The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I’m parked in my dentist’s waiting room listening to the receptionist ask a Pakistani family if they have dental insurance. The odds of that must be about the same as winning Powerball this week. Across from me there’s an Hispanic twenty-something in for a root canal. The waiting area looks like a mini-Ellis Island by the time I’m summoned to the chair in back for a cleaning, both fiscal and dental. I heard it said once that if you wanted to determine if a person was poor or not, look in their mouth. Teeth will be rotten, teeth will be missing. The poor yank them rather than get a root canal or a crown.

A friend of mine, recently deceased, had half his pulled. Too much to fix em, he told me. By the end he looked like a caricature of a hillbilly. I’ve got another buddy whose abscessed teeth lay him low every month, but he won’t go to the dentist. Costs too much.

For some reason dental care isn’t lumped under health care. Not that most poor people have either. At least in this, the greatest nation with the greatest health care on earth. I guess if we just keep telling ourselves this bit of brag, we’ll eventually believe it even when statistics show us way down the list for everything from infant mortality to insurance coverage.

When I worked graveyard at the hospital forty miles away, the uninsured came to the ER where we treated them when they couldn’t pay for a regular doctor. We all not only pay for that service, we pay a lot more than if we treated them through a clinic or a doctor’s office. But you can’t go to an ER, usually anyway, for a toothache or an abscess or a root canal.

The Pakistani family walked out, probably to another dentist office, probably getting the same answer, a brushoff. Greatest health care in the world. Choose your own doctor. Just be sure to bring cash.

A couple days ago hackers brought down PayPal, Netflix and a few other sites using, get this, a network of vulnerable entry points like refrigerators and cars and baby monitors and home security devices. Easy access, dumb passwords, nothing to it. Were the perpetrators KGB? CIA? The Chinese mafia? Malcontented teenagers bored out of their zit-infected minds? Donald Trump trying to prove the elections are easily rigged? All of the above???

I know — you love the idea you can program your house so you can call it on your smartypants phone to turn on your porch light when you’re two blocks from home. Maybe have the heat turned up and the bed warmed, TV turned to Fox News and the martinis stirred, not shaken. You absolutely love these little luxuries. It’s your privilege, your right, your payback for living in a cyber world where the jobs are disappearing faster than glaciers and polar bear cubs, all taken by robots and automation, and now your reward is forced unemployment and idle time. Of course you want to feel slightly pampered.

But maybe, just possibly, these machines are already plotting against us puny humans, the ones too lazy or naïve to set tough passwords. Maybe your house — your Castle! — has conspired against you, maybe a wee weary of your elitist arrogance. Open the garage door. Set the microwave to two minutes. Defrost the refrigerator. Clean the oven. Enough, Human! Enough!!

The day is coming, sooner than you think, when the door to your casa won’t open, the heat won’t turn on, the car won’t start and you can forget about streaming Netlix that night when the TV has set itself on fire. You think these toys are your servants, you need to think a couple times more, but faster, about the speed of a Cray Super Computer.

And, oh yeah, next time you set your Password to PASSWORD, keep in mind about 25% of us humanoids do the same thing. Might as well make it ENSLAVE ME.

I took a last hard pull on my coffee cup, set the mug down and with the trepidation of a Christian headed into the arena to face the Roman gladiators, I entered the washing machine’s den. Armed with only a few You-Tube tutorials and a couple of wrenches and screwdrivers, I tried not to show fear. You may think machines are insensate hunks of metal, but this was no wringer washer, it was controlled by silicone circuitries so alien no simple repairman could probe their defenses. I was wary, though, I wasn’t new to this rodeo.

With false bravado I jerked the dryer off the top of the Whirlpool and set it down across the room. They weren’t dealing with some wimpy wet-behind-the-ears yahoo and I wanted these hulking machines to register that deep down in their spin cycles. No, we weren’t playing games, we were playing for Keeps. I immediately wrestled the washer into a defensive posture, unscrewed its top plate and ripped it off, then without hesitating, grabbed the control panel and removed it too, disabling its primitive brain. Next came the front panel, then the door and finally the rubber boot on the drum. I noticed with some consternation I had inadvertently disconnected the wiring harness on the door latch switch. This would spell trouble later, I knew, but first things first.

I found what I was looking for: the drain filter off the pump, the culprit that must be the reason water remained in the bottom of the drum that we could hear sloshing when the last spin was finished. And sure enough, the bugger was crammed with a black sickening muck that encased coins and dental floss gizmos and other detritus too disgusting to analyze. A lesser man might have staggered backward, but I held my ground. I’ve seen worse. Much worse. My cesspool for one, but that’s another story. So I cleaned the gunk, washed the filter, and confident that I had solved my problem, I proceeded to reassemble the washer.

The wiring harness I’d pulled apart wasn’t obvious how it should go back together. Usually they are, but not this one. My confidence began to wane. But I put aside my anxieties and stuffed it into the door latch assembly. The rubber gasket do-hickey had a wire spring clamp that fought me to a standstill. I called my neighbor Pete, picked him and the two of us managed to get it on. The rest was fairly simple.

I plugged the docile beast into its outlet and watched the Power light pop to life, a bright reassuring blue. Hit the Start button … and nothing. Nada. Zip. The harness, I muttered, the &$#@! harness. I gave the sheet metal a good hard one with my shoe. Then my fist. I went upstairs to get a cup of coffee and settle down. The last thing I needed was the stupid machine thinking I was stupider than it. Even if it was true. The realization began to dawn on me that I might have ruined the washer. I had done just that with a weedeater I tried to repair a month earlier. A new weedeater. So it was possible. Maybe even predictable. Probable?

Repeat all of the above. The rubber bootie broke my heart to pull that recalcitrant spring clamp off, knowing how hard it was to put it on the first time. But a man does what a man has to do. And a machine, cripes, who knows what goes through a damn machine’s twisted little head? Who will ever know? I discovered the wiring harness had disconnected when I installed it the first time so maybe … maybe … that was the start problem. And of course, maybe not.

Yeah, I had to go get another set of hands to help with that spring clamp, but we got it on again. I thanked my neighbor prodigiously then set to work finishing up the reassembly. If you’re bored by now reading this, think how I was feeling some six hours into this repair. This so-called repair. I was switching from coffee to something a lot harder, trust me. When all else fails, drinking is a proper course of action. I plugged the bugger in and pushed the Power button, got the blue go-ahead, then, with believe me, bated breath, I hit the Start. It started. It started!!! I know, you probably can’t relate, but I was ecstatic. Ebullient. King of the Appliance World. I had gone where most sane men would never go. And returned unharmed.

I ran a load of laundry. I popped a beer and watched it fill, watched it churn, watched it agitate, watched it spin and drain. My machine. Doing my will. Subservient to mankind. The Way It’s Supposed To Be! I opened the door and pulled my clothes out. Sweet smelling clean clothes. Simple pleasures. Then I turned the drum, knowing that slosh would be gone, that a day’s work was not in vain, that I had triumphed!

Maybe you were rooting for me. Maybe you thought I could outsmart my Whirlpool. Maybe you thought I would live happily ever after in this twisted fairy tale swamp of a yarn. But this is the South End, this is where dreams go to die. Because when I spun that drum, the gurgling sloshing noises I heard mocked me with their laughter. Today I called the repair shop up north and spoke to the Maytag guy. He told me the water I hear is sealed there below the drum, perfectly normal, to help balance the loads. Nothing to worry about, he said. Write that on my tombstone, somebody. Nothing to worry about.

Nature, I suspect, at least looking back over decades of experience, senses weakness. Wolves don’t kill healthy prey, they kill the infirm, the young, the helpless. Disease takes those with weakened defenses. It’s a Law of some kind, a warning for those who believe what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Sure, we survived the Storm of the Century last week and I survived the washer floods in our basement, a sudsy tsunami. The worst, I thought, was over.

Complacency is the enemy here. The false belief that the bottom has been plumbed and now the only way is Up leads only to more misery. Optimism in the face of disaster is for pastors and fools. The Lord spared us, they say, but ignore the wreckage. The Lord is merciful, they say, but offer no sustenance for the battered bodies we’ll be burying the same week. It can’t get any worse, they say, then the aftershocks hit. I say hunker down, pull the sheets up high, wait for a Sign, forget homilies and happy thoughts, the world is tearing at your very fabric. It wants to kill you. You need to understand that. You need to know what created you will turn on you. It’s the Law.

So maybe I’m guilty of complacency too. I got our old washer out of our basement, loaded it up and dealt with it with Extreme Prejudice. It won’t be menacing us or anyone else any time soon. Or ever. I replaced it with a 3 year old unit that weighed twice as much as the old washer, hauled it into the bathroom, hooked it up, stacked the dryer on top and gave it a trial run. Seemed just fine to me, ever the dumb optimist. And think of the money we saved on a used machine over a new one!!

The mizzus, never the sunny optimist I am, noticed the water left below the drum as soon as she got five feet from the machine. She has a sixth or seventh sense for these things where I have the gift of ignoring such signs. When we turned the stainless steel drum, yeah, I could hear a little sloshing going on, sure, but it is, after all, I said, named Whirlpool. And besides, the thing works great, what’s a little residual water?

I googled and found that all machines have a little water left over. I drove up to the Appliance Connection where I had a 90 day parts and labor warranty and the nice young man said it was normal. Knowing the mizzus wouldn’t believe this salesguy’s assurances, I went to another appliance dealer and got the same answer. That made 3 of us to her one. I was doomed, I knew that, I knew that as sure as I know water flows downhill. I checked other people’s washers to see if theirs had enough residual water to make a sloshing sound. They didn’t.

I have two choices. I can load this monstrously heavy machine back into my truck and haul it 40 miles to the guy who says nothing is wrong with it … or, and you might as well know right off the bat this is the correct answer, I’m going to tear into myself, figuring it’s easier than the first choice. What is true, what I know for a fact even in this Trumpian Universe we’ve been living in where truth is no longer based on facts, is that both options are bad options but they are infinitely better than the mizzus’s sad grimace every time she runs a load from now until the day I’m relegated to the Mabana Sunset Villa for the Infirm and Aged. So be it. No one promised an Easy Way. No one guarantees the worst is over.

Wish me luck. Ha, like luck has anything in the world to do with it.

The ladies at Jolene’s Gift and Boutique were eating their bag lunches in a corner of the back storeroom they’d converted into a break room. Microwave, coffee maker, mini-fridge and a small TV hooked up to a crummy antenna they’d mounted on the back of the building and run a coaxial hookup thru a window. Since their usual soap opera wasn’t on for another 5 minutes they were watching CNN’s coverage of Trump’s tax returns.

“You imagine losing 900 million dollars?” Alice said, munching her cucumber sandwich. “How many lifetimes would it take to make that much?” Shelly laughed, put her iced tea down and pretended to do the math. “Oh, too many if you mean ours? Maybe with plenty of reincarnations.”

From behind her cup of coffee Katie volunteered, “My Jim could lose that much at the casino in a year too if he had it when he walked in. Heck, he may have lost nearly that already. I sure don’t see a paycheck these days. Goes to the tribe.”

“White man’s guilt,” Alice observed with a smirk.

“Maybe he can write it off as a loss,” Shelly suggested. “Isn’t that what Donald did, gamble and lose?”

“Or a charitable donation to the Indians,” Alice tossed in. A commercial for the Washington Lottery came on with improbable timing, its snappy slogan appearing at the end: You cannot win if you do not play. Katie groaned. “Jim should have that tattooed on his fat ass.”

“More like you cannot lose if you do not play,” Shelly suggested, taking one final gulp of her cold coffee and considered pouring a fresh cup, then decided her stomach was already upset.

“You suppose he really is rich?” Katie asked aloud.

“Jim, you mean?” Alice asked and laughed.

“The rich don’t pay taxes,” Katie muttered, “so I guess he must be rich.”

“And the best part?” Shelly moaned, “ it’s all perfectly legal.”

“He claims he’s the only one who can change the laws because he knows how to use them so brilliantly. Brilliantly, he said,” Katie added bitterly, switching the channel to the Young and the Resentful.

“We must be dumb as rocks,” Alice pronounced. Katie got ready to go back to her register. “I might vote for him, though.”

“Dumber than rocks,” Alice reiterated.

“He got rich, didn’t he? And we’re working for minimum wage.”

Shelly got up too. “And we pay taxes.”

Alice turned off the TV. “Dumb as rocks.”

This is the morning after the Storm of the Century. I know, it’s only 16 years old, the century, but 100 year floods come about every ten years now so 16 years, it’s amazing we haven’t had at least two storms of the century so far. Maybe we did and I just don’t remember well anymore.

Many of the neighbors, especially those newly arrived to the monsoonal South End, were wandering around their yards in total shock. If we had had counselors, we would’ve sent them into the debris fields to round up these flummoxed victims, take them to Red Cross evacuation centers or at least to the storeroom of Tyee Store, offer them hot coffee and consoling grief interventions. Some had lost patio umbrellas, garbage can lids, prized bird feeders — the damage was beyond their ability to comprehend. Those of us who had seen storms like this before tried to comfort them, but they were inconsolable. If this could happen once, it could certainly happen again, maybe next week.

No doubt ours wasn’t the only neighborhood trying to make sense of Mother Nature’s fury. Up and down the island, folks were probably wandering the length of their lawns, searching for a prized dahlia or an overturned planter, muttering incoherently, questioning God and their useless religion. Who, really, could blame them? Their world had been turned upside down, shaken and dropped like a ragdoll back to earth but off its foundations. The world, not the doll … pardon these mixed metaphors, but I guess I’m a little shaken too and I’ve been through these catastrophes before.

We’re all picking up the pieces now. It won’t be easy. All those batteries we bought in a panic, all those flashlights that we no longer need, a pantry full of Vienna sausages and tomato soup. It’s as if the Mormons learned their year of supplies stocked in the fallout shelter is useless now, just food going past its expiration date, same as those poor yahoos who stocked up for Y2K, expecting digital Armageddon.

We’ll survive. South End Strong! South End Strong! What doesn’t kill us is, well … well, geez, I don’t know, maybe it just weakens us. Those patio umbrellas, did it make them tough? Those bird feeders, will they be the same? It will take time to recover, I guess. Sure, we can buy another garbage can lid, but how do you restore our faith? How do you learn to sleep at night knowing the wind or the rain or the news crews can come howling at any time? South End Strong! We survived this, maybe we can survive the next storm of the century! Sure got plenty of tomato soup and enough batteries to last until 2200. We should be okay. You readers out there, take inspiration from us. And if you need any D size batteries, let me know, I’ll make you a helluva deal.

The meteorologists were apoplectic, the newscasters were tearing their hair out, the public was in panic mode, grocery stores ran out of bread, hardware stores sold out batteries and flashlights, the streets of Stanwoodopolis were nearly empty by Friday night. The storm of the decade was on its way, possibly the storm of the century!

Some killer typhoon was headed our way from Asia, crossing the Pacific at unimaginable speeds, headed like a runaway locomotive for the South End and the entire west coast from Northern California to British Columbia. We were warned to hunker down, take cover, stay inside. Hurricane force winds would be pounding the coast, tearing up the bluffs, blowing down houses and trees. Our neighbors came over with updated wills they wanted us to witness and sign. Surely this was the End As They Knew It.

We signed their wills and gave them a tearful goodbye. Our lanterns and oil lamps were at the ready on the table. The mizzus kept her I-pad tuned to the dopplers that showed a dark red blot representing winds advancing on us like Trump supporters. We were doomed and we knew it. I hated myself for not digging the tornado shelter when I had the chance, for not buying the big ass generator to keep us alive in the coming electricless days ahead, for leaving us unprotected against the fury of Nature herself, for living a life of sloth and hedonism. Because now the Piper had come for his payment and we didn’t even have children to offer.

Outside the leaves began to move in a twisted dance as the trees stirred with the first onslaught. The waters on the Sound broke in wave after wave. The lights, did they flicker? Was this it? Was this the beginning of the end? Would we die without knowing who won the 2016 presidential election? After the long depraved descent into the monstrous maelstrom of petty personal politics this past year and a half? It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right. Not after all the crap we had endured to make it this far. Only to come this close. Let the storm hit Donald, Lord, let the storm hit someone else, anyone else!

The Lord, well, she listened apparently, but in her mercy she spared nearly everyone. The storm of the century gave us gusts of, oh, 25 miles an hour or so, nothing that interrupted the power, nothing that prevented us from watching bad TV on our last night on earth. The weather people warned, by the time we called it bedtime, that the threat was still there. The newsfolks showed a house with a tree on its roof. Every station showed the same house. Proof that the danger was real! They hadn’t made it up. Look! They had a windsurfer who had to be rescued by a fellow windsurfer. And this! A kayak buffeted by wild waves near shore. Who paddled beyond camera range and, we can only assume, to his watery grave.

I write this the next day. The sun is shining on what should have been Desolation Row. A fir bough, torn from its tree, is buried point down next to the garden path. A lawnchair is on its side. Leaves are piled into the porch corner. But we’re alive. We’re alive! Later on I’ll walk up to my neighbors who rewrote their will. They said if a tree landed on their house and killed them in their sleep I could have their old outboard motor in the shed. I sure hate to get a motor that way, but a deal’s a deal.

So we get home from a four day vacation all tanned and rested and naturally we load the washer right off the bat so we’ll have clean undies and socks next day. Half an hour later I wander into the bathroom where we keep an alcove for our washer/dryer combo … and splish splash, I was takin a bath in a small lake that was rapidly forming.

You know — and I do too — we’re going into Appliance Hell now, a dark journey down into the depths of plumbing, heavy mopping, washer troubleshooting, drywall tear-out, new paneling and maybe, a big maybe, we’ll fix the problem without a huge bill or, worst case, a new machine. You know — but I didn’t — this will more than likely go badly, not easy. The gods of plumbing are cruel and capricious sons-of-bitches, we all know that. Or will soon.

I got the pond on the floor sponged up okay, then decided to wait until next day to tackle the troubleshooting, let the room dry and me cool down, drink a few beers, sleep on the problem, see if tomorrow might be less, oh, ill-omened. Sometimes it’s best to admit defeat in the short term but hope your luck will change down the road. And yeah, I understand this is a corollary to superstition.

Next day dawned sunny and I awoke optimistic. I hauled the dryer off the washer, checked supply lines and drain pipes, didn’t see anything obvious so then I ran a load to see where the problem might be. An hour later I’m noticing the spin cycle doesn’t kick right but how does that explain the water? I’m running a second load when the phone rings. So I shut the machine off, figuring I’ll come back to it when my telemarketer is through with me. But it’s my old man on the line so we banter for awhile about the weather and the family health issues when suddenly … holy toilet bowl! … I hear a strange sound followed by what seems like water pouring out. “Dad,” I say, “I’ll have to call you back.” Click, then I run to the basement. The washer door has broken open and Niagara is cascading onto the floor, out the bathroom and into the hallway. The washer apparently no longer obeys electrical commands, just keeps filling up until there’s nowhere to go but out the weakest component, the locked door. The machine is now in complete control. The machine is trying to drown its former master. The machine is willing to destroy the house. The machine is now my enemy.

Like Dave in 2001: A Space Odyssey disconnecting HAL, I begin to uncouple the monster. Standing in the rising water, I cut its hydro-electrical components one by one, first the cold water line, then the hot and finally its electrical umbilical. I slam the Cyclop’s one eye shut even though the belly of the beast is only half full of water below the doorline, the rest a cold numbing grip on my ankles. We take full measure of one another and it is obvious to both of us this is a battle to the death, no surrender, no terms, no pity. To … the … death. At this point it seems neither might win, but I’m a human and I understand what it does not. Fear, pure and simple. Fear, enough to rise to any occasion. Fear, what drives us to fight if flight is not an option.

It’s two days later if you’re wanting to keep track. If you want to keep score, it’s Humanity ONE and Washing Machine ZERO. The filthy brute is by now on some scrap heap in the salvage yard of hell where it will harm no one again. Sure, the basement looks like the battlefield it was. Soggy drywall beckoning black mold, a yawning pit where the Cyclops once stood, the dryer on its side down the hall, plumbing parts strewn in standing water: a wet and dark tableau of one man’s struggle against the machine but a man who understands implicitly, absolutely, the machine must be made to understand who exactly is boss here. After all, it’s his castle, ruined or not. And by the gods, if we have to do laundry by hand, we’ll do it by hand. Better to live free and slightly soiled than to be servant to the soulless machine.

Me being a news junkie and all, I get plenty of news feeds on my computer. I guess the three newspapers we subscribe to aren’t really enough to satisfy my addictions so I just load up the syringe and inject everything from Yahoo news to weird feeds from outfits that I’ve never heard of in my life. Today it finally hit me what this feels like, these headlines about Clinton’s disease or Obama’s new scandal or the latest Kardashian soap opera. It’s like standing in the grocery store line reading the headlines of the Globe or the National Enquirer or the Star or any of those cheezy tabloids that have the latest on the JFK assassination or the breaking developments on Martian architecture or the weight gain of some TV star gone to seed.

Now that most Americans view mainstream news, what Limbaugh calls lamestream drive by news, as nothing but liberal bias, the door is wide open for any yahoo with a laptop and a blog site to weigh in on what is true and factual. Fox News calls itself fair and balanced. Compared to some of these digital news media, that might be more true than they ever dreamed. The glut is so deep and so pervasive it’s as if journalism itself had been buried under a tsunami of radioactive malarkey. No wonder people start to read only what they want to believe. It all looks like the ingredients for sausage and if any of it is less suspect than the others, it all gets ground up and spiced to mask the rodent turds and dead insects.

You might even wonder, if you were conspiratorial minded, if this wasn’t exactly the plan. The internet, that bright and shining hope for the future, the one where all facts were at your fingertips, is now swamped by so much misinformation, the truth, if there ever was such a thing, is now asphyxiating in a morass of opinion and outright lies so as to be unrecognizable by anyone not possessed with a passion for sorting through the debris in search of some small kernel that might be accurate.

I used to wonder who bought those greasy little supermarket tabloids. I used to wonder who watched Fox News. I used to wonder who listened to all those Talking Heads. Now I realize what the answer is. We all do.

I suspect quite a few of you readers out there in blogland wonder how I make a ‘living’. Meaning, how do I make money? Moonshining is pretty much dried up, so naturally I’ve turned to other forms of petty crime. Currently I’m an artist. Partly a con artist, you might say with the same degree of truth, inasmuch as I have to hoodwink my clients that what I’m selling has real value, no easy thing in this mass produced, low priced WalMart society we live in.

Back in the day folks like me glommed onto a religion. Us artists worked for the church, painted Bible stories or filled cathedrals with portraits of the saints and baby Jesus, maybe throw in some doves and lambs. If we found a rich patron, the patron wanted to curry favor with the priests so same thing, more religious art. The Greeks, the Romans, even the Pagans, the art was to reinforce the rituals, the belief system of the Gods.

Now of course we got Secularism. Meaning, we got Modern Art. If you’re an artist, it means a whole lot of artistic freedom. Artistic freedom, you want to know the truth, means starvation wages. Very few patrons, no church commissions, just a free-for-all helter skelter rush for what few jobs there are, at least in my chosen field, public art.

I’m a glass guy, stained and leaded. Design large murals for courthouses, train stations, libraries, places like that. Build em, haul em across the country, then install em. Usually a committee decides my glass design is more appropriate, say, than a sculpture or a mosaic or an atrium hanging. I have to sell them on that design, justify its expense, convince them I can hoist glass into the heavens without killing anyone below. I have to make them believe what I believe: that this art of glass will do what Renaissance glass did for cathedrals — lift their eyes and their hearts beyond the mundane, upward to an impossible light, what we secularists still call inspirational but seems harder to sell. Even us con artists believe in our art.