The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

If you was to look at the South End on a map, it would look like a gooeyduck that had basked a little too long on the beach.  Or like myself BEFORE the miracle of Viagra.  There just isn’t a lot of blood flow down here.

I suppose that explains why the Pace of Life here is a little slower than you all’s.  Stanwood’s gotten so all-fired Accelerated – being a Hub and all – they finally had to install stoplights just to put the skids on a mite.  I believe you could cram a whole afternoon on the South End into a Stanwood minute.

No, if it’s one thing we got a bumper crop of, it’s Time.  Time on our hands, time on our shoes, time on our side.  We watch the bread rise, the berries ripen, the orchards mature, the grass grow, the kids turn juvenile delinquent, the homebrew mellow, the hound dog and myself here getting lazier with every passing year.  That old chestnut about stopping to smell the roses…?  On the South End we’d have to speed it up a few miles an hour to catch a whiff.

You may not believe it, but Mr. Einstein must’ve had kinfolk on the South End cause he explained scientifically what we know in our bones  —  time is relative.  Hellfire, I had a shirttail cousin come to visit Ma and me awhile back, brought the whole kit and kaboodle, dogs, brats, tee-totalling wife, stayed a week.  I’m telling you when that week was over, me and the mizzus was two YEARS closer to the Pioneer Cemetery.

People say Mr. Einstein was a genius.  I say he had some bad relatives himself.

Lately all I hear on the meager news that trickles down our way are stories about driving off the Fiscal Cliff.  Disaster.  Mayhem. Catastrophe.  And chaos right around the bend!!  Nobody’s at the wheel and all us chickens are screaming bloody murder in the backseat.  It’s enough to make a fella quit his job and pull his money out of the band and head back into the hills before all fiscal hell breaks loose.  You know, IF he had a job.

I thought after the election was over we’d all settle down, maybe take a break from the non-stop acrimony, get ready for an enjoyably peaceful Christmas.  I guess I was a little overly optimistic.  Or maybe just slightly naïve.  Okay, I was stoopid.  The media loves a good scare the way a TV weatherman loves predicting a blizzard a week ahead of time.  Snowmageddon on its way!!  Big low pressure barreling in from Siberia, crashing into a Pineapple Express up from Hawaii, better buy a generator and a backhoe with a plow now!!!

The economy’s gonna tank!  The market’s gonna crash!!  The sky is falling, the sky is falling, clouds are hailing down like bricks!!!  Go to your Safe Room before it’s too late!  Pray to Alan Greenspan!  Put your affairs in order!  Say adios to your kids!  Kiss your butt goodbye!!!!!

But wait … the next news story is the mania to buy Powerball tickets.  A billion dollars worth already sold with a chance to win, at this very moment, 550 million bucks.  You win, you get a Fiscal Parachute.  You could buy what’s left of a bankrupt American economy.  You could be King.  You could tell Bill Gates what to do.  You could buy the next election.  Or cancel it altogether.  You could survive!  Not just survive, you could Rule!

Tens of thousands of us a minute — a Minute! — are buying tickets.  If the government would just fake these things, pony up a happy millionaire at the end — a shill — then pocket the loot, we could turn this economy around OVERNIGHT!!

Wwe could avert the Cliff and slide back into our garage in the cul-de-sac and hit the door close button and return to daytime TV and endless sports programming.  We’d be happy.  We’d be saved.!!

Maybe I’m just being optimistic.  Maybe I’m a little naïve.  Okay … I know what you’re thinking…..

Right on the heels of Super Storm Sandy we get breaking news of yet another disaster.  We’ll recover from the hurricane, we’ll rebuild in the end, we’ll be stronger.  But … what can replace Twinkies?  Or Snowballs?  The iconic aptly named Wonder Bread??  All gone.  All gone broke.

The news coverage was frightening enough.  The reality will be much harder to digest.  Maybe not harder than a Twinkie itself, but hard.  Very hard.  The never-say-die addicts were stocking up on the remaining supplies.  Stores reported runs on the Hostess shelves.  Shopping carts were piled to overflowing with their sugar mainline.  The wise ones will meter the snacks over months, even years.  No worry about spoilage.  The expiration dates are well beyond any living consumers’ puny lifespans.  But there will come a day when the preservative drenched snack treats are gone, yet another extinction on our fragile planet.

I’ve been hearing rumors that corporate scientists are exploring cloning options.  The conspiracy theorists claim that those consumers loading up their fallout shelters were actually federal geneticists, stockpiling secret laboratories underneath the Rocky Mountains, working furiously to duplicate the chemical composition of the undead Twinkies.  Obviously it’s a race against time and the limited storehouse of high fructose-depleted Hoarders.

The cynics, as always, see a silver lining in the nutritional stormclouds.  The inevitable drop in diabetes will free up dialysis machines, sure, but they forget the determination of an Elger Bay Store consumer.  Already sales in Pop Tarts and Captain Crunch are buoying a despondent chemical industry.  The savvy consumer may stuff his shelter, but the savvy investor will stuff his stock portfolio with Dow, Monsanto and ArcherDanielMidland.  I’ll tell you this:  artificial food is here to stay.  So here’s today’s insider trading tip.  Skip the Powerball ticket, kiddo, and call your broker.  BET on the addicts, don’t BE one.

Now I know most of you have heard the latest rumor —  that Wal-Mart is thinking of moving into the Senior Center Thrift Store’s location at the top of Land’s Hill.  Now you know and I know this is gonna split Camano Island right down the gullet.

Some folks’ll say we already GOT cheap imported goods at the Thrift Store —  why bring in a middle man?  And some will say Wal-Mart will kill a way of life we’ve come to treasure here on the island.  You know, commuting to Smokey Point for our supplies.  If nothing else, a good excuse to dodge the chores…..

The artists are already up in arms.  As you know, artists are the Vanguard of Change, the Canary in the StripMall, the little light in the refrigerator.  They let you see what’s coming before it clobbers you.  Now this is all well and good, but I think there’s been a misunderstanding.  It’s Wal-MART — not Wall-ART.  They’re not selling cut-rate made-in-China original art to hang on the wall.  The artists STILL got that market.  We got to get the news to them before they start picketing or rioting.

Now you’re gonna see a new Civil War.  The South End against the North End.  The old timers against the newcomers.  The discount shoppers vs. the boutique buyers.  The expresso drinkers vs. the drip drinkers.  It’ll be a bloodbath before it’s settled.      There’s something ABOUT a Wal-Mart that sets off civil strife.  Down at the South End we got pretty near all we need at Elger Bay Grocery.  Costs a little more but sometimes you got to look a little deeper for the hidden costs of cheaper goods.  That Wal-Mart might sell you a hammer half price, but if it’s getting used on the neighbor, you need to factor in the ambulance bill.

We all like to pay less.  Except maybe the Latte Lovers.  But down at our depressed region we learned it’s probably easier if you just learn to BUY less.  I know, it isn’t the American Way, but maybe it would help lessen the social discord.

Nobody seems to like growing old.  Can’t blame em,  I guess when you factor in the aches and pains, the wrinkles and hair loss, the diminished mobility.  Well, almost nobody, cause I don’t mind.  Sure, I got the same ailments, but hellfire, you ought to pay  SOME price for all this accumulated wisdom, for some peace of mind, for a more stable financial grip on this hard world.

My brother’s father-in-law, a dairy farmer in Northern Wisconsin who knew a few things about Hard Living, told him at a ripe young age to quit worrying about money.  Money, he said, takes care of itself.  You’d be better off to tackle the rest.   Love, marriage, family, career, happiness.  My brother, being young, didn’t believe him until he too was older and wiser.

We used to value maturity.  We used to respect the accumulated wisdom of all those years of living.  We used to pay homage to our elders.  Now that I’m an elder, I sure wish we still did.  But we don’t.  We value youth, energy, good looks, clean skin, svelte bodies, shimmering hair.  We’re a bit superficial.  Okay, we’re TOTALLY skin deep.  We’d sell our souls to be beautiful, to be athletic, to be rich.  If I was the devil, boy oh boy, I’d be banking more souls than I’d have rooms to rent in Hell.  I’d be building infrared suburbs, you bet.  Plenty of beauty parlors, fitness centers, spas, sports injury treatment facilities, so many mirrors a 60 watt bulb would heat the place up to full sizzle.

You reach my advanced age, you ought to pat yourself on the back.  You probably figured most things out.  You must’ve learned plenty from all those mistakes.  You should’ve learned to live in your own skin.  When kids ask who your heroes are, tell them YOU are.  It’s not egotistical.  It should be the truth.

The truth is, we got this far.  Meaning, we had a hearty dose of living, our fair share….  We learned a thing or three.  We witnessed the world.  We even changed it a bit, don’t underestimate yourself.  Pass some of it on to the young’uns.  They might listen.  More than you think.  Just don’t wish you were them, young and starting out fresh.  Why go through that twice?

Well, down in the recesses of the Great Recession, the South End always welcomes new biznesses, fresh entrepreneurial risk takers and innovative fiscal strategies.  The Chamber of Commerce could use some substitutes for those vacant storefronts and failed capitalist endeavors.  Marty Robemblind, the current President of the C of C, whose own real estate practice has slid off the fiscal cliff, likes to tell the membership in their monthly meeting in the conference room of Windy Rear Realty’s south office, that times will pick up …. but first we have to pick ourselves up.  Marty talks like this after a couple of bourbon pick-me-ups.  And by the time the gavel calls the meetings to order, Marty has had a couple.  By the end, it’s a question of whose going to pick Marty up.

This last Chamber meeting he introduced our newest member, Brenda Livingood.  She had recently opened an office in the old art studio behind her house now that her husband Ralph had burned every last watercolor he had stacked in every nook, cranny and corner out in the burnpile in the nettles before the woods took over the lawn.  A ‘breakdown’, the more sympathetic neighbors clucked.  ‘About damn time,’ Linda reckoned, and then moved in to the nearly empty studio with a desk and a cellphone and enough energy to move mountains.  Life coach, she proclaimed herself.  New career , new identity, new Me …. and once she’d rearranged her own mental furniture and Ralph’s too, she figured she could do for others what she wanted done to herself.

The Chamber membership heard her business plan and her sales pitch and each and every one of them took her brand new business card, the one with her name and the name of her new outfit:  Brenda Livingood   LIFE  COACH  ‘You can live good too!’   She took their cards in fair exchange.  Shelly Robinson made the mistake of inquiring into fees, somewhere in the neighborhood of a dinner out for herself and her husband Jerry at a restaurant too expensive for their lunchbucket budget for an hour of life-altering suggestions.  ‘Call me,’ Brenda insisted, not detecting the sticker shock in Shelly’s voice, ‘we’ll find a new you.’

The South End, sorry to say, Shelly, kind of likes the old us’s.  Kind of like our cars.  The new models are nice, we’ll admit, but if all you can afford is the old jalopy, we’ll learn to love them, even if they’re slowly bankrupting us.  No point hurrying.

I got an e-mail today with a link to the ‘best’ and ‘worst’ jobs in America.  Gotta tell you, I dreaded opening it up, fully expecting to find Artist probably the worst.  In all honesty, I almost hit the DELETE button, but this had come from a friend and he probably expected a response or a confession or a vow to do better in my next career choice, one from the ‘best’ list.

Turns out the ‘best’ jobs were pretty much judged on the basis of salary.  Actuarials, statisticians, mathematician(!), no kidding: high paying, technical, number crunching corporate gigs.  Boy oh boy, if I’d only know known back when I drummed out of school and began my desperate search for a ‘meaningful’ job.  Nobody told me the best careers were the highest paid ones.  I thought maybe they would be the ones that made me the happiest.The ‘worst’ jobs were the dangerous jobs.  Like Lumberjack.  Probably cut your leg off or be killed by a miscalculated cut in a leaning Doug Fir.  Poor pay, hearing loss, amputations.  And forget health care or vacations or sick leave or a pension.  Not gonna get to pension age anyway….

No mention of Artist in the group.  I guess poor wages, no bennies, no pension, not really the ‘worst’ job if it isn’t dangerous too.  Although I got to thinking how about those glass installations I did back when I was too eager and too stupid, climb up on a skinny ledge two stories above a concrete floor to hoist 30 square foot panels of stained glass into place with barely a few toes on secure footing at 3 a.m., every cell in my body screaming NO NO NO! and the sweat smelling like fear.  Fear, in case you don’t know, that kind of fear at least, smells like excrement.  Truly, unforgettably.

Anyway …. I didn’t find my ‘job’ listed on this link.  I’m just sort of glad I got something I can call a job.  Although, between you and me and the pegleg lumberjack, I never think of what I do as a job.  Someone asked me about retirement two nights ago at an art gallery opening. Would I — could I — just stop?  It’s not like punching a time clock, I guess.  It’s not about making the money.  And it’s not about being afraid of the danger.  My danger was really starvation, poverty, failure and humiliation.  Too late for that now.  The fear now is the creative well drying up, the days growing longer and emptier, the boredom settling in like a slow metastasizing dread.  I don’t know yet, but I bet it still smells the same.

I’m really saddened to report that after decades of hiding, I was recently ‘found’ .  I haven’t dug spider holes like Saddam, but I did go to the end of the world the way the Unabomber did, just dropped off the radar, got deep into the hinterlands, eschewed credit cards and cellphones and the other obvious digital crumbs that lead the hunters to the lair.  I didn’t change my name  —- although I sort of inhabited the alias Skeeter of late, who, judging by a Google search, is more real than me in virtual reality.

But it wasn’t Skeeter who was Outed.  Naw, I got a phone message from some mumbling person who apparently knew me as a high school graduate of a Northern Wisconsin paper mill factory prep school and want More Info on me to put in their anniversary reunion book.  The ‘tracker’ left a call back number and an e-mail depository that, incomprehensible to me, referenced an old schoolchum that I should remember nearly half a century later.

Now I know High School is pretty much a war experience for most of us unpopular kids, one indelibly etched into our scarred brainpans, a peak experience.  Add to this the fact that I didn’t grow up in this redneck burg, didn’t ask to be transplanted there and ended up in classes inhabited by two different age groups.  I was an Outsider, in other words.  Or what I like these days to think of as an Outlier.  Although not yet an Outlaw.

Damn the stupid internet!  Damn the idiotic Facebook!  Damn these boosters of a past that holds no nostalgia for some of us!  I couldn’t leave my hellhole town fast enough.  Although apparently I left without the memories.  Course, judging by my rentention level of recent events, this was no hard task.  My interrogator even sent me a  j-peg of some group of us Young Turks offering a prize of some sort if I could identify the others.  Yah, they looked vaguely familiar.  Me too.  Vaguer still.

All I ask:  let me live in obscurity, gang.  Let me forget the war years, the snubs, the adolescent angst, the petty politics of cliques and in-crowds.  You NEED a few of us who left and never came back.  You NEED a little mystery.  That, or a scapegoat.  I don’t much care.  Just don’t call again.  And please, don’t ask me to join Facebook.   There are limits to my forgiveness.

People always ask me ,how is it you can manage to live down at the Millionaire Club of the South End when you don’t really have a job?  They think the way the world works is you make an hourly wage or a salary, then you hop right out and buy a new car, a palatial  house, a plasma TV  —- all of it on time, all of it figuring out those payments the mortgage company or the credit card company or the car dealer are gonna fit into your income. I think the schools in America, at least the ones I went to, wanted to keep us in the dark about interest and principal.  The only principal me and my wiseass buddies saw was in his office, reading us our detention notices.  I don’t owe anybody anything.  Except maybe an apology.  I drove a jalopy.  I lived in a shack  for 17 years.  I built my ‘new’ house myself.  I’m not saying it’s going to make the Street of Dreams, but it’s paid for and I tell you young’uns, that’s a dream come true for a boy a mortgage would’ve made into an indentured servant. I had a former friend’s punk teenage boy ask me one time if I was rich.  Big smirking grin.  Real smug kid.  Already a con-artist like his old man.  Smarter than you and me by a country mile, he figured.  I thought about wiping that smile right off his map.  But finally I said, naw, I’m not rich, not the way you mean, not in any way you’d ever understand.  But I am free.  I don’t owe anybody a red cent.  Don’t have debts weighing me down.  Don’t have to worry about the mortgage.  Course, that’s a rich money won’t touch.  That’s a wealth you can’t take to the bank. I won’t tell you my buddy’s punk son got any lessons here — but at least I figured he wouldn’t come back after dark to see what he could steal.  He’d go find a rich guy….

A collective sigh of relief could be heard from the South End Diner parking lot to the newly opened Greenworks Medical Marijuana Outlet once the Mayoral Election results came in after the preliminary votes were tabulated at Crab Cracker Election Central.  With 17% of the vote tabulated, the Cracker is projecting the outcome of the election for 2012 based on algorithmic models utilizing programs so powerful even the FBI and CIA  have subpoenaed our editorial board to turn over our data.

Nevertheless, in one of the most contentious electoral battles in recent history, the mayoral mudslinging campaign has finally come to a conclusion.  The ad campaigns, funded by unheard of influxes of cash from Camano Crossroads and the Puget Patriots Political Action Committee, sent a virtual landfill of extremely negative mailers during the final weeks.  Perhaps none were more vitriolic than the South End Anti-Newcomer PAC whose incoherent legions of ground troops offended most everyone south of the Mountain View/Dixon divide.

The Cracker Central team found that the last minute write-in candidacies of ‘Two Toke’ Tom Fiehlgud and Colton Harris-Moore were essentially tied for the lead at 43% each (with a margin of error of 22%).  Trailing by significant margins were Tweeter Daddle of the 47% Party (7%), Sarah Doolittle of the Do-Nothing Party (4%) and Bubba Frisk the 3rd and his Job Creator Party (2%).  The South End String Band received a scattering of write-ins but were disqualified with multiple hanging chads that gummed up the voting machines.

Because Colton Harris-Moore is a convicted felon currently serving time in a federal penitentiary, Cracker Central confidently projects Mr. Fiehlgud as the winner of the South End mayoral contest  in an electrifying outcome certain to be studied for generations.  Mr. Fiehlgud, , apparently riding the cannabis tsunami of Washington State’s 2012 referendums, was unavailable for coherent comment, but an anonymous spokesperson for his ‘grass’ roots campaign stated in a phone interview that Two Toke was ’higher than a Katmandu Kite’ and would use the powers of his newly won office to promote world peace and galactic understanding between species.  “This election,” she stated, “is incontrovertible proof, if proof was needed, that the South End is the epicenter of cosmic consciousness.  Long Live Mayor Tom!!”