The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Back in the dark days of a dying print journalism, the Shipley editorial team embarked on what, to most tired and cynical newspaper people, was a foolhardy, quixotic enterprise: to publish local news and local events and local yokels … and to pay for it all, not just with their meager savings and their kids’ college fund, but the Old Fashioned Way. With Advertising. The Walter Cronkites of the Stillaguamish Valley said Don’t Do It! Print has gone the way of the dinosaurs and the House of Representatives’ urge to compromise. Better just to blog. Better yet, get a real job!!! But don’t bankrupt yourselves.

Two years BEFORE Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for a quarter of a trillion dollars, Crab Cracker was launched, corny as it sounds, on a shoestring and a prayer. And now, many laces later, the gods of Gutenberg have spoken from On High and the little Cracker has crabwalked with claws clacking wildly into its 100th issue. The Cracker, like the Big Lebowski, abides … while a flailing print medium dogpaddles in the turbulent waters of a digital ocean in expectation of being swallowed lock stock and crackerbarrel.  I like to think their success is due to the savvy linkage of their Calendar of Events with local artworks, local poetry, local music and of course, top notch local literature. So okay, literature with a small ‘L’, maybe. All right, they did okay DESPITE these words of marginal wit and not much wisdom. Geez, whaddaya want? A refund?

No doubt the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Le Monde, London’s Daily Telegraph and the Stanwoodopolis Gazette will rush to emulate the Cracker’s example of journalistic freedom and economic viability. Amazon and Bezos’ competitors at Google will no doubt make multi-million dollar offers, Facebook may put the ‘book’ back in for truthfulness, Yahoo may see the profit in using ACTUAL yahoos and the Cracker may someday succumb to the sweet courtship of corporate dating.  But I suspect not. The Cracker is here to stay, a constant beacon of current fishing reports, local gossip, tide tables, upcoming auctions and concerts and events, interviews with new artists and the old farts too, all of it eminently suitable for late night reading and stove kindling later and fishwrap now, something digital and video journalism will never, not in a million megabytes, be capable of duplicating.

Or as we say at the ink splattered offices of the Crab Cracker: ROLL OVER BEETHOVEN AND MICROSOFT, GIVE FOX THE NEWS!

I ran into my old neighbor Paul down by the Post Office.  The Post Office we got is just a private outfit:  Copy This, Snail That.  It has some P.O. Boxes, sells stamps and envelopes, handles packages, sort of the harbinger of the privatization of mail, I guess, in these distrustful times.  Paul had about 6 letters in his mitt, which he almost dumped into the blue mailbox curbside, but pulled up short abruptly.

“Paying bills?” I asked innocuously.  “No,” he said somewhat furtively.  “I’m flying under the radar these days.  The government’s monitoring our phones, reading our e-mail, listening to our cellphone conversations and checking text messages.  I’m only communicating by mail now.”  He gave me a hard look.  “They’re watching everyone now.”  When I asked who was watching, he looked disgusted.  “Big Brother,  that’s who.”

We walked into Copy This, nothing now but a watered down version of its former self, downsized from its heyday at the end of the strip mall, now relegated to a counter just beyond the checkout stations of the IGA.  Paul needed a roll of stamps and I needed some too, although not near as many.  “I still write letters,” I said, just to pass the time.  “Course, they’re not encrypted or anything.”

“Laugh if you want, Daddle.  Chuckle all the way to the gulag.  This is war now, buddy.  War on the citizen.  You can lay down if you want, you and all the rest of the sheep, but I’m not going down without a fight.”  He got a wad of Forever stamps, nice photo of waterfowl.  Government sponsored art, I wanted to say, but Paul was obviously not in the mood for small jests.  Still, I couldn’t resist when he handed his mail to Judy, the ersatz postmistress, apparently not trusting the security of the outside mailbox.

“So the government is eavesdropping on all your phone calls.  It’s monitoring all your e-mails.  It listens to what you say on your cellphone….”

“Correcto, chum.”

“So tell me this — you hand your letters to the U.S. Post Office, you even pay em for each one.  You think licking an envelope is security enough?”

Paul glared at me incredulously, probably wondering if I was a secret mailman.  But I think I struck a nerve.  I never saw him at the Post Office again and I can only assume he communicates by carrier pigeon or trusted courier.  Next time I see him, I’ll offer to buy his leftover stamps, maybe half price.  War always has its profiteers.

Suppose you threw an election … and no one came? This week that was pretty much the scenario with only the library issues on the ballot. Oh, I know, it’s high summer and we’re a little busy barbecuing, boating and beer drinking to squeeze in the time to mark an absentee ballot, put it in an envelope and mail it in. More than half of us 15, 600 residents couldn’t find the time … or the stamp … or didn’t care enough to vote on a library levy.

About 1 in 5 of us voted to approve the new library. About 1 in 6 of us figured we didn’t need a library in this post-Gutenberg computer era. And most of us had more urgent issues to occupy us this hot happy August. I don’t know, short of offering up social media as a way to vote, how much easier we can make it. No more polling stations, no more ID checks, just mark a ballot and send it in. I mean, c’mon, do we have to vote on Facebook to get folks interested???

I heard we fought the Iraq War to bring American style democracy to Saddam’s dictatorship. Rumor has it we want the same in Afghanistan after the Taliban took over and let Al Qaida use the country as a terrorist base. You ask me — and I know you’re too busy right now to bother — we ought to fight for a little democracy here first. And if we don’t give a damn enough to vote, to exercise the fundamentals of what democracy really means, then we ought to quit our yammering about those poor oppressed countries that need our intervention to help set them free. It’s us, the pathetically apathetic, that needs the intervention.

Scientists on the South End have announced yet another major breakthrough in the genetics front. Hot off the heels of the first known cloning of old growth nettles, the labs at Tyee Technologies have grown meat from the stem cells of Wanda Davenport’s Rhode Island Reds, blue ribbon winners at the county fair two years running for biggest chickens. Dr. Frank Steinberger brought reporters from the Crab Cracker and Stanwoodopolis Gazette to witness the world’s first Hot Wings artificially grown on yo-yo strings in the sterile environment of their laboratories. From petri dish to deep fat fryer in 30 days, the zesty morsels were sampled and declared ‘hotter than a Texas abortion debate’ by patrons of the Diner where the tasting was conducted.

Dr. Steinberger, asked what the purported production costs might be, stated that to feed, say, a half time Super Bowl party of 6, would be in the range of $250,000. Or over $50,000 per person. “In other words, Bill Gates might afford this if he didn’t invite two many gridiron pals.” The scientist did say costs would drop appreciably when Full Production was reached and that Tyson Foods had already expressed an interest in the formula for the secret sauce along with Tyee Technologies’ advanced bio-engineering know-how. “Already we have teams working on Teriyaki Wings, Honolulu Lava Wings, a Cool Ranchero dip and others I’m not at liberty to divulge at this time.”

Asked what the nuggets would taste like without their grease-released flavorings, Dr. Steinberger, ever the comedian, cracked up the packed crowd of reporters by saying, “they taste a lot like chicken.” He went on to explain that artificially grown poultry would soon supplant the muss and fuss of “that barnyard mess, feather picking, manure and the ever dangerous bird flu. In a world clamoring for hotwings, we foresee a bright future. I think you’ll find the venture capitalists doing the flocking from now on,” he crowed.

This reporter hoped they were working on bio-engineered Pepto Bismol.

I had a friend call me up the other day. An intruder – ‘a trespasser’, she called him – had wandered onto her property via bicycle. Armed, she said, with a clipper. Her neighbor had confronted him lopping English Ivy off her fir trees and asked him who he was, did he have authorization for this horticultural blitzkrieg, where was he from and why the Anglophobic hostilities??

My friend was sure if anyone had a hand on the pulse of the South End, if anyone was wired into the grapevine without the use of any social media of any sort, old Skeeter would know who this interloper was.

Indeed. I told her his name, gave her is address, website and phone number and approximate height and weight. More that that, I volunteered his M.O., his modus operandi,. “He has a jag about ivy strangling the flora,” I informed her. “Harmless, really, old Clipper Carl. Rides his bike around the South End, usually asks the owner first, but I guess time is running out or the obsession has tightened around his trunk. It’s some kind of botanical fixation. Let’s not call it pathological, just a bit more like a religious calling. NOT that I’m saying Carl hears voices in the night “OUT OUT DAMNED IVY!!” Or that he might mistake a fellow South Ender for a strangler vine. We all have our hobbies. And sometimes we lose ourselves in pursuit of them.

The odd thing is, Carl is very well off, a wealthy retired professional and a big philanthropist. Sure, he could’ve chosen to eliminate poverty or disease on the South End …. but … he chose to eradicate ivy. Not maybe what Bill Gates would’ve chosen, but even Bill gets criticized for not choosing causes WE want most. You can’t really win with a lot of folks.

I was riding my bike by Carl’s property today, the ten acre parcel he bought down the road from his bluff house, the one he has the security camera aimed at the gate he keeps locked, and I noticed all the NO TRESPASSING signs he’d posted for a quarter of a mile on the perimeter. Right where I used to pick cherries and apples before he bought the acreage and warned us off. He doesn’t eat the fruit, I notice, but we can’t either now. I’ve been looking for a new hobby myself in my advancing old age and Carl’s given me something of an idea. Good sharp hatchet, hop on my bike and mosey down to those NO TRESPASSING signs I don’t much care for, I bet they’d come down faster than clipped off ivy vines. Free up those fruit trees to us neighbors.

If anyone would understand, I’m certain Carl would…..

I was out on the road the other day trying to sell the last of my Skeeter Daddle Diaries, the second printing. I’m about as good at door to door sales as I am at hedge fund managing. Me and money don’t really mix, I’ve learned slowly over a long life without an MBA degree. Neither of us trusts the other….

I meet folks — even down here on the indolent South End — who knew shortly after teething that they wanted to make money, get rich, retire early. They didn’t go to college and spend four years on a Philosophy degree. They picked careers in law or dentistry or finance. You don’t drill for water in the Sahara, that’s what they understood.

Me, I always thought I’d rather do something I loved doing. Call me naïve and slap me with an IOU, but I figured there was always a job, even a miserably low paying one, that would pay the bills and allow me to pursue some quaint interest or other. So I took English, majored in literature and poverty, then stepped off the educational track years later with a nice solid background in arts and history and yeah, literature, then promptly discovered I had virtually NO marketable skills. Kind of a shock. You kind of figure if they sell you a degree, there’ll be a placement.

I worked awhile in a dog pound, ran a cafeteria, drove metro buses, wrote poetry and short stories that got published for, oh, nothing, drove school buses, seriously considered graduate school (maybe get a PhD. in Unemployment or Swahili), moved around a bit, lived in shabby apartments, ate a lot of macaroni and cheese. To be honest, I didn’t mind. What I did mind was not finding the exact perfect job that fulfilled some as yet undiscovered passion in life. Four years at a university and I sure didn’t find it. Now I had to do it AND work crap jobs looking.

I can tell you youngsters — in hindsight — the only thing worse than some crummy job is looking for the next crummy job. But I can also tell you — and don’t get me wrong, I’m not a Perfessor of Smartology — if you settle for the money, or the security, or the health insurance benefits, or the pension, you’ll maybe be satisfied, possibly even happy, but you will never find the thing that makes working really worthwhile. It took me plenty of dead end jobs, too much macaroni, far too many bad bosses, but in the end, you’ll persevere. Probably not rich, but trust me on this, a helluva lot happier.

Little Jimmy was livid, his face about the same shade of red as the Hunts Ketchup on the South End Diner’s tables. Yukon Jack was baiting him, as usual, but Jimmy was way beyond easy banter and good humored ribbing. “I’m not saying Obamacare’s gonna solve all the problems, but dammit, Jack, you got a Cadillac health plan and I got nothin. You think that’s fair?”

Yukon was planning to work this fish slow, bring it in easy, no rush getting Jimmy in the boat right away. “Well, Jimbo, I worked for mine. Why should I pay for yours?” he grinned over a piece of toast heaped with plastic tub marmalade. “I worked TOO, you *&##!!X&**!!”

Cussing’s allowed in the Diner, but not all cussing, and already Big Larry was wiping his hands on his bacon splattered apron. “Jimmy!” he called from the grill and Jimmy put both hands in the air and mouthed I’m sorry. Not to Jack, just Larry, who shook his head and went back to work turning pancakes the size of manhole covers. And about as heavy, you ask me.

“I worked all my life at jobs that didn’t pay benefits, Jack,” Jimmy said, about 10 decibels lower. Jack chewed his toast, rolled his eyes, swallowed happily that sugary orange marmalade. “Shoulda changed jobs, sweetheart, gone for the bennies, not the easy work.”

Little Jimmy had his butter knife clenched like a machete. His blood pressure was cranked up double what Brenda’s coffee had elevated it to by his 3rd refill. Cumulonimbus thunderheads were forming over the porcelain rim of his mug. “I’m just sayin, Jack, it isn’t fair some get and some don’t.” Jack replied the way he always replied: “Who says life is fair, Jimmy?” Big happy smirk on his buttered lips.

“Let it go, Jack,” Indian Bob said, swiveling on his stool at the counter. Bob never says much, but when he does, folks generally listen. Bob is 6 foot 6 and runs about 300 pounds of mostly muscle. If he has a sense of humor, it’s beyond most of us. Jack, sensing his fish snapping the line right at the gunwale, asked not quite innocently, “Why should I?”

Bob leaned in so only Jack could hear. “Cause his wife is dying, man. Leave it be.”

We all mostly know each other down on the South End. That doesn’t mean we’re blood. But we KNOW each other. I heard a rumor later that someone sent Little Jimmy a cashier’s check. Some folks said it was a lot of money. It was even reported that the anonymous sender might’ve been Jack. Like I said, it was just a rumor.

The man I bought my shack from back in 1977 told me he’d read an article in Mother Earth News that said just drive around where you want to live, find some old run down homestead abandoned and overgrown, go to the County offices, find out who owns it, call em up and see if they want to sell it cheap. By god, that’s exactly what he did and luck of the draw, he got an alcoholic owner going bankrupt ready to sell to the lowest bidder. Fairy tales, Virginia, occasionally do come true. But mostly, they don’t ….

My guy pulled the blackberries off the roof, tore the rotten walls off, rewired the electrical, ran a hose for water from the neighbor’s house, then ran out of money. He must’ve read a subsequent article about Raising Dogs for Fun and Profit, because he bought two pedigree mastiffs, one male and one female, built a plywood Gitmo and fenced them in. He planned to breed them, sell the puppies for a small fortune and make enough to finish the shack to semi-habitable condition for his suffering wife and kids.

Course, as always happens when reality collides with dreams, the dogs, big aggressive beasts, tore into each other, scarring their mates and ruining any chance for ribbon-winning at future dog shows. I guess my boy didn’t consider dogfighting as an avenue to success, so he tried mail-order sales awhile and finally, like himself, ran into someone chasing a similar fairy tale. Me. He doubled what he’d paid and packed up the nuclear family sans dogs and headed his big trailer to Maine, lock stock and barrel. In the winter. To build, he said, a cabin and start anew.

I happen to be from Maine. I told him you aren’t going to build anything but igloos in the winter, man. He said we’ll see, just send those $225 payments to Maine. A month later I got a letter instructing me to send payments to Florida. And please, don’t give anyone my address.

I googled him up the other day out of idle curiosity. A site had him listed as some kind of snake oil salesman with unhappy customers going online to say DON’T BUY ANYTHING FROM THIS CROOK!!! It’s 36 years too late for me. Like I said, sometimes fairy tales come true. But usually you have to work very very hard. And most folks, well, they just want the Magic Wand.

Life down at the Suds and Duds Laundromat is usually pretty boring. Most patrons cram their frontloaders, then head down to the Diner a quarter mile away for a cup of coffee to while away wash time. It’s customary for the next customer to pile the wet finished laundry into plastic bins if folks aren’t back yet. Other than some vintage Newsweek magazines, some dogeared Peoples, an occasional 3 day old newspaper or a busted-spine paperback, there isn’t much to make the coin-op anything but the sterile fluorescent-lit hell it is.

Doris, the usually absentee owner, tried mounting a television set on a wobbly table in the back by the big commercial dryers, but it went AWOL the first week. When she siscovered the theft she flung her half smoked Marlboro on the linoleum disgustedly and ground it like she’d imagined the face of the thief, then machinegunned a volley of obscenities that made Willy Branson scuttle crabwise along the row of agitating Maytags and out into the gravel parking lot until she’d settled down.

Maybe it’s the wear and tear of busted fanbelts, leaky hoses, burned up motors, two bad marriages with a 3rd on the rocks that has given her a tendency toward a philosophy that life’s glass isn’t just half empty, it’s got a broken jagged top. Maybe that’s partly what gives the place, even on a sunny day, an energy akin to a small town funeral.

A lot of the housewives shuttle back and forth to nearby homes, preferring the Spartan comforts of their rental trailers to the alien sterility of the Suds and Duds, even if it means waiting an extra turn for an available machine. The bachelors sometimes hang around, but rarely inside. They climb into the cab of their work trucks and drink the beers they bring along with a box of Brand X detergent. Occasionally, if a couple of them show up at the same time and the weather is nice, they’ll share the picnic table at the side of the building and banter like two strangers on barstools, once in awhile getting up to drop more quarters in a dryer or grabbing the next Cold One from a cooler in the cab of their truck. They keep a watchful lookout, not so much for passing sheriff’s cars, but for Doris who has made it plain on notices inside that she’s fed up hauling their empties to the recycle, yet another flat tire on her short road to hell.

Like I said, the S&D is usually as exciting as grass growing in a cemetery. So when Maggie Winston came back last week to find her laundry scattered on the top of the big dryer half dried and her machine tumbling Billy Jean Sandstrom’s sheets, her mental drum hit Final Spin when she confronted Billy Jean calmly sipping a diet Coke half filled with rum down by the change machine. No one else was in the place, but by the time the deputies’ three squad cars had arrived and separated the two washerwomen, sudsy water was rolling out the front door, detergent was strewn from pop machine to toilet and Maggie and Billy Jean had shredded each other’s lingerie and sheets and blouses and were as wet as two spaniels fetching downed ducks.

The story that made the Gazette was concise: South End Women Fight for Dryer. Rumor down here was a bit more incisive based on superior investigative reporting. Billy Jean, it turns out, had been seeing Maggie’s husband — in a carnal sort of way. No doubt a dryer was the last straw, but as always, the truth was a bit more convoluted. All I know is, like the adage says, it all comes out in the wash eventually….

Well, Buckaroos, it looks like I have to go to the wilds of Wisconsin for a couple of mosquito infested weeks.  I’m going to disconnect the computer, leave the phone plugged in here on its land line, forget about checking e-mails or phone messages, stop the mail, hold the papers, go cold turkey on NPR and PBS and see if the world can manage without old Skeeter for two long weeks.  Egypt, well, you’re on your own.  Syria, good luck to ya.  Mr. Snowden there in the airport terminals of Russia, maybe we’ll cross paths.  Afghanistan, geez … what else is there to say?  Send up the white flag and come on home.  I’ll be back by then, we’ll all have a parade and declare victory.  Over something.  Or somebody.  Meanwhile, go thru the archives here and see if there’s anything that made one damn bit of sense.  They say if you put a hundred monkeys in front of typewriters long enuff, they’ll eventually come up with War and Peace.  Maybe that’s what Tolstoy did.  Me, I’m just one monkey.  Still, there might be a halfway decent haiku if you do the parsing…..