The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

This past week I hauled up north to my dentist and had my teeth cleaned. For most of my life I’ve been told that flossing is next to godliness, that it’ll prevent plaque build-up and gum disease, that if I were to neglect it, I would probably be at risk for everything from halitosis to heart attacks. Today, the news told me and all my floss flagellating friends, this is scientifically unprovable. Flossing, according to the latest studies, makes no more difference to my dental health than if I gargled with holy water.

Great. A year or so ago I received the news that baby aspirin, forever touted as a hedge against plaque build-up in arteries and therefore heart attacks, was probably not much help. Might even be offset by increased incidents of stroke. So much for the wonder drug of aspirin. So much for listening to the advice of health professionals. You wonder why folks go down to the supplement store and spend fortunes on snake oil, maybe this is why. You might as well believe what you want, the so-called experts are just as phony.

One year whole milk is a killer, better drink skim, this year a study claims we need that kind of fat. Butter, might as well eat DDT, now it’s margarine that’s demonized. Sugar, holy moley, white sugar will eat you alive. Now the diet stuff, worse yet. What’s a poor boy to do???? I don’t know about you, but I like to believe — and science may contradict me tomorrow, then support me the next week, etc. — that we are creatures of the planet Earth, most of us, and we evolved with a diet of natural stuff. All those foods we made easier to cook or made from chemistry labs, well, I’m not saying they’ll give you cancer and make your hair fall out or your teeth rot, I’m just saying we didn’t really get exposed to those things in our climb from the ooze to the treetops.

Folks think science will bring them closer to immortality, and don’t get me wrong, I believe in science, but we’re really looking for magic bullets, pharmaceutical panaceas, artificial remedies, all those medical cures advertised to us old farts on TV every damn night. Just ignore the cautionary list of adverse effects, then go bug your doctor for a cure-all anyway.

I don’t know if I’ll keep on flossing or not now. I probably won’t lose sleep over it, but if I do, I’ll check with my pharmacist and take what he recommends. Just so long as one of the side effects isn’t gum rot.

I just read where the Lutheran Church up north was having a ‘Paws Prayers and Praise’ this week. Course, I checked to see if this was an April Fool’s Joke, but … it’s July, so I presume this is for real. Not that I think furry souls couldn’t use some ‘saving’. Doggie treats were being offered, I’m betting as puppy sacrament and no doubt wine in a bowl, blood of the … well, hopefully nobody brings their lamb to the PP&P.

Mainstream churches — so I’ve heard — are losing membership. The kids go for the evangelical mega-churches where the pastors are hip and wear Garth Brooks style microphones like the stars they are. We’ll have contests soon on cable TV: American Pastor. “That was great, Jimmy, really brought them to their knees.” “Sorry, Clyde, Cotton Mather was more fun than you.” “Got to kick you off the stage, Ralph, those collection plates were a little lean.”

It’s not easy selling religion to the masses these days, don’t kid yourself. You need an angle, you need a hook, you need a P.R. agent and you definitely need Facebook. Attention spans are pretty short and sermons, well, c’mon, if they won’t fit on a Tweet, they’re too long, get over yourself. Summarize, summarize, sum it up and move on to the Christian rock music.

You’re not going to lecture to a pet, that’s for sure. Butt sniffing, that’s about the longest they’re in for. Butt sniffing is not in the Bible, not the King Jim version for sure, maybe the Dead Sea Scrolls but I doubt it. And I don’t want to mention leg humping. I KNOW that’s not in the Old or New Testament. Not saying it’s a sin, but geez, in a church? A church that doesn’t even like human humping if it’s not man on woman. In the sanctity of marriage. Well, enough said about that….

I may have to go down to this Paws Prayer and Praise, see for myself. It does though, smack of … I don’t know … dare I say it? Bestiality. There, I said it. Animal love, is it wrong? Well, I don’t know but this seems desperate, a slippery slope of 4 legged forgiveness, feral feelings and potential poop scooping in the House of the Lord. If nothing else, hopefully anyway, it should be a joyful noise, all that barking.

This morning I read about a guy who is planning to dive 25,000 feet from a plane. Without a parachute. He plans to land in a net held up 20 stories high by two cranes. He’s tested this with dummies. One dummy shot right through the webbing of the net, but I hear it’s okay. Still a dummy, though.

I’m always puzzled by people like this. Not one ounce of me has that urge for thrill seeking, death defying acts. I don’t picture myself conquering Mt. Everest without oxygen, I don’t want to bungee jump off bridges into deep gorges, I don’t imagine myself in a Formula One racecar hitting 220 miles per hour going into the turns. If you look up the word Cautious in the dictionary, you probably will find my mug shot hiding behind a tree. It’s not as if I haven’t taken my share of risks, but I don’t go looking for them. Sometimes they’re unavoidable. Sometimes they’re the result of stupid mistakes. Mistakes I wouldn’t want to make twice.

Harry, a buddy of mine, offered to pay my fare for a skydiving jump back when I first got to Seattle. He’d taken a jump out in Issaquah a couple months before and he was totally hooked so now he was looking for converts to his new adrenaline fueled addiction. No thanks, I said. He could hardly believe his ears. He repeated his offer, thinking maybe I was hard of hearing. “It’s a Total Rush!” he kept saying. “I’ll pay for your first dive. After that, you’ll be hooked too. It’s amazing. Amazing!”

I thanked him again and declined his offer. “What??? Are you afraid??”
“Afraid?”I said, “Afraid?? Jump out of an airplane and hope whoever stuffed my parachute did it right? Yeah, that would scare me. I don’t even like roller coasters, but I’m sure as hell not jumping out of an airplane with no margin of error.”

Harry laughed at me and explained about the backup chute. Called me a coward. Ridiculed my fear. “We’ll go this weekend,” he cried, I guess figuring I’d rather be frightened than forever tagged as a Coward. “Won’t cost you one dime and you’ll thank me later.”

Harry and I rafted a river once together, but we never jumped out of an airplane, no doubt the thrill of a lifetime. Harry’s a quadriplegic now after getting hit by a truck riding along a highway. He was always an aggressive bike rider, like everything else he did. He’d probably tell you it was a small price to pay, that life isn’t worth living without taking risks. I’d answer that it was plenty risky enough already.

And by the way, that skydiver landed in the net okay. The paper said his wife and family were watching from nearby. A hot air balloon in Texas hit a power line and all 16 passengers were killed. Today I’m thinking of just staying home. Why take unnecessary chances?

Week after week, month after month, I’ve watched the little Scandihoovian burg on the other side of the bridge to the island, grow smaller and smaller down on the sewage flats of the floodplain. The bookstore just closed after three decades, a couple of taverns that were there when I came here are shuttered and up for sale, the empty storefronts are mounting up. Down at the Viking Village even the Dollar Store went under and you know and I know, when the Dollar Stores go belly up, we got troubles, capital T, right here in River City. And they don’t rhyme with pool. The Viking Village megaplex still sports the ever popular Uff-Da Shoppe with its witty collection of coffee mug Norwegian jokes, plus the barber shop and the laundromat and the Duck Inn café. Anchoring the other side of the dead Dollar store is the headquarters of the GOP. To say the place is as bustling as a morgue is optimistic hyperbole.

The Fresh Alternative Medicine Dispensary, the medical marijuana retail shop next to the police station, is the latest in a string of businesses dead on arrival now that the City Council voted to rescind its permits. State law now requires pot permits for both recreational and medical. We want those taxes on medical we didn’t get previously and the legislature finally figured out that the best way to do that was combine the two and tax it all. Duh. Pot outlets opened up on the island, in nearby Conway, up in Mt. Vernon, over in Arlington, down in sleepy little Silvana. Prohibition, needless to say, is over.

Well, not quite, not in Stanwoodopolis, not with the City Council that can’t in good conscience, so they plead, sanction recreational drugs in their fair city. They have to protect the kids. As if the kids aren’t buying everything from beer to heroin from their friends and the pushers who ply the parking lots and parks. The mayor estimates that hundreds of thousands of dollars of tax revenue are going to be lost to all those surrounding areas that accepted the will of the voter to legalize marijuana. Arlington makes $400,000 a year already.

Take a little stroll down the streets of town with me. Cupcake shop, check, antique store, check many times, pizza delivery shop, check, boutique consignment shop, check, bar and grill,, check twice, Chinese restaurant, yup, co-op art gallery, check. Empty storefronts, plenty of those…. Ghost towns start this way and with the coming flood insurance increases, their best hope is to breach the sewer lagoon and bring in gondolas with singing Norwegians to ply the canals of the sunken city. Some towns get exactly what they deserve. Uff Duh!

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Some of you fair readers out there might not know it, but in actuality, I’m a biznessman. One of the few here on the corporate-challenged South End. Admittedly it’s a small bizness. And okay, full disclosure here, I’m not real high on the Job Creator list, although, I have hired half a dozen folks over the years, not enough to bring the economy to full roar, but hey, how many have you hired? If it’s more than half a dozen, don’t write to me. You either, Donald, I don’t care if you are running for President.

As a bizness, a legal entity known to the state of Washington and the IRS as Revisionary Glassworks – okay, it’s a hippie dippie name, but how was I to know back in 1980 I would become the economic engine I am today – I am required to do most of the things Boeing or Microsoft do to operate a company. No, not outsource my work to China, I mean I have to fill out L&I forms, proof of insurance, get contractor’s licenses, pay quarterly taxes (which I always forget to do, which reminds me, damn, I forgot this last one too) and file Intent to Pay Prevailing Wages, this last I’m trying hopelessly to do online. The Big Boyz hire people to manage this stuff. I tried to talk the mizzus into doing this tedious crap but she’s a little busy working full time and doing our household finances. So I’m stuck with most of it. Good thing I’m not real busy myself working.

My handlers at the WA Arts Commission put out a little booklet they call the Handbook for Artists. It’s 60 pages of hoops us artists have to jump through before they pay us a dime for any public art projects we have won commissions to do. Little things like structural engineering stamps, conservator evaluations, proof of insurance, business license, blah blah blah for page after page, plus this brand new one: Intent to Pay Prevailing Wage. I recently got a contract, signed it, sent it in with most of the above and said Yes, I will pay prevailing wage. I got back a message Not so Fast, Charlie! You got to send us a form.

Nice to let us know. Next Handbook will probably add a few pages to explain where to get such a form. Turns out L&I handles that little detail. So I go online to fill out their form and pay their fee (which, call me anti-government if you have to but don’t bet heavily on it) is really the basis for this, I think. Well, it takes money to make money, me and Donald always say, so I hunkered down over my computer and started to fill out the damn form.

I’m going to spare you the ugly descriptions of this torture. You don’t need to visualize waterboarding or online form fill-outs. I even apologize for inflicting this minimum amount on you. But after an hour I had to stop. When I went back later, the site was gone. Or so my computer told me. I tried alternative places. Same message. Half an hour later I got in. Same site, so you tell me. Alice in Wonderland would have a field day in bureaucratic mazes. I spent two more hours filling out a one page form only to get stalled trying to print it. Fast forward an hour. I’m on a different form, online alternative version I guess of the other one, and it asks, about question #3 who my funding agency is so I put down the WA Arts Commission. It says it has no record of this. How could it? I’m putting it down now. But … you can’t go to question #4 if you can’t get #3 done. And I can’t get paid if I can’t get to question # 378,934 and hit Send.

Okay. Catch 22. Somewhere in a perfect world where the sun shines all day long and the moon is full every night, we could forego this red tape. No, wait. That place exists!! I have had projects in Florida and Alaska and Oregon and Utah. They don’t give me a 60 page Handout. They don’t require 35 hoops to jump through. They don’t need an Intent to Pay Prevailing Wages, as if I would know what the guy I hire should be paid to hold a panel in place while I screw the moldings on, some union scale for Panel Holder On-ers. And okay, yeah, I’m frustrated, I’m more than a little pissed off, I’m 66 years old and still trying not to be forced into involuntary retirement. But I tell ya, I’m starting to see what the small business folks are screaming about. I feel their pain. I definitely do. And no, I’m still not gonna vote for Donald. Pain is one thing, torture is another.

When I was just out of college — we’re talking the early ‘70’s here — I wanted to join a commune and be a hippie. I know, a little late for the show, but better late than never, I figured. And anyway, I didn’t want to work so that narrowed my options down to very few. Bum, artist or hippie — or, in my case, all of the above. So a few of us went up to an abandoned farm in Northern Wisconsin and set up shop in an old Polish farmhouse, no indoor plumbing, a couple of electric outlets, a handpump out in the yard and a falling down outhouse.

Rick and I were the two males in the encampment so we he-men took it on ourselves to construct a state of the art outhouse. We found some lumber in the barn — which we learned later, much to our embarrassment, belonged to Ernie, the son-in-law of Felix, the farmer across the road — and armed with hammer and hand saw, we set to work. Now maybe you know how to go about outhouse construction, but Rick and me didn’t have Clue One. We were like Cro-Magnons who’d heard rumor of wheels but had never seen one in action. We knew you needed walls, roof would be good, a seat with one or two holes and of course one in the ground. That last one we figured out okay, but the rest, they were real headscratchers.

Somewhere on the 2nd or 3rd day we’d nailed together some boards, hoping, I guess, inspiration would carry the day. Eddie, our other next door neighbor, who’d probably been laughing himself sick watching from across the field, finally took mercy on us wanna-be hippies and brought over his extension cord, a skilsaw and his cousin Tony who lived in Chicago but had the house down the dirt road we all lived on. Rick and I managed to do just enough to make nuisances of ourselves while Eddie and Tony slapped up our new shithouse in no time flat.

We all sat around afterwards, all us men, drinking cheap beer, warming ourselves in manly companionship and camaraderie, pleased as punch like all masculine carpenters at our ability to erect cathedrals and skyscrapers with our own two hands. So okay, civilization rests on shaky assumptions. Nevertheless, you’d have been pleased too to have an outhouse, not the woods.

Even on the politically scarred landscape of the South End where scorched earth campaigns are now considered, not just normal, but mandatory, I would be remiss if I didn’t, at least in passing, make mention of this week’s GOP convention. In full disclosure I am not a Republican, have never been a Republican and even if the Republican Party survives this humiliating year they’ve saddled themselves with, I will not become a Republican. Maybe if I lived in fear of neighbors with different sexual preferences or watched through binoculars the hordes of Hispanic lawncare providers poring into our suburbs or worried that the kid down the block had pledged allegiance to ISIS, maybe I would reconsider. But by then I would be drooling in my wheelchair in front of Fox News down at the Mabana Home for the Hopelessly Insane, pounding my liver-spotted fist in cadence with the hate-spewed chanting LOCK HER UP.

My old man is a dyed in the wool Republican who thinks Fox is a news channel, not an opinion factory for the rabid right wing. And even he sits in disbelief that his party is nominating, no, HAS nominated this billionaire braggart who admits the evangelicals supporting him probably shouldn’t have, who supports LGBT rights when the party platform is vehemently stuck in the Eisenhower closet, who still wants to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, who wants to run from the globalization Republicans and the Chamber of Commerce have supported for decades, who plans to renegotiate trade agreements unilaterally, who … oh, why go on? Donald J. Trump is no more a Republican than Obama is a Muslim. Although … there will always be doubters.

Democracy is a more fragile political system than most of us think. I walk down the aisles of the grocery store now and I realize half of the folks pushing carts are really very angry. We all live on an island here in paradise, we’re mostly white and privileged, mostly retired and well off, we all count ourselves Americans and Americans, last time I looked, are the 1% of the world and we’re pretty much the 1% of America or at least 2 or 3%. What, I want to ask my fellow grocery cart pushers, are you so pissed off about? Hillary Clinton? Mexican rapists? Black Lives Matter? Teachers Unions? Terrorists? Benghazi?

Well, yes, I guess, judging from Trump’s acceptance speech. America, we’re told, is going down the rabbit hole. Economically, militarily, politically, all is lost. And only one man, one man alone, can save us. A white man. A rich man. A man who cannot be bought but who bought others. A man who sees this country as a lost dream in need of a strongman. If he’s right, if most of us share that dark vision, we may get the leader we deserve. And I’m going to need to find another grocery store to shop in.

I got a buddy who claims he was the first Owner-Builder on Camano Island. The year was 1977, the same year I bought my shack. I met him 13 years later and we ended up building 3 sailboats together, one for each of us and one for his pal the building inspector who became my friend too. Ironically, I may be one of the last Owner-Builders in Island County. I don’t think my permit was ever signed off on so I may well be the last official O-B.

I guess maybe they figured the codes got too complex for us amateur housebuilders, all those R-factors for insulation and E-glass in fenestrations and X-factors for our marriages. Or maybe it was this: a permit for an Owner-Builder was next to nothing, something like $50 when I got ours. The county might’ve done the taX-factor and realized us hippies were costing them revenue. Maybe some of us built our own palaces to save the permit expense, but I would’ve paid full freight just for the right to build my own place the way I wanted. A few hundred bucks wasn’t gonna stop me.

I spoze we can still build our own Xanadu, nothing to stop us. Just have to disclose that a rank amateur threw the hammer and ran the saw, flashed the windows, shingled the roof, installed the electric and plumbing and if you’re the prospective buyer, best beware!!! The people at the county sheds told me I’d be a Total Idiot to apply for an Owner-Builder status. Boy, he read me like a book. A comic book, I’d bet.

By the time I got our permit, us Owner-Builders had to meet the same codes as any fly-by-night contractor, go through the same inspections, all the rigamarole as the Big Boyz. In other words, the government here doesn’t allow for hippie shacks or slam-bang cabins. We got to build our parents’ suburban homes. Might explain why kids just stay with their folks now — why bother building the same damn place twice?

Now I love used car dealers as much as the next guy. You put an alligator in a white shirt, cheap shoes and some black slacks, give him a commission for every victim he drags into the sewer lagoon, I think you got a pretty accurate image. It’s a dog eat dog world, we all know that, but even in the jungle the beasts of prey don’t take smirking joy at dragging down their dinner. A used car salesman, he takes the kill the way we take a joke.

Just when I thought there was pretty much no lower bar these reptiles could belly down to, along comes Missionary Motors in town. What lemon would Jesus drive? You know, if he was thinking of trading in the donkey. Got a nice Calvary Cross where the T is in Motors. I don’t know if these folks read the chapter in Trump’s favorite book or not, the one where Jesus turns over the tables in the temple where the merchants had set up shop, but I sort of doubt it. Course neither has Trump so maybe they can be forgiven, no pun intended. But there’s something sacrilegious about using your religion to sell cars. Or mattresses. Or real estate. Or breakfast cereal. Or just about anything else outside ecumenical material. If you ask me….

I wonder what we would think if Moslem Motors rolled into our fair city and set up shop. What would Muhammed drive? Mostly I think he would be driven out of town. Which is where I hope Mission Motors goes next.

A few years back I stopped to get gas at Elger Bay Mega-Shop and was accosted by a guy in a panel truck with a fish on his tailgate and a business name stenciled across the side: Hiz Biz. Hiz being, you guessed it, God. Me, I had a fish too, but inside the fish it said DARWIN. He asked in an accusatory way if I knew what that DARWIN fish meant and I said I had a pretty good idea, something to do with evolution if my memory served me well. He spluttered, “They sell those fish at the erotic bakery in Seattle!” I said, “You could have slapped me with a mackerel, but what’s your point?” He told me they baked cakes that looked like penises.

“This will come as sad news,” I said, “but why would I care? It’s a free country.”

I guess it’s a slippery slope, freedom. And maybe I need to shut up about selling cars for Jesus too. Or Muhammed. You got to buy em from somebody.