The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The mizzus came home the other day with some real bad news. It seems she’d been at some soiree or other, schmoozing with the local philanthropists and somehow or other my name was brought up. She loves being guilty by association – or marriage – when the discussion turns literary. “Her husband is Skeeter Daddle,” they say and she knows by now there’s no hole on all of the South End big enough to crawl into. Me, I just tell her she swore For Better or For Worse and she got Door #2. Apologies and half assed jokes aren’t good for much after 32 years, I guess.

Seems there was a gentleman at the soiree who was NOT a fan of the Daddle School of Dark Humor. Hard as it is to believe…. “I won’t read that stuff,” he declared, referring to my contribution to South End Culture with about the same regard as his neighbor’s dog’s leavings on his perfect fescue. Not much room for further conversation after dropping that little buzzkill, but she managed to remain graceful. After all, she’s had practice.

I have never subscribed to the school of thought that art, whether musical or visual or literary is some kind of popularity contest, although, in full disclosure, I understand that on some levels, particularly the fiscal, it most certainly is. Offend enough of your would-be audience and see how much work you find. Explains why the South End String Band doesn’t play politics. Our fan base is small enough without cutting it in half.

The trick, you understand, is not to sell out for the applause. Or the popularity. Or the bucks either. Sometimes you have to offend some sensibilities, not necessarily intentionally — well, okay, intentionally! — if you’re going to make Art. Otherwise you might as well work for a corporation. (Gosh, no offense to those of you who did.) They’ll pay you to say the correct thing. They’ll promote you if you toe the line.

These are polarized times we live in. If you didn’t offend someone most of the time, you weren’t saying anything. To the guy who won’t read this, I guess I’ll just have to live with the weight of your disapproval. Me, I don’t give a rat’s patootie. It’s the mizzus I worry about — and I notice it was her you dropped your criticism on, not me. What do we make of that, Ace?

My ex-wife and I bought a house in a Seattle ghetto back in ’77. She was living with her boyfriend across town and I lived in the ghetto house with an assortment of roommates. Don’t ask, it’s too long a story right now. The house was in what was the Red Line District, meaning grocery stores, pharmacies, most retail weren’t able to finance from the banks which considered our area a DMZ. We did have a small store down the block which sold beer and fortified wines, some bread and old dairy, lots of canned goods, pop and candy. In a pinch, I shopped there. When I got my change, it was always short. Always. Not being the sort who argues about nickels and dimes, I wrote it off as a sort of ‘tip’ to the clerk, usually an obese black guy who never said hello or thanks or how’s the crime down your way?

Wednesday nights my wife would come over to visit. We had a small black and white television set that got 3 channels, something called an Astronaut, probably Sputnik era. The sound was shot — even turned up full volume, you could barely hear it. My wife liked watching it while we ate dinner, usually a box pizza. We were ‘living large’, as we say down in the mean streets. One Wednesday she forgot to bring wine so I hopped over to the ghetto market and bought something savory and romantic to go with sitcoms and preservative packed pizzas. I was thinking our marriage might’ve pretty much run its rope. I was thinking maybe I was close to Bottom. Course, if you think that, you aren’t even looking over the edge of the abyss. Yet.

I carefully chose an insouciant little white zinfandel for $3.99 plus tax, took it to the counter and watched ruefully as my friendly merchant shorted me most of a dollar in change. Don’t ask me why, but I chose this moment to challenge his math skills. “Mistakes, happen, Man,” he shrugged. “They happen all the time here,” I said, “and oddly, Man, they always come up short on my end.”

“Don’t got to shop here, you know. Plenty of other places. Free country.”

A racist thought jumped into my politically correct head. I kept it to myself, pocketed my extra quarters and headed back to Camelot with a fine bottle of screwtop swill. My ex was 5 feet from the Astronaut, sound this tinny scratchy noise. I poured her a tumbler of zin, popped a beer and we settled in to eat pizza and watch reruns. When she finished her wine she mentioned casually she had to leave soon. She and her beau were meeting for an evening of fun and frivolity and, well, she’d forgotten to mention it, but there you are.

My one lousy night a week marriage just got whittled down a bit. I looked at her with what I assume was a look of incalculable pathos mixed with scarcely concealed rage and/or disappointment. I’m guessing it was actually the look of a rube at the fair who just spent his last dollar on his girl throwing baseballs at rigged targets for a kewpie doll prize he’d never in a million reincarnations ever win. When she left minutes later, I sat stupidly staring at the Astronaut, slowly becoming aware the sound had given out, no doubt beyond earth’s orbit and terrestrial audio range. I twisted the dial until it too left orbit.

It was later that night, after midnight, when the wine was gone and the beer too and most of what was left of a stupid marriage. The TV had sat on its crappy little stand, flickering black and white images for hours, snowy ghosts dancing in my peripheral. At some point I jerked the power cord out of the wall and the picture shrank to a dot then nothing. I picked up the set, walked out the front door with it and up the now rainy street to my ghetto store. I don’t know what I was thinking, I just walked up the block looking, to any cop driving along, like a looter on his way to the pawn shop with a brand new stolen TV.

The store was closed, the doors shut behind iron bars, the lights mostly out other than a neon or two. I suppose I vaguely planned to put the TV through a window, but the bars made that plan pretty much senseless, if it ever made sense before. Finally I put the Astronaut on the ground in the doorway next to a couple of empty fifths of wine, gave it a good kick in the picture tube teeth and walked away. If I thought the Space Age had ended, I was in for a very long wait.

Folks are sometimes surprised to learn I actually went to college. It could be they’re surprised I could get in, much less graduate. But mostly I think they don’t understand why someone would go to four years of advanced education so he could work blue collar jobs half his life. Kids nowadays go to a university, they’re going to come out with a debt that looks mountainous right out of the starting gate. They’re probably not gonna look for a minimum wage job and a cheap apartment above the TV repair shop the way I did. Then again, I didn’t come out of college in the hole. In fact, I rolled out with enough money in the bank from working 30 hour a week jobs while going to school that I figured why work at all for awhile? That, for you ambitious young’uns, was the first mistake.

You can learn to like not working for other people. Or, in my case, you can learn that on top of hating to work for other people. I took summers off, then I took spring and fall off. Mostly I would work for two or three months, give notice and take a long well-deserved vacation traveling around the country. Which is how I found Washington State and the Olympic Peninsula. I vowed to move out, buy a slug farm, cultivate mosses and ferns, make a new life in the foggy temperate rainforests. I didn’t quite make it to the coast, but … close enough for me.

I guess if you graduate with a degree as versatile as an English major – coupled with a second major in Sociology – your options for careers are pretty near exponential. Meaning, you can work most of those jobs folks with MBA’s from Harvard probably aren’t applying for. Nowadays the young student is more likely to take a degree in business or international studies than American Literature given that tuition costs aren’t the 250 dollars a semester I had to dole out back in 1968. 500 bucks a year. 2000 for the whole she-bang. Don’t ask me why I didn’t get a PhD for that kind of money. I should’ve. Except I was itching to see the country and I had a 1962 Rambler and I was fed up with schooling.

Life looked like an open road, let me tell you. And … it was. For awhile. But you quit jobs the way I quit jobs, pretty soon your resume tells any prospective employer you may not stick around real long. Hard to imagine why a young buck like myself wouldn’t want to make a career out of kennel worker at the local dog pound, I know, but oddly, employers value loyalty and longevity, even if it paid $1.75 an hour back then.

And pretty soon even a will-of-the-wisp worker like myself realizes the job market is evaporating faster than the icebergs polar bears are sailing. Combine that with the less than rosy employment opportunities of the South End, you maybe can see why entrepreneurism works for some of us desperate dead end graduates. Which, looking back now from a few decades of a so-called career in art, it did. Sure, it could’ve turned out tragic. It could’ve been a cautionary tale for my friends to tell their kids. ‘You want to turn out like Skeeter, go ahead, keep flunking math in your senior year, see how you like living hand to mouth in some hellhole.” As it turns out they keep their kids away from me about the time when college applications are due. You don’t let them play with a happy artist when what they need is to buckle down and make some serious Life Decisions.

I hear a lot of talk these days that history and literature and the fine arts are a waste of time for a college to offer. Not worth the high tuition when you rank it against potential earnings. I think that kind of thinking is too sad for words. That kind of thinking is right out of the mouths of the folks with no imagination and no use for one. Speaking for those of us with ‘useless’ degrees, I can say my education didn’t end back in 1972 when I missed graduation ceremonies. What I learned was learning is a lifetime endeavor. It didn’t end with a job. It didn’t end at all. You ask me, whatever that cost, it was worth every cent.

I went in for my bi-yearly haircut today. In the old days I’d haul in to Stanwoodopolis at Carl’s Barber Shop for a clipping and gossip and heated debates. Sadly, those days are long gone and Carl’s retired from his long tonsorial career. Back then I didn’t mind waiting for a turn in the leather swivel chair, mostly an excuse to put a finger into the political winds.

Now I’m forced to go to the chain haircut joints. Salons, I guess they call em. They’re quick, painless and anonymous. They take your phone and name, but not for socializing, strictly for data-mining, frequency of visits, favorite hair gel maybe. At the door of Great Clips I was asked even before I took my hat off if I’d made an Online Appointment. No, I said, do I need one? Not at all, I was told.

But … a couple of folks who had made an online appointment but who hadn’t arrived just yet, were before me. Be about 20 minutes. “Do you have a cellphone,” my would be stylist asked, telling me next visit I could be one of the favored few. Wouldn’t have to wait 20 minutes next time. Mrs. Jenkins, my first grade teacher, used to make her point to us ignoramuses in the exact same sing-song voice. I didn’t like it then and I sure as gel didn’t care of it 60 years later. Call me irascible, but I’m not sitting in the chrome and mirror sterility of a chain haircutting factory more than 20 seconds. Twenty minutes is inconceivable. I mean, look at the magazine rack. Us and People? Kill me with a scissors now!

I headed for the exit, heads newly coiffed turning to ogle this ogre. “Will you be coming back in 20 minutes?” my headhunter asked, sensing customer dissatisfaction. I said no. “It’s only 20 minutes,” she explained, obviously figuring since I’d waited 6 months for the next haircut already, 20 minutes was a blink in my tonsorial universe. “Come back and see us again,” she said, half a question. “I will,” I said, “soon as I get a cellphone.” She knew — and I knew too — I’d have hair down to my toenails by them.

Now as you might’ve guessed, I’m almost always in favor of any and all new technologies, unproven or not. Get those government regulations out of the launch path and let the good old profit motive dictate the future. As we well know in this Job Creating culture we love, let the marketplace rule. If you can’t trust a capitalist, who CAN you trust?

I just read they got a new 3-D printer for creating new life forms. Program in a funky DNA sequence , load up the amino acid mix and hit a button. Pretty quick you got an iridescent houseplant or a 6 legged, 4 eared puppy, whatever you want. Experiments are fine. A few new viruses introduced out among the billions we got already the old fashioned way, well, what’s the harm? Might be some human-friendly ones in there and that hobby lab you got turns into the next venture-capitalized pharma farm. The possibilities are endless. The profit potential immense! Sure, the naysayers will worry about some 3-D printout creating the next pandemic, but hey, nothing ventured, nothing gained. You think God didn’t roll the dice?? Check out some of these South Enders we got down here ….

I heard this week Amazon wants to use drones to deliver their goods. The Star Trek teleporter isn’t on-line yet, I guess, so this is their fallback. Oh, I suppose the Luddites will fight this. Skies filled with more drones than starlings. Collisions in congested areas. Free gifts for the earthbound after the crashes, if nothing else. Put some armaments on these birds and UPS package theft on unguarded porches ought to drop significantly.

The future is in the rearview now, closer than it appears maybe, but we’re accelerating fast and there’s no time in this multi-tasked, info-deluged world to start worrying about the dearth of deep analysis. Fasten your seatbelt, download a program for an experimental lunch and keep your twitter feed on 24/7. It’s a brave new world and you don’t have the luxury of fear. Sit back and enjoy the ride.

I just met my new neighbor to the north of me.  He bought the old farm and 17 acres when the bank foreclosed on it.  After the recession of ’07 hit, my previous neighbor watched his housebuilding business dry up like a Dust Bowl swimming pool.  He never was one to save a dime for a rainy day so when the drought hit, he was goner, just another casualty on Wall Street’s gamble to enrich themselves.

My new neighbor and I met over the fence line where he’ll soon be pulling out the old 7 strand barbed wire and updating to a mesh fence, keep his dog and horses in and varmints out.  Hopefully I’m not in the latter category.  When I first came here the woods was pretty much unbroken from Dallman Road down to the Head.  The cattle days being pretty much played out, there wasn’t much need of fences except for an occasional perimeter around a vegetable garden to keep the deer out.  Other than me and Colton, not many folks ventured into the nettle barrens.  Fences would’ve been a frivolous use of money and money was way too hard to come by.

Well, the Open Range is gone now around here.  You can still wander the interior from me to the Head if you know your way.  Still find duckponds and an occasional streambed lined with swamp cabbage, even a few hidden houses obviously off the grid and built without permits or government oversight.  There’s a few old homesteads disappeared except for their shadow in a periwinkle bed or a cluster of daffodils gone wild.  There’s even a 1950 Studebaker parked up a ravine near the last old growth cedar on the South End.  No skeleton sits behind the wheel.  The driver’s probably back in the salmonberry jungle, still looking for a gas station.

Good fences, Robert Frost said ironically, make good neighbors.  My neighbor was worried I might not agree.  And, of course, I don’t.  My world shrunk another 17 acres, and before long me and the deer will have to share what’s left.  I’m just hoping they remain vegetarians.

The aptly named Land’s End RV and Trailer Park sits near the end of the island back off the road just before it hits the Head and slingshot back north again.  The state park sends folks with travel trailers down there when they’re full up, but that advice has ruined more than a few vacations.  Johnny Reddick runs the place, mostly into the ground.  Back in the late ‘70’s it wasn’t too bad.  A dozen or so single wides were spaced out on concrete pads and an old caboose sat in there too.  There was a small area for tents and some gravel for the RV’s.  Rents were reasonable and the public showers and toilets were kept clean and operational.  The tenants, mostly elderly folks on small fixed incomes, were content down there even if it was the end of the road.  In more ways than one….

But old man Jensen had a stroke and Mrs. Jensen sold the kit and caboodle to Johnny in ’82.  Johnny was looking for an investment, something he could use a small inheritance to parlay into a substitution for working, and the trailer park seemed an ideal fit.  Jack up the rents, pull a few more trailers in he’d snagged cheap, collect the rents and drink the rest of the day.  If Johnny hadn’t been a bad drunk, things might’ve worked out for everybody, but like a lot things on the South End, things went downhill.

Most of the original tenants left after the shootout in ’88, just picked up their belongings and moved on, something they’d been thinking of doing for years once Johnny leased half a dozen dilapidated RV’s on the weekly or monthly basis.  Dangerous looking men showed up in rusted vehicles with broken windshields and missing fenders and dogs they kept on chains outside.  They never seemed to work, other than under the hoods of their jalopies, not totally uncommon on the South End, but their worried neighbors sensed whatever money they got was somehow suspect.  Apparently the sheriff’s deputies did too.  Land’s End became part of their drive-by route even before the gunplay.

Johnny says the gentleman in the last trailer was drunk when he knocked on his vinyl door to inquire about that month’s rent.  Johnny most certainly was.  What Delores in Lot#6 testified in court as ‘3 sheets to the wind.”  When the door finally opened after prolonged pounding, Johnny was staring at his delinquent tenant wearing nothing but a pair of black briefs and pointing a small caliber pistol at Johnny’s head.  Apparently interrupted in a 3^rd rate romance, the man was noticeably displeased.  He suggested Johnny remove various anatomical parts immediately from his doorstep.  Which Johnny did.

Maybe Johnny would have been wiser to go home, let things settle, collect the rent in the morning.  Instead he went back to his own trailer, finished a 5^th of Jim Beam, pulled a chrome handled .38 out of his sock drawer and hauled down to the last trailer with dogs snarling and barking, lights popping on, but before anyone could get to a window, shots broke the night wide open.  Andy Watson called 9-1-1 and told his wife to get on the floor behind the kitchen counter.  Still on the telephone, he watched Johnny stroll back to his own place, gun in hand. He was pretty sure he’d killed the kid at the last pad.

When the first deputy arrived, the entire Trailer Park was awake and terrified.  Bill Traxton, the cop, jumped out of his cruiser, gun drawn.  He’d called for back-up, but he knew that would be half an hour.  Nothing moved.  No one came outside.  The only noise was barking dogs, have crazed.  Bill Traxton turned his spotlight along the line of trailers, one by one, until he hit the last one where a man in his underwear sat on the step.  “Don’t move!” the deputy yelled.  The man didn’t.  “Put your hands where I can see em,” he commanded.  The man did.

Carefully, Bill Traxton approached him.  Finally he saw the pit bull, bleeding beside the nearly naked man where Johnny Reddick had shot it point blank, hitting it in the shoulder.  The dog was breathing hard.  The man watched Bill watch the dog.  Finally Bill asked, “You hurt?”  The man shook his head no.  “Just my dog.”

The deputy took Johnny away, cuffed and swearing, in the back of the squad car.  The man in the underwear took his dog in his pickup god knows where.  No one at Land’s End ever saw him or the dog again.  Johnny got a $500 fine for animal abuse, same as the rent he hadn’t been paid, and a year’s probation for reckless endangerment.  Most of the dog owners moved along pretty quick.  Some of the single-wide folks stayed, but not many.  And not because they wanted to.  They just hoped, like a lot of us down here, things would get better.

I just came down with my favorite yearly cold. Starts with a raw throat, moves into a cough, then comes the open nasal faucets. I get this cold so predictably that as soon as that first scratch in the throat shows up, I know exactly what’s coming next. I don’t even whine and whimper any more — I figure, let’s get this over with and Move On.

I used to dose up with cold meds, pull the cover over my head and go into a sort of rhinoviral hibernation. But the past few years my ‘effective’ cold remedies, the ones guaranteed to shut off the snot valve, have disappeared. I’ve been told you can get them ‘behind the counter’, sign a form, take an oath, leave a security deposit and go home with the real stuff. Oddly, my pharmacists tell me they no longer stock these. For this, I want to thank the Meth Heads of the world who stole or bought over the counter meds used to cook Crank. Nasty stuff, Crank. Addictive, hard to quit, ruins the user’s health real quick.

I grew up in the ‘60’s. Every drug fad that came along was, and I quote by heart the police and medical experts, “the most dangerously addictive drug we’ve ever seen.” To stop this latest scourge, they have seen fit to hide or abandon any reasonably effective cold pills.

The Meth Heads now are stealing copper wire, metal signs, bronze church bells and sculpture in my little park, about anything metal not bolted down that they can cut into pieces and sell to scrap yards. A lot of sculptures in the area are lost to these pillheads, at pennies to the dollar. It’s time to say enough is really enough. It’s time, I say, to legalize a drug for them. So we can have our own drugs back!

As far as stealing sculptures, maybe a mandatory art appreciation class before their script can be filled. Each time. I know we hate government and government regulation these days, all us Don’t Tread On Me Yahoos, but remind yourselves: we let them outlaw our cold pills and now only outlaws have cold pills. Now is the time to ask ourselves the Hard Question — will meth cure my cold?

We got a token Republican in the Wednesday night Mabana Poker Club. Billy Bluff, we call him, mostly because he’s a piss poor bluffer. When he’s got a good hand he makes idle small talk. When he’s got a winning hand, he talks politics. Billy might as well send up an LED signboard announcing he drew a straight flush. But in case we missed the Signs, he bets low, hoping to keep the pot filling up until he can bet the maximum at the end, suckering the rest of us into staying with him.

He’s actually one of the new breed of GOP, meaning he hates the government and wants to stop funding about everything but the military and corporate subsidies. Taxes are too high, unions are ruining profits and killing jobs, drugs are legal, men are marrying men, Obama isn’t a real citizen, all the usual rants with a few more raves completely from Right Field. We don’t mind so long as Billy uses politics to telegraph his hand. Politics are expensive for Billy, but the thinks he’s just unlucky. That, or maybe he suspects we cheat, the cards are marked or the games are rigged. I guess in a way they are.

The night Billy drew 4 kings in 5 card stud on the first deal, I had 2 pair before the next deal. Billy got going on Secession. Bad sign before we drew a card. “Secession,” he declared, betting the usual fifty cents, see who’d stick, probably all of us. I tossed my half buck in and instead of raising, asked, “The South End, you mean?” Everyone ante’d up.

“You think everything’s about the South End, Skeeter. I’m talkin about Washington state dropping out.” He didn’t ask for a single card from Flat-top Fred who was dealing. Fred shook his head sadly. Real bad sign. Still, you never know, he might be bluffing. I took three cards, Pete took three, Ralph and Walter both took two. Fred dealt himself one. Billy tossed a buck into the pot non-chalantly. “State’s rights, I’m talkin here,” he said, a little too loud, meaning he had a helluva hand. “The government becomes oppressive, we got the right to leave, that’s what I’m sayin.”

Pete dumped in his cards right then and there. “You could always go to Canada, Bill,” Walter said, tossing a dollar. I looked at my new cards, 3 queens over my 2 jacks, full house. Maybe as good or better than Billy’s. Ralph stuck and Flat-top, sitting on a fat flush, raised. Ralph cursed and folded without even waiting for the bid to get back to him. My full house looked good, maybe too good, maybe not enough. “We already fought the Civil War, Bill,” I said. “You want slavery back or just lower the minimum wage?” I tossed my money in without raising, not real confident now.

Billy chuckled and raised us 5, the maximum bid we’d agreed to years ago. “I want my goddamn country back, Skeeter, even if we have to start over.” Flat-top groaned. “You could go to Quebec, Bill. They want to secede. You’d be in good company if you learn a little French.” He tossed a five in and raised a five. Ten to me. Those queens over jacks were looking weaker and weaker. But it was a full house. And now I was worried about Fred’s hand. “I don’t think they’d let him in, Fred. I got turned back the last try.” I was talking about my little incident with the border guards a couple weeks earlier. I pushed ten bucks into the growing pile, knowing Billy was going to raise us again. Maybe Fred too.

“Course they didn’t want to let YOU in, Skeeter. But I’m not going up to some country that’s more of a welfare state than we are. Get a grip. And get another five bucks out if you want to see this hand.” Fred took another look at his cards. A hard look. His confidence was waning fast as mine. “I hear Quebec is nice in the winter,” he mumbled and called with another five to the pot. I hated to, but I had to see his hand, so my five went in too. “Let’s see what you got, boys, cause I got a full house, queens over jacks.” Fred flipped a flush disgustedly into the chips and swore before taking a long slow miserable swig off his beer.

Billy laid one king, then another and then the third. He smirked, showed an ace, waited a long while, then dropped the fourth king. “All I know, children,” he said, “is the rich get richer. Clean livin’s what does it.” He pulled the pot into himself with great satisfaction. The world can sure be cruel when everyone’s lucky. If I’d had a lick of sense, I would’ve seceded a long time earlier.

I’ve been AWOL now nearly a week, pretty much Laying Low, avoiding phones, credit cards and car rentals. Admittedly, it’s a primitive existence, fraught with danger, close to the ground and devoid of digital toys and devices. Actually it feels a lot like those early pioneer days on the South End when we were poor, TV-less and didn’t own a credit card. Of course, computers hadn’t taken over the world yet. Microsoft and Apple were just learning to crawl. And we weren’t occupied 24/7 keeping up with Yahoo news and social media and e-mails and twitter feeds and flash sales and text messages and cellphone calls and Netflix updates and internet shopping and all the rest of that instant connectedness to our fellow ants we can no longer imagine living without.

So far I’m surviving okay. Life does go on without Facebook updates. Admittedly it’s a lonelier existence not keeping abreast of ‘friends’ shopping adventures and movie ‘likes’, but I’m managing to fill the void. Give me another week and I’ll found a new religion, one not predicated on base 10, bits and bytes, possibly one that deposes the CyberGod of the 21st century, a religion that gives humankind dominion over computers.

Okay, I’m only joshing. TV has won. Smartphones rule. We will soon, very soon, become part cyber ourselves. We’ll surgically implant new and improved body parts. We’ll convince ourselves we’re in control. But … this is delusional. Welcome to the Collective, Friend! Embrace the Borg Hive. We won’t very much notice and the transformation will be painless and quick. Half automaton, half human? I don’t think so, not for very long. Get the Google glasses, buy an implant and 500 apps. Opt for bio-appendages, improved and virtually indestructible. And eventually require all citizens to upgrade their neuro-chips. Smart? Way smart. Pain free? Of course. Disease immune? You betcha! Human? Oh, right. Me paranoid? Wait a few years….