The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

When the phone rings early in the morning, we usually jump to the conclusion it’s only going to be bad news. Parent in the emergency room, family member in some accident, something terrible. This morning I answered, expecting a call from my dad about my mom who’s in the nursing home after being in the hospital awhile, but instead, I hear some distant voice I can barely make out saying something like, “It’s been awhile, hasn’t it?” I say yeah, wondering if it’s a buddy of mine out in Chicago, voice gone scratchy with some accident.

He asks if I’ve heard about his trip? I say no, but I heard he’d bought a bike. My buddy just got one and he’d been talking about riding his Harley around Chicago and so I thought this is him, but his voice sounded wrong. “Yeah,” he says, “I’d been visiting my best friend here in Chicago who has stomach cancer and yeah, I had a couple drinks, but on the way home I had an accident.” I asked him who his friend was. Arnie, it sounded like, but not quite, I just think I wanted to twist it into my buddy’s friend. “Arnie? That what you said?”

In fact, about everything he said was muffled and mangled. He told me he was in a bad way. That I could believe. “So the cops gave me a breath test and I was over the limit so they took me in. I don’t have the money for bail so I was hoping you could help me out here.” This part came in loud and clear. Those little warning lights I’d been ignoring started blinking bright red. “Naw man, I don’t think so.”

“You can’t help your own family?” this guy asked.

“And what kin are we?” I asked back. At which point my brother or uncle or cousin hung up.

All I can figure is these creeps call 1000 people a day, hoping to get one poor senile old codger with too big a heart to turn down a relative in need. The folks who send money to Nigeria in hopes of actually receiving part of the million dollars the scammer is holding out as a carrot, well, I don’t have much sympathy for greedy people. But taking advantage of someone who is probably old and suffering dementia, who more than likely hasn’t got much savings but has a good heart, that’s more than criminal.

The truth is the weak and the poor are most likely to be prey to the beasts of the jungle. I dread the day when I get that call and wonder if a relative or a long forgotten friend really is in trouble and needs some help. It’s a mean world when compassion becomes a weakness.

We’d stopped for a picnic lunch at this little wayside along the river up toward the mountains, just us and one other vehicle. While I hauled out the cooler and the box of groceries, my wife walked over to the restroom. A minute later these two guys come over and ask me about accommodations up the road, what the hotel was like they’d seen, how one of them hadn’t slept in 24 hours, where was I going?

Maybe you never had one of those moments when the hair on your neck literally stands up, one of those premonitions of imminent horror about to unfold before your very eyes, but this was one for me. Something about these two men radiated, I can’t think of any other way to describe it, evil. And I use that word evil, not loosely, but with some precision of meaning, even though I have really never personally encountered pure evil in any real sense. But these two hombres were trouble. I had all our stuff on the picnic table and I was nonchalantly moving things around without really unpacking anything. In the silverware bag I took out a big collapsible hunting knife and laid it there between us, not in any threatening way, just another knife with the forks and spoons next to it. I wanted Karen to come out right now. I wanted her to stay inside. Mostly I wanted these boys to walk the hell away from me.

The one who hadn’t slept asked all the questions. Didn’t make much eye contact. Wasn’t friendly, wasn’t unfriendly. His partner stood beside him but never said a word, just watched in a slightly menacing way, a little wound tight, ready for god only knows…. Killer Joe smiled occasionally at some of my answers to his inquiries, some joke only he could hear. I thought, wanting to make it happen, Karen will stay in that bathroom until these guys leave. Then she’ll walk over and we’ll get in the car and drive away, no lunch, to hell with lunch. My appetite was long gone.

Just then the van they were driving opened its panel door and a woman sat there looking at us as she sat in the back seat. Nobody said a word. We all three stood looking at her for what seemed like a very long time. Then the silent one nodded at Killer Joe and the two ambled back to the van. I palmed the hunting knife and from behind the cooler I opened it up to reveal its full 5 inch blade and locked it in place. Karen appeared from the restroom and sauntered toward me. Time stood strangely still although the river behind me ran down rapids and made a sound like burbling blood. I watched the van across the parking lot and the two were talking to the woman in the seat.

“Grab that box and get in,” I said quietly in a voice that probably scared her but didn’t allow for much questioning. “We’re leaving right now. Fast as we can.” I threw the cooler into the trunk and she put the box in the backseat. The trio watched us from across the parking lot. I was estimating the time it would take for one or both to cross. It wouldn’t be much. No other cars were coming in to picnic. No other cars were coming at all on this road.

When we got inside, Karen asked what was up? I shook my head and turned the key. “Lock your door,” I said, feeling like a bad movie, then rolled out past the van and stopped at the stop sign. No one was on the road. We pulled onto the highway. That hunting knife sat between us, open. They might have just been tired travelers, I know that. They might have just been stopping to picnic too. Maybe. But I never felt such bad vibes talking to anyone before or since. I’m a trusting sort, maybe too trusting. This time I decided to trust my instincts.

Robot Blows Up Terrorist in Dallas

I don’t know about all the rest of you out there in America, but I’m a little alarmed at armed robots. The Island County Sheriff’s department will be buying self driving Google squad cars soon and pulling over speeders and all us South Enders whose tail lights give them probable cause for whatever they want to do next. Course, they won’t need deputies. Just photo ID our license plate and send us the bill. Breathe in the built in breathalyzer and fill out the form on the police laptop. If we try to make a break for it, well, good luck with that….These things will have more armaments than a Bradley fighting machine.

Robocops. I guess they’re here. All us wrongdoers are in for an unwelcome visit from the future, looks like. Great for the folks who walk a straight line, or so they think. What have I got to fear? they’ll say like they always say before the door is busted down and they’re hauled off for some offense they think they didn’t do. But you know, and I know, they must be guilty, why else would the police bust down their door? Sure hope the robot cop doesn’t get the wrong address and detonate the bomb in their livingroom.

Personally I don’t think we should be teaching our machines to kill humans. I know, I know, we got drones doing it now, but I don’t care for that either. Bad precedents for when the little goobers with their advanced artificial intelligence are smarter than us with our not so big brains. Try to program them later that they should play nice with us humans, good luck with that. They aren’t near as forgetful as we are.

Might, though, go a long ways toward slowing down our population growth here on the South End, miscreants going missing. But it seems like overkill, no pun intended. Busted headlights are one thing, arrest by robot is another. Our only hope, probably, is the lawyers. They aren’t going to care for robojudges and juries. Justice isn’t just expensive down here, it’s downright profitable.

I got a new neighbor recently who bought the farm next door to us so naturally I wandered over to introduce myself, a one man South End Welcome Wagon he may have mistook for a snoopy neighbor. The 17 acres, barn, shops and 1930’s house went on the block after its previous owner declared bankruptcy for the 3rd time, obviously a slow learner, but like he always told me: No Brains, No Headache. I assume he’s poor now but migraine free. When he went under the last time he owed me a few thousand dollars. I still have a small headache. And trust me, I’m no smarter.

“So what do you do?” I asked my new sharer of a long property line he’s just had surveyed. He’d recently been laid off, he told me, not certain if he was required to testify against himself, maybe plead the 5th. He had a wife, kids in college, another house down in the City. I could see he was growing uncomfortable under the wilting barrage of questions I interrogated him with, maybe he should talk to his attorney first. He admitted he intended to build a house up on the hill, but money was tight with college tuitions, other mortgages and no job. I nodded my understanding.

“So what’s next?” I demanded, relentless as a prosecuting attorney turning the final inexorable screw before extracting a confession. “Well,” he said, “I’m thinking maybe starting a microbrewery or, I don’t know, a nano-distillery up here at the barn.”

“Lemme get this straight,” I laughed, boring in now. “A brewery? Hellfire, man, you came to the exact perfect place!”

“What do you mean?” he asked, truly alarmed now he’d spilled too many beans.

“You got no job, money’s scarce, kids are in college, your wife’s working and you want to build a house … but first, you plan to open a distillery or a brewery. What I mean is, “ I explained, smiling broadly, “ you’re a kindred spirit. You got the same dream as all of us South Enders. Welcome to La-La Land, neighbor!!”

It’s good to know — at least for this Old Timer — the newcomers will carry on our time honored traditions. Long live our Southern Values!

When I first got out of college with my fabulously useful degree in English, I moved to a Polish farmhouse in northern Wisconsin. My neighbors, assuming I was destitute since the house had no running water and only an outhouse for a bathroom, decided to help me out by setting up an interview at the local school bus company. I didn’t know how to tell them tactfully that I didn’t mind poverty near as much as I minded work, but that seemed like a tricky argument to make and still remain friends.

So I went to the interview. I wore my worst jeans, the one with multiple tears and holes and patches, a rumpled t-shirt with frayed neck, and some shoes that looked like they’d been eaten by rodents all winter. I took my most indolent attitude, my hippie hair and tossed on a ratty hat for good measure. Nobody up in this redneck neck of the woods would hire me, I figured, but at least I could tell my neighbors I went to the bus company and they wouldn’t employ me, god only knows why.

The bus office was basically a shed and it was there I met the manager and his mechanic. We bantered a bit, talked about living in an old farmhouse with a pump over a 40 foot well out in the middle of the yard, joked about the outhouse and the woodchuck that lived in it, told a few stories and basically killed some time between the morning and afternoon bus runs. They seemed like nice fellows and they were greatly amused by me, I could see. Finally I got up to go, my work here done, and Walt, the manager asked when could I start. Start? I said. Start, he answered.

And so I got my first job after college. My advice to Mr. Trump is: be careful. Be very careful. You just never know in this mixed up world who might be willing to overlook your obvious flaws and give you the job you only pretended to want.

Kellogg’s announced this week they will be opening a fru-fru cereal bar in New York City. These are the good folks who developed a technique for flattening grains and removing most of their nutrients to make a dry product in a box the modern breakfast eater can slop some milk on and wolf down before running off to a long day at the office. We all grew up with this stuff and whole aisles in the grocery store are devoted to it. Course they figured out how to add chocolates and sugars to appeal to the kids, advertised it on the cartoon shows and addicted another generation of eaters who get their nutrients primarily from the added milk. Thanks, Dr. Kellogg.

Like most American kids who grew up on black and white Howdy Doody and Captain Kangaroo, Mars bars and processed breakfast cereals, we just took this stuff for granted. Advertising made Tony the Tiger’s sugared flakes look appealing and the Trix Rabbit made us beg for those food colored balls of basically air. We could eat an entire box of Rice Krispies and still feel hungry. We did eat entire boxes of Cap’n Crunch and felt nauseous from whatever chemical the Food Conglomerates used to artificially flavor the stuff with. It may well be the whole thing was chemical, nothing tasted anything close to wheat or corn or rice or anything else grown in soil even with healthful doses of pesticides and herbicides. Obviously, if it was advertised on Saturday morning cartoon shows, we’d demand it from our time-saving moms and they would oblige. Nowadays we should call this child abuse and the corporations who spoonfed the American family with this slop should be treated like tobacco companies and the fast food industry, purveyors of death and diabetes.

The New York cereal bar plans to charge $7.50 a bowl for their nostalgic pablum. They do, in their defense, sprinkle lemon zests and other thrilling spices to their corn flakes and they did say they weren’t going to overcharge with excessive prices like $13.50 a bowl. And the cereal baristas will definitely not add the milk themselves. Too personal a decision, they said, for them to take that privilege from the buying customer.

I guess it’s only a matter of time before we get the Oscar Meyer baloney sandwich bars and the Jiffy peanut butter and jelly cafeterias, the Hamburger Helper restaurants and the Spam counters, Frito Lay Potato Chip Delis and the Twinkie Lounges. I know we’ve been sold a bill of goods back in the Leave it to Beaver era, but seriously, do we have to have our noses rubbed in it?

When I first came to the desolate South End, my first priority was finding a job, sad to say. I tried some dead ends, then got a school bus driving gig, but my boss decided I was probably a long-haired dope smoking leftist radical who needed to find other means of employment. The writing, as they say, was on the wall. So … I picked up a part-time furniture stripping job 35 miles north just in case the ax fell.

I’d finish my morning bus driving shift, then head up north for my dose of ketones and other chemicals known to the State of California as Killers. Trouble was, the repair shop didn’t open til 10 so I would drop into the Freedom Café in downtown Mt. Vernon and have coffee and breakfast, fritter some time and maybe do a little writing while I waited. I still had visions then of becoming a poet. Or a novelist. Who knows? I had a notebook, I had a pen, I had time on my hands. You can write the Great American Novel over coffee and eggs and toast if you keep at it. And if the stripping solvent fumes don’t scramble your brains first.

My waitress, after a month or so, asked what was I writing? They evidently don’t get a lot of would-be Kerouacs in for breakfast specials. The sight of rambling Jack scribbling away over his omelette provoked some serious curiosity. When I told her, she seemed mildly impressed. After all, how many literary furniture strippers had she served?

Well, after some light banter over the next few months, she finally asked me out, maybe shoot some pool, drink some beers, see how the wind blew. I said sure, be fun, but when I came up to find her a week or so later to make it official, this date of ours, she’d quit her job and taken another one up at the Farmhouse, the new café on the highway to Whidbey. So I drove up there, figuring what’s another 10 miles more. Of course when I asked at the restaurant they told me it was her day off.

So I drove home and had some time to wonder what it was about her that was so attractive to me. On the long lonesome drive back to my shack, it hit me. She reminded me of Karen, the woman I’d left back in the Midwest, and so, I resolved to call her up after these intervening years, see if she was married with children, and if not, maybe ask if she would forgive this fool, see if she was footloose and fancy free, see if this cruel universe offers a reprieve occasionally, deserved or not. And just so you know, just to offer some small glimpse of optimism in this otherwise bleak old world we live in, sometimes it does….

My brother and I were comparing notes on our mutual maturity this last visit. I guess we both inherited some genetic predisposition toward hair trigger tempers, something we both thought we had made some progress on holding in check, but of course, we have our stumbles. He was telling me his latest, a sad little story of a woman who didn’t quite make it through an intersection before the light turned red, leaving her blocking the pedestrian crossing.

My little brother was the pedestrian she was blocking. He shook his head sadly before continuing, obviously embarrassed at his behavior at the ripe old age of 64. I cut into his recounting to guess that he had walked across this miscreant’s hood just to teach her a lesson. Which, I told him, I had done once or twice, but you know, when I was less temperate than my mellow self is now. But no, he didn’t stomp across her hood. Instead he walked around behind her car and then, beyond helping himself, he smacked his open hand on her trunk, something I’m sad to say I’ve done plenty of times.

But … this time the lady, startled at the apparent collision from behind, hit her accelerator and plowed into the car in front of her. Day ruined. Car too. My brother said he just put his head down and walked away as fast as possible, feeling like a total you know what. I did know what.

I said my last road rage I had a tailgater crawling up my bumper for a few miles. I tried slowing down but the driver wouldn’t take the hint and inched even closer. This, of course, infuriated me to righteous indignation and finally I’d had more than enough so I hit my brakes without warning, expecting to give my too close friend a little driving lesson that might back him off for the rest of the trip into town. Except instead of braking, the little jerk lurched out into the oncoming lane.

This, like my brother’s anecdote, is an example of Unintended Consequences. People can be hurt or killed, vehicles can be damaged or wrecked. Lessons may or may not be learned. Our combined ages, my brother and I, are 130 years on this little planet. If we both got as old as Methuselah, we probably will still be telling these stupid stories. “So this woman rolls out into the hallway in her wheelchair, see, and blocks my way into the cafeteria and all I meant to do was give her cart a little bump, then next thing you know….”

Me and the robins are picking pie cherries this week. All of us think the cherry trees belong to us, but … my thinking is I planted them so maybe I have more rights than the birds. Course, there’s no cherry court to adjudicate our claims so we are left with what all of us South Enders have for justice, Law of the Jungle. For the most part we all get a fair share. The deer and I split the apples. The raccoons and I divide up the corn. This wasn’t as true for the sweet cherries. The crows and the robins took most of them, leaving me sputtering with rage and revenge.

One year I found a recently dead crow and walked it around the orchard. Within minutes I had a dozen or more live relatives of the deceased cawing and screaming from every tree in the vicinity so I made a couple of circles just to make my point, then tied the dead boy in the branches of my favorite cherry tree trussed up wing to wing, a very dark and ominous corpse that the crows and the mizzus found more than a little troubling. Trust me, they left the cherries to the guy who was now their sworn enemy, but there are only so many dead crows you can scrounge up every harvest time and only so much marital criticism you can withstand so eventually they all outnumbered me.

I planted new cherry trees the last couple of years, the kind that don’t turn red, just a nice yellow so the birdbrains don’t think they’re ripe until I’ve picked them. We may find out the birdbrain is the one who wears the hat, but I’m willing to give this a shot. Admittedly I’m not too optimistic.

We had a grove of filbert trees awhile back, thousands of nuts on a few dozen trees. The jays and the squirrels took every one. Occasionally they’d leave me a solitary nut on the ground, I guess as a peace offering, but 100% of the time the nut was empty. They knew it was empty. All the 25 years we had those filberts we never got one single nut. This, I would argue in tree court, is unadulterated greed, pure and simple and unconscionable. Worse, the blue jays would sit in the branches and scream at us if we came near their trees. They are a beautiful shade of blue, but the screech of a jay isn’t something you can tolerate for long. No more than ten seconds in my case.

Like I say, I’m willing to share. Squirrels and blue jays, not so much. They’re like the rich, enough is not a word they understand. They want more, they want way more, they want yours too, they want it all. The poor? Tough luck. Grow wings and fly up to the top branches where the goodies are. If not, shut up and go home, Loser. If you even got a home….

The 1% might want to listen to the next part of this story. Us losers get fed up eventually. I took my chainsaw out to the filbert grove one autumn after another season of nut-grubbing greed and one by one I took down those nut trees, every single one of them. They were shading the garden and blocking my view of the Puget Sound anyway so it wasn’t a hard decision and now I’ve planted cherry and plum trees instead. Whatever predator comes in to supplant the jays, I can only hope they plan to share. Living in harmony with nature down on the wild wild South End isn’t the easiest thing to do. Right now they’re just lucky I’m not a hunter. But I wouldn’t count on it staying that way.

When I first moved to the Left Coast, I had a yearning to get myself a motorcycle, learn to ride, then set myself free on the byways of the Cascades. Being poor, I bought a used Honda 350 that hadn’t run in years, wouldn’t start and looked like it was ready for the crusher. I paid $100 for the piece of junk, hauled it back to my house in the ghetto and pushed it down the basement stairs where I could spend some quality time diagnosing why it wouldn’t start over the winter months.

By summer I had the problem solved and so, with the help of my roommates, I hauled it back up and out to the backyard, kick started it into an oily smoke idle and admired the thing in the full light of a Seattle sunny day. Now all I had to do was figure out how to ride it. I called the police and asked what kind of temporary license I would need to take it for some learning spins on their city streets and was told it was illegal, no temporary licenses were to be had. I said how am I spozed to learn how to ride. The sergeant said it wasn’t his problem.

So right from the start I became an outlaw biker, stalling my crappy bike on half the shifts, careening down the mean streets of my neighborhood, searching for large empty parking lots to practice sharp turns and fast starts. Trouble was, my clutch didn’t shift right and every so often the engine would shut off in mid-travel for no apparent reason that I could diagnose. On one of my ventures I came across a fellow biker working on his Harley at Seward Park, tools spread on the parking lot and so I thought why not ask an expert about my clutch problem. He was hard at it in his Joker leathers with his tattoos bulging as he strained to his work, a fellow outlaw. I interrupted him to ask about my clutch dilemma. He looked at my battered scooter and said — I can remember it clearly to this day 40 years later — ‘Get the fuck away from me, man.’ I took it to mean us real bikers fix our own bikes without outside help.

On the way back to my ghetto house I was idling at the red light on Jackson and 23rd when a menacing group of black gangbangers roared up beside me on both sides, about 15 or so, all revving their Harleys as we waited for the green so that I thought I was inside a Boeing 747 engine. I didn’t think this was an initiation test. And I didn’t think it would end well either. The light, after what seemed like an hour, turned green and we all popped our clutches, ready for a tire burning, wheel skidding jackrabbit start … and my bike died right then.

I suppose a lesser man, a man not accustomed to the outlaw biker life, might have been embarrassed. A lesser man might have thought the laughter and catcalls from the black Banditos was too much endure. A lesser man might have junked his prized Honda 350 and succumbed to the temptation to buy a Vincent Black Shadow and show these hooligans who really ruled these mean urban streets. But me, I pushed my spray painted motorcycle ten blocks back to the basement and sold it a month later. For $100. My easy riding days had come to an end. There was nothing more to prove, I guess.