The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

This past couple of weeks a Canadian film crew was on the South End to begin shooting the definitive documentary on Colton Harris Moore, aka the Barefoot Bandit and Amateur Aviator, and now our best shot at any claim to fame.  They’ve got producers and financial backers, they’ve got experience and equipment, they’ve got Rick Wood, our former cub reporter for the Stanwoodopolis Gazette lining up interviews and interpreting the native dialect for these Torontans.  They plan to tell the story, the whole story and nothing but the story, so help them God….
Today they dropped by my place: lights, camera, okay, not too much action, but I played a little banjo and regaled the neighborhood one more time with the Ballad of Colton Moore, the South End String Band’s bastardized version of Jesse James — another American youth memorialized in song and film, a role model for the next generation of kids who will look fondly back at crime that wasn’t cyber.  We live in an era already relegated to nostalgia, trust me.      I think the documentarians wanted the banjo in there but mostly they wanted that ‘Deliverance’ feel only an inbred South Ender can provide, six fingers and a simpleton grin, amiable as a jackass on PCP.  They came to the right place.  They found the right guy.
Not too long back Lance Black, the screenwriter of ‘Milk’ who won the Academy Award for it, was up with Bob Friel, the freelance writer from Orcas who’s  written the definitive book on Colton and who was in Bahama when our boy was apprehended.   These are serious people, principled people, unlike ourselves, and it was a real pleasure to drink whiskey with them and tell more than our usual lies.  Lance will be doing the Hollywood movie this year now that he’s done working with Clint Eastwood on the movie ‘Hoover’.   Bob will no doubt be a major consultant, edging me out of any imagined royalties.  Between them, this will be a serious and reflective film.
Which means it will probably be shot on location in Vancouver.  Well, Vancouver Island.  But let me be the first to alert the Chambers of Commerce on Camano and Stanwood.  Drive to Forks and check out Vampireville over there.  Down on the South End, we’re locked and loaded. Tyee Store has the tour buses ready.  Elger Bay Store has the Colton memorabilia priced and promoted.  The time is now to rename Camano ‘Colton Island’ and quit lollygagging around with Snow Goose festivals and Slow Food Roots Music.  Let’s speed it up, folks!  In fact, I recommend to all restaurants, hardware stores, clothing boutiques and assorted stripmalls on their way to sinking into the sewer lagoon — get Colton in that name.  Barefoot Burglar Burgers .  Colton Camera.  Colton Curios.  Okay, you get the idea…..  Gear up and sell out!  The kid is going to make you rich.  The recession is OVER!  Course, so is our pastoral, laid back lifestyle.  What?  You thought fame came cheap?

Used to be, folks would complain about the slow speed of the Post Office.  Took forever to get a letter, they said.  Stuff got lost.  Cost too much for a stamp.  Too much junk mail.  On and on….  Me, I always loved the Postal Service.  Send a letter to some backwash address in the Ozarks and 2 days later, some mailman would haul up, by mule if necessary, to deliver it.  Straight to their door, no matter where.  For 25 cents or so.  Costs a little more now, but not much.  If that wasn’t efficient, what was?
E-mail, that’s what.  Or Twitter.  Or Facebook.   Hardly costs anything, my advocates for killing the Post Office say.  And …. you don’t have to lick an envelope.  Well, maybe it is cheaper.  Unless you count in the cost of your computer.  And high speed internet.  And a printer.  Ink cartridges.  Cellphone.  Subscription costs.  Okay, you still don’t have to lick an envelope.
I suppose most of us haven’t gotten a real letter since that Christmas card back in 1982.  And that was probably a ‘form’ letter Xeroxed to all the kinfolk what new grandkids were born and who graduated from what school (but skipping the criminal arrests and convictions and the drug rehab news).  Now, unless you took typing, you have to hunt and peck a message, which explains Twitter.  Kind of cuts down on the length of any message you got to poke it out on some itty bitty keyboard.  And syntax, well, who’s got the time anymore, really, when a few choice syllables abbreviated to their purest form will suffice?
I finally noticed my pals who get my letters never wrote back.  Lost art.  I’m sure they thought it was quirky and quaint, a handwritten letter.  Maybe a little wordy in this new fast paced world.  Now I notice the responses to my e-mails pretty much indicate they don’t even read these with any depth of understanding.  Couple word response, let me know they got some kind of message from me.  I suppose I could lament the passing of the letter as artform, about as useful as crying over the demise of newspapers or books or illuminated manuscripts.
But I will say, I never worried about my letter inadvertently going to 100 other people when I accidentally hit REPLY ALL, I don’t care how many envelopes I didn’t have to lick.  Sometimes maybe efficiency isn’t all that we’re after.

I got an e-mail awhile back from an old girlfriend from my high school daze.  How she got hold of me is no mystery since it’s how a lot of folks get in touch these days now that we’re all on the great data bank of the internet.  She probably could’ve gotten my driving history, my credit rankings, my employment information, my political affiliations and hopefully my marital status with a few clicks of a keyboard.  No accidents, no tickets, no job, no credit rating, no kids, no tea party memberships.   One wife.  Happily married.  Very happily.
We had a nice and cordial correspondence in which, in a few paragraphs, we filled in the years since we held hands in my folks’ Buick and smooched in the woods near our place before I had to trundle off to my job on the second shift at the Coca-Cola Bottling plant in Northern Wisconsin.  She would soon be off to college while I would be two more years getting out of my hellhole high school.  She was really my first love, a platonic affair that was something we both could look back on and smile at, if not laugh out loud for how sappily sweet and innocent we were.  Outside the Amish community, those relationships are as unlikely now as a horse drawn carriage.
I don’t think she had any interest in one of those Facebook affairs or anything like that.  You know:  look up an old flame and see what they’re doing now that maybe we’re lonesome or divorced and the kids have moved on and our parents have died.   Send a few photos to see if we’ve grown a bad paunch or lost our teeth or maybe our smiles or gone to seed and old age.  If not, maybe make a date for dinner or drinks, fall in the sack, fall in love, give that 45 year hiatus a kickstart and see if our adolescent judgement was still okay.
Happens everyday on the internet.  Nothing to smirk about either, you ask me.  Love is a commodity in short supply these days and I wish folks the best at finding it, whether it’s a seedy bar or an e-mail to that kid they dated back in the good old days who went off with old so-and-so and found out 20 years later it was a bad marriage.
But it is odd to have the distant past come around the corner at you.  A sort of ‘what if?’ moment.  Not just what if for some imagined life with someone you knew when you were sweet 16 and never been kissed, but all the forks in the road, all the imagined possibilities one choice made unfeasible for all the others.  I am not immune to such flights of fantasy, having gone back to find a love thought lost, hoping beyond reason she would not be married, would not have kids, would not have a life real enough to make any fantasies of mine dissolve like a cold fog in a summer sun.  No, if anyone understands the impulse to go back, to take the fork not taken, you bet it’s me.  It is a rare thing to backtrack, to see the mistake and go back for a possibly well-deserved rejection, then to have it fall the way your mind’s eye imagined it, corny and uncynical, an old Hollywood love story nobody could sell today.

I’m fairly certain my childhood squeeze isn’t looking for anything more than some spark of nostalgia, a small suspended friendship from across the gulf of years, a gentle reminder that we parted friends, no hard feelings either, and went off to live lives totally apart and different from the other’s.  She does, after all, have a husband, kids, grandkids, a complete life in a small town near where she was born.  Teaches Sunday School at her church, goes to her kids’ weddings, just retired from her job even though her husband still has a year or two.  She’s not looking for a romance novel here.  Although the missuz may not be as certain.  And I’m not looking for a bodice to rip.  Unless it’s the missuz’s….

You live in the country out here on the island, you find out the real population is not human (no offense to my Republican friends), it’s an ever expanding group of citizens who live underground (no offense to my artist friends, who burrow and bore (no, not borrow and bare, no offense to my indigent pals) and who seem to be building an entire infrastructure beneath our lawns without bothering to get building permits (no offense to our current commissioner).  I’m talking moles.  Interstate highways rolling just beneath the surface rhododendron to garden, the little buggers tirelessly  tunneling their way from grub to grub.  Who the hell knows what they’re doing?  And who really cares?  At least until they decide to come up for some air.  In the morning those beautifully manicured suburban lawns look like small mortars were exploded by Libyan insurgents.  Ugly piles of dirt and rock sit atop the weed-and-fed fescue and explode in gravelly shrapnel when the John Deere riders hit them.  You better believe this is war.
Moles, at least to me, are like mosquitoes, a plague to be borne, not warred on.  In the end the human race will die off and yes, Virginia, there will still be skeeters and there will always be moles.   Tell that to my neighbors!  They have incredibly complex military strategies plotted out, staged, implemented and studied when they fail.  One retired Seattle police sergeant sat in a lawn chair and simply waited with his service revolver.  When he heard them surfacing, he undid the safety.  When they poked their little pink nose up into his space, ka-boom.   Underground crime dropped 50% that year, but it wasn’t long before new recruits tore up his lawn.  They’ve tried traps and poison, they’ve stuck dried blackberry cane with one inch thorns poking into their sensitive little feet so they’d bleed to death in the hole, they’ve stuck high pressure hoses into the tunnel, they’ve hooked their muffler exhaust to the exits and revved the engine on old trucks to kill them silently.  And the neighbors with noise.   They’ve cursed and they’ve stomped, they’ve bought high frequency noise repellants, they’ve tried the power of prayer.   Nothing works.   They’ve even dumped raw gasoline into the caverns, let the fumes slowly move thru the network, then they’ve set a match to it.
Don’t try this at home!  It is extremely dangerous, not only to yourself, but to the neighbors too.  The moles, not so much.  I think they move quickly along when the odor of gasoline makes the tunnel obnoxious even to them.  They probably set up little lawn chairs over by the azaleas and watch when the whole thing detonates.  Nothing quite it like it, really, when the sod lifts suddenly from its mooring,  and smoke and debris pour out of the mole holes.  Probably loosens the soil nicely for further excavations, is what I figure.  Probably not so great for the perfectly manicured lawn.   At this point, of course, we aren’t thinking rationally, are we?,  we’re thinking revenge.
There are lessons here for all of us and I don’t just mean West Point strategic planning.  The truth is, when all the assaults have proven futile, when the inordinate time spent is ultimately not worth the goal, when the expense is beyond anything sane, sometimes you just have to learn to co-exist with the varmints you live next to.  The moles, I mean…..

Maybe you already heard the results of a new study that shows 14% of cellphone calls are phony – meaning, the person on the phone is pretending to talk to someone on a non-existent other end.  That’s one in seven calls are meant to remove the user from real interpersonal contact with the excuse he has a call coming in.  This is maybe great news for thespians, all this acting practice, but not so great for actual relationships.
Consider this next time the person you’re in mid-sentence with suddenly breaks off for that important I-have-to-take-this-call incoming.  Good chance they’re nodding and bobbing, babbling away at the soft hum of a dial tone, pausing, listening, answering back, all to remove themselves from the great pleasure of your company.  Course our friends wouldn’t do that, just everybody else’s.  But … occasionally you might try slipping off to dial their number, see if it rings while they’re in mid-chat with Harvey the Six Foot Rabbit.  Good chance they’ll just put you on hold, probably, and keep on talking.  In the end maybe even a crummy friend is better than no friend at all.
Down here on the South End, we sort of expect strange behavior from our pals.   If we wanted Normality, we’d have moved north a long time ago.  But you ask me, anybody who answers a cellphone in the middle of our conversation, made up call or real, is sending me a message loud and clear.  Maybe time to go weed the garden,  let them talk without an eavesdropper.
Still, it’s a tad troubling, this phone-call-from-the-void stuff.  Sad enough to get solicitations from strangers with odd regional dialects, really almost alarming to chatter with nobody.  Next thing you know they’ll be doing it when they’re alone.  And before long, mark my words, they’ll be writing a blog nobody reads.  ….. Uh-oh.  Operator, I think I been cut off….

I’m in transit today, cars, buses, planes – no trains yet —  and hopefully my truck at the end for the final leg.  This means I’m wandering airport corridors barraged by TV’s hanging overhead every thirty feet or so for the traveler in need of a constant IV drip of fast breaking news, an electron lifeline to the events of the day.  Today we’re watching the stock market swooning, the Dow Jones down now by over 600 points, all our winnings at the national crap table lost in one throw of the dice.
Standard and Poor, that exemplar of a ratings agency, downgraded the U.S. from Triple A to AA+ and now the institutional investors are dumping equities like they were toxic drums of pesticides the EPA just banned.  If you’re like me, you got some skin the game.  Enough to hurt if you’re hoping to retire some golden day.  Probably not gonna be as soon as we thought….
I suppose we can be grateful our paltry Social Security isn’t pegged to the Market.  Although I know plenty of folks who would love to gamble that too, the same folks who want an ATM machine in the casino for easy access to more money.  Those people should take an early retirement and head straight to the nearest betting mecca, rent a motel room by the month nearby and put their severance check on the Red Seven and spin the wheel.
I guess I’m not much of a gambler.  And when this rollercoaster market steadies out, I’m going to gather up my losses and what’s left of the shirt on my back and hunker down for a long hard run toward old age.  The Young Turks of Wall Street are going to have to continue without me.  When I watch a ratings agency like Standard and very Poor make a two trillion dollar math error on their downgrade assessment, my faith in capitalism drops way below a Double A+.  These were the fine fellows who gave Top Drawer ratings to Enron and WAMU and all the other fast buck subprime freddies and sold us down the river 3 years ago.  Maybe math ought to be the criterion, not card counting.  It’s supposed to be Wall Street, not Las Vegas.

If you’ve been down to your favorite fiduciary lending institution lately, you’ve maybe run into the New Improved Tighter Regulations.  These are the folks who brought us the Great
Recession we’re still trying to climb out of, but now they’ve learned their lesson, at least the ones who weren’t bankrupted or defaulted or reorganized by the FDIC.  We gave them TARP loans so they’d loan money to jumpstart the
economy they’d stalled, and instead, they just hung onto it.  You got a house underwater, good luck getting new finance terms.  They’re going to take the house  —- the only question is how
long can they convince you to tread water, meaning, how long can they keep you making those payments before you sink like a stone.

I got a check recently through my high powered business name and when I went down to deposit it, I was informed I would now need to open a new business account.
Undaunted, I went to another of my many favorite banks who used to cash my business checks just fine, without the necessity for acting like they were
my parents.  And once again I was told firmly and patiently that they could not, no, absolutely not, confuse my business with my personal account.  I
said it is WAY too late for that in my life that is approaching what for some would be retirement age.  They said  no, the time is now.

Of course I don’t suspect the real reason for this change of heart and policy has anything to do with extra service fees or set-up charges.  I would never never accuse my banks of
petty greed, nickel and dime tactics or outright deceptions from debit card fees, late fees, overdraft fees and all those myriad other small print hand-in-my-wallet charges that eat the poor alive, one dollar at a time.

So I spent an hour setting up my corporate account.  The one I will use til the last check clears from the current client — after which I will have checks issued to me, personally.   Muddy bizness
practice, sure, but simpler for me. And when we were done and the handshakes with the assistant manager done,  I mentioned their promotion of $100 to anyone opening a new business account.  And they smiled sadly before lamenting I was just two days too late, the offer expired already.  To which, I smiled sadly and pulled the internet ad that showed the offer good for another week.  Trust, as they certainly mentioned more than
a few times, is crucial to a good relationship between my business and my lending institution, a partnership, as it were, in these uncertain fiscal times.

It finally cost them 100 bucks for my time.  About $100 dollars an hour.  I’m sure they would agree that this constitutes  a fine business acumen.  I may open a dozen new accounts.  Hell, I could easily learn to love finance
with these folks as tutors and mentors. Or vice versa.

Being the reluctant social scientist I am down here at the last refuge of the 20^th century, I’ve been noticing how a lot of my cronies are developing new paradigms of social behavior.  You folks who are up to date on all the latest technology probably just take it for granted, but I’m like Rip Van Wrinkled who just woke up after 20 years sleeping through the changes.  It’s all alarmingly new and different.  I’m even told it’s new and improved.

I’ve finally stopped saying hello to the folks in the grocery store standing right next to me who suddenly say hello.   Took me awhile to realize they’re calling somebody and don’t mind one bit if I listen in.  Kind of made me feel like I’m not
there or didn’t matter or was invisible. I even thought at first it was pretty rude.  The checkout people get the same
treatment.  Folks are too busy talking to someone somewhere else now to pay any attention to the nobody next to
them.  Sure, it looks like they maybe think they’re more important than us, but I’m getting used to it.  I just happen to be the only fool without a cellphone left in the store.  Me and the checkout clerk.

I got folks now who answer their phone in the middle of our conversation.  It rings its cute personalized ringtone and
next thing I know I’m put on hold.  Sure, I could maybe think I’m not there, insignificant as a 5^th cousin.  I thought at first maybe their phone couldn’t save a message, so they had to take a call.  Way back they used to apologize for taking it, but not anymore.

Nowadays I got friends who text message and get e-mails and search the web for stock quotes and ball scores while we’re at the table or in a conversation.  Multi-tasking.  They can keep up with my stupid banter and still get something  meaningful done.  Time’s short, why waste it?

Their kids don’t even make the pretense of eye to eye or one to one.  They got their friends to text message and if
I want to communicate with them I guess I better learn how to text them too.   Otherwise I’m relegated to the
trashpile of Obsolete Old Fart.  It took me awhile not to get mad and take it personal, but then I remembered my folks’
adage, kids are better seen, not heard.

What it seems like to me is we’re slipping out of the physical world into a virtual one where we would rather deal with folks on our gizmoes than be in the same room with them.  It took me awhile to reconcile myself to that notion, but sit with a pal through a couple of phone calls or watch them texting across the table, hey, call me old fashioned, but I’d rather they weren’t there either.

I been listening for the last year or more this growing drumbeat against public service employees, social security entitlements, health care run by the government and, well, damn near everything run by the government.  You’d think teachers were communists and firemen were Marxists and anybody who wasn’t working for themselves or for a
corporation were leeches on the body public.  We suddenly got ourselves a debt crisis and some folks believe the only
solution is to shrink government down to a size they can flush in a toilet.

I used to be a school teacher way back in the Paleolithic.  And I don’t mean Sarah Paleolithic.  I find it troubling that public employees are the bad guys now.  That somehow they don’t contribute to the wealth of America.  The Ayn Randians think the corporations are the only way to restore the nation to its former glory days, but I’m not sure what glory days they mean, although probably any time before last year would do.

We got a lot of folks out of work right now who can’t pay taxes if they don’t make a living.  And we got a Congress with a lot of senators and representatives who want to cut government jobs some more.  Because, I guess, they aren’t real jobs.  Don’t pay real taxes.  Don’t buy real groceries and cars and television sets.  Don’t pay into social security.  Don’t get loans or put their phony money in banks.  I guess.  These senators and representatives, it should be pointed out to them, don’t have real jobs either.  And lately, most of us might at least agree on that point.

What I don’t understand, being a communist on the South End, is how we watched the banking industry and the Wall Street boys and the hedge fund managers and all the heroes of Ayn Rand take us down a subprime mortgage meltdown and nobody seems to think anyone is to blame but the government.  Call me stoopid and paint a clown face on my hat, but something is terrible wrong with this picture.  Something’s upside down and inside out and distorted like those old funhouse mirrors at the carnival.  Why aren’t some people in jail for gaming the system?  Why aren’t laws being passed to keep it from happening again?

I’m not a Bolshevik just because I want to lock up thieves who were supposed to be capitalist heroes, am I? I just want somebody to tell me how it is we think one job is more valid than another, why a private construction worker is more
important to the economy than a government construction worker the FAA laid off the last few weeks, why we should want a private agency security person instead of a municipal cop, why we think a corporation beholden to its investors is
more honest than an employee working for us, the people.

Course, I’ll have to admit, in full disclosure, most of us down here on the radical South End, aren’t too much interested in jobs.  Any jobs.  Work, I hate to admit, isn’t high on the value chart.  And here’s something for the Sarah Paleontologists:  you won’t find too many communists here either. Everybody’s supposed to work under communism. That isn’t gonna fly down here.  We got a few better things to do than work.  Maybe we should’ve run for the Senate.

I was in the beer depot the other day with a couple purchases of adult beverages when the checkout lady asked to see my ID.  I don’t take that as a compliment anymore now that I’m 40 years past legal.  It’s the law and I am as law abiding as the next fellow down at the South End, meaning, I try my best even if I fall short more than occasionally.  She noticed my ID was a driver’s license from another state since I was in a liquor store in Wisconsin, not that I usually make my beer runs that far from home, no matter how good their local beer is.  She looked at it a lot longer than I was accustomed to, which is maybe ten seconds longer than a cursory glance.  June, 1950, she said.  My bank likes to tell me my birthday too, I guess to make me feel like we’re all family down there at the old First National Gouge and Steal that is my lending institution.

She finally handed me back my ID, which even has a picture of me in the same weatherstained cowboy hat I was sporting at the time, so she knew it must’ve been yours truly, but when I paid for my purchases, she asked suddenly, springing it on me, what year was your birthday again?  Trick question for the feeble minded or the counterfeiter trying to buy legal liquor with a bogus ID. This is the state that requires drivers license photo ID for the ostensible purpose of ensuring
that voter fraud is kept to a minimum.  Some folks think its real purpose is to keep students and minorities from voting since they’re more likely not to own a car OR a license to drive one.  Me, I’m cynical so you can probably
guess how I stand on that.  But I wasn’t in the liquor store to vote, you see, although she might have figured maybe that’s where I was headed next, probably after drinking my illegal purchases.  They got a big recall vote out here in a couple days and everybody and their mother is wound tight as a cheap alarm clock.  Who knows, maybe I was on a dry run, see if my phony ID would work on beer, then use it to vote
back in the folks who were voted out for wanting to let my vigilant checkout lady form a labor union for better wages and maybe some benefits.  Or maybe she just was mistrustful of some immigrant from a state she wasn’t sure was in America or Mexico.  The price of ignorance when you don’t bother with the GED.  Nevertheless, you can’t be too careful in these polarized times. Especially in a state where it’s now easier to get a concealed weapon permit than one to vote.

Well, I passed the pop quiz with, okay,  maybe not flying colors, and certainly not the answer she expected to hear.  Once I get a few beers under my belt, maybe I’ll get up the nerve to try voting here in the dairy state.  Right after I get that permit for a Luger.  If I do, I’m voting to keep her wages pegged right of minimum.  I figure a true patriot like herself ought to be willing to work practically for free.