The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Down by our Garbage Free end of the island we got about 16 trucks a week from Waste Management plying our neighborhood. Big green plastic bins get rolled out to the end of the driveway and the big green trucks stop, drop their metal arms, lift the bin up and into the maw of the trucks’ rear ends then move on to the next. The mizzus asked if maybe we shouldn’t sign up for curbside pickup, save me that awful trip to the dump.

The trip I make about every 3 months. When I arrived at the primitive South End, the dump was actually that, a dump. Roll up, toss our garbage into a pit. Frank ran the dump back then and about half what we tossed he took home. Old TV’s, busted toasters, dead lawnmowers, Frank figured they were worth keeping. Sort of recycling before recycling was cool.

Admittedly there weren’t many of us living on the island back then, but when the population grew, the county installed coin-op dumpsters. For 50 cents we could load the bin and a compactor crushed it all down. A decade later they added barrels for glass and plastics and paper. We had to sort the glass — clear, green and brown — and most weeks the barrels were full so folks dropped the stuff on the ground. The dump was a dump once again.

Now we toss all the recyclables into one place. Easy. Real easy. I don’t know why either folks still use the highway to toss their bottles and cans, maybe just the irrepressible urge to dump as soon as the container is empty. But a lot of us evidently think the roadside is their personal dump. If I thought too long about it, I’d become more cynical than I already am and none of us needs that. Litter’s bad enough.

So when folks drop their garbage in the middle of the parking lot at the park I maintain, I’ve stopped sorting through it to find a letter with their address or a magazine with their name on the label. I have to live near these folks, but I sure don’t want to get to know them. I got enough enemies as it is … so I’m real glad most of the newcomers can afford curbside pickup.

The South End Advisory Committee met last night in emergency session. The last time they convened a similar gathering was back in 2001 following the Trade Tower attacks when an alarmed citizenry demanded they beef up our shoreline defenses to counter what, at the time, seemed like imminent terrorist incursions. Since then the South End has pretty much kept its head in the sand, so to speak, ignoring the Great Recession (which seemed to most of us just a continuation of our unemployment woes), the Iraq War (we’re pretty much all too old to enlist) and the rise of ISIS (it’s hard to behead those with theirs buried in the beach). But sometimes events arise that demand attention, demand action, demand a committee meeting.

And certainly this was one of those times. Now that the Trump Tweet presidency has left the station, small groups around the country have declared themselves Sanctuary Zones. Sanctuary cities, sanctuary universities, sanctuary Starbucks, sanctuary nursing homes, sanctuary daycare centers. The question on last night’s table: should we declare ourselves a sanctuary too? Ethel Birmbach, current President of the Council, called the meeting to order. “Deportation is not an option,” she declared almost immediately. “These are our neighbors and friends, not our enemies.”

Randy Primplucker, a realtor for WindyRear Realty and the only member on the council actually born on the South End, argued for a quick vote “to protect our neighbors”, but Betsy Birdcall took him to task. “We don’t really know who some of these people are, Randy. Sure, you might have sold them their property, but beyond a credit check, how do you know what their backgrounds are? I’m not arguing for detention camps or even forced deportation, I’m just saying we shouldn’t assume there’s nothing nefarious going on in our community. The government won’t be looking out for us, that’s for sure.”

“These people already have detention camps,” Ralph Van Vleet practically shouted. “They put up their own gates! What are they hiding behind those gated walls? Why are they so nervous? Who are they trying to protect? Who do they think they’re fooling?”

“For godsake, Ralph,” Patty Plankton replied. “These people pay the lion’s share of our property taxes. Let’s don’t charge in half-cocked.”
Ethel pounded her hard rubber mallet on the desk that served as podium. “Calm down, everybody,” she commanded. “Randy, we all know you have financial ties to these folks. Maybe you should recuse yourself on this issue. This is way too important to have monetary issues clouding our judgement.” Randy protested meekly, but finally acquiesced.

In the end the Council voted 5 to 3 to declare the South End a Sanctuary. Up in the gated communities the 1% breathed a collective sigh of relief that, for the time being at least, their taxes would not go any higher. At least not until after the Trump presidency or a turnover in the South End Council. Down here we protect our own.

The other day I went looking for my sense of humor. I searched everywhere I could think of. I looked in all the closets, checked under the laundry, dug through cabinets and behind the sink, under the beds, in drawers I hadn’t opened in years. Nothing. It had to be here somewhere, it couldn’t have wandered off on its own. I’m sure I just put it down absent mindedly and walked off so if I retraced my steps, maybe I would run into it.

It’s been a few days and I’ve been to the studio, the shop, the woodsheds, back on the trails, down to the beach. Nothing. Not a trace, not even the shadow of a smile. It’s been raining nearly constantly lately and I’m worried I left it outside where it’s shrunk down to something small enough for the slugs to slime over, something I might not even want to find much less use again, just some icky sog of a remnant nobody would recognize.

The shortest day of the year is coming up and I really need to find that funny bone. The sun comes up about noon and starts sinking immediately, the rain drips off our clogged gutters, the storms keep blowing down trees in the back 40 and the news is too bleak to listen to anymore … at least without that lost sense of humor. I checked on E-bay to see if maybe someone had stolen mine and now was selling it, used, slight wear, free shipping. Not only didn’t I find mine, I didn’t find anyone offering a reasonable replacement.

Although, someone from Wisconsin had one for sale. “Funny bone, never used, won’t be needing it. Voted Trump. Best offer.” Bidding started at $25 with a $250 shipping charge. I noticed it had yet to get a single bid even though it had been listed since the election. The idea of an unused, nearly new sense of humor was seriously tempting. And at this point of desperation the exorbitant price was almost acceptable. But I’m going to hold out for one that’s more tried and true. That one from Wisconsin, I bet it’s dark and mean spirited. You know, if it even works. I worry that its idea of funny is to belittle and bully, then laugh out loud at the victim’s misery. Just make fun of others who are different, whose religion isn’t the same, who have a disability. I’m not sure how much I’d be willing to pay for that. At least not yet.

Meanwhile, I’m going to keep looking for mine. It’s got to be here somewhere. I just worry if I don’t locate it soon, if I find it after prolonged inactivity, it’ll be like my flashlight batteries, pretty much dead. Inauguration Day is coming right up. I’m going to need to find it before then. That, or buy the one on E-bay and take my chances.

My calendar is going backwards. So are my clocks. Every hour, every day now, the past is coming up fast. The future I had been counting on optimistically is now in the rearview, objects not closer than they appear, fading into the distance. Can this be possible? Have we stumbled into some kind of wormhole? Some alternate reality? Am I living my life in reverse?

Today, for instance, it was decreed by executive order that there are only two sexes, male and female. A few days ago we had a moving scale of gender identity. You could even change sex if you wanted to. But not today. Today was a few years ago. Women could serve in the military, even ( lucky them), go into combat. But the clock ticked backwards overnight. Another few days and women will be back in the kitchen, cooking dinner for us men. I can’t explain it, I just wake up every day farther in the past.

While I was sleeping, apparently the old President became the new President. Maybe he ordered the clocks turned back, hell if I know. Yesterday we thought gays and trans should be given the same rights as everyone else. We thought immigration was what made this country great, cheap labor if nothing else, a melting pot with minimum wage as the fire boiling the pot beneath it. Now we’re rounding up the foreigners, setting up internment camps, loading detainees on trains. Is it still 2025 or have we slipped into the World War 2 calendar?

I’m at a loss to explain it. And now I’m afraid to go to sleep, fearing what a backwards Ichabod Crane will find. Maybe I’ve been wrong all these years. Maybe sex is binary and the Bible is right. Maybe minorities should stay in their place, at the bottom. Maybe slavery was okay and the South understood American capitalism better than me. Maybe we Americans have nothing to learn from the past, certainly nothing to be embarrassed by. I sure hope so because we’re going back there. They say those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. I’m starting to think we didn’t forget it, we were just afraid of the future.

So you say you want government off yer back? Sure, I get it, all those EPA regulations that try to keep corporations from polluting the air you breathe or the water you drink, who needs that kind of nanny state? You don’t believe global warming is caused by us humans burning fossil fuels, why hobble big business with unnecessary attempts to keep greenhouse gases at low levels? I got it that you think vaccines are a dupe for a dope, just a way to put transmitters in your bloodstream so you can be tracked. Drain the swamp, eliminate government agencies, cut some budgets (but not Medicare or Social Security). Get government down to the size you can drown it in a toilet.

Taxes too high? Okay, lower them mostly for the wealthy and the corporations. Maybe room for a small reduction in yours too. Gut the IRS, nobody likes the tax man. So what if the big boyz hire attorneys and accountants to pile on the spurious deductions, you’d do the same if you were rich, wouldn’t you? You want government off your back, but maybe not out of your bedroom, not out of your sex life. Ban abortions, go after the trans folks, define what gender is, legislate what marriage is, why not, it probably doesn’t affect you.

Go ahead and nominate a drug-using guy like Goetz to be in charge of the Justice Department, hide his underage affairs, look the other way, none of our business, right? Let him go after the officials who indicted the ex-President. Use the power of the office to show them who’s boss now. If not Goetz, choose a fawning nazi sychophant like Kash Patel. And no, I understand, this isn’t government on my back or yours, it’s government retaliating against folks who have it coming. Folks who live in the Swamp. Not the new guy, he’s draining it. Obvious to anyone with two or more eyes.

Tired of listening to scientists and those uppity elites from the coasts? Who isn’t? Bring on RFK and put him in charge of vaccines and fluorides. Sure, he’s got some strange ideas but that’s what we need now, the stranger the better. And all the better for media ratings! Government doesn’t have to be all wonky anymore. It’s entertainment!

It’s a New Morning in America. Fox News celebrities can run things now, not elected officials, not career bureaucrats. Billionaires will take the helm and help us little people up the ladder. The business of America will once again be business, unbridled, unregulated, full steam ahead. Government? We don’t need no stinking government!

Los Angeles is burning this week. I was at a neighbor’s yesterday and she was preparing plans to escape our island when the fires reach here, wanted to know if she should get her own boat or just hope to use another neighbor’s. I said we have a couple, probably have to charge plenty for a fiery evacuation, though. Okay, she didn’t find that funny. End of the World humor while Rome is burning doesn’t really cut it.

This is the Doom and Gloom era, global warming, glacial melts, sea level rise, Category 8 hurricanes, biblical floods, bird flu fears, pandemics, untreatable bacterial infections, Artificial Intelligence, overpopulation, glacial melting, religious wars, genetic manipulation and even the old nuclear jitters. The closet of midnight anxieties is overflowing and the boogieman is crawling out from under the bed. Sure, add Wildfire to the list. And did I mention earthquakes and tsunamis? Course, let’s not forget zombies. If our current infatuation with all things Undead is any indication, this might be the one to worry about.

Probably gonna take plenty of planning to survive the coming Apocalypse, I’m figuring. A year’s supply of food and water. Probably need a fallout shelter to store it in. Garlic and crosses to keep back the vampires. Might have been a bad move living on the end of an island with only one road off to the mainland. Or maybe … well, might just be the best place to be, far from the mayhem, cities ablaze, neuro-toxin missiles raining down, pestilence everywhere, robots taking over. Hard to say, flip a coin, luck of the draw.

Me, I’m glad to be at the far end of the continent, water lapping at our shore. Worst case I’ll rent or sell kayaks and rowboats to the evacuees. Not sure what I’ll do with the profits once civilization has collapsed but I might as well be the last Optimist. I can be the guy who turns out the lights when everyone else has left, if nothing else.

I got a buddy who claims he was the first Owner-Builder on Camano Island. The year was 1977, the same year I bought my shack. I met him 13 years later and we ended up building 3 sailboats together, one for each of us and one for his pal the building inspector who became my friend too. Ironically, I may be one of the last Owner-Builders in Island County. I don’t think my permit was ever signed off on so I may well be the last official O-B.

I guess maybe they figured the codes got too complex for us amateur housebuilders, all those R-factors for insulation and E-glass in fenestrations and X-factors for our marriages. Or maybe it was this: a permit for an Owner-Builder was next to nothing, something like $50 when I got ours. The county might’ve done the taX-factor and realized us hippies were costing them revenue. Maybe some of us built our own palaces to save the permit expense, but I would’ve paid full freight just for the right to build my own place the way I wanted. A few hundred bucks wasn’t gonna stop me.

I spoze we can still build our own Xanadu, nothing to stop us. Just have to disclose that a rank amateur threw the hammer and ran the saw, flashed the windows, shingled the roof, installed the electric and plumbing and if you’re the prospective buyer, best beware!!! The people at the county sheds told me I’d be a Total Idiot to apply for an Owner-Builder status. Boy, he read me like a book. A comic book, I’d bet.

By the time I got our permit, us Owner-Builders had to meet the same codes as any fly-by-night contractor, go through the same inspections, all the rigamarole as the Big Boyz. In other words, the government here doesn’t allow for hippie shacks or slam-bang cabins. We got to build our parents’ suburban homes. Might explain why kids just stay with their folks now — why bother building the same damn place twice?

So the Bishop of the Diocese of D.C., with the newly coronated Prez of the not-so-United States of America sitting in the front pews, directed her sermon to him, asking for a bit of mercy for the gays, the immigrants, the trans kids, the enemies he’s declared are making for carnage in our great country. Maybe something Jesus hisself might ask of the powerful. Back off, big guy, have a bit of compassion.

I guess the Bishop hadn’t been paying attention to politics these last, oh, couple of decades. The Supreme Leader of the Free World takes no prisoners, demands the utmost retribution, forgives only those who stormed the Capitol to keep him in power, not exactly the poster child for Mercy. Of course he exploded on social media that the pastor was lousy, stupid, a Trump hater, a liberal snowflake and totally out of line. At least he didn’t call her a Horse Face. But one of his minions suggested she should be put on the Deportation List. Adolph would be proud.

If you want a quick portrait of where we’re at in America today, you got it. The pardons of the insurrectionists that stormed the Capitol January 6th, attacking the cops, sacking the offices, well, there’s another signpost of what’s coming. Compassionate conservatism? I don’t think so. Vengeance, retribution, attacks on any and all critics, these are the order of the day. So much for the guardrails of democracy, we’re on a track toward something darker than anyone could have imagined.

Strap in, gird yer loins, buckle up and get ready for a rough ride. You think the Proud Boys aren’t licking their lips, checking their ammo, firing up for the next assault, you didn’t study the history of Adolph’s rise to power. The nazis are here and they have the Fuhrer they want. Mercy? Those days are over….

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.

The Flatheads were parked at the Diner, their vintage machines waxed and gleaming in the packed dirt parking lot. They meet every Wednesday morning, rain, shine or engine check warning, slide a few tables together, then hold court as they argue after-market carburetors and auto body strategies. And, of course, politics du jour. The rest of us customers either avoid Wednesdays or else come for the show as a willing audience. I count myself in the latter.

Today’s improv started out with a lively discussion of Jerry’s newly purchased ’50 GMC 5 window pickup, original paint, completely stock, nearly immaculate except for a small rust hole in the left quarterpanel. The Flatheads debated whether Jerry should leave the original paint alone or go for a new spray job, an old argument between the purists and the car show enthusiasts.

But somewhere between the spray booth boyz and the ‘let er be’ crowd, the conversation veered without warning into the deep ditch of this year’s elections. Fairlane Frank, a proponent of two tone Fords, had tossed a fork with a clatter on to his half eaten chicken fried steak, splattering white gravy across the formica DMZ. “Trump’s no Republican,” he growled in a mouthful of rage and food. “He’s hi-jacked the whole party.” Pat, proud owner of a 1972 Gremlin and recipient of countless jeers and guffaws, cheerily suggested the time might be right for a 3rd party. “The Know Nothings,” he suggested as a name.

And so it began…. Bel Aire Bobby retorted that we already have that party, opening up a wild round of just which party qualified before Brenda, coffee pot in hand, said, “Maybe you boys should stick with 4 barrel carburetors and dual hemis, leave the politics to the professionals.”

Frank started to object but Brenda stared him down with her headlights on high beam while she poured seconds and thirds. “Frank, I’m makin minimum wage here. No benefits, no insurance, no 401-K. Now my kid needs an operation. Trust me, you don’t want to get me going on politics.” And with that, she whirled to the next table. None of the car guyz said a word for a full minute. Like the man said, all politics is local. But when they left, the tip from the boyz, usually measley, was enough to buy Pat’s Gremlin and pay for a paint job to boot.