The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I got a lot of friends who are O.C.D., obsessive compulsive disorder folks, what we on the South End call Anal. Harsh word, anal, so for our purposes here we’ll stick with OCD. Don’t want to offend anyone, but linguistics can be a two edged knife. My pals suffering from OCD are mostly engineers, but they don’t see their symptoms as suffering. Or a disorder even. In fact, they would argue that the orderliness they demand of themselves is quite possibly the panacea for the problems the rest of us have. Course, they don’t factor in the fact that the problem I have is mostly them.

But let’s be fair. The new psychiatric diagnostic description for myself is: S.L.O.B. Seriously Lacking Obsessive Behavior. Poor toilet training as a kid, I guess. I don’t have to wash my truck every damn week. I don’t wash it every year some years. I accept that the universe is falling apart, what we call entropy down here in the South End Scientific Community. It’s just how things work. They go to hell in a handbasket and if you want to spend your life pushing rocks up a hill like Sisyphus, be my guest. They’re going to make a nice rock wall for yahoos like me when they end up down my way at the bottom.

I don’t make my bed. I don’t clean my windows. I don’t dust my shelves. I don’t edge my lawn. I don’t stack my firewood in nice rows. I don’t organize my files. I don’t follow directions. I don’t even look at the damn directions. I don’t follow a recipe or write one down either. I mean, why? The next batch of bread or homebrew or the next meal will be different, maybe better, maybe worse. C’est la vie, amigo! Routine is the killer, lists are for someone closer to death, order is for the delusional, life is chaos and the sooner you accept it, the better off you’ll be. So yeah, I’m SLOB.

I’m sure there’s a pharmacological cure for my ailment. But hey, I’ve got a pharmacological cure for lots of my ailments, why add one that might have side-effects for the others? In the final analysis, I suppose there’s a nice equilibrium between me and my OCD cronies. They draw in the lines, I draw the rest. When it works, we got a great little homeostatic community. When it doesn’t, well … we’ll find out what happens when gravity hits anti-gravity. Probably sounds like my banjo…..

Being a card carrying South Ender, I’m a little mistrustful of fiduciary institutions. I don’t bury my savings out back in the nettle field, but I’m not real happy keeping it in the bank’s mattress either. I hear we’re coming out of the Great Recession after, oh, 7 hard years, but what I think is the folks who had enough money to play the stock market, they’re doing fine. The Fed dropped interest rates to near zero so if you happen to want to make money with the money you already got, you pretty much had to invest in the market. If you’re like me, you just wanted to play it safe after that same market dropped 40 % back in the Dark Days of the subprime mortgage collapse.

Fool me once, shame on you … fool me twice, well, I’m not happy about my options. If inflation kicks up, that money in the bank will start to dwindle. But … I learned a hard lesson about the stock market I won’t forget real soon. So when I went into my current bank, one of those Too Big To Fail conglomerates, to deposit a check awhile back, my friendly teller looked at our account and asked if I’d care to talk to one of their investment advisors. “You might want to consider something that would make more interest than your savings and checking account,” she said.

It’s wonderful to have my bankers concerned for me, it really is. Why would I ever think they were a predatory pestilence? So what if I have friends who’ve lost their homes or are even now fighting with their banks who for years have threatened them with evictions and mortgage default? Obviously they just want me to succeed. Good people, good hearts. I said, “You mean sit with one of your brokers who would suggest stocks and bonds for me to invest in?” My teller smiled beatifically. I was tuned in. Just a few keystrokes and that money sitting safely in our no interest account would electronically transfer to the Wall Street hotshots and earn us who knows how much money compounded annually over multiple years. Capitalism, what’s not to like?

“This bank,” I said, “no offense, but you folks played fast and loose back before the Recession. Bad loans, subprime mortgages, collateralized loans, hedge fund bets against your own investors. You and the other banks and the investment firms drove the economy into the dirt. And you want me to walk over and talk to your advisor? You guys are like a casino, take a cut on every hand and you win whether the rest of us do or not. Good racket, but I’ve got to pass this time. My gambling days are about over.”

No doubt I have an asterisk by my name when their computer logs me in, one that means Willing To Stay Poor. When the Fed raises interest rates — and it will before too long — we’ll see how the stock market does when financial cowards like me can make money by saving money, not gambling it. Until then it’s a bull market all right and my friendly little bank is raking it in but not loaning much out. Maybe that’s why we bought the property next door. We didn’t bury our money there, we just bought the hole to put it in.

Biker Billy was leaned up against the chrome of Johnny Banshee’s old Hudson showing the boys from the Flatheads, our vintage car club, his newest tattoo. Most of the boys don’t sport body art, figuring, I guess, customizing an old automobile is artistic expression enough. Billy had some heart with the knife in it, dripping drops of blood, and under that the words BORN TO OOZE. “Kind of Old School, isn’t it?” Ronnie asked, risking Billy’s ire which, trust me, no one wants to do. Billy isn’t in an Outlaw Club now, but once a biker, always a biker.

Billy grinned, showing his two missing teeth which none of us ever asked how they got missing. He looked like a pirate gone to seed prematurely. I helped Bill and his girlfriend who was an old bus driver friend of mine from our city days build their cabin too many years ago to count. I like Billy okay, at least when he ran solo or he was sober or he was rehabbing. I didn’t like him much when a few of his biker buddies rolled in with bottles of cheap wine and six packs of beer they’d swill down in record time. Wouldn’t take long until you were the odd man out in their gang and if they were looking for a victim, they didn’t have to draw straws.

Billy’s a tattoo parlor’s wet dream. He went for the clichéd stuff and the Needleman could do skulls and crossbones, snarling dogs and the business end of .38’s in his sleep. Billy was practically covered and running out of room. Once I asked him why he didn’t get a tattoo that was, oh, more artsy fartsy. He glared at me like I was some idiot making fun of his Harley. “Just a thought,” I mumbled and dropped the subject.

I never got the attraction for body art. For one thing, it seems like tourist shop art to me. Butterflies and dragons, Celtic crosses and rainbows, sappy slogans and cornball cartoonery. I figured if I had to look at something dyed onto my skin for the rest of my natural life, I’d want something interesting, something arty, something that maybe I didn’t get sick of in about six months. But then, I’m an old geezer now and that explains a lot.

I had a pal, Norm, who walked up to my artist buddy Prof. Jim one summer day when Jim’s tats were exposed out of his short sleeves and asked him, thinking he was being funny, how drunk was he? This was back in the ‘70’s, before tattoos were all the rage. Jim gave Norm the stink-eye and asked what he meant. “The tattoos. You must’ve been drunk on your ass, right?”

Jim pretty much gave Norm an education that day and I learned not to ask much about folks’ body art. It’s their body, as the women’s rights advocates say, to do with as they please. And if you’re thinking of questioning guys like Billy, he’ll do what he wants with yours too. Beauty, worst case, is in the blackeye of the beholder.

A lot of the new folks downriver never heard of UpCreek. They hear people talk about it, they think they just mean ‘up stream.’ Like a lot of places lost to rot and ruin and history too, UpCreek once was a prosperous town of prospectors and gold panners around the turn of the last century. Prospecting in 1890 was like high-tech startups are a hundred years later, fat money to be made and plenty of thieves waiting to steal discoveries. Mining towns sprang up like human molehills, tunnels leading everywhere. Monte Cristo made a few men rich, but UpCreek made most men poor.

Except the storekeepers and the bars and the ladies of the night…. Before I was born, but the old timers tell me UpCreek was a wild and lawless place back then, a frontier when most folks farmed down in the fertile valleys. I guess it was the same in the Klondike, the same in Silver City, the same everywhere men leave their wives and family in search of fast riches. Nowadays the casinos make it a little easier, even put ATM’s by the slots for the folks grubstaking their way toward the gold vein or the hot hand. They’ll sell you food and entertainment. They’ll pick you cleaner than an eagle scarfing spawning salmon on Beaver Creek, nothing but bones and head without eyes when they’re done.

My place is an old cabin built from fir logs and roofed with cedar shakes right where a little steam hits the Little Beaver on its way down to the Big Beaver and on to the Stillaguamish. There’s a mineshaft at the back of the property, covered now with vines and lost memories, but occasionally I cut my way into the entrance, just a few rotted timbers left I don’t have much faith in. I go a few yards in with a lantern every few years, but not being a gambler or a daytrader, I back out into the sunlight where poverty looks better than risking everything on a roll of the dice or a turn of the shovel.

I’ve never understood Gold Fever myself, but UpCreek wouldn’t be here if folks didn’t imagine winning the Lottery. Course, now it’s just me and the rest of us who bought the abandoned mines and played out dreams. Maybe we were the winners after all….

Bob the Baptist lives up the hollow where the dirt road south of me dead ends in a swampy cul-de-sac. You look hard you can see past the abandoned cars, rotted boats, rusty appliances, kids’ toys, broken furniture and busted machinery to where Bob’s shack leans into the last century. Just to be sure nobody will steal this stockpile of valuable rusty corroded parts from his junkyard covered with leaf mulch and blackberry vines, Bob has nailed handwritten signs every few hundred feet: NO TRESSPASING POSTED KEEP OUT!! PRIVIT PROPPERTY, like anyone would venture into his place. By the driveway or entrance or whatever it is that isn’t maintained and is overgrown to the point any vehicle trying to drive in would be scratched to bare metal by berry thorns and cedar limbs and lost equipment, he’s nailed a plywood plank painted black with white words: JESUS IS COMMING SOON!!

These are the End Times, Bob tells us neighbors. South End Times, anyway, if Bob’s place comes under scrutiny. It looks like Armageddon hit yesterday. Windows are broken out and covered with plastic that’s now tattered. Doors hang off their hinges, usually open winter or spring. The first time I went back there looking for my dog who’d wandered off, I walked through an open door with books and magazines strewn everywhere, thinking it was an anteway or a porch … until I realized to my horror I was deep into his house. Believe me, I backed out of there fast as anything, expecting a shotgun blast from Bob the Baptist. He walked up a minute after I’d exited his home sweet hovel and demanded to know who I was, what I wanted, why I was there. “Lost dog,” I mumbled.

“We’re ALL lost,” he fairly howled. “We’re all lost and we don’t even know it!!” Tobacco stains ran down his matted beard and his eyes bulged like King Lear in a room full of psychiatrists.

Bob’s okay, actually, reasonably harmless and even sociable occasionally. The neighbors hear him once in awhile, exhorting whatever demons drive him day in and day out. Apparently the demons aren’t listening. Awhile back we heard he used to be a minister over the other side of the mountains. Heard it from one of his flock. Bob had had an affair with the local TV station’s weathergirl and his wife had run off with the church’s deacon. The weather lady moved up to a megawatt Atlanta station and Bob was banished to the wilderness. I guess it makes some sense he ended up down here. Although … Bob still hasn’t figured out most of us don’t think of this as punishment or penance. Hell, I guess, is in the eye of the beholder too.

By now you’ve heard the bad news: Island County Transit will cancel all routes this summer in hopes of bringing fiscal responsibility to the beleaguered service. The five person Transit Board making the decision — all from Whidbey Island — voted unanimously to bring costs in line by curtailing service here which purportedly cost twice as much per mile per rider than on Whidbey. When questioned on how that figure was derived, a spokesman said it was obvious since Camano is twice as far from the county seat as any place on Whidbey. “Truth is,” the spokesperson declared, “only one of the Board has ever been to Camano, it’s too far to hold meetings.”

Another recommendation by the Board was to rename the bus system Whidbey Transit, presumably to reduce confusion over here in Tijuana that bus service might still be county-wide. A board member who spoke off the record argued that since most Camano riders didn’t own a vehicle, traffic would not be appreciably impacted. “Plus,” she added, “it should actually decrease slightly with less buses plying the Camano routes.” When asked how those vechicle-less riders would get to their jobs, she said they could always move to Oak Harbor. “Rents are cheaper here in town, I’ve been told.”

Needless to say, the South End Economic Council refused to take this lying down. Plans are in the works to create a South End Shuttle Service serving rideless residents. “Kind of an Uber-bus prototype,” Ralph Flatulenz, current president of the council, was quoted. “Course, we would probably have trucks and SUV’s, not buses. We’re still in preliminary planning. Maybe we could share school buses,” he said. “Be good for the kids to have some extra adult supervision. Although I hear rumors that school buses might also be taken out of circulation on Camano. Stanwood has its own budget problems, same as Whidbey.” Or maybe we could just stop sending Camano kids to school.

My buddy Sam lives in a dilapidated house down by the newly opened Katmandu Kite Shop and no, it isn’t a kite store, it’s a recreational marijuana outlet. Sam’s place sits back in the nettled interior, down a dead end dirt road near the old trout pond that once held trout but got dredged back in the early ‘80’s on one debauched weekend that ended my trout fishing on the South End.

Sam’s been living the bachelor life since his wife left him. She’d grown weary of the power being turned off for non-payment and the back taxes on the place reaching critical mass and since neither of them were willing to work, they played ‘chicken’ with each other, hoping the other would swerve first back into the job market. No way was Sam going back to wage slavery so ultimately Bobbie packed her things, left a short and not-so-sweet note and headed back down to an old boyfriend in Eugene, Oregon who at least worked part-time driving schoolbus.

Sam says he never saw it coming. I believe him, not because all the signs weren’t pointing inexorably toward a dissolution, but because Sam doesn’t have peripheral vision. He would have to hit a sign head-on. In fact, he didn’t find Bobbie’s kiss-off letter until four days after she left. Which isn’t as myopic as you might think. Sam is a Hoarder. His house is like one of those ant farms I had as a kid, nothing but tunnels, stuff stacked along the paths head high, trails leading to the bed or the bathroom or through the kitchen to the stove on one side, the fridge down a different path.

Bobbie kept the piles slightly more passable, but now that she’s gone, the tunnels have narrowed. Nothing much gets thrown away, but stuff apparently is coming in constantly, at least by my observation after not seeing Sam for a few months. The folks who dreamed up ‘planned obsolescence’ never counted on the Sams who keep the broken crap and live in their own midden. Another year, I figure he’ll run out of room completely. I don’t know how many Sams are out there, but I have to wonder if this isn’t why Sears, after a century, is going broke.

I remember as a kid coming down to my sad breakfast of gruel and grits and our mom asking me and my brothers if we’d heard? “Heard what?” we’d ask groggily. “School was canceled today,” she’d say. “All right!” we’d yelled, visions of morning shows on TV and neighborhood ball games in the afternoon filling our dumb little heads. School’s out, school’s out, Teacher wore her ruler out! A surprise free holiday, oh boy!

And then at the height of our Cheerio euphoria, she’d drop the hammer. April Fool!!!! If there’s a special holiday for sadists to prey on the weak and the gullible, this is it. Cruelty as comedy. Our mother would laugh until she had to sit down, then when the Old Man stumbled to the table, she’d regale him with our sad stupidity and we were humiliated all over again. You know, before we had to go to our school that was still holding classes for boneheads like us.

By the next year we’d have forgotten what April first was — and so fell once more into our mother’s traps. She had plenty. I think she worked 364 days to get the next one ready. Nowadays, it’s April Fool 365 days, no days off. Viral e-mails, the internet, Fox and MSNBC, all 24/7. If you know what’s fact and what’s fiction, good work! Just don’t send me the news on my e-mail anymore. I’m not 6 years old and I don’t believe a word my mother says now, which are mostly pronouncements from Fox News.

We live in the Digital Age where ‘facts’ are cherry-picked by the unseen hand of a computer algorithm. If we believe everything we read now, it’s because we only read what we want to hear. What fun is it if we fool all of us who’ve fooled ourselves all of the time? This May 15th the FCC is going to shut down the internet for 24 hours for a much needed de-bugging for malware. I know we won’t, but maybe we could turn off the TV too for a little Cranial Cleaning. Maybe next year we’d have a chance to reinstall an authentic April Fools Day again. That, or add an app to our newly virus-scrubbed computer, a Prank Alert.

I spend a lot of time behind the wheel of a grocery shopping cart. Since I don’t own a cellphone to check with the mizzus what size or brand of mayo or dressing she prefers this particular afternoon or to chat it up with some friend or relative to while away the lonely hours on Aisle 6, I find my entertainment studying the purchasing patterns of my fellow South End shoppers.

I was behind Ginny Sprague this morning. Ginny’s a mom of 3, 4 if you count her husband Morty who’s been unemployed since before the Great Recession. Her cart was a veritable shrine to General Mills, Frito-Lay and Coca-Cola. Now, I grew up on morning cereal, but I was a teenager before Kelloggs and their corporate adulterers began to hook us kids on Count Chocula or Cap’n Crunch with mostly sugar additives. That’s why we have moms, I figure, but Ginny either got addicted too or else the kids rule the trailer at mealtimes. Box pizzas, candy bars, diet Coke, canned Spaghetti-O’s, white bread, processed meat. Maybe her root cellar is still stocked with vegetables and fruit which would explain their absence in the cart, but … I’m betting the children and Morty hate broccoli and apples.

Her pile of groceries wasn’t a lot different than half the shoppers bumper to bumper at check-out, I know. We’re the wealthiest folks on earth and we eat like it’s Halloween every day. Ginny’s kids are little blubberballs at age 7,8 and 10. Ginny’s no toothpick herself and yeah, I know, it’s none of my damn business. I’ll be dead of malnutrition before they glut the health care system with diabetes and poor circulation and hopeless obesity. Not my problem, I spoze, but when I hear Ralph next door bitching about the ‘nanny state’ intruding on his freedom when schools serve nutritious food instead of a slice of pizza and a Coke, I think, hey, I’m paying for their lunch with my taxes too.

But arguing with Ralph is a proven form of masochism. I just nod in agreement. “Let them eat cake, Ralph,” I say. “And wash it down with a supersize soda.” Ralph’s just glad we can finally agree on something.