The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

All right, first of all, let me apologize for this form letter e-mail, this seriously impersonal invitation. Okay, now that THAT’S behind us, here’s the deal, the pitch, the scheme and the gist: once again, the South End String Band is doing a benefit concert for the Floyd Norgaard Cultural Center on Saturday, Feb. 15th at 7 PM. We know what you’re thinking — how can some Podunk backwash fiddle band roll in and expect to assist the most successful organization in Stanwoodopolis??
Good question. We didn’t pick the United Nations to help. We bypassed the Syrian Relief Fund. We skipped Doctors Without Orders. We didn’t get on Too High a Horse. We just thought the Floyd might welcome a little help. Well, okay … they were the only ones who’d let us help. So let’s move on, okay?
Past years we’ve embraced the mission of ‘cultural’ in the Floyd. We put on the South End Art Show, we’ve done travelogues of the South End, we’ve even provided free wine and beer DESPITE the liquor board and their archaic blue laws. We did an oral history of Stanwoodopolis last year, and yeah, maybe we focused on the darker, seamier, more interesting side, the bootleggers and prostitutes and con artists, but Culture is, well, multi-layered. As you well know….
This year we’ve pretty much run out of ideas. Creativity, sometimes, is a shallow well. So we’re falling back on music. And of course ample adult beverages. Got ourselves a couple of hot musicians and we’re excited about the new reincarnation of the South End String Band.
Y’all come on down and help us support the Floyd and we promise a lively evening of music and food and libation. We even got our 4th CD up for grabs —Stanwood Town. Catchy title, we know. So skip PBS’s 15th rerun of the folk revival or Doo-Wop that weekend and join up with us. This is the Real Deal. Culture. Live. No reruns. No half hour fundraisers. Good cause. No excuses!!
Hope to see you there.
The South End String Band
‘Bringing hi-falutin culture to the well washed masses since practically before soap.’

Some folks down by me in these Southern Latitudes have been, what we scofflaws call, ‘Living off the Grid’. They work when they have to, get paid under the table (in the local parlance, meaning, they take only cash) and they don’t report wages to the IRS or the State. I run into wealthy folks up north who do the same thing when the opportunity presents itself. Some people call this tax evasion — and it is — but these folks see it more as what any sensible yahoo would do if he had the chance. Me and my professorial pals call this Cognitive Dissonance, a fancy five buck word for jamming the square peg into the round hole, then proclaiming it a pretty good fit.

My neighbor Gyppo John hit 65 the other day. He’s never paid one dime in taxes, federal state or local other than sin and sales tax on his necessities. He always works under the table, takes only cash or barter and lives pretty much hand to mouth. As far as the government is concerned, John pretty much doesn’t exist. Well, at least til he showed up to sign on for Medicare. I figure what the hell, we’re gonna pay for John’s healthcare anyway, might as well do it through Medicare as all those unpaid ER visits he has after his logging accidents. Dangerous work, logging. Probably exactly the kind of work insurance companies hate to cover. That, and radio antenna repairmen and kamikaze pilots.

John and I were quaffing a cold one when he got to wondering, about two of my beers into the evening, if maybe he could get Social Security benefits too as long as the Government was making him more comfortable in his Golden Years. Imagine his surprise when I sadly informed him Social Security was kind of a pension fund. Your money in, your money out. “Sorta based on your taxes, John,” I said, popping a third can and handing it over, something I guess John was getting too accustomed to.

“You mean I can’t get Social Security?? What the hell kind of security is THAT????” he practically shouted, his can foaming. My can, I mean. “I can’t keep logging til I’m 90!”

Probably true, I agreed, but what I thought to myself was Karma’s gonna be a hard road for some of us South Enders too smart for our own good by a country mile. No doubt it would cost me plenty in additional beer to help John get through those grasshopper winters. But mostly for me to listen to the sob stories.

Some of you crusty old timers out here tonight might remember when Camano was such a sleepy little backwash, we didn’t have deputies on patrol after midnight. Crime was pretty much limited to marijuana growing —- you know, BEFORE it became a medicinal herb — and a few break-ins down at unoccupied beach cabins, probably OFF-islanders sneaking in by boat. Any criminals that were caught, well the sheriff’s department had to haul them over to the hoosegow in Coupeville, kind of a long drive, deliver the miscreant, then drive back here. In the meantime we were left vulnerable, defenseless and unprotected. To be honest, most of us never noticed….

Somewhere in the 1980’s some entrepreneurial South Enders … well, okay, some desperately unemployed South Enders thought the time was ripe for a Private Security Agency, sign up the absentee landowners and go check on their unattended dwellings. You know, cruise by and see if the front door was still on its jambs and lights weren’t on when they were supposed to be off, maybe get out and check the locks, walk around with a flashlight, wear a special agent badge South End Safeguard, something catchy, something official looking in case the neighbors wondered about us prowling the back yard late at night. Admittedly, we looked a little rough. Okay, we looked like the guys we were supposed to protect folks against. But hellfire, man, this was the South End and back then we all looked a little ragged around the edges. Remember, this was BEFORE the great migration, the one where the Dot.com’ers took their suitcases of cash and bought up the bluffs and hauled in stuff WORTH stealing.

That’s the trouble with rich people, you see. They bring valuables. They bring expensive toys. They bring, if you follow my reasoning here, CRIME. Simple as that. When we were all poor, why would we steal from each other? We left our doors unlocked, the keys to the truck in the ignition. You wanted to steal MY truck, chances are I’d find you broke down about half a mile north of me. I’d probably have to apologize to YOU for loaning you a beat up rig you’d have to repair three times to town.

Well, the South End Security and Surveillance Agency was a little ahead of the curve. So they finally called it quits. Before the incoming tsunami of wealthy neighbors brought their big suburb crime to our pastoral paradise of poverty . We got 24/7 deputies from Island County finally and for awhile we could drop off captured criminals, alleged captured criminals, with the Stanwoodopolis Police, save them hours of scenic transportation and get right back to the scene of our crimes.

And then, before we could regroup our patrol cars and security agents, along came the Civilian Patrol. Free of charge. Official. Nice lettering on the side of the vehicles instead of that ratty plastic sign we had that fell off more than a few times and even got Two Toke Tom pulled over for littering. He got off with a warning, but it rattled him so much he resigned and turned in his patrol badge, worried, I think, littering might lead to some sniffing around his grow sheds up by the South End Diner. And that was his sole livelihood, so he didn’t want to jeapordize that.

Well, anyway, I’m sort of rambling along here about the history of crime-fighting on Camano and I haven’t even gotten to Colton yet, but …. I think maybe I better just wrap this up and move on to subjects that won’t interfere with dessert digestion. But I do want to say to you crimefighters, thank you! Not so much for ending crime down by me as for saving me that job in my truck patrolling the rich folks’ houses. If I’d really seen how they lived, how much they had, how nice they had it, who knows, I mighta turned to a life of crime myself with all that temptation. Lucky for me I stayed stupid and poor.

I got on board an airplane this week. You know the drill as well as me: strip down, belts off, liquids out, pockets emptied, wait your turn, hands up at the X-ray machine, a pat down at the end. Hundreds of TSA security folks. When I got to my terminal after running this gauntlet, two more TSA wanted to see our ID’s and boarding passes once more. Most us comply complacently, but if you ask us sheep if the money and inconvenience is worth it, post Nine One One, I bet 95% would say you betcha!

I’m not one of those 95%. It’s not so much a violation of my personal privacy, all these inspections. It’s just incredible overkill on our response to perceived threats. Kids are shot up every week in our schools and I don’t see us locking down schools, setting up checkpoints and x-ray machines, maybe confiscating assault rifles. In fact, the 2nd Amendment folks resist any and all gun regulation now. I know we can’t carry penknives on a plane, but I’m amazed the ammo boyz sit still for a gun ban on airplanes. Better to have high altitude shootouts with terrorists than fly unarmed, they’d argue. Same argument for arming teachers, I guess.

The first shopping mall that’s bombed and shoppers taken hostage, you’ll see where this can lead. A full frontal assault on the bastions of capitalism, you’ll have us consumers in mega-counter response. Strip searches at Macy’s, x-ray machines at Victoria’s Secret, lie detectors at Sears, loyalty oaths at Spencer’s Gifts, proof of citizenship and credit card viability at the front entrances, language proficiency at the restrooms, profiling in the mall corridors.

It’s one thing to murder innocent schoolkids and destroy the Trade Centers — it’s quite another to kindle fear in the average shopper. Expense be damned! The bastions of commerce will be cleansed of the unholy! The deranged can shoot up our schools, but trespass on the Halls of Profit, there’s going to be some serious hell to pay — and we’ll be more than willing to pay it.

Awhile back I ran into one of my new neighbors out taking the air. I introduced myself as the guy across the road and he told me his name. “So, Bernie,” I asked, figuring this was his retirement house after years in a career, what he’d been saving that nest egg for and whoopee, the Golden Years had finally arrived, “how do you like retirement?”

Bernie looked a bit bemused over the spectacles he peered over to take ‘the full measure of me’, some impertinent upstart probing too deeply on first contact. “If you don’t mind me asking,” I added a little impishly. He took a little while, either pondering the question or wondering whether to dignify it with an answer.

“Not much,” he said finally. “It’s harder to accustom to than I thought it would be.” I asked why he felt that way and he said he’d had some prestige in his former career that was now suddenly missing. “I demanded respect,” he said sternly, “and I got it.”

“Well, Bernie,” I grinned, “I’d get over THAT. Nobody down here gives a hoot or holler what you did before. You get to start brand new. Nobody’s gonna salute the old generals now and anyway, the war’s over. Take a load off. Enjoy the sunsets. Walk the beach. It’s why we call it retirement.”

I don’t know if Bernie ever did get over it. Some folks hang their awards and medals on the wall, hoping, I guess, to just keep on re-living their Glory Days. Me, I say high school’s come and gone, good riddance. The South End’s a funny melting pot, mostly us yahoo retirees bent on figuring out how to make the rest of life interesting without hauling along the weight of the past. Retirement’s hard enough starting from scratch and not driving the mizzus insane being underfoot. And I know for a steel hard, take-it-to-the-bank fact, the mizzus isn’t going to salute either. Down here, we’re all privates in this woman’s army.

Back in the day … the Navy base on Whidbey created a sign on the highway that stated PARDON OUR NOISE — IT’S THE SOUND OF FREEDOM. Kind of an apology for those Growler jets doing touch and go’s off at landing fields up and down the island. Now the sign reads THE SOUND OF FREEDOM. Forget the pardon part. You get the picture. Apologies are for weaklings.

On our weak sister island we get a little of that jet spillover, particularly up north. No problem, just crank up the TV a decibel or thirty, close the windows, try not to think of where the next aerial bombardment might be. Syria, Libya, China South Seas, Illinois. Hey, it’s the sound of freedom, okay? You got a problem with that???

Freedom means a lot of things to a lot of people. I guess if the U.S. Navy wants to keep a jet base on a now populated piece of prime real estate, well, good luck moving it to the Mojave. You might as well vote for slavery….. Me, I like peace and quiet, even if the two seem contradictory these days. And now Amazon wants to send drones to deliver their packages. That jet noise is going to seem like the quiet good old days soon. PARDON OUR DRONE — IT’S THE SOUND OF PROFITS.

Neighborhoods like the one across the street from me will sound like a hornets’ nest clobbered by a brick. You order that bigscreen 72 inch TV bad boy, you better build a landing pad on the roof for that delivery drone the size of Chinook copter to land without chopping the head off your Prius. Actually, I don’t expect Amazon to apologize any more than the Navy base. It’s a noisier world with hardly a nook to escape it, TV’s in the gas station pumps, muzak piped in 24/7, Fox News yammering and MSNBC trying to keep up, the whole world wired and amped.

And of course now the airlines are considering allowing cellphone usage in flight. So much for the Friendly Skies. PARDON MY STUPID PHONE CALL — IT’S THE SOUND OF BOREDOM. But hey, no need to apologize to your seatmates. Not anymore.

I got a couple of cronies who still write letters, which I return religiously, but the truth is, most of my correspondence these days is by e-mail. Tells you my age right there. The folks younger than me, they look at e-mail almost like snail mail. Too wordy, too long, too damn much trouble when you can text message.

For the longest time I thought a lot of my digital pen-pals were entering senility or onset Alzheimers. Their spelling got terrible, the syntax was lost, the punctuation became perfunctory. That, or they only send e-mails when they’re drunk or on drugs or not fully caffeinated. Or, knowing half my cronies, all of the above…. It took me a couple of years to discover they were treating e-mails like text messages.

I majored in English in college. Even taught it for a short time. Literature, communication skills, language — call me old fashioned and wheel me out for Nathaniel Hawthorne Day, but I still think these are useful skills. I was in town today, bantering with a friend in a shared language, English, and we still had a misunderstanding. Imagine two people trying to communicate with separate linguistics. Kind of like a native Utsaladian asking directions down here for the South End Diner. Good luck, Sven! Probably end up at the Marina ordering lutefisk. Possibly tragic consequences.

Lately I’ve been noticing that responses to my e-mails are, well …. Let’s be kind here … it’s as if they only read the first sentence. I’m realizing all my literary endeavors are completely wasted. AND, worse! They’re just so much extraneous clutter for my recipient. They’re not going to read anything longer than a Tweet now. Anything more, I don’t care if it’s Pulitzer Worthy, it’s instant trash. If I got something Important to say, better just SAY it. Folks are a little too busy for floral accoutrements, literary flourishes, or artistic embellishments. Which, now that I think of it, means most of you readers abandoned me back in the first paragraph.

Well, okay. I just re-read the first paragraph. Too wordy. Too long. Too damn much trouble when you can text message. Here’s the tip of the day: hit DELETE. If you haven’t already…..

A few of us South Enders were up at the Camanoloch golf course’s 19th Hole, a hole in the wall café claiming “The Best Burgers on the Island.” Maybe when there wasn’t another restaurant…. It was a Monday night Seahawks game and the few sports fanatics who didn’t subscribe to cable and ESPN were hunkered expectantly at our formica tables drinking bottled beer from the cooler next to the cash register and a table selling golf balls and tees.

Must’ve been a total of three tables, the sum total of cable-deprived islanders. Ralph was grumbling that maybe we should’ve driven the extra ten miles to a bar with TV’s bigger than his laptop screen, but the game had started and the rest of us weren’t all that die-hard a fans and weren’t motoring off island in search of some sportsbar with 16 TV’s mounted strategically so every seat was Front Row. We had a front row right here. The beers were cold, the 19th Hole had advertised the ballgame and we’d taken the bait. Even Ralph accepted the finality of the decision and grabbed another bottle from the trap.

What I think we’ve accepted, all of us, is that sports are king in modern America and football is more popular by far than politics or American Idol. Marx said religion was the opiate of the masses, but he never imagined 15 cable channels of every sport from soccer to ping pong, bobsledding to skateboarding, rugby to kickboxing. As more and more of us couch potatoes hunker down over our laptops and bigscreens, eschewing any and all physical involvement with the real world, we seem addicted to almost anything that smacks of competition, whether it’s football or ballroom dancing.
One of our buddies here at the 19th Hole, Harold, never misses American Idol. He secretly thinks he’s a crooner and I have no doubt whatsoever he imagines himself under the klieg lights on the neon-lit stage, belting out Sinatra to 30 million crazed viewers who plan to vote for him. He’s elbow down with his Bud Lite watching the halftime show. Our team is losing by a field goal and maybe Jerry at the far table is warming up his kicking leg in his private fantasy.

We’re all lost in those fantasies these days. Doesn’t really hurt, I guess, but I suspect a lot of what we used to call real life is only glimpsed on the crawlers at the bottom of the screen while we’re all dancing with the stars. Way of the world, nowadays, I suppose, just living vicariously, way more losers than winners in the Big Game of Life. Although …. we all imagine ourselves the winners. Harold is singing some jingle from the last commercial as he heads to the cooler, only slightly off-key. I decide to have one more beer too. Might as well make it a duet.

I got a buddy who, like too many of the entrepreneurial South End, works ‘under the table’. Meaning, for you law abiding legitimate taxpayers, he gets paid in cash so he doesn’t have to report his wages to the IRS or pay state income tax on those earnings. Totally illegal, you understand. Even most undocumented immigrants pay income tax and social security withdrawals, even if they’ll probably never see one dime of social security.

My pal thinks he’s outsmarting ‘The Man’. Uncle Sam. Big Government. I’m old fashioned, I guess, or a little out of synch. I pay taxes – admittedly, not a whole lot of taxes since I don’t make a whole lot of money as a starving artist – and I don’t mind paying em. Pays for roads and police and fire fighters and EMT’s and schoolteachers and courthouses and city halls and libraries and, well, all those sorta important things The Man is there to do. It’s a long list and I bet some of it I wish He wasn’t doing, like maybe some of our recent wars. But I got a vote and I’ll accept the outcome, being happy to live in a so-called democracy.

I got another buddy who set up an offshore account to AVOID paying The Man. Mitt Romney does the same thing and it’s totally LEGAL. Boeing just got a 9 billion dollar tax break from this state after they threatened to move somewhere that paid more for their extortion, then they busted the union, offered them their ‘last chance’ to capitulate or else. The union voted 51% to keep their jobs at whatever Boeing was offering. Democracy in action. We got major corporations that pay zero taxes. Zip. Nada. Zilch. All perfectly legal.

So okay, I pay my taxes. My buddies think I’m a damn fool. The Man tells me I’m a Good Citizen. Me, I think Boeing should pay taxes and I think those corporations should too. I think I can tell the difference between our fair share and a tax loophole for the rich even if I don’t have a lobbyist on the payroll. Maybe that’s because I confuse Morality with Legality. Something that’s easy to do on the South End.