The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Malcolm was practically ranting down at the Diner the other morning at breakfast for the Flatheads, nothing too out of the ordinary for the car guyz but still … he was positively hair-on-fire. “Hundred, maybe thousands of em! All over New Jersey, what the hell?? UFO’s, drones, nobody knows, nobody cares!”

Fairlane Fred put down his forkful of scrambled and asked “What are you talking about, Malcolm?”

“I’m talking about an invasion, Freddie. I’m talking about … see, this is what I’m talking about. You guys don’t even know what I’m talking about. It’s kept under wraps, under the damn radar. We’re being kept in the dark!”

Little Jimmy said, unperturbed by the pre-dawn outburst, “Well, it IS almost the shortest day of the year, ya know.” Which send Malcolm into another spasm of outburst. The breakfast crowd, seasoned socket wrenchers all, accepted Brenda’s refills, probably hoping she wouldn’t ask Malcom, no need to induce a coronary before the boys had finished their chicken fried steaks, hashbrowns and sides of white toast heavily buttered and slathered with jam from those little plastic coffins.

“Can’t you see?” Malcolm asked. “It’s a conspiracy to hide the truth.” Little Jimmy, back to his eggs, asked “what’s the truth, Malcolm?” “I don’t know. None of us know. That’s the goddamn point!”

From my perch at the corner table, a not so innocent bystander over these many years, it seems like we’ve entered the Age of Anxiety. Climate change, immigration, inflation, Trump, the Deep State, nano-plastic poisoning, the coming Plagues, pick a subject, everything is a conspiracy. Lights over New Jersey, UFO’s in Oregon, nano-trackers in the vaccines. All politics are toxic. The enemy is everywhere except us.

Malcolm finally settled into his biscuits and gravy after sputtering to a stop. He probably figured Big Larry on the grill had doctored it. Who knows, maybe he had ….

More and more of us South Enders are losing their religion, don’t ask me why. I just read a survey that showed a quarter of us don’t believe in a Supreme Being, too bad for Donald Trump. That’s way up since the last survey. But here’s the odd part: the number of us who don’t believe in God but believe in an afterlife doubled. Faith based Heaven, I suppose, or maybe just bad logic, a trend that seems to be more and more prevalent.

Down at the Little Church in the Ravine, Rev. Paul makes it a point most every Sunday to exhort his flock to eschew sin. Live a holy life, he preaches, and if you mess up, ask the Good Lord for forgiveness. Believe on the Lord, he says, or surely Hell will follow.

Now, I may be mistaken here, but I’m guessing most of the folks who believe in an afterlife are talking about Streets of Gold, not Beelzebub’s BBQ. You don’t believe in a deity, you probably won’t buy the quaint notion of the Devil. And if you think Heaven is waiting for you no matter what, why not enjoy a little sinning while you’re waiting for the Pearly Gates to open? No punishment waiting, no purgatory for the wicked. Believe me, Pastor Paul doesn’t pound that pulpit with his ragged Bible to tell parishioners they got nothing to lose if they covet their neighbor’s wife. Go right ahead, cheat the other guy on that used car you said was running great when you know damn well the engine isn’t getting oil up in the cylinder head. You can make a little extra money and still get a reservation in the Angel Motel after your last breath.

Shirley, my neighbor who runs the Pampered Pekingese Pet Grooming service, claims she’ll be reincarnated. As a pup. The Hindu believe the Wheel rewards those who do good, but I guess now we think we get what we want, not what we deserve. Shirley better hope she doesn’t end up at the pound with all the other unwanted pets. Not everyone gets pampered in this mean old world.

New Year is coming right up, plenty of time to make those resolutions for 2025. Being a South Ender, it’s difficult to conjure up anything much that needs improvement, but then again, nobody’s perfect, I guess, so I’ve been wracking my brain for some small trait that might need bettering. So far I’m kind of stumped.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like I think I’m Buddha or anything, not as if all my waking thoughts are pure as the driven snow, not like I couldn’t find a flaw or two in my persona, but jeez, you start messing with a good thing, hellfire, you might just be asking for trouble, create some distortion in the cosmos, open yourself up to worry and woe. Sure don’t want to start the New Year off on the wrong foot, stumble into 2023 when a waltz might have been more apropos.

Oh, sure, I suppose I could be more generous maybe with those donations to the Food Bank or the Senior Center. And I could probably dial up my Humility a notch, but I’m not really after Sainthood, not that I was actually in the running. At least I don’t think so …. And besides, it’s hard, really hard, to be humble as a long term South Ender. We Old Timers just try not to be Braggers, about as close to humility as we can get.

So maybe, once again, I’ll leave the Resolutions to all the rest of you. And please, whatever you do, don’t resolve to move down here on the South End thinking that migration or refugee status would suffice. It’s not that simple and honestly, some of my fellow Enders, just between you and me, could use some serious improvement. Maybe that’s my Resolution: to help these folks. To be a Light and a Way! To show them the Path!!

Then again, that attitude just puts a dent in my Humility Index. Naw, folks got to make their own Resolutions. Sorry, you’re on your own. Same as last year. Good luck to ya! You’ll be fine. Probably.

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.

Little Walter, Big Walter’s oldest boy, was sucking on a Marlboro, one boot up on the chrome bumper of Harry’s newly restored ’64 Nova, waving his can of Pabst in the ketone-laced atmosphere of the Tyee Paint and Body Shop. He was addressing the assembled masses on this particular Friday afternoon, the boyz’ favorite day. Not because it signified the end of a work week; after all, most of us layabouts are unemployed, self-employed or just employment challenged. Naw, we just like to remember when Friday was PayDay and Friday night was a night of freedom. Now everyday is a day of freedom and it seems like a subtle form of slavery.

“This country,” Little Walt was saying, “went down the crapper when we started giving people all this free stuff. Socialism, that’s what it’s called, and it killed folks’ incentive to work.” Little Walter has been unemployed for most of his adult life. He’s currently laid off from the hardwood mill over in Arlington and for the past year he’s been living off the unemployment comp he gets plus some loans from his old man. Big Walter isn’t happy about this, but he places the blame squarely on the ‘ruined’ economy. He let the boy live in the spare bedroom of his double-wide and now he has to feed the kid too and fight over what programs they watch on his 50 inch flat screen entertainment center. They both have beefs.

“You talking about that tax break we gave Boeing?” Terry asked. Terry is the kind of guy who, if he knows someone is a hypochondriac, asks them how their health is, what we on the South End call a Pot Stirrer. He doesn’t really take a side, he just wants to light a fire.

“Hell no, I’m not talking about a tax break!! I’m talking about giving these people who don’t work for a living everything they need to keep on not working for a living, that’s what I’m talking about.” He crushed his Pabst can in his right hand and beer foamed out the top and onto Harry’s new paint job. Harry said Hey Man and Walter grabbed his dirty handkerchief and Quickly wiped off the suds.

Terry said, “You must be talking about those people on unemployment compensation then. Folks sitting around drinking and not looking for honest work. You mean people like that?”

Well, you can maybe guess where that conversation went. It’s just another day loitering on the South End, debating the issues of our time, nothing much better to do than drink beer and chit chat with the neighbors. Somewhere else they got wars and refugees, they got terrorists and beheadings. People starve, people are killed, people live hand to mouth. I don’t know much, but I know this. Things here aren’t too bad, they aren’t really bad at all. You ask me, and I know you’d hate to, it seems like complaining is damn close to a sin.

Maybe you used to write Christmas Cards , the one time of year you actually put pen to paper and wrote a note to old friends, family members, school chums, co-workers and anyone else you hated to lose touch with, good opportunity to keep a thin thread of connection. Happy Holidays! Some of you typed up a chronicle of what you and the spouse and kids did over the past 12 months, a huge yawn to most of those not in the immediate family circle, but it saved you all those handwritten notes even if it bored the pajamas off the rest of us.

One year I sent a mock chronicle of the Daddle Family’s year long escapades, a summary of drug rehab, chronic depression, school dropouts, cult joining, a litany of the exact opposite of the usual success stories of the kids and their beaming parents. A few of the recipients who actually read this were confused and later remarked they never realized we had children. We don’t. So much for satire in the era of text messaging.

Or you could do like a lot of my lame relatives, use one of those family group photos, pay Shutterfly to make a few cards, then send it with no note whatsoever, maybe not even sign the damn thing and call it good for another holiday season. Bah humbug, I say. What a waste of a stamp. What a statement to the recipient. We’re too busy to scribble a single thought on this hectic holiday but we managed to address the envelope. Thanks, y’all, thanks not at all. Thought that counts, right?

Now, of course, we get e-mail Holiday Greetings, some with music and individualized identifiers of us as the recipients. Merry Christmas, Skeeter, followed by some corporation’s cute and humorous video, no doubt a subsidiary of Hallmark Cards, updated for the 21st Century and the social media crowd.

I just finished sending 3 dozen handmade Christmas cards, all with a long personal letter to folks who will probably not send anything this year and if they do, count on it, just a store-bought card with their signature under the Happy Holiday text inside. My shirt sleeve relatives will send the family photo card and no message, probably not even a signature. They figure I can identify them in the picture, I guess. Every year I say I’m not going to do this again. And so, I’m saying it again. Oh, if you’re reading this, have a great holiday. Sorry I didn’t include a family photo but Susie’s still in rehab and Wyatt’s commune doesn’t allow picture taking. Maybe next year….

Wanda and Ed Zurik own 20 acres past the Diner, mostly cleared land in the South End’s remote interior. Ed grew alfalfa and grass for his six head of cattle, but a few years back he came out to find a perfect circle burnt into his field, what he later learned was a ‘crop circle’, one of those mysterious geometries created with no trail in and no trail out. One of Ed and Wanda’s cows was missing as well. Ed and Wanda contacted the AREA 51 organization who sent an investigator up from their Arizona headquarters to verify that the circle had all the hallmarks of a UFO landing. (The cow was found a day later back in the nettles where it had gotten through an opening in Ed’s barb wire fence.)

The Camano Head, it turns out, is one leg of a Bermuda Triangle of reported sightings of UFO’s, the other legs being Mt. Rainier and the Bangor Naval Base. Ed and Wanda began to devote time and money to the AREA 51 folks, at least until Wanda was abducted one night by aliens while Ed slept the sleep of the innocent. He awoke to find her missing from their bed and found her traumatized out by the barn, barely coherent, telling him in a terrified voice how she had been ‘taken’ in a blinding pulsing light, to god only knew where, and probed and poked by unseen beings. It was, she told Ed and later the AREA 51 team, horrible. She showed them marks on her arms and legs made by syringes that took fluids from her body and shot unknown fluids back in. She was certain they were experimenting on her. Worse, she was certain they would return.

Those of us who inhabit this Triangle know it to be a strange place, all right. Maybe not an ‘entry point’ for extraterrestrial intruders, but some kind of magnetic disturbance that pulls the weird and the deranged from their ordinary lives. Ed was a former insurance salesman who decided one winter day to become a farmer, closed his office that same afternoon, sold his suburban ranch house a week later and moved here where the ‘emanations’ seemed strongest. Maybe we all felt that same pull, who knows?

When the farming proved too hard and the cows not too profitable, the Zuriks did what a lot of us do down here. He kept on digging the hole he was digging. Ed took up drinking as a second job and of course his first job suffered. Occasionally Wanda calls in a missing human report on Ed to the sheriff’s department those nights he doesn’t show up before dark, but the deputies know to check with us down at the Pilot Lounge. “You aliens got Ed Zurik?” Carl, the night bartender, will holler to us layabouts and, more likely than not, if we don’t, we soon will.

Christmas on the South End isn’t like the movies, all tinsel and presents under a twinkling tree, eggnog and caroling. Unless you wanted a chunk of coal you didn’t bother putting up stockings by the chimney for old St. Nick to fill. Us kids just figured we were all naughty, not nice by somebody’s standards, so we got what we deserved. Pretty much nothing. Whoever decided Santa was judge and jury anyway?

Oh sure, sometimes we got a gift card from Tyee Store. Swell, thanks Mom, Thanks, Dad. Thought that counts, right? No, Christmas wasn’t our favorite holiday. Must be some folks’ favorite, though, judging by the strings of lights hanging all year long around the neighbors’ houses. Why bother taking them down when the nouveau riche have a consumer holiday 365 days of the livelong year?

Christmas down here now is a lot like Amazon. It gobbles up all the other little holiday competitors. Used to be Christmas started right after Thanksgiving. For those of you who quit using math, that’s about 30 days of shopping. A month, an entire month. I was in a store last year that started putting up the Christmas decorations right after Halloween. This year most of them did. And some, I kid you not, started before Halloween. That’s over two months, 60 days in case you don’t have the calendar app. That’s a lot of Bing Crosby muzak.

My neighbors who never take the strings of lights off their gutters all year round, maybe they celebrate their own birthday for a couple months, I don’t know. Presents every day for weeks and weeks. We got Black Friday, Internet Monday, the holiday that never really ends, whoopee! Did I say Christmas was a little like Amazon? Amazon IS Christmas, 365 days, don’t forget Leap Year. One day delivery. Drones, not reindeer, next year, count on it.

And oh yeah, before I forget, Merry Christmas one and all. From now until eternity.

Well, Christmas on the overcast South End is gonna be a little less jolly this year. Naw, not because most of us can’t afford presents for our loved ones, what with this half decade recession keeping us in the ranks of the chronically unemployed, but because of the news that Santa was being investigated by a grand jury on insider trading charges with MasterCard, Visa, Capitol One and American Express. Turns out old St. Nick was nicking all of us all along.

Tis the season, I guess. The media blitz for total consumer obedience is cranking up earlier than Thanksgiving now, urging us to buy buy buy whether we can afford it or not. Personally I like the car company ad that has the kids on Santa’s lap explaining to the bewildered old poop in his droopy cap and fat guy velvet suit how they want a full size pick-up truck or a fully equipped sedan. Captures perfectly the true spirit of the holiday, you ask me. Cash or credit on that? Hmm, Santa probably figured out which side his toast was buttered either right then and there or else it was the umpteenth millionth kid with the minimum wage parents wanting an X-box and a few thousand dollars of video games.

Even worse news for the soon-to-be indicted Mr. Claus and his sweatshop up in the Arctic Circle is the rumor of a class action lawsuit by his undocumented elves for withholding overtime pay and denying them sick leave. He may ultimately avoid legal sanctions and some frigid prison time if he’s got a good attorney, and you can bet he does, but the brutal publicity may take some of the shine off his squeaky clean grandfatherly image. The wolves are circling up there at the Circle and there’s little doubt the Justice Dep’t. will soon start investigating that offshore account of his, North Pole Equities, to see where the money leads. Even if it’s all perfectly legal, the spokesman for Christmas Past and Christmas Present may not get the nod come Christmas Future. The Powers That Be don’t need a cloud of guilt hanging over their pitchman and potential sales threatened by scandal.

After all, Christmas is as American as an ATM machine and the Lotto. For all the bogus controversy about the government clamping down on what might once have been a religious holiday of some sort, let’s be honest with ourselves, it IS about religion. Capitalism. Whatever else it WAS has been swept asunder under a consumer juggernaut that feeds the economy. Keep playing Bing Crosby songs at the mall and haul out the cute reindeer for a few months, most of us are so anesthetized we’d gladly go deeper into debt to shut off the saccharine insanity. This year, put an automobile under the tree. Santa’s getting 1% kickback on every credit card purchase. This year, let’s help the old guy out…. and the economy too. Fa la la la laaaawyer, as we say down here.

You might find it hard to believe, but the South End used to be a Destination Spot. The whole island did. The island you could drive to, one developer in the 80’s called it, but 50 years before that, the resorts promoted it the same way.

Camp Grande, Diane, Tyee, Cama, Madrona, Indian Beach, Camp Lagoon, Sunset Beach, Utsalady Beach, Camp Comfort. The poor miserable sweltering city folks could escape their sizzling apartments and rent a cabin for the week. All day long the menfolk would do what menfolk have done since Cro-Magnon dropped their tails and descended from the branches of the nut-trees. They’d sit on their butts and drink. Course we modernists call it FISHING. Which is really a euphemism for Drinking.

When the boat was full of empties and dead salmon, the boys would pull up on the beach and wobble up to the mizzus with their trophy salmons and do what menfolk have done since the 2nd day they hit the ground. Order the womenfolk to cook up the catch.

Back then they had these cute pioneer woodstoves in every cabin. Women must’ve really liked this. Their menfolk, being he-men, could split up the firewood with an axe, probably whacking off a couple of fingers and toes, and she could stand over a 500 degree stove in a cabin with all the doors and windows open and the kitchen about 400 degrees, and she could fry up some smelly fish for the whole squalling family. Later she could wash the burnt-on skillets and the rest in water boiled on the stove. She probably had the time of her life playing pioneer mizzus.

The resorts are all gone now, end of an era on the South End. Some say the fishing dried up. I say the women finally got fed up.