The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I know what you’re thinking: I’m feeding you misinformation in case the Customs people who’ve no doubt cross referenced the readers of this blog and and are now readers as well are monitoring your computer records.  Maybe I never left the area.  Maybe I’m working an off-site secure computer back in the nettle hollows, living off the larder of snowbirds still tanning in Pahrump, Nevada, ordering pizzas and survival gear with phony names and numbers.  By now the Customs Swat Teams know who Skeeter is and the net is closing faster than habitat for deer  up at the clearcut by the Country Club.

Wait!  How would I know that’s been cleared if I’d left the area?  But why would I mention it if I hadn’t?  Life on the lam is a cat and mouse, life and death 3-D chess game.  The pursuers know all the moves, all the gambits, every turn and fake.  You have to think like them, but you have to think differently than their usual prey.  You need to be semi-insane.  You need a warped reality.  You need — do I need to say it? — to think like an artist, mangled synapses,  broken chromosomes, mutant mentality.  Take them down the rabbit hole with you and see how well they deal with a distorted reality, see what they ask Alice when they’re 10 feet tall.

Am I hiding?  If I am, I’ve been hiding all my life.  I’m accustomed to the funhouse mirrors.  I’m comfortable with the Jabberwock, the mad tea parties under tangerine skies, the bi-polar seasons, the non-linear logistics.  I’m at home with uncertainty.  I’m not looking for answers.  I’m not even looking for  questions.  Let’s see how the Authorities do when the signpost up ahead reads:  SOUTH END.  NO EXIT.  Then we’ll see who’s hunting who ….

Richard Kimble, the original Fugitive, was an innocent man, hounded across the American landscape by his pursuer, Det. Philip Girard, for killing his own wife.  Kimble didn’t flee in a world of Amber Alerts where the entire Hive stands ready with a cellphone keyed to 911.  I can’t recall anyone lasting 24 hours after the Alert was posted on freeway signs with descriptions of car and license.  I can’t recall anyone eluding capture whatsoever.  Richard Kimble, the TV fugitive, wouldn’t have made it past the Pilot, much less through a series.

Oddly, the last Amber Alert of recent memory ended in a capture on Camano Island by the same Sheriff’s Department that never caught the Barefoot Bandit in years of trying.  The Kid never had a car.  Or a driver’s license.  Never had his own cellphone or credit card.  Never shopped in town and swiped a Haggens card.If you wondered why he became an internet hero, this is why.  He was digitally invisible.  A cyberspace cypher.  A ghost in the machine.  He was the bat in a world of bits and bytes.   He was the 21st century fugitive.

I’m not the Kid.  But I’m trying.  I abandoned my truck next to the woods by our woodsheds, keys in it, CD in the player, White Rabbit on pause.  I’m moving cross country, but I’m not stealing planes en route.  The rest I can’t tell you.  I can’t trust anyone now.  If you knew me pre-Flight, you don’t now.  Nothing personal.  The hunted don’t have the luxury of friends.  Or family. Or even a past.  No postcards.  No phone calls.  No memories.

The Kid should’ve holed up on Camano.  Or Orcas.  Maybe he was looking for the Grand Gesture.  He taught himself to fly so by God fly he would.  I’m guilty of entering my own country illegally.  What grand gesture can I make commensurate with a crime so heinous?  No way would Kimble make that mistake.  But then, unlike the Kid and me, he was actually innocent.  If there IS such a thing anymore….

Now that I’m a fugitive, life has become, needless to say, a great deal edgier.  To be hunted means sharpening those lazy senses, sniffing the incoming wind, staying hyper alert.  Colton Harris-Moore could give seminars once he’s released from his federal playpen.  He managed to elude the dogs for years without leaving his backyard.  I can tell you this from my present location thousands of miles from home, that is no easy feat in post-1984 America where every phone call is documented and stored, every credit card transaction is accessible, every license plate is tracked on traffic cameras and most stores have video monitoring.

We’re wired into the Hive and the folks who weren’t traumatized by George Orwell’s vision of a future where privacy is a thoughtcrime take it on faith inter-connectedness is desirable.  What have they got to fear if they’ve got nothing to hide?  Put It Out There.  Facebook, Linked-In, social databases, grocery store card swipes.   Zuckerberg believes in Total Transparency as the Ultimate Good.  We don’t live in post-Orwell so much as we live in post-Zuckerboy.  God may be omniscient, but the government and Amazon certainly are.

I have plenty to hide, myself included now.  If you don’t, join a cult.  Stay logged in to Facebook 24/7.  Spill your guts.  I don’t care.  But don’t drag the rest of us heathens up to the Kool-Aid stand.  Freedom is the right to be left alone.  The right not to be tracked.  Not to be watched or listened to or followed constantly.

The recorded voice you hear that sweetly informs you “This call may be monitored for your protection,” is a bald-faced lie.  It WILL be monitored and it won’t protect You.  Facial recognitions, crowd monitoring, surveillance cameras, NSA phone tracking, GPS locators — all linked up in vast computer servers.  You think they’re for your protection>?  I may be a fugitive now, but hey! wake up!  You’ll be one soon.  A state that takes your privacy doesn’t trust you.  And I’ve learned NEVER to trust anyone or anything that doesn’t trust me.  They’re the ones with something to hide.

I’ve been watching the skies lately.  Looking for drones.  So far so good.  Or so I think.  I feel like a hunted refugee now that I slipped back into the Yew Ess Aye without stopping at U.S. Customs.  The Canadians detained me a few days ago, for the serious offense of walking into their country to ask them a few questions I couldn’t get online or by phone.  They made it clear THEY would ask the questions, not me, and after a lot of theirs, I pretty much knew mine weren’t going to get asked, much less answered.

After the waterboarding they realized my smuggling vehicle was safely out of their reach — back in America, nothing much they could do.  Finally they ran out of forms and further interrogation tactics.  Obviously I wasn’t going to talk.  “Get out,” one of the agents finally said.  “Go back home.”  He handed me my truck keys and said leave the way you came in —- on foot.  The man with the holstered gun at the car booth opened his bullet proof glass door and commanded I go through U.S. Customs.

I smelled a trap.  They might be finished with me, but the NSA, frustrated over a futile ‘rendition’, certainly wouldn’t be.  And if the Canadians,usually polite, had been rough with me, what in Orwell’s name would the gringos have in store?  Like the fugitive song says, Indiana wants me, Lord, I can’t go back there.  I cut up to a park restroom, slipped inside, steeled myself, then bootlegged out of there up through a rhododendron grove, across the petunia beds and the last open stretch of concrete to my truck.  I didn’t sprint.  Just strolled nonchalantly, even chatted with a man walking his beagle, reached the truck, unlocked it, waited a moment for sirens, bubble lights, stormtroopers exiting the rear of the assault trucks, a bullhorn : EXIT THE VEHICLE, MR. DADDLE, WITH HANDS IN THE AIR.  DO IT NOW!

Nothing.  Sweet nothing.  I turned the key, put it in gear and drove through downtown Blaine and on to the interstate, southbound.  I went home, packed a bag.  I’m at an undisclosed location as I write this.  No cell, no credit card transactions, far far away from these post 9-11 goons we’ve unleashed to ‘protect’ us.  Innocence is an arachaic term now.   We’re all guilty.  The real question is Guilty of What?

I’m parked in the USA, but right now I’m in lockdown in Canada. Accidentally…. I wanted to get some information from Customs about an upcoming trip to Alaska with a glass project I’m installing and I couldn’t reach anyone by phone or e-mail so I decided to go up in person and do it without crossing the border, but … as the man with the gun just told me, I’m already in Canada now. He wanted to know if I had a gun too. Can’t blame him, I guess. Then he wanted to know if I had $10,000 on me. I guess the battered cowboy hat made him think I might be a Texas oilman on holiday. I didn’t have $10K on me right then so I figured a bribe was out of the question with what I did have.

Turns out I’m in the wrong customs — the one I need for information concerning transportation of art contraband is the commercial crossing 5 miles east. Trouble is, they’ve taken my driver’s license and asked me to sit over here. They just called me back up and asked what other states I’ve lived in. Maine, Michigan, California, Mississippi, North Carolina, Georgia, Wisconsin, Washington. I’m already homesick for all of them, especially Washington. And I still have to go back through U.S. Customs.

The custom men called me back up to the desk again. They wanted the keys to my truck. I gave them the keys. They wanted assurance there was nothing sharp when they searched it. Holy Kafka Krap. My license, my history, my truck keys. I was wishing I’d stayed home. I was wishing I’d eaten a Last Meal. I was wishing I’d said a last goodbye to Karen. Who’d never know why her husband never came home.

“Where’s your truck parked,” the customs agent asked for the 3rd time. I told him once more, the 3rd time. It was in Peace Arch State Park, in Blaine, Wa. IN AMERICA. No doubt loaded with syringes, briefcases full of hundred dollar bills, caches of small armaments, undocumented American fruit pickers, hockey spies, who knows? He gave me another Hard Once Over. 63 year old Caucasian male. Shabby clothes. Rumpled hat. Beard. Apparently migratory (but not anymore). . A walk-in purportedly looking for information. Right….

If possible, I’ll try to smuggle this out. If you get this, if you read it, call the embassy!! Tell them I’m an American citizen. I have rights, dammit! Well, I thought I did. I’m learning different real fast here in the great white north.

I’m on what I guess you’d call a Bizness Trip, some meeting over the mountains to see which is easier, moving those or my incalcitrant architect who wants my stained glass windows to go anywhere but in his. Frank Lloyd Wright spoiled these guys — they all think they’re geniuses and everything in their building should be designed only by them. My boy, in fact, wanted to redesign my proposal, but the art committee told him mine was their choice. Probably why they picked me in the first place…. So here we are once again, locked in mortal aesthetic combat. Swell. Welcome to the politics of public art.

50/50 he even shows up. He’s canceled or missed three out of the last four. If I owned a cellphone or had a laptop, I suppose I could receive a cancellation notification, let me know I might as well drive home and salvage one day at least. But I’m still living in mid- 20th century, I guess, and for the near term I’m willing to accept some consequences for my refusal to embrace instantaneous communication.

My cheap motel has made the assumption, since they don’t have a phone that can place anything but local calls, that we all carry cellphones now. I can, however, order delivery pizza. Try to find a public phone booth anymore. If you do, Sasquatch is probably using it as an office. I’m realizing as slow as I possibly can that the world moves on and doesn’t necessarily care if you come with it. Microsoft announced this week it would no longer support its old XP computers. I won’t call this planned obsolescence, but consumers sure need to plan on obsolescence. The future is rolling up the carpet, the sidewalks and all us pedestrians behind it.

It’s one thing to live in a museum of the mind, but I notice visiting hours are dwindling fast. Just like us docents…

Nuke the Kid lives almost at the very end of the South End, meaning, he’s at the Head of the island, that promontory that gives viewers on a boat heading north up Saratoga Passage the sense Camano at its tail end is the bow of a great ship. The bluffs have eroded and its bare face falls 300 feet from the firs above to the beach below. Parked up there, almost an ersatz guardian, resides the Kid.

The Kid prefers to be called by his full name, Nuke the Kid, but his neighbors refuse to do so. You can give yourself a goofy moniker, but don’t expect others to respect it. He lives in the logged off nettle wetlands at the curve in the road where the highway loop cuts back north. His shack is hidden from view and …. Well, let’s leave it at that. I’ve said too much already but I do respect the Kid’s privacy and his xenophobic tendencies.

The Kid arrived here in ’72 after a Dishonorable Discharge from the army. He was at the siege of Khe Sahn and most of his unit died there. Part of the Kid died there too, but not all of him. If you ask him why he calls himself Nuke the Kid — and I seriously advise you don’t — he’ll give you a death ray glare that will leave you no doubt why he was discharged.

I’ve known the Kid nearly four decades. I won’t tell you we’re close friends, but I’m probably as close as he’s got. The Kid doesn’t want friends and he doesn’t need em either. His friends are buried in pieces back from Khe Sahn and when he came home, nobody thanked him for a job he never applied for in the first place, one he was drafted into. I don’t think the Kid wants any thanks anyway. He sure doesn’t want anyone’s pity. He just wants to be left the hell alone.

Most of us down here do too. But then again, we don’t have ghosts to keep us company or demons to scream in the night. People are more fragile than we like to think. We sent the Kid into the heart of darkness 40 years ago. He doesn’t ask why we did. But … he did name himself Nuke the Kid.

The Little Church of the Ravine has a huge flock down here on the sin-saturated South End. The new pastor, Rev. Jeffrey, recently removed from his post in Eastern Washington, preaches on the side of punishment over redemption. His new parishioners figure those wheat farmers must have responded better to prods than to penance. The rest of us know Jeffrey has a rough row to hoe if he thinks South Enders are going to respond to Fear. If abject poverty hasn’t scared us yet, the good Reverend is tilling soil dryer than Eastern Washington’s.

Faith takes a lot of forms down here and the Little Church of the Ravine is only one of many. We got spiritualists and Ouija Boarders, Tea Leaf Readers and Palmists, Y Ching Tossers and the just plain superstitious. You name it, we probably got one or two back up the holler. Most of em don’t mind admitting to some faith based mysticism, they just want to believe in Something. Mostly we accept each other’s cosmology — even if Rev. Jeff makes it plain where he thinks that leads.

Jerry the Card Counter lives a half mile up the road and throws in with us boys occasionally at our weekly poker game. Jerry plays the odds mathematically, analyzing probabilities in his engineer’s head. Don’t even ask if he buys lottery tickets. Jerry usually goes home a winner. Partly because he never plays a hunch and partly because he drinks less than the rest of us, a good combination for profit, but not for fun.

Jerry is a believer in science. Which is fine. But he doesn’t like it when I say, peering over my 4 sequential cards and going for an improbable straight, that science itself is unprovable and so it too is essentially faith based. Jerry, nearly apoplectic at such heresy, forgets the odds of his own hand to unleash a spirited defense of Empirical Inquiry, then meets my raise by raising me back. The boyz all fold at the high cost of calling bluffs and embroiling themselves in epistemological exercises. “You can’t prove anything, Jerry,” I say calmly, looking at the last card Fearless Fred dishes me. I bet 3 bucks, the limit for our games.

Jerry can’t help himself, meeting my 3 and raising 3 more. “Science is fact-based, Skeeter!” he yells, thumping down a puny 2 pair when I throw my money in the pot, aces over eights, all black, ‘the dead man’s hand’, what Wild Bill Hickok held when he was shot down.

“Not true, Jerry. The Uncertainty Principle. The experimenter affects the results on the quantum level. It’s a strange world down there, Buddy. Believe what you want — it might make it come true.”

Jerry’s watching as I lay down a ten, then the jack and the queen, both lining up with the king next and I hold the final card until he can’t stand it any longer.

“Dammit!” he explodes when I lay down the Ace of Hearts with a gentle slap and big smirk. “What a lucky bastard!”

I smile as I rake in the big fat pot. “Sometimes, Jerry, you got to bet the hunch and hope the quarks line up. It’s all about believing. Next game is 7 card stud, gentlemen. Jokers wild. My deal.”

It was sunny today, a few days past the Vernal Equinox. I was back in the woods, splitting trees into firewood, what once upon a time was considered sustainable forestry. Now burning wood is considered about as ecologically correct as using shale oil in Chinese factories or soft coal in Wisconsin power plants or Saudi oil in my pickup truck.

Energy. I wish we had solar panels on my shack roof, wind turbines powering the well pump, battery power in my truck. I wish I weren’t cutting my trees to keep warm, even those alders that are old and dying soon no matter what I burn for fuel. I wish nuclear power plants didn’t blow up and contaminate half the Pacific and we could dump radioactive waste in a deep hole into the earth’s core.

About everything we do, seems like, is denuding the countryside, scarring the mountainsides, polluting the skies, acidifying the oceans and killing the planet. Paper or plastic? Give me a break….

I got friends and neighbors recycling, buying Priuses, moving into the city and using mass transit, downsizing, desperately trying to be Good Stewards of the Earth. Me, I decided long ago it seemed sort of hopeless. So I got a vasectomy at 21 and figured a kid or two less would be a helluva lot more efficient way to reduce waste and consumption than recycling my bottles and papers, cans and plastic containers. And no, I didn’t get a tax deduction for it — in fact, my friends got one for having kids. Don’t ask me, I didn’t make the world. And my progeny won’t have to pay the piper.

I know, I know, without the children our species dies out. Procreative Urge. Breed or go extinct. But I figure we don’t ALL have to make babies, even if it goes against the Genetic Imperative. And I also know we won’t be rewarded, we won’t be thanked, we won’t really be accepted, okay by me. Just don’t think I’ll high five you for recycling or making the right choice at the grocery check-out line when you bring your own cloth bag or you buy a car that gets an extra 5 mpg. Your 3 kids pretty much canceled that out….

Psychiatrists this week announced the discovery of a new mental malady: Sluggish Cognitive Tempo. This apparently is a sub-order of Attention Deficit Syndrome and is sure to raise a controversy in the medical community as to whether it is really a proper psychopathological disorder. Apparently it is characterized by slow learning, chronic daydreaming and lack of interest in the world around the victim. Patient, I mean. What we used to call Stupid before we became more touchy-feely and enlightened.

No doubt the next step is a pharmacological breakthrough, something akin to coffee, but not as potent as crystal meth, and hopefully (unless you’re the pharmacology company) not overly addictive. Bring the patient back to reality gradually, no point trying to make it TOO interesting. This is great news for the South End, you no doubt realize. All those artists and musicians have been struggling for years with stargazing, cloud watching, daydreaming and other similarly wasteful idle pursuits. We just didn’t have a name for it, but now, thanks to psychiatric research, we not only have a name and a diagnosis, but possibly the hope for a cure.

With counseling and the proper drugs, we South Enders can imagine the day when our idyllic but lachrymose lives are given new leases. Jobs, responsibilities, duties and a focused commitment to meaningful undertakings. Finally we can put down the banjos, drop the paintbrushes, store the blank canvases in the cellar and look forward to normality. We can drive to our satisfying new job at Boeing, we can balance a checkbook, we can scan the TV guide for exciting new programs, we can do all those things the rest of you take for granted, but for us were always far far away.

It is undoubtedly a New Day down here. We’re going to take that sluggish cognitive tempo we’ve been sleepwalking with most of our adult lives and kick it up a notch or three. Multi-task! We’ll be able to juggle half a dozen activities at once while making appointments on our new cellphone for job interviews and doctor visits and financial planning and car repairs and ….well, I get goosebumps just thinking about it. The future is wide open, just like my eyes, and I trust you’ll understand if I don’t finish this, but hey, I haven’t got time for literary nonsense now. It’s a big world out past the garden and I’ve got to make up for lost time so if you’ll excuse me, I have to go march to a similar drummer ….