The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The Island County sheriff’s office was holding a bipolar man for attempting to cash a $355 check, what we call identity theft. They brought him in and he promptly stuffed the toilet so that it overflowed his cell. The jail guards cleaned up the mess and decided to teach our boy a little lesson so they turned off his water. Turned the water off and left him for a couple of weeks without anything to drink. He died yesterday of dehydration.

Oh, I suppose some folks might consider this excessive. Medieval even. Cruel and unusual. The sheriff has been lobbying these past years for more money, what we thought might be used for additional deputies and staff, but now seems obvious will go toward racks and Iron Maidens and other torture devices since the jail is so bereft of funding all they can do is turn off a prisoner’s water. Until he dies. Maybe they just want to speed things up, I don’t know.

I do know Arizona’s got nothing on Island County for dealing with criminals in a firm manner. Abu Ghraib looks like a spa-resort in comparison. If they can execute a man for the high crime of attempting to cash someone else’s check for $355, you speeders better wise up, the full force of Island County law is going to come down on you like a nuclear bomb. Roadside justice! Maricopa Joe down there in Phoenix looks like a bleeding heart compared to our law enforcement officers. Swift and sure punishment, save the expense of a trial, not to mention the cost of food and water. These are hard fiscal times down at the cop shop and it takes a confident leader to make those calls.

This next few days should see the lawsuit for millions coming at the County. So much for that extra money for law enforcement. Or for social services. Or, well, for most everything. Maybe the folks down at the station haven’t been watching the news lately, maybe missed Baltimore and Ferguson and the others. Maybe they thought the public was too quick to blame the police in those deaths, they’d just knee-jerk some misplaced sympathy for the criminals. Shooting a suspect in the street is one thing, though. Killing him over two weeks is quite another. Where I come from, we call this murder in the first degree. And so far nobody’s been charged.

Like so many of us South End men in this post-chauvinistic era, I was in the kitchen chopping up vegetables for a tasty dinner for when the mizzus got home from the mine. Every store-bought pepper had this itty bitty sticker with a scanner bar glued on semi-permanent so I had to dig at it to get it off. And it got me to wondering — what kind of glue sticks like this and does washing my pepper really get that stuff off and does it add anything savory to the tastebuds and is it known to the state of California to be carcinogenic???

Now let’s understand here, I’m not talking about the government getting involved. I’m not advocating the FDA look into whether my level of glue toxicity is above some approved threshold. No sir! We’re living in the day of Get-Government-Off-My-Back and the last thing us South Enders want to see is paying some federal employee to investigate this when we can just run some studies on our own, find out exactly WHAT that sticky substance is and set up a double blind experiment to find out, for ourselves, what kind of effects this glue has. All I know it might be good for us. Might grow hair back. Might cure erectile dysfunction. Might prevent cancer.

I mean, why can’t we just think positive? Why do we assume GMO foods are necessarily so bad we got to have labeling? Or irradiated foods? Milk that last months instead of weeks? Take that fracking we got going on. The oil companies don’t have to tell the damn government what they’re dumping in those wells. They got government off THEIR backs, but do we celebrate that? Do we declare victory over burdensome regulations? Hell no, we don’t!! We whine and we cry and we scare everybody with horror stories of funny tasting well water and water that catches fire. Here’s a tip: don’t drink flaming water. Duh.

You’re worried, get a test kit and have a go at it. Government can’t do everything for ya. And when you find out those chemicals kill 99% of the bacteria down your well, maybe consider a little thank you card to the oil companies. It IS called Better Living Through Chemistry.

I ran into my old pal Junk Ranger Ralph today. He makes his living hauling folks’ junk to the dump. He’s got a 1960’s pickup that looks like he could leave the trash in the back and drive it right into the bin, the whole kit and caboodle, truck and all, good riddance, but of course he needs that truck. His hand painted sign JUNK RANGER is on half rotted plywood he’s attached so he can pile trash and junk and garbage clear to the sky. It’s a hard way to make a living, but then, what’s new? Most of us down here like to think there’s an Easy Way, but none of us ever found it.

Ranger Ralph saw me digging out front and pulled his Ford 150 halfway onto the shoulder where it could challenge the Sunday drivers out for a spin in the bucolic countryside. His emergency blinkers don’t work so he left it up to the Lord to protect the tourists. It usually turns out okay, at least so far.

Ralph and I went up to the house to catch up. Like I said, it’d been awhile. His big news was he’d found a ‘soul-mate’, which, when you stop and think, is big news for any of us. “The only problem,” he confided, “was she lives 300 miles away.” I guess soul-mates aren’t worried about the temporal world. I asked how he met her and of course it was on the internet. “I spoze it could’ve been worse, Ralph. At least she doesn’t live in Shanghai.”

They’ve met a couple of times, in person, I mean, and Ralph thinks it’ll work out, this distance thing. Me, I’m not so sure, but then we ARE talking about a soul-mate, not some chatroom hookup with an FBI undercover agent. At least I hope so.

It’s a New World out there and actually, I was surprised Ralph even had a computer to use to let his fingers do the walking. Maybe a recycled one from his dump hauls. All I can say is love blooms in the unlikeliest of places these days — and being an unrepentant romantic, I wish Ralph al the happiness in the world. Although, between you and me, I doubt his old truck can make too many trips 300 miles one way. With luck, maybe he’ll break down the last time in her driveway.

Google cars came out with some statistics recently. Driverless cars don’t have accidents really … and the few they do have are cars with drivers running into them. Some of the boyz in the Flatheads, our vintage car club, were flabbergasted. They’re old school, guyz who revel in memories of souped up engines, backroad drag races, cue ball shifter knobs and dangling furry dice on the rearview. They love their rods, they love their memories and they go apoplectic to imagine a future of robot automobiles they can sit in the backseat and read a paper. They have fond memories of other uses for that backseat.

“The Age of the Automobile is coming to an end,” I made the mistake of saying to Two Toke Tom at the Diner where it was overheard by half the Flatheads at the breakfast pow-wow where they’d pushed half the tables together to make room for about a dozen car enthusiasts. Their Packards and Chargers and 88’s were lined up outside the plate glass like an outdoor Museum for Testosterone, right next to Tom’s beater with the cracked windshield and the missing front quarter panel, all gleaming with fresh wax and loving care. I might have been wiser announcing we ought to confiscate guns in an NRA meeting.

Freddie, the head honcho Flathead, jerked his head in the direction of my blasphemy. “What are you drinking, man???” he practically shouted. Brenda spilled coffee on Harry’s hand, missing his cup by a quarter mile. “Yeoww!” he hollered in pain. The whole café was now on Alert. “I only mean the day is coming when cars will drive themselves. They don’t have accidents, Fred, and if they don’t have accidents, guess what the insurance companies are going to demand? You want to drive your big Dodge, fine, but guess what they’ll charge your Charger for the privilege?”

“Over my dead fender, Skeeter.” Two Toke raised his cup. “Amen, brother Fred, Amen.”

“All I’m saying, Fred, is half the folks out there on the road these days aren’t driving anyway. They’re text messaging, they’re talking on the phone, they’re wobbling over the center line and they’re drifting onto the shoulder. They go from 60 mph to 30 mph. I don’t know what all they’re doing behind the wheel, but it sure isn’t driving. Might be okay with me if they let the computer do that for em so they can pay attention to their smartphone.”

Fred snorted and the assembled Flatheads snorted in agreement. Brenda mopped up Harry’s table and dried his hand. Harry would live, Two Toke would get a good laugh on me later and the Flatheads would all drive down Memory Lane with rumbling mufflers, KaHooga horns, mohaired upholstery, big fins and whitewall tires like mastodons crossing back over the Bering Strait to a garage somewhere in the Pleistocene.

This last week Dutch Shell moored their gigantic oil rig down at Seattle and Gomorrah’s waterfront. A flotilla of kayakers — kayactivists — slapped their paddles in the harbor like angry beavers slapping tails at Godzilla. With similar success at scaring away intruders. The Raging Grannies shackled their rockers to the gated entrance at the wharf and were politely arrested. Tech Town, polite but not much interested in politics.

Some of the boyz in the Band at our last drinking session, I mean, practice session, suggested a solution to Seattle’s escalating ecological confrontation: bring that drilling rig up here! The South End has a legal port, the Port of Mabana. Three port commissioners are required to fill out 65 pages of paperwork for the state, same as Tacoma or Seattle. They’re volunteers, definitely part time, and they don’t want a full time clerical position so they’ve been considering dismantling the old landing of the Mosquito Fleet that docked there almost a hundred years ago with supplies and immigrants. The old dock was blown down long ago and the Port has pretty much existed as a historic relic ever since.

“Why not kill a couple of seagulls with one stone?” Mando Mike wondered aloud over his rotgut wine at our last practice. Don lifted his beer glass in accordance and I had to admit once again the South End String Band, marching to a demented drummer, was once again ahead of the curve. Not to mention the beat….

“What about protestors?” Monika asked and Erich mused that what we got around here are Tea Party protestors mostly, more worried about the heavy hand of Island County government than some transient oil rig destined for the Arctic Sea. I figured maybe WE could protest. Give us some free advertisement. The Raging String Slingers! We already sing stuff about the coal cars and coal mining. Got our very own War on Coal, I guess, why not weigh in on oil drilling? Paddle out in our dugouts and slap banjos on the water, why not? Great photo for the Stanwoodopolis Gazette and the New York Times, all those liberal commie media outlets!

Well, we didn’t get much practice in, not music anyway, but I think we got a good gameplan. Which one of us is gonna call Dutch Shell’s rep, I don’t know, but I left an urgent message for Fred at the Port of Mabana. He hasn’t called back yet, but we figure he’s on vacation, hopefully be home soon. Fred better be rested, all I can say, cause there’s serious work coming to the South End. Maybe even jobs, the paying kind. Be a first down here….

Some researcher, no doubt hunting for a good topic for his PhD thesis, did a follow-up survey on high school seniors, asking them before they graduated How Important they considered themselves. In the Gallup study 65 years ago, only 12% answered Very Important, probably the kids on their way to Harvard, Yale and maybe the Korean War. In 2005 80% of seniors responded with high marks for themselves. This kind of tectonic shift is what gives sociologists tenure. And tenure probably gives them a sense of being Very Important too.

My boomer generation has spent decades instilling self-worth into their prized progeny. Every crayon drawing is framed before mounting on the refrigerator. Classes in ballet and gymnastics and soccer and flute and yoga for kids and golf and tennis and art … all are vehicles for discovering that special talent we let lie dormant and hidden until it was too late for us, too late, but not, by god, for our kids.

Now, of course, the little peepers got Facebook. Everyone is his or her very own press agent, forever updating the photos, refining the resume, bragging on-line. If you spent hours every damn day of the year looking at your Bragbook, wouldn’t you think you’re Very Important?

Gonna be a total shock, the real world, for those 80% when their new boss doesn’t give a rip about their Facebook page except to ferret out reasons not to hire them in their interview, when they discover ‘friends’ aren’t, when they’re confronted by bad jobs or no jobs, high rents, bills, health issues, lowered expectations, the tsunami of stuff that knocks the feet from under VIP’s as well as the losers with low self esteem. Go back to the high school reunion, the one for the class of 1950. I bet the % of us folks who answered Very Important back when went down even further. Life is good at one thing — at least down here on the South End — it teaches us modesty. Those 80%, trust me, they’ll learn it the hard way. But they’ll learn it.

I just got off the phone with my airline companies, you know, a couple of the ‘friendly skies’ folks. The flights I’d reserved needed to be canceled, long story I’ll spare you temporarily. I got the computer first which gave me plenty of options to choose from and only took 3 or 4 minutes to listen to first, then answer the multiple test. Five minutes later I was shuffled over to a human. Cindy, her name was, although, given her very indecipherable accent, it was hard to tell. If I thought getting her name right was difficult, understanding her questions was impossible.

I think she understood English. I’m pretty certain she couldn’t speak English. Most of our conversation was me asking if she could repeat what she just said. Finally, totally frustrated, I just guessed. Would I like to cantigate my frist? I said okay. What slingbash was my conflastation? I gave her a flight number. She seemed to accept it as an answer.

I’m assuming, if my airline hired her for customer service, their strategy was to frustrate me to the point of hanging up. Save them any additional bother. But … I wanted a refund, money, moolah, greenback of dollar, whatever Alaska Airline deposits with whatever butchered name they give it. Finally Cindy or Candy or Karla managed to garble the word ‘credit.’ No, I said, I wanted a refund. She repeated ‘credit.’ Gleddit. Or keepit, but I got the message. No refund. I tried 2 or 3 different tacks, but like I said, she understands just fine. It was me who didn’t….

I’m what you call an Infrequent Flyer. Who knows when I’d want to fly Alaska again? And I didn’t want to ask about the expiration date on my gleddit. I asked Cindy if the mizzus — who IS planning a trip — could use that gleddit. I think you know what her answer was even if none of us could understand it clearly. She burbled a few more unintelligible phrases, asked hell if I know what, then paused, obviously waiting for an answer or a dial tone. “Okay,” I said, “we’re done. You, me and that crappy outfit you work for.” Cindy said, “Hap a niece drive” … or something equally inscrutable.

I don’t know about the rest of you in the flying public, but I can’t wait until computers replace some of these jobs completely. I don’t think they’ll be any more empathetic, but at least I’ll be able to understand what they’re saying when they screw me.

Before the heady days of internet shopping, we had Bryant Hardware. You got some impossible to find esoteric gizmo, you could probably find it down at Bryants. Or at least Ma Bryant could. If she couldn’t, trust me, Joe Google couldn’t either. And if Joe couldn’t find it, trust me again, you’d pay Top Dollar for one when you discovered it in an antique store.

My piston driven well pump quit pumping water about 6 months after I bought my palace. My water was down over 100 feet in a hand dug hole 3 feet in diameter. The pump ran fine, it just didn’t pull up the water. Down the hole 105 feet away from quenching my thirst, a foot valve had given out so we had to pull up the oak rods in 10 foot sections. Which meant cutting a hole in the wellhouse roof so we could hoist each of 10 sections high enough to unscrew the upper one from the next one below. It was nerve racking work, but then … most of life on the South End was nerve wracking back then.

When we got to the end we found the old ‘leather’ was blown out. My neighbor — who’d identified our problem in the first place — said we needed to go to town to buy another. “Another?” I asked, incredulous. “Who in holy hell is going to carry a ‘leather’ for a 1930’s well pump system?”

“Ma,” he answered. “Ma’ll have one.”

We drove to Stanwoodopolis, walked into Bryants and asked the owlish woman behind the register if she had our ‘leather’. She peered at the ruined one, then peered at us. Finally she got up with a heave and we followed her into the back section with the 20 foot ceiling of stamped tin, what’s now the food bank, down the aisle of 1950, over to the shelf of 1940 and up to some dusty boxes near the top that was all that remained of the Great Depression. She climbed up on a rickety step ladder, pushed aside a Kitty Hawk propeller and a Model T crank, rummaged through Victrola parts, muttered once or twice, then finally came up with the last two ‘leathers’ in America. “I thought I had a couple,” she said. I couldn’t believe it. “Two dollars,” she told me, probably the price back in 1928.

You folks who buy your hardware in plastic wrapping and expect the part you want has long been obsolete, well, that may be the modern condition, but for a long time on the South End, time meant nothing in Bryants. Ma finally died a decade ago and we lost the 20th Century overnight. Needless to say, I have a modern pump now that I can’t get replacement parts for my old one. And you know, I’m sure, when it malfunctions, it can’t be repaired.

I was at my local grocery checkout line, the one I’d changed 2 or 3 times, trying to anticipate the check-out time based on cart size, age of those line up, types of grocery, all those variables a bettor ranks the way a gambler at the horse track factors in jockey vs. distance run vs. history of the filly vs. age vs. condition of the track, all those reasons I don’t play the ponies. I picked the line with the least items, ignoring the age factor. It looked like a winner judging by the guy in the line I just vacated who was hustling the woman in the line even further over and who, I figured, wouldn’t be ready with check or credit card, probably fumble around for it at the end, maybe wouldn’t have either one and would miserably fail the question paper or plastic.

The woman half checked out in my line only had a few items, but then, after I’d committed, she hauled out some coupon for double ‘points’. What the hell ‘points’ got her, I sure didn’t know, but by god they wanted them. The cashier shook her head, made a phone call, asked her customer some further questions, made another phone call. “OH!” she said to the unseen supervisor on the phone. “Those are only double on Thursdays, Fridays and the 32nd of June.” Mystery finally solved, we checked her out and moved on to the couple between me and my escape into the sunshine. I knew I was in trouble when the lady kept hitting numbers on the swipe machine. “Hon,” the cashier said finally, about the fifth time she’s goofed the transaction, “what’re you trying to do?” Hon said, “I’m 92 and my husband is 94. This machine is different where we come from.”

She came from, obviously, the 19th Century. When she dropped her credit card, I shot down to pick it up. I’m no spring chicken myself, but hey, she’s 92! I didn’t want to call 9-1-1 and anyway, she and I didn’t carry a cellphone to make that call.

“My dad turned 92 this year,” I told her. “You’re doing way better than him.” Half the time I expect we’ll have the security guard escort us out the way he handles the grocery card then the credit card then gets them mixed up.

It took me an extra day to get out of that store, but all I could think was I hope I’m as spry as these two nonagenarians at their age. Hell, I just hope I REACH their age. Although, when I piled into my truck out in the parking lot, I spent a few extra minutes making sure Ma and Pa had left the area. No point meeting up again fender to fender….