The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I was chatting it up with my neighbor today who bought the old farm next door. He’s been out of work awhile but said he’d been doing a little consulting this past year. Consulting. I like the sound of that. Conjures up visions of bathrobe and slippers, a cup of joe and a home computer screen. “Sounds good!” I offered, semi-envious. “Well, he countered, “I don’t know about that … but it’s good to make some money for a change.” Indeed. And isn’t that the question for all us South Enders: how much money versus how much work? Or, as I opined to my neighbor, “what’s the bottom here? What’s the LEAST amount of money we need to live so we can have the time to do just that?” Live. Sure, it’s probably germane to a more global audience too, but … let’s be honest. This is THE burning question on the sloth-inducing South End. How much is Just Enough? Wen do we draw a line in the beach sand and say, No Mas!

Admittedly it’s a slippery equation, one fraught with peril. Foreclosures, collection agencies, repossessions, divorce, severe depression. But obviously we didn’t move to the end of a skinnyass island off the beaten career path looking for a management position with a high tech startup. Those people RETIRE here. The rest of us, we’re hoping to retire here too — just a lot earlier. Without a pension, without a 401-K plan.

Let’s just say it’s a high wire act without the safety net.   Sure, plenty of us slipped. Hit bottom and couldn’t scrape ourselves off to try again. You don’t get second chances down here. The bank isn’t going to offer grief counseling and Tyee Store isn’t going to extend credit. It’s a hard road when you screw up. Paradise when you balance the risk to the reward. Point is, you want to keep both in equilibrium. You need help, call me, I’m available for consultation.

Back in the 70’s when everyone else in America was putting on leisure suits and rocking out to the BeeGees and disco, I headed north up to a Polish homestead in upper Wisconsin. Had a farmhouse and the old summer cook shed, a smoke house and a barn. We pumped water from a well outside and we did our business in an outhouse we had to build to replace the rotted original one. It was primitive living, but you ask me, better than disco by a country mile or two.

I guess I went whole hog on this going back to the land thing. We put in a big garden over the old pigpen, laid in wood for the winter that was going to come soon and hard, made homemade bread and tried to steal honey from the bees in the barn who taught me a vicious lesson about theft and the need for better bee helmets. Somewhere during that idyllic summer I decided to become a hunter. My father-in-law gave me a .22 semi-automatic rifle and so I wandered into the oak woods across the road to pursue my luck at squirrel hunting.

Maybe you never shot a semi-automatic rifle before. If not, let me explain that it’s made for folks who don’t intend to be marksmen. You sort of point it in the direction of your target and start shooting. It fires as fast as you can pull the trigger, a couple times a second. You don’t really need to aim, just watch the bark peel back as you zero in on that poor little squirrel who really has never seen anything like that in his woods before. Needless to say, Davy Crockett here came home with plenty of varmint for dinner those first couple weeks of autumn.

We skinned em, we tanned the hides, we ate stews, we fried em, we put em on the grill. It took a couple or three to make a meal. A squirrel is really more of an hors doeurve than a meal, but you have to kill a few mammals to fill your belly. It started to seem, well, cruel. I mean, I know I was going back to a hunter/gatherer ethos and all, but a lot of squirrels were dying to satisfy my pioneer dreams. After all, this was the 1970’s, not 1870.

My last hunt I shot a little gray squirrel, knocked him off his limb and he managed to hang on to another on the fall. I shot him again and he stayed put. I put another couple of slugs into him and he finally dropped in a heap to the leafy ground, but then he hauled himself into a hole in the trunk of the oak. I had to pull him by the tail out of that shelter and dispatch him mercilessly with one final shot. I still remember that moment and I still remember that little squirrel, riddled with my bullets, dying for what would be a morsel to me. Call me squeamish, call me a bleeding heart liberal, call me a squirrel lover … but don’t call me a hunter. I put the gun back in a closet and never shot it again.

When I moved out here, I threw the gun in the Conestoga along with most of our possessions, but that first few months I traded it for a 5 string banjo. Which can fire a note as fast as I can pull the trigger. So … I guess I’m still inducing unnecessary suffering on innocent creatures. But at least no lives are being lost….

I was contacted recently to participate in the annual Christmas Bird Count. I’m not all that curious about bird censuses, but hey, maybe it’s time I paid a little more attention to my feathered fellow companions here on the nettled South End. After all, we all flock together most days, bumping into each other or giving each other plenty of space. We’re what is called a Backyard Habitat, what I used to call my woods. The birds don’t care what we call it so long as the fruit and berries, seeds and nectar keep them on task. We got so much food these days the hummingbirds stay for the winter, altho … hell if I know how they live through the freezes and still find enough to eat. Probably the neighbors who put out hummingbird feeders with sugar water and apparently anti-freeze when the temperatures drop into the 20’s….

So I wander out for a gander … or at least a look-see. I wander around the yard, down through the orchard, around the shack, back into the woods, back out and up the hill. I hear, but don’t see, two crows exchanging gossip so I diddle around by the rhodies, back through the yard and into the garden, then retrace, slip by the pond and hike up the back way to the house. In twenty minutes of paying a little attention to the bird life around me, I realize there’s no bird life whatsoever around me. None. Zilch. Nada. Zip.

It’s not like we live in the South End Sub-Sahara. It’s not semi-arid or desert. Although it appears to be deserted. All aviary existence has ceased! The birds are gone! It’s like a reverse Alfred Hitchcock, instead of billions of the feathered beasts gathering for the final assault against mankind and those killer cats that prey on them constantly, they’ve simply disappeared. It’s obviously a die-off. I think DDT. Might be. Or a radiation cloud. Those quirky North Koreans at it again, this time killing our birds. Or all those microwave towers, maybe they upped the voltage. Who knows? Who’s investigating? And then I realize, I haven’t seen a car go by. Or a neighbor out in their yard. Or heard a chainsaw in the distance. The world has ended, just me and those two crows left and they’re not talking to me. Or are they?

And of course that’s when it hits me: the birds are like illegal immigrants when the census people come knocking, they don’t want to be noticed, much less interviewed and counted. They’ve hidden in the bush, crawled into their nests, stopped flying, stopped foraging, stopped period. They’ve become invisible to us. They don’t want to be counted!!

Today the count is over. My tally was apocalyptic. Noah could build a pretty small ark if the Flood comes back for my sinner neighbors. I went outside to prune fruit trees today and … well, the birds are back, busy as bees. But wait! Where are the bees????

The South End has always been a refuge for us scofflaws and scalawags, con-men and con-artists, ne’er-do-wells and downright losers. I admit it. I even prefer it to the manicured fescue estates behind remote controlled gates further north. Until they start figuring it’s easier to steal from fellow denizens. Which is exactly why I removed myself from the ghetto I found myself in before coming here 37 years ago.

Taking a walk up to a little park I tend on the east side of the island, a neighbor asked if I’d had any break-ins lately. No, I said, you? Three, he said. Know who it is? I asked and he said yeah, the twenty-something heroin addict staying two doors down at John B.’s. John B. won’t talk to my neighbor and the kid in question ran off into the woods when he tried talking to him. I said I guess you know who your culprit is. Fat good it’ll do him….

An hour ago, after chainsawing up a few downed trees in my park, I stopped in to see my old pard Guitar Bob just down the road. He was hauling wood in from a huge cedar that fell in the storm, but we took a break to catch up on news. His news concerned the neighbor woman who kept stopping by to use his phone. She doesn’t have one herself. What she has is a hard luck story for G.B., no car, needs a ride to get meds in Seattle, has cancer, undergoes dialysis, kid is in a halfway house, can’t work, doesn’t have any money. Bob, a hardened urban character, street-wise before they made cobblestones, also has a soft heart. He takes in stray cats and unwanted dogs—he took my junkie neighbor’s hound – and he gives to about 42 and half charities what little he can afford to give.

So he ends up taking her clear to Seattle one night to get a prescription filled for meds she desperately needs. Two hour drive one way. They go, not to a hospital 24 hour pharmacy, but downtown to some seedy apartment in Belltown. He waits in his jalopy and she goes up to get her ‘meds’. I know, you’d think the lights would come on for a streetsmart character like Bob, but … he felt bad for her, you know, dying of cancer and needing dialysis and well, at least she wasn’t selling a bridge.

Long story a lot shorter, she gets lots more rides, stops in frequently to use his phone, wants to borrow money. You might even say they’re developing a rapport, if not a relationship. He does think it odd that the calls she makes are from his bathroom rather than the livingroom, but hey, maybe she needs some privacy. A week ago she takes the phone into the privy and he notices his wallet is missing from the counter where he always keeps it. So when she comes back he asks her for his wallet back. She says she didn’t take it.

There is something broken in a junkie’s head. I’m not a counselor and I don’t play one on TV, but … I know this: somehow they think the rest of us are way stupider than they are. And they are seriously intellectually challenged folks. That, or desperation just takes over and they will try anything, no matter how ridiculous. Guitar Bob can see her holding his wallet inside her jacket and he says you can give me my wallet or I’ll call the cops and we’ll sit here together until they come. She reluctantly hands him his wallet. Of course the money is gone. She probably figured he wouldn’t notice.

Okay, he sez, I’m calling the sheriff. If you don’t call the cops, she sez, I’ll give you a blowjob. Now, I’m no expert on these things having lived too long down in the desolate wilds of the South End, but maybe this actually works on some guys. Bob had 3 dollars in that wallet. Don’t ask me what fellatio goes for in the city, but I’m betting more than 3 bucks. Bob, being Bob, takes Total Offense, this isn’t, after all, the plot to a porno movie. He tells her he’s not calling the police, but that money is going back in his wallet and she’s going back to her hellhole house and she can never darken his doorway, he doesn’t care if her blood is toxifying to sludge or her meds are waiting at the local pharmacy.

If you think this is where the story ends, like Bob does, I suspect you’ve never been around addicts. I wish to hell I hadn’t either, but apparently, they’re living in the neighborhood thick as the deer that eat our apples. At least the deer are cute little buggers….

Little Jimmy, a buddy of mine who’s almost exactly the same old age as me, was reflecting on what he’d like to do when he retired. He’s a glass artist – same as me – and so I know, even if he doesn’t, the kind of retirement he’s dreaming of is just that, a pipe dream. There’s as much likelihood of golden years in a hammock beside a South Seas Lagoon as winning American Idol with a tin ear and laryngitis, but like most folks who gamble on a lottery ticket, the fantasy trumps mathematics.

He’s the kind of guy who itemizes his day, schedules his week, plans itinerary into the coming months and can tell you, by rote, the exact steps he’ll take into the coming years. I can no more imagine him poolside with a Cuba Libre beside his sunglasses on the cabana table slathered with tanning lotion reading a novel than I can see him winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Little Jimmy’s a List Maker. An organized, tightly scheduled Planner. He knows far ahead what he needs to do not only this morning but the morning Tuesday first week, next month. He’s the guy who made an outline before he wrote the essay in 12th grade history class and got an A+ with the teacher’s comments: well organized. I don’t need to look in his dish cabinet to know the bowls and glasses are neatly arranged by size and color. Chaos, to him, is MY cabinet, one step shy of disaster, mayhem and death.

Little Jimmy pulls out a tape rule last visit and shows me 80 inches. “See that?” I shrug in incomprehension. “What’re we measuring?” I ask. “Time left,” Jimmy declares. “If I live to be 80, slightly longer than the average U.S. male … and I’m 64 (he puts his finger at 5’4”, then this is all you and me got left, buddy, 16 inches.” He shakes his head sadly. “Time’s short now.”

Unlike most of us and me in particular, Jimmy’s hit the End of his Calendar. No more days no more months no more years. Just inches. He wants to get more done, he’s got to speed up the Line, blow more glass, sell more stock, finish 2018 by 2017, squeeze into that retirement before the tape rule hits 80 inches. They say dogs don’t understand death. I think dogs are like me — they get the idea, all right, they just don’t carry a tape rule strapped to their collar. I guess we’re a little too busy scratching fleas.

A few years ago Guitar Bob’s beater car gave up the ghost so he asked if I would drive him north to the used car lots to buy a replacement jalopy. Reluctantly, I said okay even though I had to go after my graveyard shift with no sleep. He was, after all, a friend. And one without wheels to get to work….

Walking into a used car lot is vaguely similar to driving the streets of Baghdad in an unarmored HumVee. It’s a landmine. You might make it back out, but you’re going to take incoming and there’s going to be casualties. At some point you’ll ask yourselves is this war worth it? Did you have an Exit Strategy? And who, in the end, is really the enemy? Or like General Sherman famously stated as he torched the South: car buying is hell.

Bob started out hoping to buy a vehicle for under $500. Not wanting to bust his bubble, I decided to forego the story of my last expedition into the minefields. He would learn soon enough. The Hard Way. The lot in Stanwoodopolis, just prior to closing its doors forever, showed him a $2500 wreck, bad tires, 175,000 miles on the odometer, a tranny that slipped, burned a little oil. Savvy buyers that we were, we moved on.

At a fly-by-night used lot in Burlington we found a nice little Honda, 200,000 miles, ran good, only $6500. Obviously they could rob you without a gun. Bob offered the nice salesman $5000 and he said wait right here in his office while he conferred with the manager. Bob was concerned the nice salesman would think we were gay. I said you got way more to worry about than some yahoo with a bad toupee’s opinion of your sorry manhood. In a minute, you’re gonna meet the manager.

Which we did. The manager said we seemed like nice boys and he sure wanted to work with us on this deal, put us in that car, ‘but fellas, I have to make a little money too. I can’t just give this away at a loss.’ He showed us paperwork that proved he was rock bottom on that $6500. But seeing’s how we were nice boys, he’d take a couple hundred off and take no profit. Bob said let me think about it and the manager said sure, sure, but don’t take too long, this beauty’s gonna sell today at this price. Outside Bob worried he’d thought we were parnters. I said I’ll sit out the next negotiation.

By late afternoon I’m fading from lack of sleep and food. It’s late, we’ve hit every shyster and crook up and down the pike, nothing is even close to reasonable and the notion Bob is going to shop for a week or two sends me into adrenaline-fueled panic. I drop down in the Toyota lot and forgetting about promising to stay out of negotiations, march up to a salesman coming out of the showroom side door. “We’re looking for a Toyota or a Honda,” I rapidfire. “$5000 or less, under 100,000 miles. The salesman doesn’t blink, he doesn’t hesitate, he smells the blood in the water and he knows instinctively exactly what to do.

“Your lucky day,” he smiles. “Just came in, hasn’t been detailed yet, but you boys won’t mind saving on that, one owner I’m pretty sure and the boss wants to move inventory, make you a helluva deal.” He points us over to where we just came from, past a line of cars with prices on the windshields and in my sleep deprived fog I realize he’s pointing at MY car. “Give me a minute and I’ll grab the keys from the office. Be right back. Go ahead and kick the tires.”

I regret, even to this day, we didn’t tell him we found the keys in the ignition and take him with us for a test drive. “These two gay guys, see, pulled over on the shoulder …. I thought maybe we’d run out of gas. Then I thought, oh my God, they’re going to do unspeakable things to me. But no, they said get out. Here? I asked. Here, they said. I called the lot and told them to call State Patrol, report a stolen car, even gave them the license number…. Ya know, I always said I could sell snowballs to Eskimos. But those two gay guys, I couldn’t close the deal on selling them their own car. I’m good, but I guess I’m not that good.

For the past 25 years or so the mizzus and me throw a big New Year’s Party here on the South End, partly so we don’t get to know the sheriff’s deputies any better than we do now, which is what we tell the neighbors, but the real reason is a bit more shrouded in the mists of lost memories. I got a call today from Brent, an old friend now in Alaska, and it triggered a couple of neurons into firing spasmodically once more and voila, I was back in, oh, 1985 down at the shack with just a few of us struggling mightily to make it to midnight so we could toast the new year and pass out in our bunks.
My brother was here with his wife Judy and we had Brent and Liz visiting from Portland. My brother is what you’d call a spark plug for party stuff. Meaning, when conversations lag, he springs into instant action. ‘Let’s go around the room,’ he says, ‘and tell what the best day of the year was for each of us.’ So Brent goes first and he relates a warm summer day when he and his collie were at the park and the sun was shining and the Frisbees were sailing and it was just a golden day, a boy and his pooch, fetching the Frisbee. Not maybe what my brother had in mind, I bet, but just a hippie dippy zen day that stood out for Brent more than some birthday or Christmas or the day he got a raise or the usual dopey stuff we trot out when you play Name Your Best Day.
I don’t remember what my favorite day was. I don’t remember Karen’s or my brother’s or my brother’s wife’s favorite day. But I remember Liz’s turn, Brent’s girlfriend who I’d know a long time. A real long time. A way too long a time. And as the clock ticked glacially toward 1986, gears needing oil, glasses waiting for that toast and then goodnight everybody, my brother sez, ‘Okay, Liz, what was your favorite day?’ And to this day I can remember Liz turning to Brent who was rubbing his collie’s head, probably still warm in his remembrance of a summer day in the park, and the clock’s hands stopping forever, the wood stove throwing a heat nothing like what she was focusing on poor Brent with a laser look that would burn through titanium like it was cheap plastic, and our glasses with champagne broke in the sudden stillness before she said, ‘My favorite day …. (and the ‘my’ was a small caliber bullet) My favorite day was the day we got back together, Brent.’
Maybe you’ve had a New Year’s ‘Party’ like that. The room emptying of air and sound and mirth, as if a stopper had been pulled from the tub of our happiness and no matter how hard you try, and Brent desperately tried, that stopper won’t go back in and all the merriment drains out by your feet and deep down in your cold curling guts you know, you know absolutely this is not the way you wanted to ring in the next year. You know what they mean by ill-omened now and all the months to come you will dread the next New Years’ Eve the way you would dread death itself. And of course Liz and Brent broke up and Brent moved to the furthest corner of the earth and my brother admitted maybe that wasn’t the best holiday icebreaker of all time and we decided either to forsake New Year’s altogether or bring so many people in we couldn’t possibly go around the room and play parlor games like Stab Your Lover.
And that is how the South End got its gala New Year’s Extravaganza Potluck and BYOB Party. And of course, you’re invited! Unless you got some serious issues with your girlfriend or boyfriend, lover or husband, wife or mistress. Then I think you got a new parlor game for you and a few select friends. Happy New Year anyway.

Some of the boys down here on the South End were deep into a night of nog over at the Marina’s Pilot House when the subject of New Year’s Resolutions reared its ugly head. We’d pretty much solved most of the burning issues of the day that Congress can’t or won’t address, and with world peace close at hand and a solution for global economic recovery looming in our fevered LED’s, we naturally turned to self-improvement, the final obstacle to Nirvana.

Self-improvement, in case you’ve never met a dyed-in-the-alpaca-wool South Ender, isn’t high on his Honey-Do List. If it’s on the list at all….. I’m not saying we don’t think we could use some polishing, but all those so-called vices other folks resolve every January One to curb or cut back on or eradicate completely, are those very traits we hold in high esteem. We sure aren’t in any hurry to canonize ourselves. We aren’t aiming for perfection. Okay, maybe we could stand a bit of sprucing up, but we all know what a slippery slope that is. Mabana Mike quit the bottle for 13 weeks two New Years ago and by the 3rd week he was an insufferable convert not only to Sobriety but worse, Piety. Every day was like an AA meeting with Mike and he might as well have started his own church, passed out nicotine patches and offered up 3 more cups of decaf coffee to the gods of abstinence.

No, we decided long ago it’s better to accept our little blemishes and move on the best we can. You live in a Shangri-La-La like we do, you don’t want many more monks claiming blissful enlightenment. Next thing you know hordes of tourists seeking Truth, Wisdom and the South End Way will be clogging our backwash blacktop. Plus, the Pilot House isn’t legally zoned for monasteries or temples. We’ll probably just save everyone the grief and skip the resolutions again this New Year. Good luck, though, to the rest of you….

I gassed up the pickup yesterday. $2.19 a gallon. Whoo-hoo! The price at the pump is going down faster than a horny snake courting a garden hose. Russia, who was courting crony capitalism, is doomed, dependent as they are on oil exports. Ditto Venezuala and Iran. Folks maybe wanted a military solution to the Crimea and Ukraine take-over, they can skip the shooting part, except where the Russkies shot themselves in the foot.

We’re awash in oil now. Might not even want to fight wars in the Middle East anymore, just frack our way to energy independence. Dig a shaft in every backyard and shoot down some chemicals we aren’t allowed to know what they are, probably benign, right?, just a secret is all. Like Coca-Cola’s formula. Might even taste good in your well water, but don’t light a match by the faucet if the concentration gets too high.

They aren’t fracking on the South End. Not yet. But we sure use gasoline like it was going the way of coal. Takes a tank just to commute to work. Those of us unemployables are obviously Unsung Heroes, low carbon footprinters. No need to thank us. Sloth, sometimes, is its own reward. Historians will no doubt re-evaluate our rightful place in society and we’re willing to wait. Part of those low gas prices is low demand. Yup, us again!

Pretty soon gas should be cheaper than water. Well water, I mean. It’s always been cheaper than the bottled stuff and nobody’s complaining about the price of bottled water. When fracking is done, well water might very well reach concentrations that work in an internal combustion engine. That mandatory health care folks have been complaining about might make a lot more sense then. Drink up … and drive safe! Or drink safe and stop driving. The way we do down here.

We’re about to head out before Christmas hits its Big Finale, Santa sets his GPS and leaves all his elves waiting for that fat bonus which is as likely as a Peking Pension Plan. Just shut the door behind us, leave the island and motor past the malls jammed with desperate folks on their last frenzied Push, credit cards and stress maxed, feeling like Jimmy Stewart when the bank run ends. Only without the Norman Rockwell town to back him up with community support….

I remember the Old Christmas. The one where we were poor as churchmice and all those gifts to friends and family felt like one more weight on the anchor dragging us below the surface. The folks who make minimum wage or who are unemployed or who pick our crops for next to nothing — Christmas isn’t A Wonderful Life, let me tell ya.

I know, we say the same thing every year. Christmas. Too commercial. Too materialistic. Too phony baloney. A month or two of seriously clichéd songs, TV specials, movie reruns. Scrooge, the Grinch, Tiny Tim, Christmas Future, Miracle on 34th St., all to sell cars, perfume, watches, toys, baubles and bullshit. I’m as sentimental as the next he-man, but C”MON!! It’s a tad excessive. It’s pretty close to obscene. I’m sorry, Virginia, but Santa is an executive at Wal-Mart, hate to be the one to break it to you.

I could tell you we go away to some dark hollow to escape all this … but the truth is, we leave so we don’t dampen the neighbors’ spirits here on the cynical South End. No need to thank us. It’s our gift. And as always, it’s really the thought that used to count.