The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Every once in awhile I get wind of another town that thinks it would be a good idea to arm the teachers in their schools. Having been a teacher for a very short career, I probably would’ve liked carrying a sidearm. Cut down on a lot of backtalk, for sure. And saved the cut-ups a long trip to the principal’s office. Course, when I think about it calmly, seems sort of harsh to inflict capital punishment from the front of a classroom. They are, after all, children.

I guess being Americans and all, the idea of a fully armed populace is appealing. You don’t hear many stories how some hijacker or bank robber met his match with a Dirty Harry packing heat, but that could change quick if we just advocated for universal ‘conceal carry’. Probably take some collateral damage, planes decompressing in a shoot-out at 30,000 feet, 7-11 customers caught with their Big Gulps in a withering crossfire. But it wouldn’t take long for us pacifists to realize we need to return fire ourselves, simple law of survival in the urban jungles of America.

We’ve maybe seen too many Westerns, all those cowboys with six shooters slapping leather on their hip and a Winchester in a scabbard beside the saddle. The folks down in Malheur rode in fully armed and they can’t understand why the Feds and the troopers and the sheriff won’t surrender. Or at least negotiate to give them the range land they say belongs to them, these folks up from Utah. Too many Westerns, like I said. Then, a month into their occupation, one dead and most under arrest, the remaining gang wanted amnesty before they left. Lucky for them the bureaucrats whose headquarters they liberated and whose jobs they disrupted didn’t take their own 2nd amendment rights as seriously. Be like letting the kids in my old classroom carry live ammo — for sure my odds would go way down.

In breaking news this morning the Camano Commandos, our vigilante group concerned with porous borders and government over-reach, took over the Cama Beach ranger office and the old resort store. Dressed in camo gear and carrying hunting rifles and assault weapons, they barricaded the road down to the beach and the cabins, set up roadblocks near the entry station and demanded the tourists still vacationing leave immediately.

Walter Jorgenson, the Commandos unofficial commandant, issued a press release to the Stanwoodopolis Gazette demanding that the Park be returned to the People. Law enforcement, quick to respond to the potentially life-threatening take-over, shut down the highway outside the entrance to the park. State police soon joined forces with local sheriff’s deputies and two SWAT teams from Snohomish County. The FBI was reportedly on the way. Seattle news helicopters were already circling and mobile satellite vans were camped on the highway while the tense standoff had barely begun.

“We represent the People,” spokesperson Jorgenson said via Facebook. “We are sick and tired of these land grabs by the federal government.” He later clarified his statement to include state government as well. (Cama Beach, after all, is a state park.) By noon today the FBI and agents from Alcohol Firearms and Tobacco had set up a negotiating team via cellphone, although reception proved spotty most of the time. According to Vince Hammer, the FBI’s senior agent in charge, the Commandos’ demands were a bit vague. They wanted the Park ‘vacated by all government thugs’ and returned to the true owners, themselves. Mr. Hammer mentioned that, in essence, they already own the land. “It’s a state park, Mr. Jorgenson. You own it already. You drove right in, nobody stopped you. But now you’re preventing anyone else from the public sharing the park.”

The Commandos disagreed with this assessment strenuously. For the past two days the stalemate has stood. I met with Vince Hammer yesterday and offered a possible solution to the impasse. Hammer was reluctant at first but finally said what have we got to lose, we need to end this thing. Today I walked into Cama carrying a white flag (actually just waved yesterday’s underwear) and met with the Commandos who were obviously in serious television withdrawal. Walter’s first demand when I sat down at the old fir table was for a television to be brought in to the park. “Give it up, Walt, they don’t have cable here and I can tell you for a fact reception without a long distance antenna is zip. Maybe we could get you boys some videos from the library. Hell, Walt, if you’d been thinking, you’d have taken over the library.”

“What are you doing here, Skeeter?” one of the vigilantes asked. I said I was just trying to be a good citizen. “I got a deal for you men, something you might want to consider before the FBI decides to quit playing cat and mouse with you and goes ballistic.”

“Give me liberty or give me death,” Hank Griggs shouted, waving his double barrel shotgun in the air. “You got the safety on?” I asked. “You’re gonna blow your leg off if you’re not careful. But let’s cut the comedy, boys. I’m here to offer you a way out of this mess you got yourself in, let you leave without losing face. You can take it or leave it, but … I don’t think you’ll get a better deal.”

“Let’s kick his ass out to the highway,” Hank growled, still waving that 12 gauge recklessly. Walter growled back. “Let’s hear him out.”

And so it was that we traded Hutchison Park, the little county park no one uses, a five acre chunk of nettles and downfall I used to caretake as a volunteer, soon to be renamed Commando Corner. The boys surrendered to the FBI and were allowed to leave with their weapons and their pride intact. Me, I gave up my lawnmowing chores at the park and now they fall to the Commandos. I give it about six weeks of that and they’ll beg the public to take it back.

We got a lot of folks on the South End making a living the hard way, meaning, they don’t work. In the pioneer days when I first scratched out a meager existence in these played out nettle farms, people survived on piece work here, odd jobs there, some bartering, some horsetrading, the usual indolent country skills. But the new folks, they do some of that, but mostly, due to some serious drug maintenance problems, they got more pressing issues. You want to maintain a heroin addiction, you probably aren’t going to commute to McDonalds and take a job as fry cook. No, it’s easier if you just steal what the neighbors got.

This is more or less what I left the city to escape. No, not jobs or employment. Neighbors stealing from neighbors. What was really sad back then was how the poor folks stole from the poor folks. Easier, I admit, to slip down the alley and come in a nearby backdoor than to drive up to the white folks’ suburbs even though the pickings would have made it more than worth the effort. Course then you have security alarms and motion sensitive cameras and a police force that patrols those tonier neighborhoods. Me, I had Dr. Gonzo.

Dr. Gonzo was a refugee of the Humane Society, part boxer, part hound of Baskerville, a fearless brute of a dog who had been abused by its previous owner who was, judging by her reaction to men, male. If you happened to be a black male, she ratcheted up her snarls about double the decibels. And if you were a fat male, she was nearly unmanageable. Frighteningly so. But if you were a black and fat male, she wanted to hurt you. She probably wanted to kill you. My assumption is her abuser might have fit that exact description and it might explain why she ended up at the pound. Her tormentor probably realized he wasn’t going to cow her and one of them had to go.

She was well known to my neighborhood. It was also well known my house wasn’t usually locked. Not with Dr. Gonzo inside. You wanted to walk in, maybe see if my TV was worth stealing, have at it and good luck. Men knocked on my door and I’d say, kicking a snarling growling Gonzo back behind me, come on in, why dontcha? “Naw man, let’s talk on the porch here,” they invariably replied. And invariably they would want to know if I’d consider selling Gonzo to them. “Maybe you’d like to get to know her better,” I’d suggest, opening the door a crack to let them see Gonzo trying to get her snapping jaws through and I’d say it doesn’t look as if she likes you, man. “How about you breed her, sell me the pups?” And I’d shake my head sadly, naw man, she’s been spayed.

I didn’t have much trouble in that high crime neighborhood even with the 10 units next door that were nothing but a breeding ground for drugs, gunrunning, sex trafficking and fencing. Still, it seemed, I don’t know, a corrosive atmosphere, a breeding ground for cynicism, a hard place to practice peaceful meditation. For both Gonzo and me. So we packed it in, bought a 1910 shack up here on the South End and made a new start, both of us. She died some years back, broke my heart. But at least she never lived so long she had to see the ghetto boys living next door once again.

When I was about butt high to a bumblebee, we lived in Mississippi. Then we moved to the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina to live in a ranger station back in the Pisgah National Forest. Some years later we headed further south and moved to the hill country of North Georgia. I lived in the Deep South from the time I was three until I was thirteen. You never lived there yourself, you can’t really imagine what the South is. It’s different, is what it is.

My best friend in 6th grade invited me to come along with him to his grandparents’ for a day on the farm and a Sunday dinner with the family. I said sure and we all rode in Tom’s dad’s station wagon into the red clay country south of where we lived. Once we arrived Tom and I headed into the pasture to explore the countryside, getting admonitions from his folks to be back in an hour for supper, supper being lunch. All I remember of that walk was being chased by the biggest meanest bull I’d ever seen. Tom said Run! and boy we sure did. I’ve never thought of cattle as benign ever since.

So later at the dinner table, after grace, we told the assembled family how we narrowly escaped death by Brahma as we hunkered down to eat okra and cornbread and ham and pickled beets and so many vegetables from the garden it looked like a pantry from the Garden of Eden. I may have noticed the grandfather glaring at me, kind of a contemptuous stare, but I tried not to, just ate my food and complemented Tom’s grandmother and thanked them all for inviting me for lunch. Supper, I mean. Somewhere about the first round of dessert he pointed a fork over my direction and asked, “Boy, where you from?”

“Dad, don’t start up now,” Mr. Vandiver, Tom’s pop cautioned. The old man said he was just askin the boy a question, and he turned his gaze on me again. I felt my apple pie turning to cement in my mouth. “I’m from Gainesville,” I said and he shook his head no. “You come from up north with that Yankee accent,” he corrected me. “Yessir, I do. I lived in Mississippi, North Carolina, California, Michigan and I was born in Maine.”

“A Yankee,” he muttered, “in my house. Never thought I’d live so long to see the day …”

That supper table got real quiet real fast. Tom’s father was shaking his head sadly but he wasn’t about to add much to the conversation, not at his own father’s house. Later on the long ride home he told me he was sorry it turned out this way, but Gen. Sherman had marched through those hills 100 years ago burning and pillaging and some folks had long memories. His father was one.

You think maybe another fifty years later, folks down there might have forgotten the War. But you would be wrong. They don’t fly the Confederate flag because they forgot the damn war. Some of it might be racism, plenty of it is resentment the North fought them and won, even more is that they think a way of life, a cultural heritage was stolen from them that left them poor. I have no doubt there are more than a few places still where no Yankee has crossed the front door in a century and a half. And just like the bulls, I give them a wide berth too.

When I left college I moved up to a Polish homestead in Northern Wisconsin, no running water other than a hand pump in the front yard, leaned-over outhouse out beside the ‘summer kitchen’ and wood for heat. I thought it would be nice not to work for awhile. I’d saved some money from working through college, which tells you college didn’t cost what it costs today. I think my last tuition payment was $250 for a semester. This was the Univ. of Wisconsin – Madison. That was 1972.

I know most folks would prefer to jump right into their careers, get a jump with that degree, maybe plan to travel later. You know, when they’d established themselves. Me, I’m not much for procrastinating what seems fun. Work, that’s a different deal. I’d pretty much burned out on work back in college. It wasn’t that I was thinking Retirement at 21, but a Prolonged Vacation seemed just the ticket. Give me time to think, time to relax, time to ponder the Future.

My next door neighbors, cousins of my wife at the time, were unfamiliar with those kind of concepts. They saw two people, so desperately poor they had to live rent free in an old farmhouse no one had inhabited in decades, pumping their water from outside, burning firewood to keep warm. It was inconceivable to them that we were not in Need. And so Eddie wandered over one autumn day to announce he had set up an interview for me at the local schoolbus company. I said, “Gee Eddie, you didn’t have to go and do that….” But Eddie waved me off. “It’s the least I can do,” he called as he walked back home.

This was bad news indeed. Should I call the bus company and decline my interview? Eddie would think — no, he would know — what a shirker I was. I decided to go to the interview. I wore some jeans that were mostly holes, threw on an ugly Goodwill shirt and wandered down to the bus lot, figuring, if I acted strangely enough, looking the way I looked, long hair past my shoulders, they’d make the interview brief and send me home. Easy. Great solution.

Ted and Wally, the owner and his mechanic, were in their office when I got there between shifts. I allowed as how my neighbor had talked to them about me working here, here I was. I could see they were amused by the sight of me right off the get-go. But as sometimes happens with me, I’m a sociable guy and before long we’re talking about everything from deer hunting to vegetable gardening, politics to TV shows. Even though I didn’t even have a TV. They asked me what kind of business I had with college and I said I studied literature. They looked at me blankly. “Books,” I said, “fiction. You know, like novels.” Ted shrugged and Wally shook his head.

I tried again. “Like when you were in English class, those books you read???” Ted laughed. “I never read em,” he said. “Fact, I never read any books.” Wally said, “Me neither.” “None?” I asked, incredulous. “Seriously??”

Well, they admitted they’d read some ‘men’s’ magazines and such, but books, no way. As a recently graduated English major, this was akin to finding myself in some backwash of the Amazon. I tried a few more times, thinking they’re having some fun with the new kid, but pretty soon they had convinced me that no, they were basically illiterate and proud of it. I shook my head. “Okay, I need to bring you boys some reading you might like.”

“When do you want to start?” Ted asked. I thought he meant when did I want to bring them some Tolstoy, but of course, that was how they got their new driver to fill an opening they needed filling. And how my retirement ended before it really got started.

You readers of the Crab Cracker, our local advertising and literary journal, must surely have felt my discomfort last week when the Cracker issued its apology for offending you readers with a humor column by fellow satirist Tim Jones’s View from the Bleachers. Surely I would be hauled in next and forced to confess my sarcastic crimes. Tim had upset some of you with his reference to the starving kids in Africa who he had planned to help with his Powerball winnings — well, after he’d bought a few Picassos and a jet and some other items most of us would purchase without one iota of thought for the poor or the struggling or the … Okay, better not get me going.

Let me say straight up. Tim is a very funny guy. You meet him, you’ll realize he’s a nice guy too. He didn’t win the Powerball lottery, but you know what, he’d already sponsored a couple of kids in Africa for seven years through World Vision. You or me sponsor any? No? Didn’t think so. I’ve read and re-read his article to see if maybe there was a hint of something dark and sinister lurking under the real point, which is that we lottery fantasists are narcissistic materialists. Maybe, just maybe, this is the rub with the folks who missed Tim’s sarcasm. (Only kidding!)

We live in a world these days that’s mostly lost its sense of humor. Any perceived offense, fire away on Facebook, write a letter to the editor, shoot out a bad review. I’m not completely against political correctness, but for the luvva Bob Hope, not every grievance is punishable by banishment. If it were, we’d put an end to these embarrassing GOP debates. (Only kidding, of course.) I don’t know who’s amputating funny bones in the dead of night, but they’ve gone missing. I checked with my insurance company and discovered to my horror they do not cover funny bone repair or replacement. So blame Obamacare!! (Only kidding, of course.)

But before I end up giving a lame lecture about what makes comedy funny, let me just apologize ahead of time for some of my up-coming so-called humor sketches in case I step on any toes. (Only kidding, trust me….) For those with sensitive elbows maybe just stick to the ‘word of the day’ column a few doors down. Won’t make you laugh, but I’m betting that hasn’t happened in a very long time. (Oh stop, I’m only pulling your leg….)

A few years ago my folks decided it was time to be pro-active about setting up for Old Age. They had lived in Georgia for 20 years when the Old Man retired, but none of us kids lived near and three quarters of their friends had died or moved away themselves. My brothers met with them in the spring and we all decided they’d move in August. That way we could move them when it was 99 degrees and humid, more fun that way.

We said go through your stuff and throw away all the crap and junk. We’ll have a 26 foot U-Haul trailer and your stuff has to fit in that. No problem, they said. While we were there we started hauling stuff to the dump or to the Goodwill. “Whoa, whoa!” they’d cry every item, every load, “we can’t throw that away. It’s valuable!”

Our folks grew up in the Great Depression. Pennies mattered. Stuff got passed down and stuff got reused. Everything was saved. Recycling before its time…. Rusty useless tools, busted TV’s, battered Christmas ornaments, goofy knickknacks, nothing was too ruined to toss. For a week we battled over what to keep, what to throw away. We pretty much decided 90% of their lifetime possessions were disposable and half that was rubbish. They decided 100% was keepable, if not indispensable. We reiterated that come August, what didn’t fit in a 26 foot U-Haul was going to be left behind. “You make the call,” we said, “but in August, we make it.” They’d moved about 20 times in their lives so we figured they’d be ready.

Ho ho. We flew into Georgia in August. Hot, humid, stressful. The first day we filled half the 26 footer and we hadn’t dented their pile of ‘indispensables’. Downsizing, apparently, was an alien concept. My brother and I shook our heads. Now what? we asked. We called the U-Haul place and rented another 26 footer. When it was full we closed the doors and pushed hard. In the end we left grills and patio furniture where they stood, a gift for the new tenants.

Last trip out to my folks, the Old Man was digging through unopened boxes in his basement. Five years after the Big Move. “I don’t know why we brought all this crap with us,” he said, shaking his head. I never said a word … but when I got home here I cleaned out my own closets. Believe me, there was plenty of crap. Why wait for the nursing home? I just hope I don’t buy half of it back accidentally from the thrift stores I donated to.

Saturday night at the End of the Road Tavern, Big Larry was pounding the weathered fir table he and Ed Grabowski, a newly unemployed log skidder, were sharing as they finished up a dinner of Donny’s Hot Wings and a plate of curly fries. Big L. was exercised over the Big City liberal weatherman calling the upcoming storm the result of Global Climate Change. “My global ass!” Larry roared. Ed seemed more inclined to drink away his recent lay-off than encourage environmental debate. As he got up for his 3rd or 5th or whatever bottle of Budweiser, he said to Larry, “Who the hell cares? The weather’s the damn weather. It changes. So what? Hit me again, Donny, willya?”

Donny slipped a hand into the cooler, corralled a Bud and knocked the cap off with a practiced expertise, then slid it two feet down the bar. “I dunno,” he ventured, “they might have a point. Heating up like a greenhouse, gotta change the winds, probably the ocean too.”

Larry wasn’t having any of it. “Aw, what next, Donny? We gonna quit cutting trees? Quit drivin our trucks? We gonna live like Afghans cause we’re afraid the weather’s too hot?”

Trapper Charlie suddenly came conscious at the end of the bar where he was watching college basketball between two teams he’d never heard of. “Ain’t like it’s gonna be all bad. We might become the new California.” Big Larry avowed how he’d rather get sent to Lake View Nursing Home down river than live in a new California with all those wine-sipping yuppie yahoos. Charlie said we’d still be the ones living here and Larry said he’d be damned if he’d live here then!

These are meteorologically interesting times, I guess, and we’ve debated this many a rainy night at the End of the Road. The scientists seem pretty much in agreement and the Hot Talk Radio folks are in total disagreement. I can tell you this — and I know it’s a small sampling poll — we aren’t going to do much else about it but argue, at least up here in UpCreek. It’ll be a cold day in hell before we change our minds or our habits. Donny says to no one in particular, “Maybe I should start stocking up on a higher class of wine. You know, just in case ….”

My neighbor Jill was working down at Labor and Industries and since I needed to get a contractor license so I could install my stained glass in a state project for two whole days, I ended up with Jill. The whole process took half an hour so we covered subjects ranging from dogs we have owned to retirement strategies for us geezers. Jill’s main point was the necessity ‘to keep moving’ when you retire. She herself wanted to establish her post-retirement interests pre-retirement.

“I used to work at the Casino,” she said, something I didn’t know. “Lot of people spent their whole day sitting on a stool playing the slots. You didn’t see em for a few days, you could figure they probably died. The Casino was their whole life. We even provided funeral services. Why not? Half their friends were us casino workers. You have the funeral in-house, we didn’t take half a day off to go to a funeral downtown.”

I said it was something I never imagined. Maybe scatter their ashes under the crap table, one stop shop. Jill muttered ‘why not?’ and kept stamping my documents, checking stuff against her computer screen read-out, asked an occasional question. “Lot of those folks,” she said, “they thought of retirement as dying. Kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Kind of like filling out this endless paperwork, I thought. “Uh-oh,” Jill said after half an hour and I thought here’s where you return to jail, do not pass Go. She asked a few questions, made one small change on the form that warns NO CHANGES PERMITTED. Casino work, I thought, might not be as far removed from government bureaucrat as I thought. I bet L&I might even provide funeral services for those of us who died in these long lines … but I was hoping I wouldn’t find out today.

I know most of you probably think I’m a red-blooded American male, gorging myself on synthetic testosterone and subscribing to ESPN so I can watch soccer matches in Brazil and tennis tournaments in Australia and Nascar anywhere they got an oval track. It’s understandable, your misconception. I probably haven’t exposed my poetic sensitive metrosexual side near enough, but it’s late in the game now and I guess you’ll have to take my word even if it brings my manly manhood down a notch or two in your estimation.

Sports. I have to confess I was never much for team sports in my youth. Oh sure, I played some Little League baseball, but I got that out of my system pretty early. And by the time I realized that proficiency in sports was inextricably connected to desirability by women, it was too late, I was doomed to lonely intellectualism. Without being very intellectual, which as you might guess, is lonely indeed.

So when Fantasy Sports reared its head this year, I didn’t have Clue One what the hell this was. I kept asking my more sports-minded buddies what this new sports craze was all about, and they kept telling me it was an on-line something or other where you could pick a team from anybody on any team and compete against folks in the world of the internet. And you could bet on your team! Gambling, that I could understand.

So now the government is looking into whether this Fantasy Sports is really gambling or is it a skill? The skill, I guess, is figuring out the odds and variables of whatever intricacies of betting on different players in different combinations you can come up with. Sort of like blackjack, you ask me. Which, if you’re a card counter, is a skill. But if you’re just a schmuck like me at the casino table, it looks remarkably like gambling. If you had to play against a good card counter, I bet (but not much) it would seem like a skill, one I don’t possess.

I saw a piece on the news last night how 91% of the money made in Fantasy Sports was made by 1.3% of the people who bet. Those, except for the Lottery addicted, are long odds. I have to say, the government might want to regulate what seems like gambling to me. The danger, of course, is they might have to take a hard look at the stock market too. I think those same 1.3% who make up the algorithms and the formulas might be the bright boys in Goldman Sachs. And I quit betting against them a long time ago.