The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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.

I was shuffling around in the express checkout line of my big box grocer the other day, waiting for the nice lady in front of me to unload a full shopping cart onto the conveyor even though the sign said 15 items or less. I assume she was in a hurry and the sign was for lesser peons like myself, not m’lady. Her bill came to $150. So I had plenty of time to study the gift card rack, the candy section, the gum, all those marketing strategies the store used for a last minute buying pitch to us captive shoppers.

The displays of National Enquirers, Star Magazine, Soap Opera Digest or the Globe all shouted headlines of impossible scandals, dead Elvis sightings, the affairs of movie idols, starlets gone to fat and obscurity, weird prophecies and creepy tattle-tale muckraking. Oprah’s secret love child, Hillary’s 6 months to live, Ted Cruz’s father linked to JFK assassination, Bigfoot’s logger love slave, Brad Pitt forced into rehab, Cher’s shocking breakdown, Sarah Palin’s satanic counselor — this is the stuff of viral e-mails, half insane, totally fabricated, obvious to anyone but the hopelessly drug addicted or irreparably dumb. All my life I have wondered who the hell buys these things and I have, being the elitist college educated liberal white male I apparently am, thought only the really ignorant, the poor white trash, the pathetically empty-souled, the truly gullible, the socially inept, would pay the money to toss a copy into their grocery bag laden with chips, pop, lean cuisine, candy and frozen pizzas.

But now I don’t know. We just voted in the headline for the National Enquirer: LIAR ELECTED COMMANDER IN CHIEF. TRUMP CLAIMS THE WORLD IS FLAT!! The New York Times, quoting the President’s latest tweets, might as well be the banner headlines for the Globe. How do the tabloids compete with this now? By reporting the truth? BOWLING GREEN MASSACRE A HOAX!!! SWEDISH TERRORISM NON-EXISTENT!! CRIME WAVE NOT THE HIGHEST IN DECADES!!! ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION LOWEST IN YEARS!!! INAUGURATION NUMBERS FOR TRUMP LOWER THAN OBAMA!! RUSSIANS HACKED THE ELECTION!! WORLD PROVEN TO BE ROUND!!!!!!!!

Those tabloids made my skin crawl. Just something pulpy and phony and nasty, something wrong with the need for sensational trash instead of real news, something that left a bad taste the way diet pop coats your mouth for half a day with an artificial metallic residue. The world is strange enough without manufacturing two headed babies and the tawdry affairs of movie stars. All those folks who bought and believed this sensationalism, well, they outnumbered the rest of us, apparently, and they took their belief in all this faux news down to the ballot box. It could make me yearn for the days of illiteracy. 15 items or less. I don’t believe that anymore either.

April Fool’s Day came on Inauguration Day this year and now with every day’s events sprung on us citizens, we’re barraged by the unbelievable, the inside out and upside down, by faux news and ‘lying’ media. Naturally, the one day set aside as a national holiday for the absurd was canceled. In an executive order tweeted at 3 A.M. from the West Wing, President Trump (no joke!) announced April 1st would no longer be a day to mislead the gullible and those with atrophied funny bones.

As a possible substitution he suggested Paul Ryan introduce a bill to the House of Representatives making the day officially Shoot A Liberal Day. “Only kidding!” he tweeted. “Ha ha. But GREAT idea!!” The National Institute of Funny Bone Reconstruction immediately issued a protest to the White House counsel demanding that 364 days of the calendar year be restored to truth telling, not alternate facts, in order to repair the badly damaged national sense of humor.

Anxiety has spread across the land, the NIFBR argued. “Reality, no longer fact based, has eroded to the point where the average citizen feels like Alice in Wonderland, wandering a topsy-turvy minefield of impossible juxtapositions. What was up is down, what was inside is out, what seemed true is now lies. If everything is true, nothing is true,” the Institute wrote in their brief. “We are experiencing national insanity as a result of endless April Fool’s Days. Restore the holiday, Mr. President!”

Mr. Trump tweeted: “Never heard of the Funny Boners. Liberal Losers?? They should thank me. Every day is unbelievable! So hilarious!”

At least for now April Fool’s Day is officially rescinded as a national holiday. Press Spokesperson Kellyanne Conway stated emphatically later that morning that this was not what the President meant. When asked for clarification, she said he meant exactly what he said, not what you thought he said. “It’s not my job,” she added, “to interpretate.”

I just got word my TV, a 32 inch Vizio, is spying on us. Evidently it’s capable of sending data back to its central headquarters where our avid interest in all things PBS are collected, collated and analyzed. For all I know these statistics are being sold to the Trump administration and filed under NEVER WATCHED ONE EPISODE OF THE APPRENTICE. ALERT THE FCC IMMEDIATELY!

I blame myself. I brought the cyclops into our house well aware that it was not my friend. It was a time-stealer, an electronic sedative, a babysitter and worse, a mediocre mess of programming. But I never imagined it as a spy. Oh, maybe I had some subliminal fears. Might explain the time when I lived in Seattle and Gomorrah that I tied a dummy to a chair and set the chair in front of a TV set in the living room. The TV had a Thunderbird wine bottle smashed through its picture tube. Guests who came over fell into two categories: those who treated it like an art installation and those who averted their eyes and ignored what to them was a disturbingly unacceptable tableau of deviant behavior.

Deviant behavior was probably the correct answer. Once, in the same year, my roommates and I dragged a TV into the vacant lot next door and proceeded to stone it to death. We hooked it up to an extension cord for maximum spark and implosion. When I moved up here to the island, we continued the tradition, but by then we aimed for peak destruction and tossed the one-eyed beast into a bonfire before smashing its eye. It became a kind of tradition, this television destruction. But like a lot of traditions, it lapsed over time.

Back in about 1982 my parents visited and were seriously alarmed that the only working TV in the shack was an old black and white with something wrong with the volume. At top volume it only whispered. Watching it was like a return to silent movies. Without the piano man. So naturally they decided to give us an early Christmas present in September. Our first color TV. So they could watch it when they visited when we’d exhausted conversations.

And now, 35 years later, we still have a TV. A TV we watch. And a TV that watches us. I suppose we could watch reruns of the Apprentice to give the appearance of compliance to the Donald’s ego. But we don’t have cable and I doubt we could find those reruns. I’m thinking maybe it’s time to return to those old traditions and just burn the bastard.

Seven Habits of Successful South Enders

START THE DAY BEFORE NOON

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If none of these suggestions work for you, plan on moving soon. Life on the South End is mostly for those with alternative-fact occupational schemes. If you landed here thinking this was just a suburb of America, get yourself a GPS and head back to the mainland. Not guaranteeing jobs necessarily, but at least the possibility exists out there in Trumpland when America’s CEO brings them back. And those of us who stay, well, we could use the extra elbow room. Good luck to ya!

A few weeks ago some Silicon Valley bazillionaire announced he thought it was highly possible this little reality we live in is some sort of computer simulation. Yesterday I read where two physicists were theorizing the universe is actually two dimensional, not three or four, but similar to a holographic image. I guess they’ve all been watching too many reruns of The Matrix.

It’s a discouraging notion, this idea that the Creator is a computer programmer, at least to me, a boy with nary a binary bone in his body. The tech boyz must think God was created in their own image, but I suppose if I’d invented the silicon world and made a fortune, I might see it their way too. Life, as the Bard once said, is but a dream and maybe it’s a cyborg dream after all, some simulation by an artificial intelligence where we all live in a fractal virtual world.

I’ve never been much interested in this kind of speculation, the stuff that religions are based on and faith revolves around. The universe is way too large for me to get my mind around and I only get to live an incredibly brief lifespan in the big scheme of things. I just figure there must be better ways to spend my time than dream up explanations that aren’t provable, then try to convince others they’re true and maybe have them worship at the font of this ersatz wisdom. Maybe even have them give me money. Maybe fight wars with the infidels who refuse to see the Light and the Way.

I know it’s appealing to create a world in our head. We probably do it all the time, every day, year in and year out. At least I do. Reality is pretty slippery and if you don’t believe it, you haven’t done psychedelic drugs or you don’t have friends who have lost their moorings. Reality is pretty much a misnomer, something I hate to admit in this newspeak world of ‘alternative facts.’ The truth is (if I can still use that word), if reality is relative, we haven’t got any solid ground to stand on. But I can still walk the beach, hike the woods, till the garden. One day I may wake up and find it’s all gone. More likely, someday I just won’t wake up. Then, maybe, we should reprogram, check for updates, add some apps, reboot. Hopefully then things will revert to normal. You know, if you believe in normality.

For most of my early elementary school years, every Valentine’s Day our teacher would have us write little cards to everybody in the class. I guess they believed in Universal Love, although looking back, I know they were good God-fearing Georgians and probably didn’t intend to promote what would now be banned behavior in most of our cautious classrooms outside Sodom and Gomorrah. WILL YOU BE MY VALENTINE? we asked everybody oh so sweetly. So innocently. Who knew the Supreme Court would probably be the ones to answer that ultimately. So I guess the jury is still out…..

Whatever the ruling from the folks in the black robes, we’ll still have Valentine’s Day, celebrated not so much for Cupid and his/her aphrodisiac-tipped arrows as a marketing tool for florists and chocolatiers bent on cashing in on the lovefest. And why not? After all, candy’s sweet, flowers are fragrant. They celebrate Love, and lately, that seems more and more an endangered species. I see the boyz down my end of the island rushing in to the wilted flower section of the Tyee Store MegaMart after work on the anointed day, hoping to grab a last minute bouquet of anything colorful and perfumed, about to go home to the love of their life with a handful of posies instead of the usual quart of Steel Reserve 9%. And maybe they buy a card, something saccharine and hokey and cloying as only Hallmark can manage, then they get back in their 4×4 extended cab Dodge Ram one ton with the workboxes and ladders and upside down wheelbarrows filling the acreage of the truckbed, and for a moment, right before they tear another hole in the cratered blacktop of the parking lot, we’re back in Mrs. Fleming’s 2nd grade class in backwash Georgia with all the rest of our love struck classmates, scribbling Valentines and putting candy hearts with inscriptions in the envelopes. For everyone.

A few years back the South End String Band wrote a little ditty about the Barefoot Bandit and submitted it to the Ron and Don show on KIRO radio, at the time the slot with the largest listening audience in the entire Pacific Northwest. We got something like 25,000 hits and the Band, unaccustomed to prime time notoriety, had heads swelled to the size of Goodyear Blimps. Well, the size of pumpkins anyway. Okay, we were mildly amused.

As we followed our number of hits daily, we noticed at the bottom the COMMENT section so naturally we checked to see what our admiring public had to say about our soon-to-be-classic Side A. To say it was an eye-opener is an understatement. It was a stick in the eye, is what it was, a few dozen trolls unloading on us for everything from celebrating a criminal to undermining the Judeo-Christian faith, stuff so far off the wall it was hard to get our mind around what they were driving at. Except that they seemed angry and angrier, dumping toxic waste and their disgust with the world into their commentary.

I didn’t understand then, and probably don’t now, this trolling stuff. I mean, are people really this creepy? The poisonous venom spewed in those comments was troubling and still is. Occasionally I peek at the comments to some news feed, just to see what the peanut gallery has to say, and invariably find myself blown back by the sheer unadulterated nastiness. Maybe, I sometimes think, it’s just seven maladjusted teenage guys venting their rage at a childhood with no toys and bad parents. After I get the taste of their venom out of my mouth I desist peeking at these commentaries for a few more months. Who needs to spoil their day reading noxious stuff from people you (hopefully) will never meet? It’s worse even than the punk who flips you off in his car for some unknown slight. You want to follow him to the gas station and see what’s bothering him?

Seven guys. Not likely. I have been trying to wrap my head around this country voting for a mean spirited, misogynistic, racist bully who shoots from the lip via tweet at every imagined slight. All I can come up with is there are a lot more trolls than those seven dwarfs. And they not only vent on the comment section, they vote.

So you voted in this guy thinking, what, he’d mature once he took the oath? How many folks married the person they wished he or she would be, only to find out they were the same sad sorry sack they’d dated? And now what? You’re supposed to reform this goof of a husband?

All your friends told you the guy was a jerk, but no, you thought you could manage him. Sure, he flirted with your girlfriends, might’ve even slept with your best friend, but you weren’t married yet, he was ust sowing some wild oats. Later he would be faithful. Okay, he was a thin-skinned hothead and offended your family, but you figured he was maybe just drinking a bit too hard, something you’d correct with a little encouragement or maybe some nagging. And if he seemed a bit, oh, I don’t know, obstinate maybe … or … resistant to criticism … or … all right, just damn pigheaded most of the time … you thought he was just showing off for your friends and missing the mark somewhat. Nothing that wouldn’t level off once he’d slipped those rings on your fingers.

But now you’re wondering, was this all just crazy hopeful expectation? Were you so desperately alone, even this philandering, blowhard know-nothing looked, if not good, at least okay? Were YOU drinking a little too heavily perhaps? Oh sure, sometimes he said mean things, but you didn’t think he’d lay a hand on you, did you? And now your friends are saying you should leave the sonofabitch after that last black eye and Sheila, your former best friend, finally confessed that yeah, he’d basically raped her that night after he’d taken you home and given her a ride to her apartment.

The folks are tearing their hair out over this son-in-law. They’d offer to pay him for a divorce, but he’s got more money than Midas has gold. He’s contented to be at the Thanksgiving table, to hell with the looks that could kill across the carved turkey, he ain’t going nowhere, and Christmas looks like Halloween coming back again, no treats this time.

We wish we could offer some advice. We wish we could offer condolences. But we warned you, didn’t we? Trouble is, you brought this bully into our neighborhood and now he’s our problem too. He feels like he’s entitled and he’s got the clout to back it up. Thanks, Eve, for bringing the snake into the Garden. Now, how do we get rid of him???

You live on the wild wild South End, you know the Long Arm of the Law isn’t all THAT lengthy and the Reach of Rome isn’t either. Frontier Justice is what we got, more often than not, although I’m not saying I’m an advocate. Me, I’m like most of us down here at the end of the county road —- I just want to be left in peace.

Dan the Woodcarvin Man is of the same mind, maybe more so. He got a new neighbor on the north side of his 5 acres, pretty much out of sight through a stand of woods, although with the new hound that came with the new couple, not exactly out of earshot. It drove him a little crazy all that incessant barking, and he spoke with the couple finally when it chased his cat up a tree and it took two days to get it to come back to terra firma. The wife flat out told him their dog never left the property and slammed the door behind her when she stomped back inside. Dan and the husband — he thought his name was Jesse — stood there in awkward silence. Until Jesse’s sweetheart stormed back out and told Jess to get his ass inside and Dan to get his off her property.

Robert Frost said good fences make good neighbors. He meant it ironically. A week after being thrown off their property, a gyppo with a chainsaw the size of a Ditch Witch rolled in and in an hour, half a dozen huge firs and cedars were kissing the ground, two on Dan’s fence and his property, one was even his own tree, a prized old cedar. The nice couple, when he mentioned it to them through a half open front door after he got home to discover the clearcut backyard, told him the tree in question was theirs and his fence was too. Woodcarvin Dan wanted to be Headcarvin Dan for a brainbusting moment or too, but murder, even down here, WILL bring the Law.

I’m not gonna tell you Dan’s a pacifist, but he doesn’t look for trouble either. He had the property surveyed to prove his claim, left the stakes ribboned and ran a new fence two feet inside those. A week later he received a court summons that informed him his neighbors were suing him for trespass, for threatening to kill their dog and for his surveyor’s trespassing as well. Dan hired a local lawyer, legal papers went back and forth with their attorney, they went to court and the judge ruled in Dan’s favor. So far he was only out $6000. Justice occasionally prevails, but it doesn’t come cheap.

Last I heard, Dan had gotten another legal letter from his neighbors’ lawyer, this time that he’d threatened to harm their kid. Dan’s never talked to the lad other than one time to ask him NOT to play in his pond. And the Neighborhood Association, according to Jesse’s wife, was going to file an insurance claim for their shed half on Dan’s property his fence runs into the middle of. Dan, nearly berserk and rapidly going broke, asked me for advice. Which tells you all you need to know about his state of exasperation and desperation.

Quit hiring attorneys, I said. Let them pay the legal fees. They’re bluffing, I said. They’re obviously insane. They’ll be bankrupt by the end of the year, the place will go on the market, they’ll move to a new place to torment someone else. Dan asked, “You really think so?” I said, “How the hell would I know, Dan?”

So Dan’s living in Paradise with the Neighbors from Hell, the Hitler Family. You tell me, so I can tell Dan, what’s he supposed to do? Maybe better fences might not make the neighbors better, but he wouldn’t have to look at them. I don’t think Dan wants to build the Wall of Jerusalem over there …. but he’s thinking about it.