The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The British Medical Journal just released a study confirming what most women and a few of us men already know: guys do stupid things. I know, it’s not exactly news, but this is Science, a powerful tool. Okay, only half of us believe in it anymore, but the newspapers have to put something in between the appliance ads and the comic page.

Nevertheless, it got me thinking about my own Great Moments in Jackassdom and I’m sure you got your own. Not all us males will risk our lives frivolously, whether from high IQ or low courage, but I’ve noticed plenty who do. A few years back a bunch of us South End yahoos were having a little bacchanalia off the backroads at a log cabin in the nettle savannahs. A few drinks, some medical herbs and next thing you know we’ve got a roaring bonfire lighting the sky to whoops and holler and general mayhem. At some point we haul out a couch and four of us (right, all guys) toss it on the fire sending sparks halfway to the space station. I don’t actually remember who initiated it, but some idiot (right, a male) decided to leap the conflagration. Then, at the encouragement of one particular female, others took a turn Fire Jumping, crazed drunken pheromone-incapacitated morons hurtling over a sofa in full toxic flame. Great fun!

I had worked in Everett General Hospital one 4th of July and I remember a guy we got in the ER who’d toppled into a fire and been dragged out by bystanders. He died that night. So when I saw my overweight out-of-shape artist buddy revving it up for his turn, I said don’t do this, man, but I could see he needed to impress the cheering lady and nothing I could say was going to deter him so whoopee wahoo! off he goes … and stumbles at the edge of the bonfire. I can still see him, arms akimbo, off balance at the launch pad, a silhouette aglow like a Bosch dream of Hell, another human sent packing to the furnace. He hit the ground all fours, tumbled to a landing to cheers and celebrations. I was the one weak in the knees.

We don’t burn as many couches these days. I don’t know if we’ve grown wiser … or the dumb have all been incinerated.

South End Greenworks finally opened its doors. They’ve pretty much avoided the radar and the microscope since they bought the old cinderblock building that sat vacant for years after Shari’s Style Shoppe closed up when Shari retired and moved to her Nevada trailer court retirement villa. Since then it’s grown a nice patina of green mold. You’d think they’d have had a Grand Opening, throw open the doors to all the smokers and tokers who’ve been buying marijuana for years illegally. When Prohibition ended — hoo boy! — the celebrations rang to the rooftops and the liquor flowed like glacier melt. And lasted for days. It was an undeclared National Holiday.

Maybe we’re just accustomed to being miscreants and scofflaws down here, but I didn’t see much hoopla the day they opened their windowless doors. Only a discrete sign in a barred window timidly declaring they were OPEN. The End of an Era and it went out with a whimper, not a bang. A few folks stood across the highway with cameras. Two Toke Tom waved and smiled and said ‘cheese’. I think he thought they were reporters for the Stanwoodopolis Gazette chronicling the momentous event, but Tom was maybe overdosed on the ‘edibles’. The so-called press sure wasn’t going to help publicize this affair even if it might sniff of newsworthiness. No sir. The South End String Band played a tongue-firmly-in-cheek Strange Grange Ganja Gig a few weeks earlier to fundraise for the South End Grange, something they do most every year. The papers, every one from Skagit Valley to Everett, refused even to list the concert on their events calendar. Oh my. So much for that left wing bias. Even legal, the sheer mention of the drug that apparently can’t be spoken scares the ink off these folks.

No, the photographers wanted mug shots of the citizens brazen enough to enter the Greenworks. By god, if the government won’t label these folks criminals, they sure would. Paste those shots on Facebook instead of the Post Office. Maybe call these infidels out if they show their shameless faces at the Little Chapel in the Ravine. Shame them and blame them and defame them!!

Sure, I thought about photographing them photographing my pals, then running their sorry mugs on the Skeeter blogspot, but I was worried they’d go North Korean on me, hack my e-mail, threaten to blow up my shack. All I can say is I sure am sorry we’re overseas fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We could use some help down here on the South End.

I had an old friend ask me late into our New Year’s Party last year if I had a banjo she could borrow so she could learn to play one. Since I had 5 of them hanging on various walls, I could hardly say no without seeming like some selfish materialistic you-know-what. Four were handmade by me, three of them within the year so I didn’t want to loan those. Another is my concert banjo, mostly rebuilt by me, so no on that too. And another was a 1920’s vintage Sterling, nice inlays, sweet action, pretty sounding little 5 string.

So I loaned her the Sterling. Reluctantly. And I still felt like a selfish materialistic you-know-what. I mean, jeez, she was a friend and I could help out and maybe she’d even learn to play the thing and maybe love playing it and the world would be a better place with another banjo picker. Stranger things have happened, believe me.

Two weeks later I get a call. The banjo, she says, has problems. Won’t hold its tuning. The 5th string peg is glitchy. She’s had her luthier pals look at it, but they don’t want to make adjustments. She wanted me to pick it up, fix it and return it when I had it ready. She sounded a little put-off that her loaner wasn’t up to snuff. I said bring it down and I’ll see what I can do, but I’d been playing it and I sure didn’t have those problems. She said snippily, it does now.

I adjusted some tuning pegs and glued the 5th string peg and she took it on home. It was clear she wanted a replacement banjo, but I was … well, you already know what I was. A week later she called to say the banjo was no good. Her friends had looked at it and they said it was no good too. She was bringing it back. I said okay. I was leaving but just leave it in the shop, door is unlocked.

When I got home, it was raining cats and puppies. There was a message on my answering gizmo telling me my banjo was leaned against the shop back door, outside, and it was raining so if I got this call, I might want to bring the banjo inside. At which point she laughed and hung up. I raced down and sure enough, my vintage 1920 maple banjo was soaking wet, the pot full of water, the tuners ready for some imminent rust.

Maybe a better man, a less materialistic you-know-what man, would’ve shrugged and said c’est la vie, it’s just a banjo, probably only worth $500, no big deal. But like I said, I’m not. And my friend, well, she isn’t my friend anymore. With friends like that I could start another band. Course, it would be mostly blues.

G.I. George is positively apoplectic watching the news on the flatscreen over the bar at the Pilot House in the South End Marina. “Torture?” he’s snarling, “they can’t HANDLE torture!!! They’d rather see those *&%!!* Arabs blow us up in our sleep than interrogate the ?!!@*^’s!” Jerry, the night bartender, hits the channel changer and the Senate committee’s report on the CIA becomes Two and A Half Men, Charlie Sheen smirking with a cocktail in his hand and a girlfriend with 38’s spilling into the camera, usually a Pilot House pacifier, but not tonight.

George is threatening to waterboard Jerry if he doesn’t turn the station back to Fox News. Little Jimmy votes with his empty beer bottle for Charlie Sheen and his lady friend and out of sheer contrariness I second the motion. “Who’s with me on this?” George shouts. He’s standing up and he’s ready to hit Omaha Beach – or Tyee Beach in this case – but he’s getting no Takers.

“Call up Dick Cheney,” I prod, “see if he wants any more sunlight on the subject.” Jerry shoots me a warning as he wipes a glass with his bar towel. Politics and liquor, a flammable cocktail. He’s seen too many fires. George is scowling at me now. “You creepy little draft dodger,” he growls.

“Too old for Iraq, George, too young for Korea. I missed all the good ones.” I watch George calculating my age, see if maybe I should’ve been in Viet Nam like all the other drafted patriots, but he’s not certain enough to go for my skinny jugular. George, we all know, lost a brother those last days of the Saigon evacuation and he’s bitter, even after forty years. He’s got two American flags on little antennas off the roof of his Hummer that look like the Star Spangled Banner after 200 years of Hurricane Sandy.

I can see if I say one more wiseass thing, he’s going to waterboard me in the men’s room so I say, “George, let’s agree to disagree, okay?” I know, it’s a stupid cliché and I feel small for saying it, but George heaves himself back down at the bar and sighs. “Jeez, Jerry,” he finally says, “that Charlie Sheen is a total %!@**#.” Jerry pours him another whiskey sour, on the house, and says, “Yeah, but he’s a funny %!@**#.”

I’m parked right now in a heroin den. Don’t be alarmed, don’t call Nine One One — I haven’t succumbed to the siren call of narcotics. Yet. We had a couple of neighbors renting the low rent house next door for quite a few years and if I’d been more alert, I might’ve realized the discarded syringes I occasionally found by our property line weren’t from diabetics littering from passing cars. Call me naïve, but I’ve never tuned into the ‘needle culture’. Turns out our boyz were what their counselor — a friend of ours — refers to as Heavy Users. And here all the time I just thought they were Hopeless Losers.

When I moved to the South End, I was figuring I’d be leaving the city and my ghetto neighborhood behind. Course I realized I’d substitute urban gangsterism for redneck reality, but … there were way fewer rednecks than pimps, prostitutes, gun runners, thieves, drug dealers and white slavers that populated my street in Seattle and Gomorrah. Give me a few NRA anti-government racist whackos in exchange for all the capitalist creeps next door to me in the Big City and I was happy to decamp on Camano Island.

Little did I know these urban lowlifes were going to follow me out to Nirvana, no doubt assuming our sleepy island deputies were related to Barney Fife. Even Mayberry is pockmarked now with meth dealers, crackheads and smack addicts. And for certain they’re here on the South End. Although … we’re rid of two. The renters next door moved on. One to the afterlife and the other to Oklahoma. You won’t hear me say HELL. I suspect the survivor will do real well in Oklahoma, a gay junkie in a Red State. Couldn’t do much worse than here. The last month he was sequestered in this house, no power, no lights, no heat, the curtains pulled, no visitors, no sign of life. I thought he’d moved away … until the day he was hitting the electrical panel box with a hammer, hoping, I guess, PUD was joshing about non-payment disconnections and a few hard blows would do the trick to restore juice, probably a fairly common mistake among urban refugees.

His landlady, good hearted soul that she was, gave him an extra month free of charge to find a new lair. In the end she even helped him pack, rented him a storage unit, moved his stuff and gave him a ride to the airport. I think it was the straw that ruined her dream of renting the place anymore.

So … we ended up buying the place. I’m not too hot to rent it just yet. Maybe clean up the discarded syringes, fumigate the joint and let the little house breathe for awhile. I think it deserves a rest. And … so do we.

Well, they just discovered the oldest known art on the planet, some zig zag scratches on a clamshell from 500 thousand years ago. This is about 300,000 years earlier than the next oldest masterpiece from the prehistoric era. I guess that zig zag abstract set us artists back, oh, not quite half a million years. Presumably the philistines of the Neanderthal caves weren’t ready for avant-garde minimalist renderings at their clam barbecues, a lesson us contemporary aesthetes ought to take to heart. Sure wouldn’t want to be responsible for another Dark Ages. And … I notice the Neanderthals have mostly died out. Okay, maybe not died out so much as just kept denouncing art and Western culture. Okay, actually they seem to be making a comeback in the Middle East, parts of Africa, and all of the American South. Kind of a heavy price for a couple lousy scratches on some bi-valve shell left in a midden, you ask me. Course there will be a boatload of theories why art languished from then until the French cave drawings. Everything from comets hitting the salons of the shell carvers’ showings to Obama’s predecessors over-reaching their political positions.

Art, not for everybody. The cave renderings in France awhile later were a little better received. Realistic animals the Cro-Magnon boyz hunted, probably used for target practice with slingshots. Practical art. The mizzus probably complained but they didn’t have wallpaper yet and even some animal scribbles probably Martha Stewarted up the damp cave walls. That happily-received realism held sway for, well, pretty much into the 20th century. For you art historians that adds up to about 300,000 years… or pretty much 99.999% of human existence. That’s a lot of painting and sculptures of horses, cute kids, sunsets and nature scenes. I mean, I can’t really get enough either. And so, apparently, can’t the South End judging by the tourist art cramming up the galleries and boutiques . As the gentleman who sent me a hate letter when we built the decidedly abstract Visitor Center a decade ago stated vehemently, Modern Art was dead and relegated to the ash heap of history according to his fellow art professors … and pretty much my so-called career was too … or so he hoped. Why, he asked, couldn’t I have done a mural of a mountain or a stream, something equally as beautiful as nature? Why too couldn’t I just go away and spare the island my blighted vision of the world?

A good question, Professor, but since you didn’t give me a return address, it’s one that you apparently weren’t interested in hearing a response to. The Zig Zag Man of half a million years ago might have had a better answer than mine anyway, but since Art beat Literature and Writing to the historical table, we’ll never know, will we? And since I beat the good Professor to the finish line, his criticism was a bit too belated to stop the project. He did, however, write a similar complaint to the Senior Center when he got wind of another contemporary window we’d planned for installation in the entryway, more ‘degenerate’ art he might have called it if Adolph hadn’t sullied the description for future critics. Of course, unlike a lot of artists, I’m a bit tone deaf to criticism. So instead of just a couple of door panels we doubled down and did the entire front entryway to the Center. The Perfesser no doubt was apoplectic, but … it didn’t destroy the building after all. Jump forward a nano-second in the Human Timeline and those abstract shell scribbles are dotting the landscape from the South End to Seattle and Gomorrah and beyond. Someday, no doubt, future art archeologists will pry up remnants of broken glass and marvel that nothing like that has been seen on earth for a quarter million years. And my guess is they’ll probably be thankful. Like my old man always said, You can’t please em all…

Most of our crime on the South End is local. You got basically one way off the island, even most criminals can figure out how easy it is to put up a Roadblock by the bridge. But occasionally we get Outside Trouble. Rare, but it happens. Last year one of my old band members, who rents his castle a little to the south of us, dropped by his tenant where he planned to meet his realtor so he could discuss why his house hadn’t sold in, oh, four or five years.

His tenant, when he knocked on the door and finally shouted inside, came down the stairs in a state of disrepair, having been tied up, pistol whipped and shot in the shoulder by two ‘friends’ from Seattle who’d purportedly come by at 7 or 8 in the morning to, what she claimed!, give her some money they owed. Instead, I guess they decided to keep the money and take hers. Happens all the time …. Just not a whole lot on the South End. Did I mention our victim denied being shot?

It’s probably lucky for us that most criminals think the police are as dumb as they are. If not decidedly dumber….

My ex-band member — I did mention EX band member, didn’t I? — believed every word, even if the deputies who arrived later were somewhat more suspicious. Still believes she wasn’t shot, last time I talked to him, even when I asked about the hole in her shoulder, entry and exit. Probably doesn’t believe the Band 86’d him either. So when she gets released from the hospital, he takes pity on her and lets her stay rent-free until she can get back on her feet.

About two days later he gets a call from another ex-band member, neighbor Jim, who informs him there’s a box truck loading up in the driveway and maybe he ought to come on down and see what’s what. Which he does. Only to find two guys busy loading his artwork and furniture into the truck. He politely tells them this stuff belongs to him and they apologize and say they’re helping his tenant load her stuff and didn’t realize. All a misunderstanding, an honest mistake, see? He puts his stuff in the garage so they won’t misidentify it from hers, goes home satisfied that things worked out, and of course, they load up all his paintings and furniture and hit the road, where, since he’s a trusting sort, no roadblock awaits them at the bridge off the island.

If there’s a moral to this story, hell if I know what it is. Other than to say, if you’re ever starting your own Band, be sure you audition your prospective musicians.

The Umpcrickomish live in government housing in the valley they once had a name for but don’t anymore. All of us in UpCreek would live there if we could imagine a reservation or remember our elders or if television wasn’t invented because we’re all part of the same tribe, we just don’t know it. Charlie Johnson, who owns the Otter Creek Trading Post, who sells us our cigarettes and canned meat and our 24 ounce high alcohol beer, he knows we’re all kin whether we’re great grandsons of immigrant loggers or the grandparents of native babies left in our care by drug addict parents. We all would dream the Ghost Dance but the ghosts are all us now and the drums long ago stopped beating. Charlie, just like the rest of us, stopped Spirit Chasing and went after the money.

There’s a playground in the center of the dilapidated government houses, mostly rusty chainswings and a slide that’s tilted toward Whitehorse Mountain where the concrete beneath it heaved over and cracked. Walking by the other evening, I watched Jimmy Walks-the-Talk sitting on the rotted seat of one of the swings, head bent forward, pushing himself slowly back and forth in the fading winter light which looked to him like his future. Laughter left this playground a long time ago and took its friend Hope with it.

Maybe if the reservation had been nearer the freeway, we could’ve built a casino, sold cheap gas and untaxed cigarettes. But we’re a world away from an interstate teeming with gamblers and chainsmokers. No one would come to our Las Vegas. But those are the dreams we dream now, not the ones we’ve forgotten. The kids have computers now and their own cellphones. They live where the river has dried up and the mountains have crumbled and the skies are grey with microwave grids. So do we. The real world is dissolving into the past. We don’t see it yet, but so are we.

Jimmy, I know without seeing him now, is swinging in the dark, eyes closed, sightless as the windows across the unmowed football field with no curtains and the flickering blue electronic lights. He should go home. I should go home too. We’ve just forgotten where it is, is all.

After an hour in the South End Dental Clinic chair, I’m slowly starting to feel my face again. It’s been years since the last road construction in my mouth and I’d forgotten — or repressed — the uniqueness of the dental experience. Mouth dams, jackhammers, sump pumps, interrogation lighting and full disclosure on finances, assets and lienholders.

Like I said, it’s been awhile in between visits, something to do with the lack of dental insurance. You want to see the face of poverty, look at a person’s teeth, at least the ones that aren’t missing. I’m trying the best I can to keep mine. But … when the good doctor shows me the estimate for filling a cavity, $250 (not counting x-rays,etc.) versus what the bill will be if this is a root canal, $2200 —which is what he expects it to be — you can maybe understand why the frugal shopper might opt to have the damn tooth pulled right out of his head for good, skip the anaesthetic.

My last root canal and crown cost $1100. The dentist in Stanwoodopolis drilled twice and didn’t get the infected nerve cleaned out. The last visit he asked if I wanted to give it a 3rd go or have him refer me to a specialist. I said, gee Bob,I didn’t get a dental degree but since you need to ask, let’s go with someone who knows what they’re doing, which is obviously neither of us.

You want to spoil a doctor/client relationship, this is pretty direct. Course when I had to have the specialist’s temporary crown replaced with a permanent one, something beneath him apparently, I went to a new dentist. News travels fast in Podunk and I got a pretty cold shoulder from my new guy. Another last visit. Which is why, after 15 years, I’m at the newly opened South End Pain Clinic, no records transferred, no toxic gossip exchanged. Just money. The way I remember dentistry in the good old days….

Yup, I’m flying cross country again. Always an adventure! You think you’ve heard every excuse for flight delays, you underestimate the airlines. I’m waiting in Minneapolis/St. Paul because, you ready?, the stewardess spilled hot coffee on herself, burning herself so badly she’s incapacitated. They’re looking for a spare stewardess right now. The last flight the pilot apologized for not having Wi-Fi. Seems the plane was brand new and they didn’t install it yet. I guess they like to break a plane in first, get the coffee spills out of the way.

It’s two hours later…. Evidently they couldn’t hire and train a stewardess on such short notice. Plus there’s the scorched coffee lawsuits to consider. We were herded down an eighth of a mile for new seat assignments on the next and last flight out ‘for most of us’ on a flight four hours from now at the other end of the terminal. Course we got plenty of time for that marathon walk. I plan to hike it 4 or 5 times. The guy in front of me really wanted his first class again, but hey, that’s evidently beyond a computer’s meager capacity so we’re in Random Shuffle. The lady next to me wanted a food voucher. Ho ho. She thought these were still the ‘friendly skies’ of yesteryear. I was the only yahoo they needed to see ID from, maybe see if my temper snapped, make room for those poor saps who weren’t getting out tonight.

Those who say government couldn’t run anything but into the ground, tell someone else. I haven’t made a flawless trip by airplane in years. Maybe I’m just unlucky and you’ve got tales of efficient monopolies running like well-oiled machines, lower costs and improved services, happy travels and complementary dinners, competitive pricing and roomy seating, convenient schedules and direct flights, plenty of overhead baggage room and free luggage once again. But … I seriously doubt it. Santa is dead, the Easter Bunny’s a drunk and the airlines don’t answer to anyone but their shareholders … who no doubt fly in private jets.