The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Lately all the boyz at the Diner can talk about is guns.  Guns and ammo.  We got a new waitress, Anita, who keeps their coffee cups rimmed and what you got is a dangerous combination of testosterone and caffeine.  Expletives about gun control and the 2nd amendment ricochet off the back mirror and the grill hood like an AK-15 on the firing range.

“They’ll have to pry my gun outa my cold dead hand,” Walter likes to shout every time some ‘pablum pooping pacifist’ in a corner booth tries to make the case for maybe banning at least semi-automatics.  Walter worries he’ll need an arsenal when the government comes to take away his freedom, which, he’ll remind his target de jour, it’s doing Right Now.  “You gonna stop an army with a baseball bat when they come for you?”

Big Larry usually has to come out with a spatula dripping bacon grease to calm Walter down to a reasonable decibel level.  “Nobody’s coming for you til you finish breakfast, Walt, so eat up.  You’ll need your strength.”

Some of the boys have started to wear their NRA caps, I guess to show South End Solidarity.  Me, I’m not a big gun-toter, but since I own my grandpa’s old shotgun, I’m evidently no pablum pooping peacenik either, even if it hasn’t been fired since 1975.  And once upon a time, living in an old farmhouse in Northern Wisconsin, I got wind of a rumor that the Posse Comitatus, a redneck right wing anti-about-everything group of good ole boys, wanted me and my friends to move back to whatever hippie commune we’d crawled out of — or else!

I kept more than my gramp’s 18 guage rabbit gun then.  Kept 7 rifles loaded and ready .  Two were semi-automatic  .22’s, pull the trigger fast as you can go and watch the bark peel back, no point aiming through the sights.  Later my neighbor across the field told me he kept an arsenal too for the night they might come in half a dozen pickups.

It’s not the government I worry about.  It’s the Walters.  But I can’t live with that much paranoia.  Why I moved here.  Walter just likes to rattle the coffee cups, I know . But, there are places where they do more than that….

The world isn’t just growing smaller, it’s positively moving lock stock and crackerbarrel into the South End.  It’s one thing to have shirt tail relatives moving in with us, but I’m discovering perfect strangers roaming the nettle trails out back.  Who ARE these Kardashian people?  Why am I supposed to care enough to find out?  Some quarterback from Notre Dame has an internet imaginary girlfriend who died — he’s in the driveway explaining this??  Oprah is interviewing some lying bicycle junkie down in the studio.  I don’t give a doper’s damn;  I just want them out of my studio so I can work.

I got You-Tube nonsense e-mailed to me, I got Yahoo News flashes on famous people’s fashion faux pas, there’s blog sites and twets and facebook and up-to-the-nano-second updates on what total strangers are doing.  Our computers and cellphones and I-pads and televisions are sending silicone tentacles into our plumbing, our electrical, our phone lines and our synapses.  We got the world crammed into a two bedroom house.  Believe me, I need more closet space.

What I really need is to turn the computer OFF.  Radio too.  TV — I need to shoot the one I got.  Shoot it, burn it and bury it.  I have friends who never turn it off.  They watch anything.  Judge Judy, game shows, soaps, potty training poodles of the stars …. anything.  WITH commercials.  And don’t even get me started on advertisers.

We must be the most bored generation since those long winter nights in Cro-Magnon caves before fire was discovered.  Nothing to do, nothing to create, nothing to fire an imagination, nothing to give us joy, nothing to make us wonder, nothing — absolutely nothing — of interest in our barren lives.  The entire world at our fingertips and we can hear nothing but the babble, a white noise always on, a tinny tinnitus of the mind.

The Kardashian clan is living on the South End now and apparently we’re expected to feed them.  Where in hell did they come from?  And more importantly, how do we get rid of them?

We had a Coal Car meeting down at the Grange the other night.  Folks could weigh in pro or con whether they wanted coal shipped by rail from Wyoming to Bellingham, then loaded on boats for China.  This same week on TV you could see the pollution in Beijing, something so dangerous to breathe, they didn’t have a number on their toxicity scale.  150 is plenty poisonous.  Theirs was over their top number of 500.  Way more….  You could see for yourself they need more coal.

I had a friend who sat down awhile back and decided to drink himself to death.  Suicide by bottle.  If he’d asked us to pick him up a sackful of booze every day — and offered to pay us really well to do it — maybe we could’ve had some meetings at the Grange to decide if it was okay or not.   He was going to kill himself with or without us making a profit on his suicide.

I’m old and more than a little cynical.  I figure the coal is coming in.  Money talks.  But I once went to apublic hearing in Coupeville when the pipeline folks meant to come down from Alaska and go across the country.  This was back in, oh, the early 80’s.  The pipeline changed its proposed route, originally intended to go through Portland where opposition was mounting, to cut across Whidbey and Camano after coming up out of the Straits and Saratoga.  Smart move.  Caught all of us by surprise.

Me and my roommate Joe were the only folks who went to the public hearing.  The ONLY two other than the pipeline rep and his pretty wife and two cute kids.  Pause on that awhile.  Gov. Spellman eventually vetoed it, said the pipe was deeper than any ever laid, sunk in a seismic area, no less.   The Secretary of the Interior came out to speak to the Guv.  The Secretary of the Defense came out to twist his arm.  The President leaned on him.  It was a matter of national security, they said.  It meant jobs.  Money was at stake.

No doubt Governor Spellman read Joe and me’s incisive testimony and was swayed by two long-haired, unemployed citizens of his state who cared enough to drive clear over to our sister island and make our position crystal clear:  No Pipeline!

So I don’t know why I think the coal is coming sure as Santa comes to the Mall.  I don’t know why I’m so pessimistic.  Most of the folks at the Grange didn’t like the idea much so I wonder if the average Joe in China doesn’t either.  We didn’t lose much security when the pipeline didn’t get built and I suspect we can survive without the profits from 19th century energy sales.  I’m betting there’s a couple of unemployed Chinese guys living hell and gone from Shanghai who may think so too.  If the government doesn’t run a tank over them when they make their protest, maybe someday they’ll get a job and become productive members of society.  Like Joe and me….

I remember — vaguely now — telling folks I wasn’t going to learn how to use a *#@!!?>% computer until they evolved to a simplicity enough to coach me how to use them.  WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO, SKEETER? it would ask politely.  And I would say, oh, let’s check for airline reservations, or why don’t we send my old pard, Guitar Bob, an e-mail?  I’LL GET RIGHT ON THAT!!  BY THE WAY, DID I MENTION THAT I HAVE A NEW PROGRAM I COULD SHOW YOU … WHEN YOU HAVE THE TIME, MR. DADDLE.

Maybe a decade or so later I could see the mizzus’ computer wasn’t getting simpler.  In fact, from my arms’ length analysis, it looked way more complicated.  And I was being left farther and farther behind in its rear view mirror as it waved goodbye in its digital little way.  What in the hell were Billy Gates and Stevie Jobs doing if they weren’t making this easier for old goats like me and my Jurassic pals?

Looking back, it was like asking my socket wrenches to teach me how to repair a car engine.  Tool usage is still dependent on the intelligence of the hominid user.  And my computer, seemingly stupid, wasn’t about to run tutorials on raising my IQ.  Still won’t.  But it will get me to a site that will answer 90% of my questions —- so long as I don’t get philosophical.

My folks are in their 80’s.  They’re like me — reluctant newcomers to the Digital Age.  Virtually nothing is obvious … or intuitive… or remotely familiar from our previous world.   I watched a 2 year old kid with an interactive toy he had, part computer, part CD player.  He mastered it in, oh, 30 seconds.  He could turn our TV on, change channels, adjust the volume.  Two years old.  His brain is hardwired to silicon.  Mine is mostly plaque.

We will only be visitors to the next Era.  We’ve already been relegated to the past by the kids who are connected to a new hive, one that exists beyond our physical world.  The Pied Piper has come for the children.  We invited him, I guess.  Some of us will try to follow too, but we don’t hear the music the same way.  What we try to dance to, they simply breathe in.  This new music is their air.  Me, I’m feeling like I got emphysema.

I’m a great believer in the notion that by the time you reach MY ripe old age, we old dogs don’t need to learn new tricks.  We got most of it figured out.  So it undermines my South End cosmology when one of us goes off the tracks.  I’m gonna tell you about Randy the Handyman, but sadly, he’s not the only pal who’s veered into the bushes, asleep at the wheel.

Randy had his own company for years – South End Construction – where he started out as a general contractor, tore off roofs, added porches, built decks for the newcomers’ hot tubs, remodeled kitchens and bathrooms.  He learned the trade by doing it, then moved up to house building.  Specs, customs, the whole American Dream, until finally he was building million dollar homes . You might think — him coming up from humble beginnings and all, the whole bootstrap theory of success — he’d have it made in the shade, salt away some profits for when the rains wiped away the shade, plan for  a Lazy-Boy recliner old age.  But Randy, who believed religion was set up to allow him to pray to a God the way a kid goes to a department store Santa, figured money might not grow on trees, but it was in there somewhere next to the 2×6’s.  He made a small fortune, but like a lot of folks way richer than him, he spent an even bigger fortune.  Mortgaged the farm for four times what he paid for it,  right past the barn roof, and when the Recession Grande hit, nothing could save him.

The two previous lesser recessions hadn’t taught him much, except maybe how to navigate the bankruptcy laws, but the Big One had some lessons for him almost Biblical in nature.  Lost the farm, lost his wife, friends turned their backs,even the kids wouldn’t talk to him.  For a man who loved material things more than what matters, a stingey Santa will make him lose faith.

I see Randy once in awhile, tooling aimlessly around in his pickup, both on their last legs.  You could feel sorry for a man who worked hard and never quite had the dream or maybe lacked the reach.  But the man who had it made and only wanted more?  I tell you this, Santa’s a pisspoor substitute for God.

I can remember when the Fuller Brush salesman came clear down to the South End.  My neighbor bought her cleaning supplies from him.  Not so much because they were cheap; she just felt sort of sorry for the guy.  Not so many travelling salesmen down our neck of the holler these days — other than religious salesmen.  A dead profession, gone the way of tinkers, the wagoneers who sold pots and pans.  I got neighbors who still sell pot, but not the pans.

The new Willy Lomans down here are selling on E-bay.  They find an item cheap at the garage sales, snap a digital photo, paste a description and then folks bid on it from Utsalady to Hong Kong.  It’s a testament to the mighty consumer instinct down here that we still have junk to sell after years of shipping goods off island over the internet.  You’d think garages would be empty, sheds bare, grown kids’ bedrooms an echo chamber of only memories.  I guess not.

Trouble is, WE shop on E-bay now.  Used to be one UPS truck burning up gas past Elger Bay Store, delivering to the dot.com retirees.  Now there’s a whole fleet, brown shirted, short pants boyz, always in a major hurry.

The guy I bought my shack from in ’77 was a mail order salesman.  Kind of a scam back then mostly.  Snake oil through the mail.  Satisfaction guaranteed.  Just pay the shipping and handling, some unspecified amount slightly less than what a new car costs.  Late night TV still does this, probably where my shack salesman ended up if not jail or a church somewhere economically distressed.  Seem like folks like to prey on the poor.  That, or just pray with them.

I was chatting it up with my UPS driver a few years back.  He had a shack like mine, burned wood for heat, lived in a remote spot up in the hills east of Stanwoodopolis.  I asked him how he liked driving for a living and he said, well, it’s okay if you don’t mind only making wages.

I said what does that mean?  And he took some precious minutes from his frenetic schedule to explain he delivered to all the dot.com millionaires up the road, boyz who retired at 40, cashed in their stock options and lived like shahs in their palaces on the bluff while he was making mere union wages.  You know, with health insurance, vacation and pension.  Stuff me and my pals don’t get….

Wealth, I guess you already know in the land of the free, is relative.  All these folks with early retirements, McMansions, dot.com money, his and her BMW’s — well, it can sure make a decent salary with benefits look like pauper’s wages if you care to do a comparison test.  Make you feel positively deprived.  Make you think if your time isn’t worth $500 an hour you’re being cheated, sorta like being homeless at Christmas in Beverly Hills.  Probably explains why folks play the Lottery.  Even up their playing field if they hit big.

We spend too much time wanting what we don’t have than enjoying what we do — and that maxim that money won’t buy you happiness, well, save that for the simple minded.  Money for most of us will BE happiness.

My UPS driver left awhile back.  Maybe a new route.  Hopefully one delivering to minimum wage earners.  My guess is he’s starting up some new software company, fishing for venture capital, looking for investors.  Probably in a couple of years he’ll sell out to IBM or AT&T, retire near me with enough money to buy the bluffs across the street and build a Taj South Hall.   UPS trucks’ll line up at the coded gate and he’ll regale the drivers with stories of when years ago, in another lifetime, he drove big brown trucks and worked for slave wages.  Won’t be long, we won’t have enough folks left to drive delivery.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/audio-egotopia1.mp3[/podcast]audio —- egotopia

Some of the Hotheads down at the Diner have been talking about seceding.  We’ve always heard talk of Camano seceding from Whidbey, but some of these Firebrands are advocating something more than that.  They want to make the South End a sovereign entity, sort of Freedom County South.  Dig a canal from Elger Bay over to the east side, put up a gate and make our own island.

I admit at first I thought they were loony tunes, something out of a Jack Gunter movie, but I been thinking about it lately and I wonder if they’re not onto something.

Sure, the taxbase would be smaller.  At least til Tyee Grocery gets its WalMart permit approved and the CostCo comes in right behind. Course we could charge tolls at the canal bridge to pay for essential services.  Like the South End String Band.  And all these valuable artists.  After all, what would the South End be without its endangered wildlife?  We could name ourselves what my old professor down at the Elger Bay Institute of Aesthetic Enlargement  has always suggested:   EGOTOPIA, a paradise for free spirits, fine artists, bohemians, tax dodgers, scofflaws, tree huggers, paganists, banjo players and xenophobes.  Basically what we got now.

Working’ll disappear. Traffic congestion’ll go away since nobody’ll have jobs or money.  SUV’s will rust and we’ll make art projects out of the corroded carcasses. Eveybody’ll be king of nothing.

If it gets too crowded, we’ll annex Hat Island and impose our more spiritual way of life on them.  Operation Liberate Hat Island, we’ll call it.  Make us an archipelago of anarchic artistic license.  Bring em the news.   Teach em the fine arts:  macrame and mailbox decorating, stained glass and popsickle stick twirlers.  You live in harmony with nature and your enlarged ego, the way we do, you’ll realize pretty quick government isn’t really necessary.  Course in a few months, it’ll probably look like Rwanda.

One of the saddest things in this whole wide world is to watch someone who comes into money, a lot of money, then manages in the time it takes to spell L-O-S-E-R, fritters it all away.  They got it made in the shade, but no …. They want more.  So they ‘invest’ in, oh, the stock market or commodities or some knee-jerk pal’s idiotic scheme to double that blessed largesse.  Only to watch the market crash or nettle futures drop to $1 a bale or the ‘can’t miss’ investment in medical marijuana growing go down in flames.

My pal Fishin Freddy got a million dollar settlement from an Alaska boat disability that left him with a bad back and limited mobility and constant pain.  Some South Enders might think a million greenbacks were the pot at the end of many a rainbow guarded by troll-like leprechauns, but Freddy?  No, Freddy thought of this as in initial downpayment on future wealth.  And, of course, a smart boy might’ve parlayed that pot, grown it with conservative investment strategies, maybe even hired investment counselors.

Fishin Freddy didn’t need fiscal advice, he was pretty damn sure of THAT!!!

Bought him and the missus his and her sinister black Chryslers with dark tinted glass.  Looked like the Mafia had infiltrated the South End.  Kind of a police magnet, really, all the more problematic if you haul contraband which, you know, I know, and certainly the sheriff’s knew, he did.  You don’t like investment counselors, believe me, you won’t like attorneys and their fees and court costs.

First time I saw Freddy after his windfall, he was selling high end tools he’d bought …. at yardsale prices.  Not a good sign, I thought at the time, turning his offers down.  Last time I saw him he was selling firewood.  Millionaires don’t usually sell firewood.  Hard work for a disabled fisherman rich guy.  Especially when half the wood was cut off property he didn’t own.

I haven’t seen Freddy for awhile.  Heard he was poaching deer in the ravines behind me.  The law says you must use only a shotgun, not a rifle, since a rifle bullet might travel a mile.  Freddy, of course, was using a rifle.  Believe me, I’m reluctant to walk the woods lately, but I figure, give him a few weeks, he’ll offer that 30 ought 6 to me for a song and maybe some fresh venison to boot.  Sell it for a price that should buy himself a case or two of cheap beer.

I guess a million dollars just isn’t what it used to be.