about the supplemental income part. He sees what the Gallery up the road charges for an oil painting and he figures he’d get the same thing, ignoring the inconsequential detail that he’s starting from scratch, got no name recognition and hasn’t picked up a brush in over 50 years. Other than that he’ll probably be rich by a year from now, quit his handyman work and retire to Hawaii. A man has to dream, doesn’t he?

In the course of this fantasy he says he just doesn’t seem to have the motivation yet, not sure why, but he’s not getting any younger at 78, probably should get going before it’s too late. Maybe a better pal would tell him the Iceman isn’t coming, the dream is stillborn, you’re kidding yourself, nobody’s going to buy your stuff, wake up, get real. What I do tell him is that if you want to paint, then paint, forget about making money, do it for the joy of it, make art for yourself and maybe, who knows, maybe you’ll catch lightning in a jar, your work will sell and you might be the next Big Thing. Just don’t bet the farm on it.

I had a neighbor bring her grandson over last week, a highly artistic kid, she claimed proudly, to see my workshop, maybe inspire the lad to fire up or maybe just quit after a tour around my shack turned studio. They stayed maybe 5 minutes, thanked me for the visit, well, she did, then at the door asked me if I had any advice for this young Picasso of hers. I said I did. “Don’t go into debt.”

What I regret is not telling him to get a part time job and pay into Social Security so you won’t be working into your 90’s. Might give you time to do your art, art you wouldn’t have to do for money.

Quite a few years ago I picked up a couple of Chicago boys off a ride board in Madison, Wisconsin headed west and eventually to a student exchange program in Mexico City. The three of us sat in the cab of my ’68 Chevy truck, the same pickup I’d just finished driving down to New Orleans, over to the Florida panhandle, up to Maine and back to Wisconsin, now headed to Seattle. The boys threw their backpacks into the back along with mine and we motored west. Part way across the Dakotas I asked them if they’d ever been backpacking and of course, being Chicago born and raised, they said no. “You’re in luck then, let’s head up into the Big Horns and hike in for a night or two.”

The first part of the trip the boyz were pretty unsure what to make of me. No job, beat up truck, a vagabond cruising the highways of an America they’d never seen, why would they trust him? But the road makes for intimate relationships, I’ve found, and this one was no different. We left the pickup at a campsite above Buffalo in the National Forest and hiked into the wilderness, the boyz trusting me as a guide and mentor now. The first night we built a campfire, then after dinner, laid out under the stars.
Wyoming has some of the darkest skies in America and up in the Big Horn’s elevation there are more stars than most of us have ever seen, enough to humble a mere human on a planet circling a sun that’s one miniscule speck in the vast unknowable universe. In the Windy City stars don’t even exist. So when Jason sees his first falling star, he asks what was that? A meteor, I tell him nonchalantly. Oh right, chimes in Brian, totally disbelieving such objects are observable. He thinks maybe it was an airplane.

‘An airplane? I say. “What, with a tail wing on fire?” But the boys are unconvinced, no way were they witnessing an extraterrestrial object igniting in earth’s atmosphere. And then we saw another. And another. And plenty more. By the time our campfire had burned to embers they were convinced. And amazed. Something they would tell their kids about, the night the sky filled with falling stars.

Course, if their kids go in search of meteor showers, they’ll see instead the thousands of Starlink satellites cluttering the skies on the vacation their fathers take them back out west. “C’mon, Dad, those are just airplanes,” they’ll probably protest. And maybe Dad will glimpse a memory from long ago, the one I keep with all those wishes from that magic night before we three hiked back down to the rest of our lives.

Some of you Geezers out there might know what a Blind Pig is … and no, it’s not a myopic hog.  Since there’s no bar or tavern licensed by the State down here, the South End has had to revert to the lessons of Prohibition once more.  Meaning, we keep our drinking establishments underground, what the dry gulchers called in 1920, a Blind Pig.  Knock on the door — if they recognize you or you’re with a pal they do, you can belly up to Rotgut Billy’s Basement Bar.
 

Course, Billy doesn’t have it in his basement — it’s his barn, once the home of Herefords and a couple of draft horses.  Probably no pigs, 20/20 vision or otherwise.  It sits back behind his house and his house is back along a rutted lane off the highway, down a dirt road dead end.  Nobody goes down that road without an inkling and a thirst.

It’s not like Billy’s making money — he hasn’t got enough customers.  And he mostly just covers his costs.  The jukebox is his old Radio Shack stereo.  The neon isn’t a beer sign, it’s a pink flamingo from a motel in Utah he picked up at a second hand store.  He’s got a pool table you need an alitmeter to calculate the warpage and there’s a battered steel dart board in the back corner where wayward projectiles land harmlessly against the walls.
 

Billy has a few of us who make homebrew so sometimes the storebought bottles get upgraded to high gravity heavy nettle, jalapena ales, chocolate stouts and any other experiments we care to inflict on the patrons.  Occasionally we’ll bring in pizzas and cheesy nachos Billy heats up in  a little toaster over behind the bar.  The bar’s a nice hunk of old growth he slabbed off a 300 year old fir that fell in the storm of ’79 that knocked out the Hood Canal floating bridge and raised hell on the island here.

Folks ask me all the time  if Rotgut Billy’s really exists.  I tell em if it didn’t, we’d have to open it up anyway, but yeah, Billy’s is an institution, a beacon of entrepreneurial panache without the profit motive, half drinking establishment and half social club.  For Billy, since his wife died, it’s pretty much his life.  He doesn’t serve us when we’ve started to slip over the line.  We’re family and he looks after his family.  Those same folks shake their heads and wonder why the County sheriff hasn’t closed his operation down.

It’s a fair question, one we boyz have debated for years.  The only answer we got is the deputies let it go even though they’re pretty sure what transpires at the barn, figuring, I suppose, it’s better to get sloshed close to home than drive drunk miles to the closest tavern.  Maybe they just see Billy as the lesser of two evils.  I guess a lot of things are like that down here….