The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Being’s how we South Enders are naturally indisposed to work — and work is pretty much non-existent down here anyway — we have a lot of neighbors who turn to alternative means of employment.  Meaning, they become, in the parlance of the day, ENTREPRENEURS, a fancy French word for I’ll-be-my-own-boss-thank-you.

The artists pretty much have that trademarked.  Get up before noon, putter around in their bathrobes with a cup of cappuccino, wait for the flash of inspiration to strike, then paint another watercolor sunset they can add to the wallspaces of the islands’ retailers with a handwritten FOR SALE tag, usually no more than 5 times the going rate.  But the artists, with a bit of overbreeding, have pretty much saturated the area.  We can’t all be artists, I suppose, although some years it sure seems that way.  The creationists would have a field day with the evolutionists, since obviously Darwinian selection doesn’t seem to apply to artists here.  Course, neither does intelligent design, you ask me.  And I know you didn’t.

What Darwin does apply to are all our would-be animal entrepreneurs who pound a couple of corner stakes out back, fence off a piece of nettle acreage and commence to raising llamas or alpacas or show dogs or ostriches.  For awhile the South End looked like a zoo for the insane.  With the animals, I mean.  My neighbor raised thousands of quail to sell to the Hawaiian market he imagined existed.  Quail of the Nile, he called his ranch, to give it that international mystique.  A year and $10,000 of bird feed later, he was broke and despondent and drunk as a goose so he let them all go.  Coyote smorgasbord for awhile down here.  The Mexican restaurant in Stanwoodopolis carried ostrich meat on the menu for a couple of years from O-Zi-Ya Ostrich Farms, not exactly authentic Hispanic cuisine, and anyway supply always exceeded demand, something Quail of the Nile might have revealed if we had an Ag College down these parts.  Llamas ran their course a few years later —- looked like Machu Picchu for awhile.  And now we got alpacas.  Cute little buggers, but not much meat when you see one recently shorn.

Pygmy goats showed up in the Fog Farm fields last year.  And for a time we had Vietnamese pygmy pigs.  What most of these entrepreneurs figure is they’ll sell the newborns to other entrepreneurs, kind of a kennel dream, breed yourself to success.  What they never figure out is the pyramid scheme it actually is, a Ponzi for pygmy pigs, until the feed bills mount and the poop filled fields look like muddy tarpits and finally they give up.  And take up oil painting or driftwood sculpture.

Meanwhile we got a woods down here that’s home to every weird creature on the planet.  You entrepreneurs out there might consider starting tours of Galapagos North.  Easy money, but I recommend you jump on it before some damn fool brings in a breeding pair of Bengal tigers.

Down at the Camano Cut and Curl, Sheila was opining last week how the weather seemed to be getting preternaturally colder and wetter this so-called summer.  “I’ve burned a cord of wood,” she said, “since April.  And here it is almost July and we’re down to twigs and kindling.”  Mrs. Flatterowski, vice-president of the women’s fire auxiliary, the Flame-Ons, put down her mirror for a pause in scrutinizing her freshly tinted blue curls to say, “Well, if there’s so much Global Warming going on, where is it? I want to know.”

Sheila, diplomatic as always, recognized a political turn to the conversation and tried to divert what would inevitably lead to a potential loss of customer base.  “All I’m saying is, where’s my summer?  My garden won’t even grow peas this year.  The slugs are wearing tea cozees, for heaven’s sake.  The corn is frost bit and the mosquitoes are starving for anything warm blooded, which sure isn’t me!”

Mrs. Flatterowski, not be detoured so easily and expecting full service for her $30 perm, muscled through the chemical fog of Cut and Curl to give full throated polemic on everything from polar bear extinction to glacial recession.  “Who cares about an albino bear anyway?” she challenged.  And Sheila, making brief but meaningful eye contact with Rhonda, the owner of C&C, sighed and admitted she didn’t know what was going on, but whatever it was, how about a little summer?

Rhonda shook her head before finishing Alice Norad’s henna highlight, spinning the chair toward the backbar mirror so Alice could examine the results.  Alice touched a finger to her bangs and nodded a curt okay.  “You ask me,” she said, addressing Mrs. Flatterowski now, “I don’t like my weather to be so political.  Fred and I have a family reunion this weekend and if it’s hot, I’m not going to blame it on greenhouse gases.  If it rains, I’m going to cook indoors.  God Almighty, I’d like to have one silly weekend where I can eat a hamburger without debating the ethics of meat or what I should do about Eskimoes or raise money to save an igloo.  My kids and their husbands and wives, they want to solve the world’s problems, go ahead.  But not this weekend.”

Sheila spun Mrs. F to the mirror too, maybe to kaibosh a retort, but Mrs. Flatterowski was up, plastic gown shedding blue curls.  “The polar bears are screwed,” she said sadly, “and I’ve never even seen one.”  At the counter, paying her bill and adding a more than generous tip, she met Alice’s sideways glance.  “I hope you have a sunny day for your family’s reunion.”

“Thank you,” Alice said.  “The polar bears will have to make it without our help, I guess.”

Some of us layabouts at the Poker Parlor were trying to think up something special for an upcoming 4th of July celebration.  We figured we got so many Vets down this way the Diner might as well declare itself a VFW South End Auxilliary.  And since most of them are vintage car guyz too, they could hold their own annual Independence Day Parade from Camano Head to the Elger Bay Store.  I, of course, wanted to just use these militiamen as an excuse to secede from the Island, but cooler heads prevailed.  As usual.

Two Toke Tom served in Viet Nam and now is pretty much anti- every war.  Jimmy Z, who’s old enough to be Tom’s old man, fought the Japanese in WW2.  Tom thinks Jimmy’s still fighting em and maybe so, but I notice Jimmy driving a Toyota pickup now even though he swore for 60 years he’d never buy a ‘Jap Car’.  Baghdad Bill fought in the second Iraq War and Big Larry just got back two years ago from Afghanistan.  Jerry spent a year in Korea and frostbit a couple of fingers he wishes he had back, but he still can play a mean guitar.  We even got Crazy Eddie who ‘liberated’ Grenada.  We’re missing Somalia and Panama and Bosnia, but with all the newcomers rolling in, we may cover those too eventually.

Sometimes the boyz argue among themselves about those wars and sacrifice and what patriotism really means at the Friday night poker game we’ve been running since 1986 down at the Marina and Bait Shop.  Two dollar limit on bets, no limit on alcohol.  The pots don’t do much damage, but single nettle Daddle Distillery moonshine sometimes does.  I sit in with these war-hardened patriots most Fridays and serve as their patsy and their sometime referee, the one who never served even in peacetime.  Or what Two Toke calls a draft dodging, student deferred, flag burning, Summer of Love hippie protester.  He takes great joy in telling me I would’ve loved the smell of napalm in the morning over there on the Delta.  Jimmy Z chimes in how his platoon could’ve won Viet Nam single-handed although Jimmy never once has told us one iota the hell that must have been Iwo Jima.  But he’s the one who puts a liver spotted hand on Bill’s arm whenever Bill gets overwhelmed by memories of buddies lost in the HumVee he was driving when it was blown off the road to the airport in Baghdad.

We’ve fought too many wars, I think, before realizing I’ve said it out loud.  I see by their pinched lips and averted eyes I won’t get an argument tonight.  Patriotism comes in all uniforms, even no uniform at all.  Big Larry finally breaks the swelling silence, pushes a handful of quarters into the pot and says, real quiet, “I’m willing to spend a couple bucks, Skeeter, to see if you got more than bluff in this hand.”  Grateful to change the subject, I say, “Name of the game, Big.  Read em and weep.”

Folks ask me all the time – well meaning folks mostly – why in Blue Tarnation would a right brain sided yahoo who makes his so-called living on the fringes of the art world sit down and write himself a blog.  Blogs, they reason, are the direct polar opposite of the visual arts.  You could cut away the entire left hemisphere of my frontal lobes  –if you had a magnifying glass big enuff to find it — and I probably wouldn’t miss a banjo beat.  Van Gogh mighta been trying something similar with his ear surgeries, see if it might equalize the polarity.

People nowadays believe in specialization.  Find your niche and stay put.  Brain surgery, okay, don’t try chainsaw sculpture too.  Hard on the scalpel hand.  Maybe it’s cause I never was much good at anything in particular.  Couldn’t find a niche …. Or a crack or a crevice in the world that seemed like something I wanted to spend my whole life on, give my whole self to, dedicate all my energy for.  Probably just attention deficit before we gave it a name and diagnosis.

This blog writing – it was something to fiddle with.  Explore it a little, see where it led.  Life, it seems to me, now that half of it’s in the rear view mirror, objects appearing closer, life should be an exploration more than an explanation.  Writing, I suppose, to most folks, is different than painting an abstract, or sculpting a nude, or cutting glass to pieces and gluing the scraps back together.  It’s different than building a house.  Or making music.  Or becoming a physicist.

Or so they think.  And, they think this way because instead of seeing the universe as a whole, they see it as its pieces.  They see their life the same way.  Compartmentalized.  Fragmented.  Broken up like my glass art ….. only they don’t know how to take the pieces and make them cohesive again.

We live our lives, not so much in quiet desperation as quiet isolation.  We’ve lost the sum of our parts.

Folks tell me way too often, oh, they could never be an artist.  They think artists are BORN that way.  They think Mozart and Picasso.  They think if genius doesn’t come pouring out by age four,  the fountain’s probably dry.  No point trying.  Can’t do it.  Not an artistic bone in their body.

The world, I think, is a grand experiment.  Meaning, failures are okay.  What’s not okay is not even trying.  Not learning.  Not exploring.  Not imagining.  I got some real bad news for the artistically invertebrate …………….. we’re all artists.  We’re all born with an empty canvas and our life is what we’re all painting.  The only art that matters one iota …. is creating ourselves.

So, I’m doing some writing and I’m playing banjo in a fiddle band and I’m building my house and I’m struggling along in this vastly inexplicable world the best I can, trying not to bore myself more than necessary.  I’ll no doubt prove  I sure wasn’t born a Mark Twain, but I didn’t let it stop me.

The Skeeter Daddle Diaries are really about the arc of a life on Camano’s backwash South End.   I came out here to lick some wounds and hide from the world.  Turned out, I learned most everything I know down here.  But mostly I learned that the fun of life is the adventure of learning.  If you’re not afraid to look the fool sometimes, everything’s possible.  This fool, you better believe, got more than a few laughs from watching himself trying to figure things out……

I know there’s still a few of you builders out there whose knees haven’t given out completely, whose backs are bent but not quite broken, whose minds are still … well, let’s not go there. You boyz have seen some changes since the heydays before Growth Management, permit delays and draconian building codes. And I’m not just talking about profit margins.

Some of you old growths might remember when Bruce Kennedy was the building inspector. Golden days, that’s for sure. Some of us — and I won’t embarrass you – might remember his dad, old ChucK Kennedy, when he was inspector. I’m not sure you even needed a permit back then. Bruce is gone now — hiding out in Lewiston/Clarkston — and his old man’s there too. I guess they aren’t coming back so I’m going to tell you a story — and if they do come back, you didn’t hear it from me.

Bruce was out one weekend helping a buddy of ours build an illegal cesspool, what we called a Costa Rica septic system, three 55 gallon barrels lined up and connected with high tech, highly engineered, not quite fully approved PVC pipe. Bruce was up on the backhoe —- it was his day off and he was nervous about getting caught by somebody from County, you know, losing his job, his career, his pension, his whole future. I got wind of this and so I had my brother, who was visiting at the time, stick a clipboard in his hand, walk up to Mr. Kennedy on his backhoe and identify himself as a state health department inspector. He orders Bruce to shut off that machine and I mean Right Now, Mister! and let’s have a look at those health department permits If You Don’t Mind.

Now I know it sounds mean. I know it may look cruel. But hey, those opportunities for practical jokes don’t come everyday. Course when I saw Bruce slump over the steering wheel, I thought sure he’d had a heart attack and I ran out of my hiding spot and said enough’s maybe enough. When he saw me it was like a jolt off a defibrillator. He started breathing again. Swearing revenge, of course.

Shortly after that Bruce quit the county. He said it was all those rules and regs, those codes, all that rigamarole. But deep down I suspect it was the guilt of being a renegade fly-by-night septic installer. Oh, I suppose some of you think I should share the blame. But hell fire, if we all quit our jobs over side-skirting county regulations, who’d be left to build the houses??

Bruce is happily retired now, probably still bitching about Island County Building Department Management. And we’re all left learning the new rules, the new ropes, even with our Tea Party Commissioner who builds her own palace without permits. Okay, we’re bitching too…. But I hope occasionally we all think back aways and maybe recall fondly the era when our building inspectors not only looked the other way, but actually ran the backhoe for us old renegades. Knowing Bruce, you can bet it was one damn nice septic system.

The Commissioners up at the Port of Mabana were holding their semi-annual meeting and high stakes poker game the other night when Melvin, the self-named Porta-Potty President, introduced into the minutes the ticklish subject of tsunami debris. “The entire west side of the South End is going to be Ground Zero for all manner of invasive species and radioactive garbage and foreign junk,” he warned ominiously. “And it’s the Port’s job to anticipate this.”

Willy, the Port’s #2 man, raised $5 and his Rolling Rock, looked around the table with his best poker face — the one that broadcast to everyone he was bluffing on a loser hand — and said maybe they could get some grant money for beach clean-up, whereupon Rick, real estate agent of the year in 2011 for Windy Rear Realty’s worst sales year, opened his cards to look  a pair of jacks straight in the eyes and asked, “Who’s going to give us this money, Willy? The Feds are broke, the state’s selling its liquor stores, the county has us cleaning up its parks? And in a minute, you’re going to be broke too. I’ll see your 5 and raise you 10.”

Melvin groaned but his two pair held him in and he reluctantly pushed 15 bucks into the pot for a look at Rick’s hand, figuring both boys were bluffing. “Be a good way to promote the Port,” he motioned, tinkling the ice in his scotch. “The Port,” Willy grumbled, tossing his cards with no little disgust, “is nothing but old pilings, Mel.”

“Half of Japan is on the way headed right at us,” Melvin repeated as he raked in the pot while Rick shook his head woefully, ready to call it a night and wrap up the meeting before his losses became personal. He hadn’t sold a property in two months. And that one looked like it would flip any day. “Stop your worrying,” he muttered. “The beach will look like a Goodwill for awhile, only cheaper. Be a beachcomber’s paradise. The only downside is sales at the Last Chance Thrift will plummet for awhile. Not our problem.”

Willy brightened a bit and gestured with his beer bottle. “How about this: we hide a blown glass ball or two down by the Port, advertise the hell out of it, and they’ll clean up that beach like it was a resort hotel in Waikiki.” He killed the Rolling Rock in a grand gulp and moved to adjourn. Melvin seconded and Rick pushed away from the table. Outside in the rainy driveway, starting up his battered Toyota Camry, he could almost hear the waves churning housewares and broken furniture, appliances and broken boats. Mostly he wished he hadn’t bluffed on that last hand.

I’ve been vacationing recently to various mental illness get-aways. Some on the South End, some further afield. For some reason, unfathomable to the rock solid foundations of my own worrisome mind, I’m helping friends and relatives deal with sisters and brothers who have journeyed past the signposts, not only of normality, but possibly even the Twilight Zone — and I don’t mean Forks, WA. Maybe it’s the recession or maybe it’s the intensity of solar flares or, well, who really knows? These folks aren’t sure and if they were, you wouldn’t believe them anyway.

As I write this I’m in the Brown County Courthouse in Green Bay, Wisconsin where my brother’s brother-in-law is trying to get released to personal recognizance if he will agree to drug monitoring and many other requirements in return for a guilty plea to reckless endangerment and resisting arrest for destroying eight automobiles and leading the Green Bay Packer Police Dep’t on a 120 mph chase through downtown 3 months ago. Like the Blues Brothers he was on a ‘mission from God’ to root out Satan. Lots to do, not much time to do it, apparently. Now fully medicated, he is way less evangelical and far more contrite. In a day or so we’ll see if the judge agrees.

Being a South Ender, I witness mental instability on a near daily basis, even discounting my bathroom mirror. Art may very well be a 2nd cousin of incipient insanity in my case, but I suspect we all have an artistic streak or two and none of us is more than a warm day or two from going through the thinning ice of what we blithely refer to as reality. Or normality. Or sanctioned behavior. Beaver Cleaver never lived in anything firmer than the warm fiction of an electronic TV womb. June Cleaver took to her bed when Ward lost his job in the recessions of those days and Wally died in a Viet Nam rice paddy from friendly fire. If the Beave lost his moorings a few blocks from a perfect Norman Rockwell suburban two story Cape Cod, we might hope for a touch of compassion from an enlightened justice system. After all, we are our brother’s keeper in a world where reality may not be what it’s cracked up to be.

Just a quick note to leave on the back door here as we motor down to the aerodrome and off to see family back in beleaguered Wisconsin.  Fortunately we avoided the recall election.  Unfortunately they’ll still be stewing about it.  The weather isn’t the only thing that will be hot there.

So old Skeeter will be off-line for awhile.  About a week.  Kind of the spiritual equivalent of a kid who stops texting for, oh, five minutes or so.  Almost forever in digital time.

I know some of you are going to suggest I’m leaving because I’m disgusted we live in the only place in the country that isn’t having the warmest spring on record.  Or that we’re sick and tired of picking moss out from under our toenails every morning.  Admittedly I’d have more luck growing seaweed in my garden than bibb lettuce.  I mean, if we’re going to have global warming, let’s include everybody.

Meanwhile, enjoy the peace and quiet of this website.  Watch a sunset and count the stars as they pop out from the strato-cumulus. Listen to the cicadas chirping.  Wait, that might be your hard drive going to hell.  Anyway, no need to thank me for the respite.  But come back later and sit a spell on the back porch.  I’ll promise to fix the leaks in its roof.   Not that I think it’ll still be raining….

4^th of July on the South End

We got our fair share of veterans down here, heroes of the wars, past and present, maybe too many wars, you ask me, but nothing anybody should voice too loudly any particular night at the VFW Hall.  Patriotism means a lot of things to every person, but most of the veterans I know pretty much believe they got the patent on it.  Maybe they do.  After all, they marched into the fray and a lot of their buddies didn’t march back out.  You don’t question the loyalty of these vets, not ever, and you don’t doubt their patriotism.

The other night some of the boyz were waxing nostalgic over a bottle of some privatized CostCo single malt Baghdad Bill had brought to the Marina and Bait Shop for the usual Friday night poker game.  Two Toke was there, and Big Larry too after closing up the grill at the Diner, plus me and a few other draft dodging, student deferred, anti-war types, and what with the 4^th rolling right up and the fireworks stands about to set up red white and blue bunting to sell incendiaries legally, we naturally gravitated to holiday talk and that led to Independence Day, not just here but for Iraqis and Egyptians and Afghan women, and that got us going on wars, good and bad, won and lost.  Two Toke was about one toke — or at least one shot glass — over the line when he started musing about Viet Nam.  Two Toke was there during the Tet Offensive.  He lost most of his unit and a part of a knee there.  He doesn’t have one good word to say about that war, and really, none about any since.  I guess he earned the right.  Bill was in Iraq.  He argues with T.T., but it’s like arguing with a Stanwoodopolite whether they’d like to be annexed into Camano Island.  You’re just asking for some vicious yelling.

Big Larry served in Korea, meaning, we got about all the wars covered since WWII.  Except maybe Granada.  Okay, Panama and Bosnia too.  Some nights we even have Jimmy Z sit in for a hand or two and he was in on the tail end of the Big One, kind of the grand old soldier, and when Jimmy’s sitting in, not even Two Toke questions the point of the latest wars.  Jimmy, though, doesn’t talk much about his two years in the Pacific theater, which took him through Iwo Jima and some nasty business on the beach and then back in the jungle.

Two Toke was wondering aloud if the Revolutionary War was fought so we could just march back over to some foreign country and make life hell for somebody else while Big Larry and Bill were starting to take swigs with every one of Tom’s verbal shots.  I might’ve let them duke it out if it wasn’t for the fact that I had 3 kings over a couple of jacks and the pot was by far the fattest it had been all night.

Boyz boyz boyz, I said, trying to sound like the cool head I never am.  Let’s agree to, you know, not agree.  But hellfire, we’re all in this together, aren’t we?  We got food to eat, a bottle to finish, we got friends and family, some of us got jobs, we got the great good luck to be born here and not in Smokey Point, let’s just be a little thankful, shall we?  4^th of July is coming and we can all at least be glad we’re sitting here in the Land of the Brave Home of the Free.

Course, that set Larry off, fuming over mangled quotations, and before I could get my bets down, the Marina was its own 4^th of July, fireworks ablaze.  I don’t know who won the argument by the end.  I know this: one of us lost a plump pot while he held a winning hand.  Poker, I guess, is a little too much like war.  But we’ll all be at the table next Friday night.  Probably fight about privatizing liquor.

Mama said there’d be days like this — dark, monsoonal, rivers-over-the-gutter- raindaze. No going outside without full slickers, no possibility of sunbreaks, no phone calls with good news, just a joyless unremittingly bleak nimboculumulus parked on the brainstem. Pull the covers up, go back to sleep, wait it out…. Otherwise you risk taunting the Fates. And do NOT think things can’t get worse. They can always get worse.

These are the days you don’t check your e-mail, you don’t answer those spine-trembling rings, you don’t look at caller ID, you don’t dash for the mailbox. If you get a knock at the door, for all that’s holy and sane, leave by the back door and don’t bother shutting it. Whoever — whatever — is scratching for entry, you don’t want to know. It isn’t Knowledge that’s bliss, pal. Not that bliss is in the forecast. Steady pain is. Intermittent pain. Painstorms followed by pain showers. And forget the umbrellas.

I’m not going to explore the chemical/ hormonal/ meteorological foundations for these days — wouldn’t help anyway and might give you reason for misguided optimism. What you need is the will just to hang on. Think of a splintered board floating by after the ship goes down. Straddle it and go where it takes you — unless it’s DOWN. If you’re a drinker, start early. If you’re employed, take sick leave (it’s no lie!). If you’re religious, beseech your gods. But don’t expect miracles, not today. Today the meek will not inherit the earth. Trust me, they’re the lucky ones…..