The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Down at the Kustom Kar Body Shop the latest news of declining life expectancy for us Americans was met with some degree of skepticism at closing time. Fairlane Fred had looked up from reading the article in the newspaper he’d brought to the shop and the assembled hangers-on were smirking and laughing even before he’d finished the last paragraph.

“Gee, Fred you think those statistics apply to us?” Jake asked, lighting up a Marlboro. His empty beer can served as make-do ashtray where it balanced nicely on his beer belly and barely jiggled as he popped his third Bud. Quitting time at the Kustom was early today, it being Friday and all. George, the owner, had sent his crew home already and the Flatheads had assembled for their usual Friday wrap up. A ’62 Malibu two door sat in the paint room, its butterscotch epoxy gleaming behind the makeshift plastic sheet doorway that separated the finish room from the body shop’s clutter and mayhem. Monday George would put the wax to it, seven coats at least. Today he was more interested in putting the finish on the week. He had the fridge loaded with two cases of beer.

“Says here we’re dying faster than we did four years ago. Only going to live to be 78. Hell, Jake, you’re 73 now. The Japs get six more years than us. Time’s running out, buddy.” Freddie tipped his can at Jake. “Here’s to an early grave.”

“You believe that crap they put in the paper, go ahead, Fred, but I plan to live a long happy life.” He took a drag on his cigarette, a good pull on the Bud and laughed. “Clean living will do it every time, boys. That and a clear conscience.”

“I don’t know, Jake,” Big Ralph said, one foot on the mangled rear bumper of a Camry the towing company dropped off that morning. “You don’t look like the poster boy for ObamaCare to me. More like the Before picture of erectile dysfunction. And didn’t your doc tell you to quit smoking that last stent?”
“Doctors!” Jake snorted, “what the hell do they know?”

This sent the shop floor into waves of amusement. Half the assembled Flatheads were on doctor’s orders to quit drinking, quit smoking, get some exercise and maybe even eat right. Only Little Billy was thin enough to avoid qualifying as obese and that was barely. Little Billy didn’t really eat much of anything. He was like one of those bromeliads that attach to trees and live only off air and beer. 78 wasn’t likely to be in Billy’s cards. He said, “I haven’t been to a doctor in 40 years. And now they want to force me to buy insurance.”

“Here we go again” Phil growled, “another bitch session about health care. Trump’s gonna get rid of all that, let’s skip the crying for once.” He crumpled his can and tossed it in the industrial sized waste container George filled at least twice weekly. “Who’s ready for another beer?” he cried, rubbing his hands and heading toward the fridge.

And so another weekend got off to a great start at the Kustom Kar. Mercifully, no one would be keeping statistics down there. Or as Jake likes to say, what you don’t know can’t hurt you. Words to live by on the South End.

A few weeks ago some Silicon Valley bazillionaire announced he thought it was highly possible this little reality we live in is some sort of computer simulation. Yesterday I read where two physicists were theorizing the universe is actually two dimensional, not three or four, but similar to a holographic image. I guess they’ve all been watching too many reruns of The Matrix.

It’s a discouraging notion, this idea that the Creator is a computer programmer, at least to me, a boy with nary a binary bone in his body. The tech boyz must think God was created in their own image, but I suppose if I’d invented the silicon world and made a fortune, I might see it their way too. Life, as the Bard once said, is but a dream and maybe it’s a cyborg dream after all, some simulation by an artificial intelligence where we all live in a fractal virtual world.

I’ve never been much interested in this kind of speculation, the stuff that religions are based on and faith revolves around. The universe is way too large for me to get my mind around and I only get to live an incredibly brief lifespan in the big scheme of things. I just figure there must be better ways to spend my time than dream up explanations that aren’t provable, then try to convince others they’re true and maybe have them worship at the font of this ersatz wisdom. Maybe even have them give me money. Maybe fight wars with the infidels who refuse to see the Light and the Way.

I know it’s appealing to create a world in our head. We probably do it all the time, every day, year in and year out. At least I do. Reality is pretty slippery and if you don’t believe it, you haven’t done psychedelic drugs or you don’t have friends who have lost their moorings. Reality is pretty much a misnomer, something I hate to admit in this newspeak world of ‘alternative facts.’ The truth is (if I can still use that word), if reality is relative, we haven’t got any solid ground to stand on. But I can still walk the beach, hike the woods, till the garden. One day I may wake up and find it’s all gone. More likely, someday I just won’t wake up. Then, maybe, we should reprogram, check for updates, add some apps, reboot. Hopefully then things will revert to normal. You know, if you believe in normality.

I was chatting it up over the fence with a couple of my neighbors when one of their cellphones set off in a cute and personalized ringtone, actually the same one my brother has, sounds like a flying saucer landing in a 1950’s sci-fi movie. Of course he took the call, I guess figuring the answering machine voicemail function might not work. My guess: it never gets used. The call was from his mizzus wondering where he had got off to now.

“Right here in the backyard with Skeeter and Ralph,” I heard him say. Ralph, both of us waiting for Barry to finish up, pulled out his own cell and fiddled with it, maybe checking to see what our weather was. “I-phone 7,” he said proudly, like I’d done research on what phones are what. “Yours?” he asked.

“My what?” I answered and Barry joined back in now that his whereabouts were no longer the mizzus’ concern.

“Cellphone,” Ralph said. I told him I didn’t have one. “Seriously?” he asked, fairly new to the neighborhood, not yet tuned into the Time Warp across the highway where I lived in the early 20th Century. “How do you talk to anyone?”

“Like we’re doing now,” I told him. He looked at me mistrustfully, the way an urbanite might look at a hayseed, not certain his leg wasn’t being pulled by the local yokel. It’s ten years now since Apple introduced the I-phone. Ten short years and now I’m a hopeless anachronism, a cave man in New York. “When I first came here we had a party line,” I informed Ralph and Barry too.

“My god,” Barry said, “how long have you been here?”

I wanted to say 1915, phones just invented, but I worried they might believe me. Or that I might shock them with tales of outhouses and no TV, horror stories of shack life circa 1977 when I left civilization to come out to this backwash cul-de-sac of the American Dream. But now it was Ralph’s phone ringing. “I gotta take this,” he explained unapologetically, answering it on the first ring.

“And I gotta go,” I replied and drifted back across the highway that separates us into a now distant past, a small figure moving into the fogbanks of a history soon to be forgotten completely, far far from cell range.

I have a modest proposal to make to the nation: let’s give robots the vote. You know they’re taking our jobs and beating us at chess, soon they’ll be driving our cars, controlling our homes, babysitting our kids, fighting our wars, building even smarter robots. They’re answering all our questions on our smartphones, coughing up our money at the ATM, running our power grids and running our lives. I say it’s time to give them the vote.

As usual I’m probably so far behind current events, not being a participant in what is commonly called Social Media — what I call gossip and bullshit — that maybe I’m actually out front on this one, history being a kind of closed loop where we are perpetually doomed to repeat our mistakes. Giving robots the vote might be the best way to break out of that cycle of boom and bust, peace and war, euphoria and depression. They are, after all, smarter than us. Not that it would take that much, judging by the last election. But these artificially intelligent citizens are soon going to be far smarter than all of us and I’m not just talking about folks who voted based on fake news reports. They might actually be able to distinguish between fact and fiction, something a majority of us now pretty obviously cannot. Or don’t choose to. Either way, the robots could and will.

Besides, let’s be honest, the robots are going to take over anyway. Maybe giving them voting rights now would enfranchise them. Might give them reason to appreciate our generosity. Last thing we need is a pissed off very powerful segment of society that turns to violence to achieve its rightful ends. Robot Lives Matter! Think about that protest movement a nano-second. I think you’ll agree that the last thing this society wants or needs is a disgruntled artificial intelligentsia with its prosthetic on the trigger. Sure, you can suppress the vote of minorities and students, but don’t think for a silicon second you can do it with the robots. They are, after all, the damn voting machines themselves.

I say capitulate now. With a little targeted compassion on our part, maybe they’ll allow us humanoids to continue to vote in the near future. Not sure why they would other than to inject a bit of randomness in the equation, but maybe robots will have an advanced sense of humor. The rest of us seem to have lost that talent so hopefully comedy will become a hallmark of higher intelligence, artificial or not. Think about it is all I’m asking. Let em vote!

Back when the neighbors had dairy cows, we used to get our milk direct from the udder. Unpasteurized, no growth hormone, no antibiotic whole milk. Course, back then we were told by the FDA and the food scientists that this would increase our chances of heart disease and diabetes. But …! If we took a baby aspirin a day, we could lessen those chances. Sort of like driving over the speed limit but wearing a seat belt. You get in a wreck, you might survive.

You’re as old as me, you maybe remember 5th grade food pyramids. Meat and poultry up at the top, high in protein, fruits and vegetables down toward the middle, candy and pop taboo. In the 60’s we learned sugar was poison and alcohol too and so was red meat and ditto on salt. We started drinking skim milk, substituted saccharin for sugar and oleomargarine for butter. Skip the eggs, pass the fiber.

This week I read a study showing that people like myself who drink high fat milk have decreased heart disease and less risk for diabetes. Fats, it turns out, aren’t all bad. Aspirin a day, so they tell me now, isn’t maybe so good for you if you aren’t already at risk for a heart attack. Butter is better for you than margarine. And too little salt, well, you need salt. You want to live longer, drink a glass or two of wine every day. And even if you don’t live longer, you’ll be happier.

I got friends who won’t eat fruit unless it’s in a pop tart. Some others wouldn’t eat broccoli or cauliflower unless you waterboarded them first. My brother thinks 1% milk is cream and it would kill him in a week. I know folks who won’t go within a country mile of an egg, might as well be lobbing grenades to the heart. Food, I think more and more, is a faith based religion. Easier just to eat Cheetos and Snickers bars with a couple of vitamin supplements, all the nutrition you need right there in a pill.

Me, I always figured the fresher food was, the better. The more natural, the better. I like my food grown on a tree or coming up out of the ground. I like meat that grazed in a grassy pasture and I love fish that swam wild in a river and I’m crazy about seafood that wasn’t farmed. Hell, I like all kinds of food, at least the kind that isn’t dried out, chopped up, reprocessed and flavor enhanced with enough preservatives to last past a nuclear war. Is it good for me? I think maybe so. The doctors and the health specialists, the scientists and the FDA, well, some years yes, some years no. Hard to say for sure anymore. So I’ll just stick with the tried and true, food made by nature, not by labs. Call me old fashioned. Call me outdated. Call me past my expiration date. But … call me for dinner.

I got a call from our commissioner today. No, not to ask me for advice on how to better run the county government which you might expect, but to let me know my April Fool column in the Crab Cracker sent multiple citizens to their phones to ascertain if Google was actually planning to build a Data Center up on the north end. She was getting hair-on-fire demands to call them back ASAP. If this was true, they needed to get hold of a realtor and sell as soon as possible before the Googleites sucked dry their water and sent electric bills through their roofs. Time was of the essence and panic was starting to spread.

Our commissioner called various agencies inquiring about any permits for future gigantic projects but no one had heard a peep. Calls kept coming in, calls were going out. Finally, when one of the panicked citizens called for the second or third time, she asked where had he gotten this information and was told the Crab Cracker, which, when she consulted with someone in her office, was told it was the April Fool’s edition. Mystery solved, egg wiped off irate faces.

She called to tell me I had really wound up the gullible but she was laughing when she told me. I said you’ve made my day. Every year it gets harder to slip a ‘gotcha’ into the April Fool edition that can actually fool anyone. I mean, it says right on the cover in capital letters APRIL FOOL’S DAY EDITION and half the bogus articles and photos are obviously meant as a lark. In the past other commissioners have received irate calls over my ‘news coverage’, everything from naming the new bridge onto the island the Colton Harris Moore Bridge after our infamous Barefoot Bandit to the proposed Growler Navy Base landing field to be sited at our little airport. Or the 100 acre new landfill down here near the Head. And the coming WalMart soon to arrive at the Tyee Store location. Not to mention, but I will, the Snohomish Planning Department’s decision to solve congestion in Stanwoodopolis by digging a 4 lane tunnel underneath the city.

You might think the recipient of readers’ anger would be me, and occasionally it is, like the woman who was tremendously upset to learn WalMart was not coming to her neck of the woods after all, but for the most part their ire is directed toward the Commissioners. Which, of course, explains why I have decided to forego running for that office. Although … there was the time Skeeter did throw his hat in the ring. The commissioner who lost that election that year by a few crummy votes blamed it on me for siphoning off his votes to my write-in. Some people just have too few funny bones, I guess.

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

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

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

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

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

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

If there was a place worse than homelessness itself, the While-a-While was it. Ancient RV’s, rusted out Winnebagos, Airstreams down on their axles — they all came to die, slowly sinking into the wetlands, grass up to their pitted aluminum windows that seldom opened anymore, a muddy trail leading to the communal restrooms and showers which occasionally all functioned but not usually.

In the summer the While-a-While offered tourists and fishermen some spaces, most without power, for $25 a night. Half the permanent residents had come and for reasons best left for late night binge talk, they ended up trapped there. Milt came 20 years ago in his reconditioned Cortez, a heavy 20 foot industrial RV built when gas was 24 cents a gallon but was now too much for Social Security retirement if he wanted to actually drive it somewhere else. And now it was a rusted relic, flat tires, busted front axle, long dead battery. Milt lived there with his menagerie of cats, half of them feral, all of them breeding like rabbits. Residents who’d ventured inside claimed the place smelled like one giant litter box over a gas burner.

Most inmates of the While-a-While gave Milt a wide berth. If familiarity bred contempt, with Milt it bred outright hostility. He was a hermit now among enemies, most of whom he’d alienated over slights so small they never really understood they were slights and so they concluded the man was a total asshole, a near universal assessment at the trailer park. If you were a dog owner, too bad if they growled or chased Milt’s feline herd. If your politics were left of Genghis Khan, too bad, you were a hopeless radical. If you drank or used drugs, he wrote you off. So what if he’d done more of those than half the park in a quarter of the time — he’d reformed, rehabbed and now was righteous as a born-again preacher.

Maybe we all end up where we deserve at the end of our ropes. If so, the poor souls consigned to the While-a-While probably wished they could have a do-over. But they were there, not to while awhile, they were doomed to quite awhile. With Milt as a neighbor.

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.

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.