The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I was in the beer depot the other day with a couple purchases of adult beverages when the checkout lady asked to see my ID. I don’t take that as a compliment anymore now that I’m 45 years past legal. It’s the law and I am as law abiding as the next fellow down at the South End, meaning, I try my best even if I fall short more than occasionally. She noticed my ID was a driver’s license from another state since I was in a liquor store in Wisconsin, not that I usually make my beer runs that far from home, no matter how good their local beer is. She looked at it a lot longer than I was accustomed to, which is maybe ten seconds longer than a cursory glance. June, 1950, she said. My bank likes to tell me my birthday too, I guess to make me feel like we’re all family down there at the old First National Gouge and Steal that is my lending institution.
She finally handed me back my ID, which even has a picture of me in the same weatherstained cowboy hat I was sporting at the time, so she knew it must’ve been yours truly, but when I paid for my purchases, she asked suddenly, springing it on me, what year was your birthday again? Trick question for the feeble minded or the counterfeiter trying to buy legal liquor with a bogus ID.
This is the state that requires drivers license photo ID for the ostensible purpose of ensuring that voter fraud is kept to a minimum. Some folks think its real purpose is to keep students and minorities from voting since they’re more likely not to own a car OR a license to drive one. Me, I’m cynical so you can probably guess how I stand on that. But I wasn’t in the liquor store to vote, you see, although she might have figured maybe that’s where I was headed next, probably after drinking my illegal purchases. They got a big vote out here in a couple weeks and everybody and their mother is wound tight as a cheap alarm clock. Who knows, maybe I was on a dry run, see if my phony ID would work on beer, then use it to vote back in the folks who were voted out for wanting to let my vigilant checkout lady form a labor union for better wages and maybe some benefits. Or maybe she just was mistrustful of some immigrant from a state she wasn’t sure was in America or Mexico. The price of ignorance when you don’t bother with the GED. Nevertheless, you can’t be too careful in these polarized times. Especially in a state where it’s now easier to get a concealed weapon permit than one to vote.
Well, I passed the pop quiz with, okay, maybe not flying colors, and certainly not the answer she expected to hear. Once I get a few beers under my belt, maybe I’ll get up the nerve to try voting here in the dairy state. Right after I get that permit for a Luger. If I do, I’m voting to keep her wages pegged right of minimum. I figure a true patriot like herself ought to be willing to work practically for free.

Snail Mail

Back in the Paleolithic Age I used to write a lot of letters. Mostly to friends. Hard as it is to believe now, I used a pen and notebook, wrote by hand, put a page or two into an envelope, attached a stamp and sent it through the U.S. Mail. A couple of days later and voila, it would arrive at its destination. Later I might even receive a letter in return.

A couple of decades ago my friends stopped writing back, but being a stubborn Anachronist, I persisted. After a few years of sending epistles into a Black Hole, I guess I wearied of being the last yahoo on the planet trying to prop up the U.S. Postal Service with first class mail when everyone else had moved on to e-mail, so I got myself an e-mail account and wrote my letters on a keyboard, hit SEND and voila, instant delivery.

Course my friends had moved on by then to text messaging on their cellphones. Since I didn’t own a cellphone, I just continued my communications on a computer, figuring they could handle both technologies. What I didn’t anticipate was how using two thumbs on a small phone pad would morph communication to truncated misspelled messages the length of their new attention spans. Now, in response to my salutations, I received a garbled often incoherent pecking that apparently has become the Lingua Nueva of the Twitter Age.

I was idling at a fast food joint recently and the kid who brought me my tray of dollar specials said, “Hey man, that’s too cool.” I asked what he was talking about and he pointed at this notebook I’m writing on now and said you don’t see that anymore, you know, people writing stuff down. “Good for you,” he grinned.

Well, I resisted the urge to ask him for his address so I could write him a letter maybe. And anyway, you and I both know he’d never, not in a bazillion nano-seconds, write back. Nevertheless, I hope he moves on from burger flipping, maybe develop an app to organize Tweets into full blown novels. Okay, graphic novels.

You might not guess it, and you might actually be alarmed to know it, but I was a school teacher back in 1972. Taught English and Social Studies to 8th graders, those pre and post pubescent adolescents who drove a couple of my colleagues to retire early. Truth is, I retired early too. But it was my fellow teachers and administrators who drove me to it. Or so I like to say. You know, 40 odd years later….

I guess you could accurately say that I wasn’t cut out for teaching. I came out of the radical 60’s where one entire semester our campus was in full blown riot, National Guard camped down at the ballfields, buildings trashed and finally one blown to pieces. After nearly four years of grueling studies in pharmacology, street protesting and alternative philosophies, I realized I maybe didn’t have the credentials for, well, probably any serious occupation beyond car wash employee. So I took some education credits, just to hedge my bet. Who knows, I might like teaching.

I got a job teaching 8th graders. Eighth graders are an interesting subset of humans, half already passed into virtual adulthood, half still immature as a 3rd grader. It was like teaching in a one room schoolhouse circa 1850, kids age 6 to 18. Being a graduate of a radical institution, the University of Wisconsin, Madison, I came into the profession with radical ideas. Schools, or so I thought at the time and pretty much still do, are nothing more than prison lite, get those brats into some cells and keep them busy all day long. Instill in them virtues that would make working in a factory or a corporation palatable. Obedience. Subservience. Acceptance. Sit down, shut up. Do what you’re told, get a good grade. Act out, the Man will sit on your head.

So naturally I dispensed with seating charts, grading systems and most rules. My fellow teachers watched with horror my kids outside hanging from the trees where we would take books and read on sunny days. It looked like Monkey U. My principal stopped by one day to inform me that one of my kids’ parents, a University professor in English lit, was extremely distressed to drop by his son’s class only to find him in white facepaint with blood smeared on his lips in the filming of our epic zombie movie. “It was ketchup,” I smiled. “No zombies were harmed in the making of our film.” Oddly, this was not reassuring to him. Nor was the fact that I refused to issue grades, just written evaluations.

The zombie movie, no doubt the inspiration for our current wave of endless copycat books, television shows and B movies, was really a social commentary on the school itself complete with shots of zombie like students in my fellow educators’ classes, sitting in rows, half awake, barely alive. My fellow educators, once we began to screen the film for 25 cents a head, were less than amused. My principal trudged once more to my room to inform me school policy forbade charging money for school activities. I said I didn’t realize that. We instituted the novel concept of voluntary donations and had Gerald, an 8th grade gorilla the size of a bar bouncer, ask forcefully for those voluntary donations. We made more than enough money to pay for processing the film with plenty left over. Lessons in Capitalism 101. And still the administration complained!

At the end of the year my principal explained that I would not be coming back and he would not be offering letters of recommendation. I explained that this was okay with me. I had had a dose of the education system and maybe it was time to remove myself and set out to explore the ‘real’ world. He heartily agreed and for once we were on the same page. The real world, it turned out, proved that I was probably right to get those now useless teaching certificates in the first place. I was ready for some mean lessons in the school of hard knocks. The zombies were about to have some fun with me this time.

Any of you unfortunate enough to know me probably understand that I’m not the kind of hombre who wanted neighbors. Thomas Jefferson famously said people should live far enough apart that they can’t hear their dogs’ barking. Times change, I understand that, but in these modern times, I’d like to think we would live separate enough not to hear each other’s lawnmowers, chainsaws, weedeaters and teenagers’ boomboxes. So imagine my distress when, two years after moving to the end of this island at the end of the continent, the trees across from me were clearcut and a 52 lot development was slated for my neighborhood. I immediately went looking for a new home, up river by the Sauk and Skagit convergence, over on the peninsula, out by the coast, somewhere I could hide out.

Needless to say I never left the South End. The development got scaled down to 26 lots and for the past 3 decades, about one house a year was built. My own included…. This past year the last house was finished and the clamor and clang of construction ended, the quietude enfolding us like a benediction. Amen.

Today we were over at the annual picnic our neighbors put on for themselves and those of us across the road. The mizzus and me are the only non-members who attend, but every year we meet the folks who moved in the past year, shoot the breeze, carry in a potluck dish, eat potato salad and hamburgers, reminisce and get reacquainted. Slowly but surely over the years we’ve made our peace with a more crowded neighborhood than we’d maybe wished for. And slowly but surely the neighbors are no longer folks older than us but quite a few are younger. I can see where this is going. Through bifocals clear as day.

I haven’t always been on the best of terms with these newcomers of ours, I’ll admit that. Probably their fault, I figure. And in the old days they didn’t get along with each other. Not my fault, definitely. But as we all sat around the picnic tables at the cul-de-sac’s only shade under the big leaf maple on a hot summer day, I felt at home with all these folks, all these neighbors of ours, some new, some old, and I count myself lucky, this crusty curmudgeon, for the friends we’ve made over there and the friends we’ll make in the coming years. We crab together, we talk across the fence, we go to birthday parties and anniversaries, all that socializing you might expect when you move to the country and not the suburbs. If you live near your neighbors, close enough, say, to hear their beagle bellowing, think about that picnic once a year if you don’t have one already. Invite the neighbors and if they don’t come like some of ours don’t, it’s their tough luck. Chances are, up close and personal, you’ll find you have plenty in common. And don’t let the potato salad sit out too long….

When I moved to the wilds of Northern Wisconsin as a high school kid, the Big Deal was to letter in sports. They had, for a school out in the swampy boondocks, a reputation for winning teams, particularly swimming and tennis. Maybe there just wasn’t much else to do for us future paper mill workers.

A buddy of mine was a helluva swimmer. Won state championship when he was a junior, set records when he was a senior. We all figured he’d go on to collegiate swimming, probably try for a shot at the Olympics. Every morning before school, every afternoon after, he’d be in the pool. The kid was half porpoise. The future, through his swim goggles, looked bright. After graduation we both went off to seek our destinies, John to win awards, me to figure out what the hell I was going to do with my life, a 50/50 proposition. It pays, in case you hadn’t noticed, to decide on directions early then stick to it. Tiger Woods started at 3, kids nowadays probably are doing laps in the womb.

A few years after leaving for our separate colleges, I ran into John. “Still swimming?” I asked, expecting new gills and a long rundown on trophies, awards, scholarships, endorsements from nose plug sponsors.

“No,” he said matter-of-factly, “I quit it. Gave it up.”

“Seriously?” I asked, wondering if he’d been hurt maybe, but no, he said, just wanted to live a life, not just live in chlorinated pools, training for a shot at the Olympics.

The Olympics are going on this week in Rio de Janeiro, the world’s best athletes competing in beach volleyball, ping pong, target shooting, side pocket pool, mudwrestling, horseshoes, every sport imaginable. I’m betting John and I are two of the few who don’t follow the Games. He’s a professor now in Idaho, I’m still wondering what to do with my life. But … I suspect our lives are more interesting than the ones of those dedicated to some sport only the very few will ultimately succeed at. It’s easy enough to be a Loser in this specialized world without taking on the longest odds possible. John, well, he’d be surprised to hear it, but he’s always been a hero to me, a man who could walk away while he was ahead.

Amid rumors that our commissioners have decided to divest the county of its parks, the South End Environmental Koalition (SEEK) has begun a campaign to Save Our Parks (SOP). Ginny Davis, the newly appointed president, spoke at the South End Chamber of Commerce, arguing that parks mean tourism and tourism means dollars. Ralph Hinshaw asked if she thought our little 5 acre park —Hutchison Park — really brought tourists into our ‘economic sphere’.

“Seriously, Ginny,” he asked, “who the hell comes to that park except teenagers doing drugs and having sex? You think they’re going to fuel the economy down here?” Ginny realized she’d maybe gone down the wrong cul-de-sac, citing economic growth where economics barely existed, but Harry Walton, owner of Tyee Megastore, stood up and declared he sold a lot of ice cream bars to the bicyclists who stopped at the store and he’d seen more than a few eating popsicles at the picnic tables down at the park an eight of a mile north.

Ralph avowed how he’d never seen a soul down there much less a motorcycle gang with sweet tooths. Ginny, who didn’t catch the humor in that, asked, “What do you think, Ralph? Sell the park for a building lot? Not much revenue in a single house on a lot zoned for 5 acre rural residential.”

The South End only has this one park. Course it only has one store. One diner. One hair salon. And two art galleries. Which are extraordinary if you’ll allow me to play art critic. We got plenty of art studios, some good, some not, but they all add to the mythology of the fabled South End, if not, admittedly, to the tax base.

Personally, I think the park should stay. I don’t give a fig or a fart if folks throng to its short trails and its unused BBQ grills or notice the flowers or idiosyncratic sculpture. Some day when this is an art mecca for weary urbanites, they’ll have a place to pull in and check the GPS for how to get home. Meanwhile the teenagers got a place for backroad sex.

Right next door to our Shangri-La-La sits an old 1940’s bungalow, a small one bedroom, low ceilinged place perfect for one person or two people very much in love. Over the years it’s been a low income rental, one of the cheaper rents on the island. I got a buddy who rents a chicken house a mile north for $200 more per month than this place charged. Not to insinuate that cheap rent equates to low life renters, we have had our share of heroin addicts, malcontents and obnoxious neighbors roll through that place the past couple of decades.

The best neighbors were usually single women, two of whom we practically never laid eyes on the couple of years they rented the place. Barry, the Navy guy, wasn’t too bad, but his dog would come down by the garden and snarl at the mizzus, who, never growing up with the four legged pets, mistrusts the barking beasts. Something to do with bared teeth rattles her. I finally had to wander over to Barry and ask if maybe he could keep his mutt from coming over to menace her. He said his dog never left the property. O … Kay, I said, I guess this conversation is over. I made it pretty clear what would happen to him, not the dog, if the dog that looks like his and growls at us shows up once more. Barry moved on a few weeks later.

We had the guy whose girlfriend went off her meds and her head, then chased him down the highway with his rifle, angry about something or other, alarming us neighbors with gunfire in the night. Three SWAT teams arrived, 50 police cars and who knows how many officers before finally talking the girlfriend into surrendering herself.

The two gay junkies who parked in there for years were usually broke. They borrowed tools and lawnmowers, gas and whatever else they needed, usually without asking. They sent their pals over to the orchard to pick fruit. And their vehicle was usually out front, hood up, another breakdown. When one of the partners died, the remaining junkie took the inheritance and bought an SUV, a hot tub, a motorcycle and all manner of goodies so that over the next few weeks we watched the repo folks come to take back what Jeff didn’t bother to make payments on. PUD turned off his power and for months we thought he’d moved on, but no, he lived in a heroin haze in the dark and cold until finally Lisa, his landlady, kicked him out. Actually, she basically paid him to go, helped him pack, brought the boxes, paid for a storage unit. I should’ve chipped in.

The last guy, a nice enough fellow who kept to himself mostly, drove the mizzus crazy calling for his cat incessantly. She called me over to the garden one day and asked, what is he saying? Here Girlfriend, Here Girlfriend, over and over. I admitted that it sounded strange but it had to be, god help us if it’s not, the name of his cat. I never really saw a cat, but the alternative was too grim to contemplate. Either way, the mizzus was disturbed by this and started to avoid the garden completely.

So when Lisa came up to do what seemed like more than touch-up after Girlfriend’s owner packed up the Conestoga and headed over the mountains, I asked if she was thinking of selling the place. She replied that yeah, the rental biz was starting to wear her down. I said it was wearing us down too, truth be told. And so, that is how — and maybe why — we ended up buying the place. Privacy, it turns out, unlike when we first came out here, is a pretty expensive proposition.

You maybe have been a little too busy lately with texting and Facebook updating, Google searching and e-mailing, to pay attention to the world accelerating at the speed of algorithms. You probably don’t remember exactly when you got your first calculator (I got one back in 1975) or your first computer (we got one in, oh, I’m guessing, 1988 or thereabouts). The point being, not that you can or can’t remember the date, but that it happened in recent history, it happened in our lifetime. And in the few intervening years, it became an integral part of modern living. It changed everything. It is, just as the invention of the spinning jenny and machinery was, a revolution. The world will never be the same.

Now we take it for granted. Only took a decade, maybe two. Future Shock, just as Toffler predicted, is here, picking up speed, faster than we Cro Magnons can possibly adapt to the changes. Oh, sure, you can send twitters, you can e-mail, you can download movies on your TV, easy as pie. And if it’s hard, the kids can show you how. My parents, not so much. They’re a bit too calcified in the Industrial Age to manage much more than the basics. Try to explain trickier navigations, they’re boggled immediately. The old man keeps a set of directions for operating his TV that his grandson wrote down for him five years ago. Oh yeah, he uses it every time he wants to switch from cable to DVD.

Everyone now, except me and two other Neanderthal knuckle draggers on the planet, carry a cellphone or a tablet or an I-pad everywhere they go. They’re ‘connected’ to the hive in ways that were unimaginable ten years ago. I don’t know if the world has shrunk so much as it has become denser, jammed with data and information, more coming in at the speed of light. If our attention spans have truncated to about 20 seconds max, it’s little wonder, we have to move on to the next new incoming. The world, once external in our early years, is now internal, virtual, digitized and flying at us at incredible speed.

If you’ve been around kids the past decade or so, you know they no longer live among us. They might be in the same room, sleep in the beds upstairs, mumble occasionally when they enter or leave the house, but no, they’re already gone. The Pied Piper of PC and Apple have taken them to a different place, one where you and I won’t be going. You might have learned a few tricks, but they’ve internalized the circuitry. They learned from the machine and the machine is how they think now. Eventually they will add chips to themselves, apps, all that stuff they carry in a box now but will soon be inserted into their physical body. You think tattoos or lip rings are invasive, you’ve got some shocks coming. It’s a brave new world, old timer, and we’re the last of the humans.

Just when you thought you’d dodged the swine and bird flu pandemics, along comes another black plague to end civilization as we know it. This disease, spread by the usually suspect mosquito, comes with a twist. It doesn’t kill its victim outright, it destroys the fetus it carries, something right out of a science fiction movie. Every day the media reports the northerly spread of the disease in America. Today the numbers hit, get ready if you’re not already sitting down, 30.

30. Not 30 million. Not even 30,000. Not 3000. Not 300. Thirty. Two and a half dozen, if my math is correct. More people were shot in Chicago yesterday than Zika has infected all year. But … I don’t live in Chicago and Zika is spreading!!! Well, okay, it’s mostly in Miami. Not really close to the South End, Miami. Chicago is a thousand miles closer. And even in Miami it’s sort of in a small area. BUT!!! It could be here any day now, what with air travel and all. You know an infected Typhoid Mary could get off a plane at Sea-Tac then get bit by a mosquito up here and before Yahoo News could sound the alert, half of Puget Sound would be Ground Zero for Zika.

AND THERE’S NOTHING YOU CAN DO TO STOP IT!!!

Well, you could maybe not be pregnant. And you could stay indoors. And if you had to leave the bunker fortress of your house, you could maybe wear bug spray. I don’t know about you all, but I’m for bombing Miami, get rid of the threat before it reaches Ft. Lauderdale or Tampa. Or the South End!!!! I know, it sounds harsh, but these are desperate times, judging by this year’s election speeches. If we’re feeling a little squeamish, hey, we can use a drone to do the dirty work. Collateral damage, I think it’s called. Millions of lives are at stake here. Decisions have to made. Think about it, but not too long.

The Flatheads were parked at the Diner, their vintage machines waxed and gleaming in the packed dirt parking lot. They meet every Wednesday morning, rain, shine or engine check warning, slide a few tables together, then hold court as they argue after-market carburetors and auto body strategies. And, of course, politics du jour. The rest of us customers either avoid Wednesdays or else come for the show as a willing audience. I count myself in the latter.

Today’s improv started out with a lively discussion of Jerry’s newly purchased ’50 GMC 5 window pickup, original paint, completely stock, nearly immaculate except for a small rust hole in the left quarterpanel. The Flatheads debated whether Jerry should leave the original paint alone or go for a new spray job, an old argument between the purists and the car show enthusiasts.

But somewhere between the spray booth boyz and the ‘let er be’ crowd, the conversation veered without warning into the deep ditch of this year’s elections. Fairlane Frank, a proponent of two tone Fords, had tossed a fork with a clatter on to his half eaten chicken fried steak, splattering white gravy across the formica DMZ. “Trump’s no Republican,” he growled in a mouthful of rage and food. “He’s hi-jacked the whole party.” Pat, proud owner of a 1972 Gremlin and recipient of countless jeers and guffaws, cheerily suggested the time might be right for a 3rd party. “The Know Nothings,” he suggested as a name.

And so it began…. Bel Aire Bobby retorted that we already have that party, opening up a wild round of just which party qualified before Brenda, coffee pot in hand, said, “Maybe you boys should stick with 4 barrel carburetors and dual hemis, leave the politics to the professionals.”

Frank started to object but Brenda stared him down with her headlights on high beam while she poured seconds and thirds. “Frank, I’m makin minimum wage here. No benefits, no insurance, no 401-K. Now my kid needs an operation. Trust me, you don’t want to get me going on politics.” And with that, she whirled to the next table. None of the car guyz said a word for a full minute. Like the man said, all politics is local. But when they left, the tip from the boyz, usually measley, was enough to buy Pat’s Gremlin and pay for a paint job to boot.