The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Historically the South End has been a place where the lumber companies cut down the forests and the developers sold off the scrub and slash that was left as ‘view property’.  You look around and times haven’t changed too much.  Except the price of a lot now is more than all the five acre chicken ranches of Mabana sold between 1910 and 1950.

Folks wonder why it took so long to discover’ the island you can drive to’ never knew our history as an exploited backwash.  The developers didn’t worry about zoning here.  Blast a bluff down with hydraulic hoses and call it Tyee or Tillicum.  Sluice down Summerland and build a rock jetty around it out into the bay.  Dig out a canal at the country club and double the waterfront.  It was wild west stuff, all right, where a man and his bulldozer could cut a wide swath without fear of government regulation or horrified neighbors.

Nowadays we look askance at dynamiting bluffs to make waterfront or dredging a lagoon to create lakeside gated communities or draining the wetlands to make quality 18 hole golf courses.  Judging by the agonized screams of the developers, you’d expect growth would reverse, forests woulde expand, housing starts would sit half finished, abandoned and rotting.  Oddly the juggernaut of gated communities and developments with names like South End Estates, Elger Bay Meadows, Tyee Vista all seem to be doing just fine with more on the way, thank you very much.

Clear Cut Cul-de-Sac, Blast Zone Barrio and D-9 Trailer Court are going to struggle, but the South End is gentrifying now that some of the trees have grown back and the chicken farms are broke and the Dot.com retirees are priming the pumps.  Won’t be long before we South Enders celebrate Back Wash Days and the rough and tumble no-holds-barred pioneers who carved out our civilization over the past century.  Thank you boys!

One of the things we don’t talk about much down here on the sunny South End is depression.  I know, it’s hard to imagine.  Sort of a worm in the apple of the Garden of Eden — before God made the rule not to eat it.  But we got everything from Seasonal Affective Disorder to Monday Morning Blues that last until Friday to outright disabling pull-the-covers-over-our-head-and-wait-until-spring depression.

I was always of the school of thought that depression was a symptom of bad marriages or crappy jobs or poor life choices.  External stuff but something you could change.  I don’t believe that anymore.  I got friends who struggle, who wrestle, who go 10 rounds with this stuff and in the end, lose on a TKO by the first cup of coffee.  We all know folks who try all manner of self- medication.  Sort of leads to other problems which compound the original diagnosis, maybe like mistaking gasoline for water to fight a smoldering fire.  Next thing you know, you got a 3 alarm.

I know it’s hard to believe we could suffer severe bouts of depression, living as we do, in Shangri-La-La, but even Paradise has its ups and downs.  Don’t try to tell me Heaven is all sunshine and bliss — I know better.  God herself has more than a few Bad Days, at least judging by the state of the world out there.  You come home —All Alone — to the news that there’s more genocide, more torture, another couple of wars and a few new extinctions —- and that’s just on this planet, well, I bet She needs a few stiff drinks to get through the evening news.  Who wouldn’t?

I’m no psychiatrist so I don’t offer up panaceas any more.  Religion, drugs, self help advice:  might as well sing Sinatra to the wind.  I hear there are meds now, everything from Prozac to lithium, that may or may not help.  This world is hard enough without seeing it through a Blue Veil.  If you’re suffering through a cyclical bout, don’t think you’re alone.  I realize it doesn’t help much, but hang on.  Reality’s a slippery slope, but Hope is a ladder.  Even down here we always have to climb our way back up….

Well, you knew it was bound to happen.  Zumba has come to the South End.  It won’t be long before we’re overrun by personal trainers, Weight Watchers, fitness centers, nutritional supplement stores and eventually rampant steroid use.  For a long long while we seemed exempt from that national narcissism that needs a mirror on every wall and a scale in every room, monitoring for an hourly check on weight gain or wrinkle formation the way a Day Trader checks his stocks every  15 minutes.

I actually know one or two people who DON’T think they’re overweight or out of shape.  Course, they’re 80 plus years old and didn’t get brainwashed by TV commercials or fashion magazines, or … well, about everything that floods across the airwaves or through the mail or via the internet.

It’s a lot like living in Eternal High School where everyone is excluded from the Kool Kid Klub.  Too overweight, too out of shape, too much gray hair, too many varicose veins.  The pharmaceutical folks are making up non-caloric fats and artificial sweeteners.  The medical industry will offer us Botox treatments and plastic surgery.  There are 2500 diet plans known to the state of California … that work for 6 months.  You can get hair transplants and you can get dye for the plugs.

Old age is not something we accept gracefully.  And judging by every other ad in every media, old age starts at 30 or earlier.  Course the next ad will sell us potato chips, pop, beer and fast food — sort of like selling oxycontin then advertising the rehab clinic.

I guess we’re just not comfortable in our own skins.  Which are way too thin….  Unless you only see the fat.  Or the varicose veins.  If Zumba will toughen us up, okay then.  Throw away the bathroom scales and break the mirrors.  Go take a walk and read a book.  You’re not going to be the Prom Queen or the Star Quarterback.  It’s maybe time to really graduate from high school.  Oh, and when you’re contacting those long lost sweethearts on Facebook, show them your actual photo.  We all got a little older.  Naturally….

About 20 years ago last century I started building our new house.  1992.  Took a couple years, but when it was finished, I walked everything up the hill from the shack we’d lived in since 1977.  I decided if I wasn’t willing to carry it up, it wasn’t worth keeping.  You want to downsize, this strategy can’t be beat.

I cheated a little on the clawfoot tub and the wood cook stove and used my truck and a buddy or two with beer bribes, but otherwise I spent a week moving ant-like up and down the hill with occasional breaks to haul the discard pile to the dump or the thrift stores.  By the time we took occupancy we were down to the bare essentials.  All that clutter and crap from the shack was gone.  And good riddance!

Fast forward a couple decades.  Not only has the dust collected up here at the hacienda, but so have boxes, knickyknacks, books, CD’s, clothes and all the rest of those possessions piling up slowly enough to avoid detection or set off hoarder alarms.  In a perfect world I suppose I’d build the next house back in the woods, then downsize again, taking only the necessities.  This seems like a nuclear option and anyway, I’m too decrepit and old to build another mansion.

So … I’m going to Option B.  I’m digging into every closet, every nook and most crannies, behind the stairs, up in the rafters, back in the crawlspaces.  I’m hunting junk, scraps, extra dishware, broken pottery, bad art, tattered books, drawers of cassette tapes, stacks of vinyl, unused camping gear, beat up shoes, torn coats, old tape decks and Beta machines, analog cameras, relatives who never left, lost puppies, missing children, Romney advisors, leftover lunches, tube TV’s and every computer we ever owned.  I want it out.  Gone.  Forgotten.  I want space.  I want Grand Vistas once again in the living room.  I want closets that aren’t sedimentary.  Pots and pans that aren’t archeological.  Art that isn’t historical.  I want my house back.

Seems like every twenty years or so this could hold back the glacier of garbage.  Course, it might take twenty to finish the job.   Check back in a year or so.  See if I’m okay.

Half the folks I know down here on the organic, antibiotic-free South Endzone are self-insured.  Meaning:  they don’t have health insurance, life insurance and possibly not even car insurance.  They count on clean living, herbal remedies and a whole lotta luck to get them to old age without accidents or bankruptcy.  When they DO get sick or their luck runs out, we collect donations and the bank calls in the mortgage.  This is the state of health insurance these days.  A half wit on meth could dream up a more sensible plan, it seems to me.  Course, I’m not on meth….

I’m on the catastrophic plan.  High monthly payments, high deductible, high probability my coverage will be denied anyway.  One time long ago I had health insurance through my employer — and yes, way back when I actually had a job.  Part time.  Low pay.  But it offered health insurance.  Hot damn!!  Since I’d never had coverage of any sort previously, I ran right out and bounced a double-bladed axe off a maple I was cutting down right into my leg about ankle high one 4th of July.  Deep gash right through the ligament, fireworks in my brain.  So I dropped the axe, tightened up a tourniquet and drove to the nearest emergency room which was 40 miles north.  The ER doc put about 15 stitches in the ligament, then another 15 in the leg and declared me good as new, maybe in a few months.  He declined any pain med prescription, fearing, I think, I might enjoy them.  “Stop on your way home and buy yourself a six pack of something strong,” he advised, no doubt remembering his Hypocritical Oath.  I asked would this wound hurt much and he assured me it would hurt like hell.  “Roll a fat doobie,” he added, “you’ll be fine.”  Medical marijuana four decades ahead of its time…. I wasn’t fine.  I spent the summer on crutches after a week of pain and pogo-sticking on one leg.  Which was bad enough, but then the other shoe dropped, metaphorically and literally, when my insurance policy refused to pay my ER bill, some clause that required my accident to have taken place NOT in the county of my residence.

Well, since 95% or more of accidents occur near home, this was a stroke of genius for my ‘insurers’.   Insured them from the possibility of payments, I guess.  Shortly after this, I left my place of employment and rejoined the ranks of my fellow South Enders.  Semi-retired, self-employed and very vaguely entrepreneurial.

So when I hear my neighbors whose companies pay their health premiums complain about my friends who don’t carry insurance at all, I tell em what my ER doc recommended:  just drink until the numbness hits.  You still think health care works,  roll a big fat one too.

I occasionally wet my whistle in the fine taverns of Stanwoodopolis where I got a bartender who invariably asks me if I want a particular beer, hoping to curry favor by remembering what I might have had the last time.  Doesn’t much matter that she doesn’t know my name, just my brand of brew.  Some folks like this kind of consumer familiarity, maybe makes them feel welcome, a family member in their drinking society.  Me, I don’t much care for it.

My computer is doing the same thing.  Says hello by name even, then pops up stuff like what I looked at recently.  Shows me a picture, what it costs, maybe a special sale.  If I ever actually buy something on-line, my computer starts ringing, flashes lights, looks like a Vegas Jackpot.  It figures I’m a genuine, bona fide Consumer and it knows my brand, my preferences, my price bracket, my sales soft spot.  Maybe some folks like this.  Me, I hate it.

Welcome, I guess, to the new world of capitalism.  Kind of like having a salesman coming to your door, only he doesn’t have to knock, he just uses the key he took from you and comes right on in.  Every day.  Every week.  From here on out.  The Kirby vacuum guy can test drive his product forever.  Slam the door on him, he’ll be right back.  My computer now is a 24/7 Home Shopping Channel and I don’t even have cable.  I suppose there are folks who appreciate this service, but I sure never met them.

Most of us didn’t bargain for this when we bought a computer and wired up to the internet.  I didn’t read the fine print, apparently, but it must have had some subclause about the right to invade my privacy, sell my information, keep records on me and set up shop in my house like some kind of shirt-tail relative who goes to my refrigerator, grabs himself a snack and offers me a beer.  Knows what brand I like.  Just helping out.  Unlike my bartender, though, he’s never leaving….

Politics down here on the bucolic South End isn’t much different than most everywhere else in the Red/Blue USA, meaning, we’re a bruised Purple too.  Signs get vandalized and letters to the editor warn about Farmageddon if so-and-so wins.  Pastor Paul at the Little Church in the Ravine rails about the medical nettle legalization issue and turns downright apoplectic over the same sex marriage initiative.  He doesn’t even like the word SEX on the ballot much less Same sex.  Even God Hisself doesn’t use the word in the Holy Book, he fumes.  And the congregation either nods approvingly or sits in the back with their arms crossed.  More like Little Church in the Schism, these hot button days.  With only two weeks to the election, it’s touch and go whether the Flock can hang together.

These days even the South End has a south end, it’s that polarized.  We got the newcomers who want more fire and police, figuring, I guess they need quick response time emergency services for their next heart attack and some police protection for their BMW’s.  The old timers are too suspicious of government, even one they never see, to trust in much else than Smith and Wesson and a snarling dog chained near the porch.

Not that the dividing lines are so easily drawn.  We got libertarian anti-abortionists and we got Tea Party medical marijuana opponents.  We got folks who want government off their backs but want it in their bedrooms.  Well, YOUR bedroom.  We got folks who demand less taxes but more police.  We got folks who want less police but wanted Colton caught.  We got the people who vote based on Scripture and folks who want separation of mosque and state.  We got free range clammers and clamorers for free range.  It’s enough to knock the South End off its axis.

In the end I suspect it’s all sound and fury, much ado about nada.  You got a government that’s out of money, it’s broke all right.  Folks kind of forget we live on Camano, the Tijuana of Whidbey, the ugly step-sister, and on top of that, its keester end.  Vote yer conscience or vote yer wallet:  you’re still a long day’s drive from the reach of Rome.

I can’t figure out whether we were bored BEFORE the internet and smart phones …. or whether they MADE us bored.  Ruined our concentration, shot our attention spans full of holes, filled every waking minute with text messages, snippets of celebrity gossip, news flashes and crawler messages on the bottom of our brains’ screens.

We check our phone messages every 3 minutes (if we’re older than 40) or every 15 seconds (if we’re under 40).  The older crowd checks e-mail 20 times a day.  If you still get a newspaper, you got most of the articles from newsfeeds on your computer anywhere from a few hours ago to a full day.  It isn’t ‘news’ you get in a newspaper these days.  Everyone’s got a cellphone now and by god, they paid for it and they plan to use it — as often as humanly possible, whether they’re driving in the freeway passing lane or taking a whiz in the airport urinal.  They’re connected, linked up, every waking hour of every day, I guess forever until the day they die or their phone plan expires.

It’s hard to believe this has happened, not just in our lifetime, but in the last decade.  If we thought the Rat Race was hard, well, the digital rats are on steroids, cranked on meth and just a little too busy to slow down to consider what’s happened in the last few years.  Too busy for sure to read a book or write a letter or just disconnect from the Hive half an hour.  Watch a 15 year old and see the Future — it’s here!  30 minutes ago.  17 tweets.

Even on the South End there’s no escaping the tsunami of this incessant incoming information.  At least until the winter storms.  For those 6 of us who refuse to own a cellphone.  Or buy a generator.  Or even go down to the Diner to keep abreast of the breaking gossip.  In a few days we’ll try to catch back up.  Course, by then the world will have accelerated another few miles per second.  And we’ll be those objects in your rearview that aren’t anywhere near as close as they appear.  Best of luck when you get where you’re in such a hurry to get.  You got a second or two, send us a postcard.  We still get mail….

With Halloween cranking up full volume in stores right after Labor Day, Pastor Paul down at the Little Church in the Ravine made it his mission to warn the South End about a holiday devoted to Devil Worship and the celebration of Evil Spirits.  He’s been pounding the pulpit three Sundays in a row now and we still got three more before Fright Night actually arrives.  No doubt he’ll need chiropractic work on that right hammering hand.

Most of the congregation is my age, meaning they remember when Halloween really was a spooky affair.  Outhouses got moved a few crucial feet back, wagons got disassembled then reassembled on the shed roof, burning bags of dog poop were set on fire in the driveway.  Trick or Treat was no idle threat.  Now, of course, the only Trick is the one played on us by the candy industry.  Like most every holiday, holy or not, Halloween’s been popularized, commercialized and sanitized.  Now they’re profit industries.  Economic engines.  Job creators.

I haven’t seen a kid in a skeleton outfit come knocking on the shack door in decades.  Pastor Paul is maybe a bit overwrought about the flock’s grandkids serving as Spawn of Satan when maybe we ought to worry more about the little tykes dressing up in $50 Star Wars outfits, becoming subjugated Slaves to Obesity.  The poor little high fructose sugar beggars haven’t got the foggiest clue what Pastor Paul is worried about.  And their parents, who’ve driven them to the lucrative candy-rich suburbs of Stanwoodopolis, mostly worry about child predators and sewing needles stuck in apples.

Nowadays Halloween ends before dark and the security lights come on.  Hardly matters with Mom and Dad sitting shotgun in their SUV idling by the curb….  Now, I’m not advocating we go back to the days of cruel tricks.  But it did encourage some creative thinking.  Although maybe this is what Pastor Paul is railing about.  He’s got a steep hill to climb down here on the South End, is all I know.  That, or he should look into Exorcism as a second profession.  Be a cash crop down here.  And not just around Halloween.

Here’s a newsflash:  most of us are addicts now.  To our TV’s, to our cellphones, to our computer, to social networks, to everything Digital.  If the medium is the message, here’s the message — we got a syringe in our heads with a permanent IV drip.

My mom used to catch us kids laying around, doing pretty much nothing, complaining how we were bored.  Nothing to do, we’d whine.  She wasn’t buying it, no way, no sir.  She’d shoo our sorry butts off the couch and out the door, where, presumably, the world was waiting for us to get busy, make something of a new day, summon up the neighborhood cronies, go bike riding or play whiffleball.

Watch a friend who’s visiting and notice how frequently they check their phone for a text message.  These are people OUR age.  The kids never stop checking.  It’s like having video games and Netflix and the high school prom and phone gossip and Google all wrapped up in a candy wrapper.  The heroin isn’t listed as an ingredient but believe me, it’s there.  We’ve hooked the kids, we’ve hooked ourselves.  Our attention spans are shorter than a commercial now.  And everything in America is a commercial.  Don’t ask me what the answer is.  There’s no methadone for this, no 12 step program, no Going Back.  Every 30 seconds we need a Google fix, a text message, a Facebook update, a digital affirmation that we’re still on-line, still worthy, still connected.

Walden Pond now isn’t some remote back-to-the-land escape from the oppression of the Industrial Age, it’s a wilderness where cellphone towers are spotty and cable doesn’t reach and high-speed internet isn’t available.  It’s a place where Hi-Fi exists, but Wi-Fi doesn’t.  It’s a primitive world where the pace of life is measured, not in Twitters, but in the entire day, in the seasons, in lives moving slowly with time to pause and contemplate.  It’s a world that, sadly, no longer exists.  Not even down here on the halcyon South End.  You don’t believe me, Google it…..