The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

When I was a young guy I used to think a bit about Death, capital D. Kind of a melancholy waste of time, I finally decided. You spend much time on the subject and pretty soon you’re down the dark alleys of heaven and hell, God and Satan, reincarnation and ghosts in the attic. I finally decided that there are some things in this world I’ll never understand, probably plenty I won’t even imagine, worlds beyond witnessing, universes within universes.

I decided reality is more than enough. Lately I’ve been talking with friends who are taking classes in Mindfulness, whatever that is. They tell me it’s a focus on shutting down their thoughts long enough to pay attention to the world that isn’t our own jabber. Used to be we would sit in a lotus position and chant OM, the original sound, the first noise, be still, be aware, be here now. Be mindful, I guess.

Swami Betty was over the other day, I guess is why this is on my mind, mindful or not. Betty is forever searching. For answers, for cures, for God, for something to fill her life up with meaning. It’s not a bad quest, you ask me, but it’s not my quest. I’m not looking for answers any more. In fact, I’ve even quit looking for questions. The world isn’t a puzzle to be figured out, at least not one I’m going to have any luck solving. I’m no Zen detective.

Betty’s husband died a year ago and her kids are estranged. She asked me last week, over her fungus tea she grows in a gallon jar on the kitchen counter, some concoction that she’s been keeping alive for ten years or more, while I had a cold beer, if I believed in God. We were out on her back porch, sitting on the rickety steps that led to her gardens, and the sun was full on our faces, the bees were humming as they slipped flower to flower, the world seemed plenty full to me. Betty wants to believe, but what kind of deity kills her husband and lets her children abandon her as an eccentric old South Ender? She’s a bit adrift and I know I would be too.

“Well,” I said, “ I would hate to run into God if there was one. I could do a better job dreaming up a world than that cruel fool. I’d ask what was He thinking? Just what the hell was he thinking?”

Betty chuckled. “Tough guy, huh? Kick his ass, maybe?”

Well, in the end we came to the usual conclusions. Just a couple of old friends sharing a porch, idling away our brief time in this hard old world. Life, I think, is more a music than a riddle. And if maybe shutting up for awhile, if being mindful or quiet helps us hear it, I guess that’s fine with me, just don’t ask me to whistle the tune….

Denny the Dealer and I were hunkered down in a watering hole up north and the waitress had just brought us our beers. Denny, always on the lookout for an ‘angle’, held up his hand and said, “Wait a minute. Is that what I ordered? “ The waitress didn’t know Denny, at least not yet, and she said, “Didn’t you order an IPA?” There was just enough uncertainty in her voice that Denny pronounced that no, he had definitely ordered an ESB.

You maybe never have known a boy like Denny the Dealer. He doesn’t believe in paying full price for anything. He thinks you should buy him dinner, I guess for the pleasure of his company. He will take a broken tool back to the hardware store, possibly not even the one he bought it from, and demand they replace it or give him a discount on the new one. Or on something else he wants to buy. He has a scam for everything from mailed packages to airline tickets. If you dropped him in a bazaar in Constantinople or a tourist shop in Tijuana, he’d make them sweat for any puny profit they might make off him.

He has a business that he pays virtually no taxes on. I asked him how that was even possible, naïve about the nature of corporate tax laws, and he spent half an hour describing various offshore corporations he’d created, multiple bank accounts that shifted money from one to the next so that they never showed more than $10K at some magic time for the IRS. He has money in another person’s name, underage and therefore beyond the revenuers reach. I assume he spends more time in fiduciary sleight of hand than he does in his business enterprise. You want to see capitalism in action, you need to drink with me and Denny.

I’m going to assume, for the sake of friendship, most of what Denny does is legal in a strictly tax law sense. Moral, I think we can safely say moral doesn’t weigh in on Denny’s calculus. Money, they say, is the root of all evil and maybe so, but what I know from watching folks who think money is pretty near Everything is that it usually doesn’t buy them happiness. Easy living, yeah, but it’s hard to be happy when you’re always worried someone is going to get the upper hand in your deal.

Our waitress was obviously flustered, what with screwing up Denny’s order, so she reached for his glass to take it back, dump it and get his ESB. Denny didn’t hesitate, he just offered to take the IPA and pay half price, fair is fair, he said. The waitress was considering it. At least until I said, “He’s pulling your leg. He does this everyplace we go. He ordered the IPA. He thinks it’s funny to horse around.”

When our relieved but somewhat puzzled waitress left, Denny shook his head. “I try to teach you a few tricks and what do you do? You’ll pay full price for everything, Skeeter, and lemme tell you, that’s not how the real world works. Full price is for suckers like you.” I took a long sip of my own beer. Which, being the first of the day, tasted like liquid pleasure. “Worth every penny,” I said, already knowing what Denny would say in reply.

We had some folks stay with us this week, out from the wild suburbs of Chicago, who had a couple of kids in tow so naturally I took them for a stroll through the rainforest behind the house here. They noticed a large tree I’d felled the week before with about half of it still laying there half cut up waiting for me to put the peavey on it and roll it over so I could finish. Dan, the boy, had never seen a peavey and I’m betting his dad hadn’t either now that the Chicago forests are long gone for toilet paper and baseball bats.

A peavey, in case you might not know either, is a pike with a cant hook attached on a swivel. You get that hook into the meat of a log and pull or push against the pike with a handle 6 feet long and meaty as a horse thigh so you can roll that log over, all this so you won’t saw into dirt on the bottom side and dull your chainsaw chain. It’s an indispensable tool of the woods soon to be relegated to relic in our local museum.

I just came in from rolling a few two ton sections over to finish my cuts. This afternoon I’ll take an 8 pound maul and split my sections, load them in a cart and haul them to the woodshed. Logging, kind of a lost art, even down here on the South End. Guitar Bob, my old drinking partner, once asked what I’d been up to that day and when I said ‘logging’ he smirked. “Oh, right, Paul Bunyan,” he mocked. Bob has his wood hauled in, already sectioned, and he splits it, then stacks it in the shed right beside.

“What’re you laughing at, man?” I asked, laughing myself. “You wouldn’t know a logger from a TV repair man.” And Bob says, “Oh, like you cut down trees ….”

I guess we never really know one another, most of us. That, or we like to keep our friends in our own image. But just between you and me and the Blue Ox Babe, some of us get our heat, not from a thermostat, but from a passing mythology, one soon to be forgotten. Although … maybe my second nephew Dan will tell his friends back in the Windy City how his uncle still stalks the Northwest Woods with a saw and an axe and how the ground shakes when he takes down those giant trees of his. But I doubt it.

Heaven — Free Admission

More and more of us South Enders are losing their religion, don’t ask me why. I just read a survey that showed a quarter of us don’t believe in a Supreme Being, too bad for Donald Trump. That’s way up since the last survey. But here’s the odd part: the number of us who don’t believe in God but believe in an afterlife doubled. Faith based Heaven, I suppose, or maybe just bad logic, a trend that seems to be more and more prevalent.

Down at the Little Church in the Ravine, Rev. Paul makes it a point most every Sunday to exhort his flock to eschew sin. Live a holy life, he preaches, and if you mess up, ask the Good Lord for forgiveness. Believe on the Lord, he says, or surely Hell will follow.

Now, I may be mistaken here, but I’m guessing most of the folks who believe in an afterlife are talking about Streets of Gold, not Beelzebub’s BBQ. You don’t believe in a deity, you probably won’t buy the quaint notion of the Devil. And if you think Heaven is waiting for you no matter what, why not enjoy a little sinning while you’re waiting for the Pearly Gates to open? No punishment waiting, no purgatory for the wicked. Believe me, Pastor Paul doesn’t pound that pulpit with his ragged Bible to tell parishioners they got nothing to lose if they covet their neighbor’s wife. Go right ahead, cheat the other guy on that used car you said was running great when you know damn well the engine isn’t getting oil up in the cylinder head. You can make a little extra money and still get a reservation in the Angel Motel after your last breath.

Shirley, my neighbor who runs the Pampered Pekingese Pet Grooming service, claims she’ll be reincarnated. As a pup. The Hindu believe the Wheel rewards those who do good, but I guess now we think we get what we want, not what we deserve. Shirley better hope she doesn’t end up at the pound with all the other unwanted pets. Not everyone gets pampered in this mean old world.

I just read that some of our educators are thinking of dropping algebra from high school curriculums because it lowers the graduation rate. Seems a lot of us students stumble over the difficulty of y’s and x’s and the formulas that use them, then we end up flunking math that year and well, that creates depression and depression causes dropouts and dropouts mean bad jobs, limited career choices and an increased probability for a life of crime. Put another way, if x=the # of math failures and y=dropout rate, x squared divided by y over 3= z, z being the crime rate of any given school district.

Down here at South End Central High the dropout rate is astronomical. Plus the job market is virtually non-existent. I guess we know what this means. It means, even if you don’t understand probability theory, we need to get rid of algebra. We might even need to drop science itself from the curriculum, given that 50% of our students don’t believe in evolution or deductive reasoning. And if we want to increase self worth and employment opportunities, let’s axe literature and grammar too. I don’t know when the last text message or e-mail or twitter I saw had a complete sentence or correct spelling. Certainly not both. You think kids need to read a book, you haven’t been doing your homework. Graphic novels maybe, War and Peace, wake up, you’ve been watching too much Downton Abbey.

Who needs algebra when you can Google up formulas and let the computer do the math? You maybe want to bring back slide rules when a hand calculator does everything you need? Oh, sure, you figure maybe it would be good to understand the underlying priniciples. Like the way you understand your microwave or your CD player or your hybrid automobile??? You think it’s useful to know how to parse verbs or construct a compound sentence in a world that limits itself to 140 characters? C’mon, wake up. Watch a 5 year old kid work a laptop and tell me he needs to learn how to read when the computer can translate words into speech. Or vice versa.

When the day comes that our local heroin dealer needs basic algebra to conduct a drug transaction or our addict needs it to calculate the percentage of worth to sale at his favorite pawnshop when he sells my stolen guitars, okay, we can consider bringing it back into the curriculum. Until then, you might want to consider a career in computer coding and forget math teacher as an option.

When I first arrived here in the primordial South End, I had a small garden and a smaller yard. The yard I mowed with one of those old push mowers with the spiral blades that worked fine on level land with no rocks. Rocks jammed that set of blades and I mean right now. So eventually we did like all sodbusters and homesteaders, we cleared land and moved stumps and expanded our gardens and lawn. A postage stamp parcel of grass grew into acreage and I put away that little push mower and bought a used gas powered one. Progress? Maybe, maybe not.

My neighbors all got big John Deere riders for their puny weed’nfeed lots. That, or they just call in the landscaping outfits and the Hispanics roll in for an hour and manicure the lawn, edge the walks, trim the hedge. Me, I’m still pushing a mower. Good exercise, if nothing else, plus I get to survey the hidden corners of all those gardens, watch all the bulbs come up, the flowers bloom, the shrubs grow and the trees turn color. It’s my job and I try my damndest to find something positive about it. Although I will admit I cheer the day when the summer drought browns the lawn and mowing ends until the monsoons start.

What I don’t like is working on those mowers. I’m what you call a shade tree mechanic. And that’s putting a positive spin on it. Shade shrub mechanic more like it. Take today. The spare mower has been giving me trouble since it got left in the shed of the house we bought next door. Last year I could make it start, barely, but it wouldn’t run long. This year I decided to let it know who’s boss. So I disassembled the air filter, took off the cowling to the carburetor and unscrewed the bowl that hides the float valve. I had no idea what I was looking for, but you never know, something might be loose or a hose is disconnected or there’s a snake dead in the electrical. Okay, I’m hoping for a miracle. It is, after all, Easter. My lawnmower might roll back the stone and rise from the dead. Why not?

When I loosened the bolt raw gas came out the bottom so naturally I began to hurry. I’m not all that handy going slow, but speeding it up, I dropped the bolt and the bolt fell into the engine area. I could just see it hiding through the gasoline waterfall so I grabbed a screwdriver and managed to wedge it tightly in its hidey hole. Gas spewed everywhere, obscenities flew and I beat that mower like an obstinate mule with my socket wrench. Then I beat it with a large crescent wrench and stabbed it with my screwdriver. All I needed was to spark the fumes and send the whole she-bang to hell and gone. Probably me too. I didn’t much care.

Why God, Why me?? I won’t go into detail, but an hour later I had the bolt back in my hand, back on the bowl, back on the mower. What a colossal waste of my precious time!! I could’ve been watching daytime TV or checking my e-mail for spam. Not that bathing in spilled gas isn’t my idea of a spring day.

I reassembled the little mower, dragged it off the potting table and let it hit the ground from four feet up, I mean, who cares? I have burned recalcitrant chainsaws and destroyed VCR’s and tossed CD players out second story windows. They may think they have won, but they are wrong. There will be no winners. And one will die. Mark one up for humankind.

But … when it comes to machinery, I am superstitious. Science seems preposterous to me in regard to my mechanical ability. I trust in luck. And in a certain sadism toward my metal compadres. So I poured gas in the tank, not because I was confident, but because you have to pull the starting cord one last time . You have to give the obstinate brute one last chance. It’s a code, even if unwritten. You must let the universe work things out and no, it doesn’t make sense and of course it does not a religion make. And because this is what must be done I pulled the starting cord and you can believe it or not, but that mower jumped right to life and kept on running.

Do I think I fixed it? Do I think next time I go to start it, it will? No, my friends, I might be superstitious, but I’m not a gullible idiot. I know my enemy and now it knows me. Today is Easter and my mower has Risen. Let’s leave it at that.

The political season is in its final innings here on the South End. Down at the Diner the debates continue unabated, but practically everywhere else, we’re wore down, depleted, dejected and pretty much exhausted with the whole damn thing. Even the Pilot House, once Hotbed Central for lively late night alcohol fueled discussions, even the Pilot House has turned its short span of attention to the college basketball tournaments and the pre-season baseball scores.

The tulips are coming in early up north in the fields of La Conner. I was thinking maybe going there instead of the caucus this Saturday. Last time I went to a caucus it was Carter running against Reagan. All the local politicos were in attendance. And me and the mizzus. We never really understood the process and we never went back. I like voting in private, to tell you the truth, not in small groups of people I don’t really know. The tulips, I get tulips. They come in early some years and some years late and rarely, but it happens, they bloom on time. This year they’re way early and the Festival, that two week traffic jam miles and miles long, well, it’s going to be pretty much after the harvest.

I spoze the folks stuck in the colorful backup out in the flats can while away the hours arguing whether global warming is to blame or if the low price of gas is a blessing or not. The big tour buses can haul up the city folks for a slow creep through the countryside and hope for a few fields of blazing candy color seen vaguely through the rain. Us locals pretty much avoid the whole show now. You’ve seen one tulip field, you’ve kind of got the idea.

I wish I could say the same about elections. I’ve seen a few, but … this one is very very strange. Maybe even troubling. Says a little too much about my neighbors, for sure, but hey, that’s the price of democracy. Nobody says you have to be sane to vote.

I got a friend who was kicked out of Catholic Seminary many years back for admitting he was gay. I guess if he had been a pedophile too, he could’ve been a priest. Even a gay pederast known to his parishioners would’ve been okay, although the bishop or cardinal or the Pope might want to move him along to other parishes that didn’t know his history. Like they say, it takes a lot of faith to be religious.

My buddy lost his faith. He couldn’t quite square up a church that professed love for his fellow man in the abstract but not in the particular. All I can say — as an outsider and even an infidel — they lost a good man, a thoughtful man and a man with a very big heart.

Religion is a topic best left alone, I’ve learned the hard way. For awhile the South End Diner had the Bible study group descend on two of their too few tables. They only ordered coffee, no breakfast, and drank refill after refill without leaving much of a tip or a thank you either. Anita, the owner back then, watched her business going downhill, mostly when her other regulars got sick of the debates over Leviticus. She finally asked them to go somewhere else, they were curdling the eggs.

“And besides,” she told them, “morality shouldn’t be as hardboiled as you gentlemen make it.”

Live and let live, but nevertheless she wanted them to live somewhere else half the damn mornings of the week. Jezebel, they called her. But not to her face, of course. Anita was much loved down here and known by all as tough but fair. “Take it back to the church,” she told them, “and if I want to join, I will.”

We actually got a little church on the South End, the Little White Chapel in the Ravine, a non-denominational congregation that ministers to quite a few of us sinners. Comfort and fellowship come in many forms and myriad faiths. Debating which one is the correct one, well, I leave that to the righteous. Me, I just try to do as little harm as I can and stay out of their way. Figuring out the universe, trust me, that’s not in my pay grade.

When I built our palace over two decades ago, I installed a brass bathroom faucet for the marble sink surround we’d hauled by homemade sailboat across the treacherous straits of Saratoga from Whidbey Island. The spout of that faucet was a little shy of reaching completely over the sink so I was forced to do my first renovation. The faucet I replaced the first one with finally gave out, don’t get me started, but with a sigh I tore out the entire marble sink so that I could access the water inlets and the drain stuff, all that plumbing we hide in the cabinet and put out of mind until the leak starts.

I decided to win some gold stars from the mizzus with the next evolution of fixtures, so I bought a pricey little Kohler number. Kohler is a Wisconsin company and since we lived in their fair state long ago, we have even toured their factory and admired their half acre wall of toilets mounted horizontally like some art installation gone monumentally absurd with bathroom humor. It took me a day to disassemble and reassemble the sink, but it looked worth the effort once I stood back to admire my plumbing skills. At least until I turned on the water. A trickle like an 80 year old with advanced prostate problems dribbled out the spout. I turned both faucets full volume, but the flow stayed miserably small.

If you’re a modern handyman like myself, you go straight to Google and start asking questions where, hopefully, you will find real plumbers, not fellow idiots, responding with cogent and useful answers. I discovered, thanks to BillyBob Hosebib, professional roto-rooter from Boston, that my aerator was to blame for the low flow. He even told me the gizmo was difficult to remove and had a few helpful suggestions. God love Google!! Two hours later I had mangled my plastic aerator which refused to unscrew the way Billy B had told me it would. Undaunted, I managed to get a needlenose on the little blighter and got it far enough out to be able to snip it from its tube which was all one unit. Needless to say, I crushed the tube. A few hours later I opened the thing up, but …. apparently I had pulled the tube from some important connection and now no water whatsoever came out.
In disgust I threw the faucet out the back door in a small but cathartic rage, then drove 40 miles back to the big hardware store up north and purchased another faucet, but definitely not a Kohler with its cheesey plastic tube guts. No, I bought a nice little brushed nickel number. A day later and a couple of marble sink surround removals and installations later, I had that baby in and operational. I liked it, the mizzus liked it, guests liked it and so, we had another successful home plumbing project completed.

Until the power went out and the well sat idle. When the power returned, so did the grit and sand and loosened rust from the water lines. The new faucet now had very little flow too. I grabbed a shop vacuum and blew out the lines from the spout, reconnected the supply lines and now had worse water flow. I tried sucking from the other side, then blowing from the spout, etc. etc. When I finished, hardly any water came out. What in the name of Price Pfister !!??

So again I went to Google. Where I learned ALL new faucets now are mandated by FEDERAL LAW to have Low Flow. Which is fine if you are a city dweller on municipal water. But it’s a killer if you are on a well that pulls sediment and kicks grit when the power is off and comes back on. The Google experts recommended buying new valve cartridges if blockage occurs. Probably only 20 or 30 bucks apiece each power outage. Pretty easy to put in, they said. Not too expensive, they said. Easy for them, charging $100 an hour for their labor.

I could bore you some more. Hell, I could bore you for days telling you how I went and found an older faucet, pre-EPA, actually illegal now so that most recycle stores won’t sell you one unless you tell them you have a utility sink, something to do with lead content in the solder pre-2009. My first vintage faucet — and it’s too long and sad a story — was destroyed in the refurbishing. When I went looking for its replacement, I found virtually none so when I laid hands on two up north about 75 miles from home, I bought both. Call it insurance. Or just pessimism.

An hour ago I managed to put one of those in the sink, dropped the marble surround with it installed back down into his frame and turned on the taps. Not only didn’t it leak, but water roared out its spout, just another success story in my quest to be my own repairman. Sure it cost me two new faucets, three used ones and maybe 6 or 7 days of labor. Course I paid a psychological price too high to calculate. Probably it nearly cost me a marriage. But now I too can post advice on Google for fellow idiots to read and follow in my drippy footsteps. Home Repair: Not necessarily easy, but oh so very satisfying.

I was driving past the Plaza IGA — our ‘hometown grocery’, meaning, I guess, a monopoly for higher prices — when the transformer blew in a windstorm. The rest of the drive down to the tail end of the island was dark except for my headlights casting wild beams on tormented branches and roadside bushes come to life like amphetamine goblins. It would be a long time before PUD got around to us, that was a given.

Slipping off the grid for a few days hurtles us back to the early years here. Ordinary life comes to a sudden stop. No more TV, no more internet, no phone calls, no e-mails. The world shrinks inward, lanterns come out, candles are lit, the homefires are kept burning. All those devices we amuse ourselves with to ‘pass the time’ are put on the backburner, the one that operated on electricity but doesn’t now.

Most of the neighbors have invested in generators. Fifteen minutes after the power blows, the ‘hood here sounds like a hornets’ nest hit with a baseball bat. For them the diversions halt briefly. For us, it’s a few days of nostalgia, memories of wild howlers, crashing waves, trees toppled, neighbors comparing damage, the whine of chainsaws up and down the highway.

We read books we hadn’t finished, play instruments that sat for too long, stoke the stoves, carry water, talk, go for walks. It’s 1977 down at the wild South End once again. A time before cellphones and computers. A time only 40 years or so ago. But the world has changed. Not the way it did with our parents or grandparents. It changed completely.

Me, I like knowing no matter how inexorable its march into a digital future is, it can stop dead in its tracks, if briefly. But it feels like time has stopped and the natural world has reasserted itself. Today, I spoze, we’ll go back to the Future. If nothing else, we won’t have to listen to a dozen damn generators.