The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

When I was a kid struggling to come to grips with the funhouse of high school cruelties, my parents made it clear to us boys that when we reached the ripe old age of 18, they were cutting us loose. They really didn’t need to bother. All us brothers were planning our escapes from the Northern Wisconsin hellhole they’d landed us smack into. Some folks complain about the mosquitoes up there but not me. It was the blood suckers who were human that annoyed me more and I intended to leave first chance I got.

Which I did. Went to college and got a 30 hour a week job. I would come home for a holiday or two, but basically I was out of the nest for good. Thanks Mom, thanks Dad, appreciated the raising. Nowadays we got kids living in their old bedrooms until they’re 30. Rents are crazy high, spouses are put on hold, jobs are minimum wage. This seems to me, a guy who couldn’t wait to get on with my life outside the confinement of my parents’ walls and rules and thumbs, a sorry state of affairs.

A couple years ago an eagle’s nest down at the state park was easily watched from a trail above. The two fledglings reached the point where it was time to literally leave the nest, but for some reason one of the kids didn’t want to leave. Probably got used to cheap rent and free meals. Or just couldn’t face the world on its own, who knows. The parents tired of it and one day tore the nest to pieces. Stay if you want, but there’s no home here anymore.

Now, I don’t think human parents ought to burn down the house when Sally or Jimmy are barhopping with their friends, let them come home to a smoldering childhood, see if that doesn’t give them reason to leave, but I can’t see how extending dependence a decade is going to help them become independent, self-sufficient adults. Call me cruel, but life is hard enough without pampering the little beggars. They need to face the world, live with crummy roommates, take a crappy job, eat top ramen and macaroni and cheese the way I did, live in bad apartments, all that young adult learning. So that in the end, if nothing else, they’ll be sympathetic with the underprivileged, the poor and the homeless. That, or they’ll give up and become artists. Not that we need a lot more artists….

Yesterday we had a shootout at the freeway park and ride. Most of these are drive-by shootings, but this one, no siree, this one was a genuine wild wild west pull-your-six-shooters and blast away from close range in true vigilante justice, see who’s standing when the cylinders are empty. After this hail of bullets ended, one guy was shot four times and carried away to the nearest hospital where he’ll most likely live. The others, well, they had some serious explaining to do.

It seems one of these yahoos had his chainsaws stolen, so when he ran across an ad in Craigslist featuring the exact same saws, well, he decided to call the thief up and arrange a meeting to buy them. He got his son and a couple of buddies to come along to the meetup at the park and ride and then, just to be on the safe side, he called the sheriff’s department to meet them there too. So now we got the Earps, we got a posse, we got plenty of guns and we got a nice public spot.

The seller must not have suspected too much or else he never watched the Gunfight at the OK Corral, but he came alone, no gang, no family members, just him and a couple of chainsaws. When the Earps got tired of waiting for the Law, the buddies of the aggrieved theft victims decided to approached this guy’s truck, no doubt pretending to be the interested buyers of the saw, but in true comic fashion, they came with guns too. Drawn. And the seller, realizing something bad was afoot, produced his own weapon and commenced to firing. Chaos, of course, ensued.

These things get out of hand sometimes. Sure, they should’ve waited for the sheriff. Maybe they could’ve left the guns at home. All easy to imagine in hindsight. But a man’s chainsaw is his chainsaw and a rope is too good for the mangy dog that stole it. Or so it seemed. Until the purported thief, in interviews with the police, claimed he’d owned those saws for years and even identified marks and features that seemed to validate that claim. And the attackers did mention that they’d really only seen the photo in the ads and that, yeah, it might not have been their saws. Saws tend to look a lot alike since they do look a lot alike. And yeah, it might’ve been smart to wait for the sheriff.

No doubt there are some lessons to be learned here. But probably none gleaned by us South Enders. Me, I’ve started locking up my two chainsaws. I don’t want to have to duel it out for the time I have to get them back from a thief. Probably better just to bargain him down rather than shoot him. Especially if I found out later they weren’t my saws….

What is it about real estate sales that they feel compelled to include mug shots of the agents? I notice that Reflux Realty, Windy-Rear, all of em down here on the island, they run ads with photos of dozens of these salespeople. Half our ads in the local papers are pictures of these piranhas. Looks like a geezer version of a high school yearbook.

Now that I think about it, the insurance agents pretty much do the same thing. Is this a sales thing? They think if we see their faces we’ll trust them more? I always considered myself a pretty trusting sort. I take checks from clients. I never ask for money up front, just at the end when the job is done, that kind of bad bizness practice. Call me naïve. Call me stupid. Call me an artist. But … in the end I’m a salesperson too. Maybe I can blame my lack of business on not advertising with a photo of myself. Or just on not advertising. Duh.

Something, though, troubles me about these photos in the paper all the time. Maybe the sheer numbers. There’s dozens of agents under each office. Even the post office doesn’t have this many photographs in their lobby with wanted felons. I wonder if the point isn’t to brag on the hordes of agents they have, a hungry sales force in the market, desperate to serve me, ready to kill if necessary to make a sale, to put food on their tables no matter what the cost, no matter what price it takes. Darwinian real estate. Only the strong survive. Only the ones with the best photograph. The ones with honest eyes, beautiful features, reliable visage. If you look like a terrorist, don’t bother applying. If you’re old or ugly, get a different career. If your teeth are crooked, get em fixed. Who’s going to spend $300,000 on a fixer-upper bluff cabin if they think their agent never flossed?

I admit, I might be biased. Wouldn’t be the first time. I’ve only had a couple of real estate agents in all my life. My last one, old Bob whose last name I’ll withhold out of respect for the dead, cheated me out of a wood stove that was part of our original deal. Said he couldn’t remember if we’d agreed that would stay with the shack. I said that’s kind of your job, Bob, really, to remember things like that. Course, being the trusting sort, I didn’t have it in writing.

Bob, it turned out, lived a few doors down from my newly purchased palace. Needless to say we weren’t real good friends and not much for neighborliness. Bob passed on a few years later. I guess I should be more thankful he helped me find a place to live here on the South End. Maybe keep a photo for memory sake. Back then, though, the realtors weren’t so photogenic.

The ‘Make My Day Guns & Ammo” shop does a brisk business these days on the heavily defended South End. Earl and his brother Biker Billy watched their revenues double in the 2008 election, then double again in 2012, most buyers convinced the government was going to confiscate all the firearms in America. Earl and Billy could keep up with their gun inventory, but ammo was rationed and frightened homeowners were put on a waiting list. Ralph Hansen wanted to know if he’d need to ask his ‘intruders’ if they’d mind waiting before they broke into his house, raped his wife and daughters, then killed him. In the end, Earl sold him a Browning over and under and a box of 12 gauge slugs he said would stop a rabid rhinoceros. Billy shook his head when Ralph walked out with the shotgun in its tooled leather case proud as Hemingway. “How many shotguns does he have?” he asked his brother. And Earl smiled as he put Ralph’s check under the cash drawer in the register. “Probably one shy of enough.”

Down my well armed end of the Alamo I hear plenty of gunfire. The mizzus took years to get used to the sudden bark of semi-automatic practice sessions of the local militia excercising not only their right to bear arms, but their obligation to shoot them as often as possible. She’d ask, alarmed, what is THAT?? Gunfire, I’d say nonchalantly, and she’d grow more alarmed, her fears realized and then want to call the police. It’s America, I’d explain patiently, figuring that was explanation plenty, all Clint Eastwood would bother with, why waste words OR ammo?

A few years back we had a bad hombre stroll down Bernie Road when it was a one lane dirt cutoff to Tyee Store, occasionally letting loose with an automatic assault rifle beside the cow pastures up there, alarming more than just the mizzus. Turns out he was wanted on felony warrants and the local gendarme treated him like Machine Gun Kelly on meth, waited until he’d gone to bed at his moll’s place off Dallman, then dropped a stun blast through the window and shot him to pieces reaching for either his trousers or his gun. The sheriffs around these parts don’t much cotton to automatic weapons being practiced on the roadways. Especially by hardass criminals.

I won’t say the mizzus has gotten used to country livin’, but she doesn’t race to the phone to call 911 every artillery session or the opening of hunting season. I guess she just figures it’s slightly better than moving to Beirut or Baghdad or the wrong side of Everett. At least the casualties are somewhat less. Even if supposedly we’re not at war.

I just read in my morning paper that 38% of Americans who make over $100,000 a year would have a hard time covering an emergency bill of $1000. They’d have to sell their BMW convertible or their condo in Kuaia or jerk their kid out of Harvard law school for a semester. Or at least a week. You can only imagine what the rest of us have in rainy day savings, much less tornado day when the fiscal roof gets blown off the old shack. Nearly two thirds of this country don’t have a grand on hand, but they have credit cards. We average about 2 and a half per person. Get in a scrape, put the bill on the card. When all else fails, declare bankruptcy and start over. A million of us do every year. Most of that is because we don’t have health insurance.

Down here on the fiscally conservative South End, a thousand bucks is a lot of wampum. I suppose we could blame ourselves for not filling the piggy banks and our savings accounts, but last time I looked the Fed had kept the interest rates down to practically zero, hoping to stimulate a languishing economy after that Wall Street meltdown of nearly ten years ago, not a lot of incentive to save which is what the Fed wanted. If you’re patriotic, spend it now, don’t wait to buy that Lexus.

If you were like my folks and lived through the Great Depression, you learned some hard lessons. You didn’t want to be in debt. The banks who made you those easy loans wouldn’t be so friendly when the sheriff came to repossess your farm. The Great Recession, I’m not so sure we learned those same lessons. The banks might’ve. They pass out those credit cards instead of loans and they got a lot of extra charges at the brick and mortar, help them make up some of the losses when folks didn’t have enough money to play the stock market the way they used to.

Down here I see more neighbors playing Lotto than the Dow Jones. And a few play at the Southendomish Casino, hoping to cash in on the blackjack tables. I asked a buddy once who’d just bought a brand new John Deere riding mower how he could afford it on his paycheck and he said he figured out the minimum payment on his credit card and calculated how much overtime he’d need. I said do you understand how much interest that would be, probably cost you twice the original price of the mower? He said all he worried about was that minimum payment.

I used to think folks didn’t understand interest and percentage. I used to think they had bad math skills, maybe didn’t realize the odds down at the Casino or the fee at the ATM. I used to blame the education system for not teaching basic economics, household economics, you know,bank accounts and loans and interest calculations. As usual, I was wrong. They understand it probably better than me, they just want that riding lawn mower. And hope overtime doesn’t dry up. I guess they’re not as nervous as me.

I was recently introduced to a stranger the other day as ‘the artist who did …’, a designation that invariably makes me squirm in my underwear. I don’t go around introducing my friends as Joe the accountant or Wendy the professor or Ralph the serial adulterer. No point in tying them to a preconception, putting them in a neat well-defined box and leaving them to futile extrications. The person I was introduced to said, “Oh, I saw your glass in the train station….” And then she asked where I’d taken my art studies, expecting, no doubt, some university or salon, possibly an apprenticeship under Chihuly.

“I took a night class at Stanwoodopolis High School,” I said, giving the answer I’ve given since the first time I was asked this. “Went to one class and came home with just enough information to be dangerous.” I lived in the shack I bought in 1977, a place with plastic on window openings that needed to be boarded up or filled with conventional paned glass. But since I didn’t know then how to frame a house or remodel a window opening to make a used window frame fit into the wall, I got this eureka moment when I saw a stained glass class offered in the local night school. Why learn framing when I could make a window that fit exactly the opening where the plastic was?

I know, I know, I could’ve just as easily learned woodworking and carpentry, but I didn’t have much faith in my skills on that front and anyway, I didn’t own tools either. So, like always in my life, I took the easy route instead, rolled into town for a night class, figured one hour was plenty, bought some glass the next day and a glass cutter, then went to work. By the next class I had one window installed and a six foot doorway filled. Why go back? I was practically a pro. So what if it took me decades to learn what I didn’t learn by finishing that class?

But a funny thing happened on the way to my career. I learned how to frame a wall, learned how to build a house and learned how to cut glass. I made a few windows, but being poor, the glass cost a fortune and those windows got smaller and smaller. By then I’d gotten kind of hooked on stained glass, all that color, all that sparkle, all the magic of it, corny as it sounds. And I hated working small. I’m the sort of guy who could never be a clock repairman. Those tiny parts would drive me nuts. Doesn’t help that I have ten thumbs.

So I started selling stained glass windows, much as I hated to given my disdain for all things commercial. Victorian designs, roses, cute iris windows. Do a few of those and you too might venture toward doing your own stuff even if it was odd or bad or semi-weird. The woman I’d been introduced to said ‘you must have a natural talent.’ I replied that she hadn’t seen my first attempts, otherwise, she would know I didn’t.

But … I’m living proof you can learn. All this mumbo-jumbo of right brain, left brain, maybe you buy that. Okay, but keep this in mind: we all got a brain and it has both sides, no assembly required. Doesn’t cost any extra to use both and the funny thing is, they get better the more you do.

We got a little Art Tour going on this weekend on the island, about 50 artists, then about 50 more who’d rather ride the coat tails of the ones who advertise and promote this event. Since I was one of the original artists at the beginning some 19 years ago and watched it grow into a successful regional event, you might think I’d resent all those artists who avoid dues and meetings just to profit from the work of others.

But I don’t. It warms my cockles to see the entire island — for two weekends — celebrate art. Sure, there’s the profit motive, but the island is in America, land of capitalist excess, a fact even us artists can’t ignore though we try our damndest. My old shack (let’s call it a studio) was on the Tour for 9 years at the beginning. Had four of us starving artists down there and by the end we had 3000 visitors in the 3 days we were open back then. For you non-math majors, that’s a thousand people a day who drove clear to the South End for aesthetic entertainment.

I didn’t sell much except the notion that the island was the Art Island, plenty enough for me. Folks wandered the acres of gardens the mizzus had planted, saw how we lived, how artists lived and maybe where their inspiration came from. What we wanted, of course, besides getting filthy rich those few days, was offering a glimpse into our own creativity, how art isn’t so much just an art form, a blown glass vase or a pastel painting, but a way of seeing the world, then creating one. Gardens, tool shed architecture, found object sculptures, hand built houses, all of it a tapestry flowing from the imagination.

What we hoped was to inspire others to explore their own world. To the folks who told me they didn’t have one single artistic bone in their body, I always said sorry to break the news, but we all create our lives, some consciously, some not. We’re all of us artists, but some of us fools try to make a living at it.