The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Maybe you used to write Christmas Cards , the one time of year you actually put pen to paper and wrote a note to old friends, family members, school chums, co-workers and anyone else you hated to lose touch with, good opportunity to keep a thin thread of connection. Happy Holidays! Some of you typed up a chronicle of what you and the spouse and kids did over the past 12 months, a huge yawn to most of those not in the immediate family circle, but it saved you all those handwritten notes even if it bored the pajamas off the rest of us.

One year I sent a mock chronicle of the Daddle Family’s year long escapades, a summary of drug rehab, chronic depression, school dropouts, cult joining, a litany of the exact opposite of the usual success stories of the kids and their beaming parents. A few of the recipients who actually read this were confused and later remarked they never realized we had children. We don’t. So much for satire in the era of text messaging.

Or you could do like a lot of my lame relatives, use one of those family group photos, pay Shutterfly to make a few cards, then send it with no note whatsoever, maybe not even sign the damn thing and call it good for another holiday season. Bah humbug, I say. What a waste of a stamp. What a statement to the recipient. We’re too busy to scribble a single thought on this hectic holiday but we managed to address the envelope. Thanks, y’all, thanks not at all. Thought that counts, right?

Now, of course, we get e-mail Holiday Greetings, some with music and individualized identifiers of us as the recipients. Merry Christmas, Skeeter, followed by some corporation’s cute and humorous video, no doubt a subsidiary of Hallmark Cards, updated for the 21st Century and the social media crowd.

I just finished sending 3 dozen handmade Christmas cards, all with a long personal letter to folks who will probably not send anything this year and if they do, count on it, just a store-bought card with their signature under the Happy Holiday text inside. My shirt sleeve relatives will send the family photo card and no message, probably not even a signature. They figure I can identify them in the picture, I guess. Every year I say I’m not going to do this again. And so, I’m saying it again. Oh, if you’re reading this, have a great holiday. Sorry I didn’t include a family photo but Susie’s still in rehab and Wyatt’s commune doesn’t allow picture taking. Maybe next year….

Wanda and Ed Zurik own 20 acres past the Diner, mostly cleared land in the South End’s remote interior. Ed grew alfalfa and grass for his six head of cattle, but a few years back he came out to find a perfect circle burnt into his field, what he later learned was a ‘crop circle’, one of those mysterious geometries created with no trail in and no trail out. One of Ed and Wanda’s cows was missing as well. Ed and Wanda contacted the AREA 51 organization who sent an investigator up from their Arizona headquarters to verify that the circle had all the hallmarks of a UFO landing. (The cow was found a day later back in the nettles where it had gotten through an opening in Ed’s barb wire fence.)

The Camano Head, it turns out, is one leg of a Bermuda Triangle of reported sightings of UFO’s, the other legs being Mt. Rainier and the Bangor Naval Base. Ed and Wanda began to devote time and money to the AREA 51 folks, at least until Wanda was abducted one night by aliens while Ed slept the sleep of the innocent. He awoke to find her missing from their bed and found her traumatized out by the barn, barely coherent, telling him in a terrified voice how she had been ‘taken’ in a blinding pulsing light, to god only knew where, and probed and poked by unseen beings. It was, she told Ed and later the AREA 51 team, horrible. She showed them marks on her arms and legs made by syringes that took fluids from her body and shot unknown fluids back in. She was certain they were experimenting on her. Worse, she was certain they would return.

Those of us who inhabit this Triangle know it to be a strange place, all right. Maybe not an ‘entry point’ for extraterrestrial intruders, but some kind of magnetic disturbance that pulls the weird and the deranged from their ordinary lives. Ed was a former insurance salesman who decided one winter day to become a farmer, closed his office that same afternoon, sold his suburban ranch house a week later and moved here where the ‘emanations’ seemed strongest. Maybe we all felt that same pull, who knows?

When the farming proved too hard and the cows not too profitable, the Zuriks did what a lot of us do down here. He kept on digging the hole he was digging. Ed took up drinking as a second job and of course his first job suffered. Occasionally Wanda calls in a missing human report on Ed to the sheriff’s department those nights he doesn’t show up before dark, but the deputies know to check with us down at the Pilot Lounge. “You aliens got Ed Zurik?” Carl, the night bartender, will holler to us layabouts and, more likely than not, if we don’t, we soon will.

Christmas on the South End isn’t like the movies, all tinsel and presents under a twinkling tree, eggnog and caroling. Unless you wanted a chunk of coal you didn’t bother putting up stockings by the chimney for old St. Nick to fill. Us kids just figured we were all naughty, not nice by somebody’s standards, so we got what we deserved. Pretty much nothing. Whoever decided Santa was judge and jury anyway?

Oh sure, sometimes we got a gift card from Tyee Store. Swell, thanks Mom, Thanks, Dad. Thought that counts, right? No, Christmas wasn’t our favorite holiday. Must be some folks’ favorite, though, judging by the strings of lights hanging all year long around the neighbors’ houses. Why bother taking them down when the nouveau riche have a consumer holiday 365 days of the livelong year?

Christmas down here now is a lot like Amazon. It gobbles up all the other little holiday competitors. Used to be Christmas started right after Thanksgiving. For those of you who quit using math, that’s about 30 days of shopping. A month, an entire month. I was in a store last year that started putting up the Christmas decorations right after Halloween. This year most of them did. And some, I kid you not, started before Halloween. That’s over two months, 60 days in case you don’t have the calendar app. That’s a lot of Bing Crosby muzak.

My neighbors who never take the strings of lights off their gutters all year round, maybe they celebrate their own birthday for a couple months, I don’t know. Presents every day for weeks and weeks. We got Black Friday, Internet Monday, the holiday that never really ends, whoopee! Did I say Christmas was a little like Amazon? Amazon IS Christmas, 365 days, don’t forget Leap Year. One day delivery. Drones, not reindeer, next year, count on it.

And oh yeah, before I forget, Merry Christmas one and all. From now until eternity.

Well, Christmas on the overcast South End is gonna be a little less jolly this year. Naw, not because most of us can’t afford presents for our loved ones, what with this half decade recession keeping us in the ranks of the chronically unemployed, but because of the news that Santa was being investigated by a grand jury on insider trading charges with MasterCard, Visa, Capitol One and American Express. Turns out old St. Nick was nicking all of us all along.

Tis the season, I guess. The media blitz for total consumer obedience is cranking up earlier than Thanksgiving now, urging us to buy buy buy whether we can afford it or not. Personally I like the car company ad that has the kids on Santa’s lap explaining to the bewildered old poop in his droopy cap and fat guy velvet suit how they want a full size pick-up truck or a fully equipped sedan. Captures perfectly the true spirit of the holiday, you ask me. Cash or credit on that? Hmm, Santa probably figured out which side his toast was buttered either right then and there or else it was the umpteenth millionth kid with the minimum wage parents wanting an X-box and a few thousand dollars of video games.

Even worse news for the soon-to-be indicted Mr. Claus and his sweatshop up in the Arctic Circle is the rumor of a class action lawsuit by his undocumented elves for withholding overtime pay and denying them sick leave. He may ultimately avoid legal sanctions and some frigid prison time if he’s got a good attorney, and you can bet he does, but the brutal publicity may take some of the shine off his squeaky clean grandfatherly image. The wolves are circling up there at the Circle and there’s little doubt the Justice Dep’t. will soon start investigating that offshore account of his, North Pole Equities, to see where the money leads. Even if it’s all perfectly legal, the spokesman for Christmas Past and Christmas Present may not get the nod come Christmas Future. The Powers That Be don’t need a cloud of guilt hanging over their pitchman and potential sales threatened by scandal.

After all, Christmas is as American as an ATM machine and the Lotto. For all the bogus controversy about the government clamping down on what might once have been a religious holiday of some sort, let’s be honest with ourselves, it IS about religion. Capitalism. Whatever else it WAS has been swept asunder under a consumer juggernaut that feeds the economy. Keep playing Bing Crosby songs at the mall and haul out the cute reindeer for a few months, most of us are so anesthetized we’d gladly go deeper into debt to shut off the saccharine insanity. This year, put an automobile under the tree. Santa’s getting 1% kickback on every credit card purchase. This year, let’s help the old guy out…. and the economy too. Fa la la la laaaawyer, as we say down here.

You might find it hard to believe, but the South End used to be a Destination Spot. The whole island did. The island you could drive to, one developer in the 80’s called it, but 50 years before that, the resorts promoted it the same way.

Camp Grande, Diane, Tyee, Cama, Madrona, Indian Beach, Camp Lagoon, Sunset Beach, Utsalady Beach, Camp Comfort. The poor miserable sweltering city folks could escape their sizzling apartments and rent a cabin for the week. All day long the menfolk would do what menfolk have done since Cro-Magnon dropped their tails and descended from the branches of the nut-trees. They’d sit on their butts and drink. Course we modernists call it FISHING. Which is really a euphemism for Drinking.

When the boat was full of empties and dead salmon, the boys would pull up on the beach and wobble up to the mizzus with their trophy salmons and do what menfolk have done since the 2nd day they hit the ground. Order the womenfolk to cook up the catch.

Back then they had these cute pioneer woodstoves in every cabin. Women must’ve really liked this. Their menfolk, being he-men, could split up the firewood with an axe, probably whacking off a couple of fingers and toes, and she could stand over a 500 degree stove in a cabin with all the doors and windows open and the kitchen about 400 degrees, and she could fry up some smelly fish for the whole squalling family. Later she could wash the burnt-on skillets and the rest in water boiled on the stove. She probably had the time of her life playing pioneer mizzus.

The resorts are all gone now, end of an era on the South End. Some say the fishing dried up. I say the women finally got fed up.

Folks these days are scared. Can’t say I really blame em. The fear mongers pump the worst case scenarios on X and Facebook, Newsmax and MSNBC. The liberals are grooming their kids, the conservatives will be policing their bedrooms. We’ve divided into two warring sides and the other side is definitely Evil.

No one is left in the wide chasm that once was the middle. The center couldn’t hold. Covid taught us to fear the coming bird flu already in cattle and milk. Half of us are afraid of any potential vaccine. Might be a transmitting device. Might be poison. We don’t trust scientists, our school teachers are undermining our kids’ patriotism, the courts are witch hunts, the elections are rigged. Who ya gonna call?

Artificial Intelligence should kick the last of the foundations out. Nothing can be taken at face value, all news, all information is suspect. The internet, that promise of democratizing information, will be riddled with worms, lies, propaganda, craziness, conspiracies, bots and phony baloney as far as the eyes and ears can see and hear.

Scared? Angry? Hell yes!! The old reality is dissolving every day! The world is shape-shifting every mouse click. Nothing is as it seems and definitely not as it seemed only yesterday. We live by gizmo. Cellphone addiction, TikTok entertainment, Facebook popularity, memes, video games, internet ‘influencers’, distractions distractions and more distractions. Our attention spans have atrophied to bits and bytes, click baited, concentration rendered impossible.

From my perch on the porch of the South End, the mainland is drifting further away on tides of grievance and anxiety, almost another country no longer tethered to the rhythms here of tide and moon, seasons and song. Walking the beach today, no one else for miles, the wind blew warm and a lone whale spouted offshore. The two of us traveled together to the Head, keeping pace with each other, maybe keeping faith, definitely sharing the same world. I’m no Ahab, don’t call me when you realize reality has come unmoored. I’m staying put.

Okay, the verdict is in, the election is over, it’s all over but the shouting. Or at least the celebration by the billionaires. All of you who voted for the winner, maybe you thought he would unleash capitalism, deregulate the poor hamstrung corporations and bring riches to your small towns and rural communities. Let the captains of industry loose, you figure, and they will pull all of us up on a rising tide that has nothing to do with fake global warming.

Trickle down economics will unleash a flood of wealth, lifting all our boats. Just let the tech boyz and the corporations have their way, unfettered by pesky rules and regulations, and the engines of capitalism will bring untold wealth and prosperity to our land. If government was the problem, the obstacle, the elephant in the boardroom, then by god, government has to be dismantled department by department. Or at the very least it has to be hobbled. Put in charge the most incompetent people possible, fire the deep state employees, drown the damn beast in the bathtub when its size is reduced. Drain the swamp and let the corporations run free. After all, isn’t that what it means to make America great again?

If the rich don’t know how to make money, who does? YOU? No, your job is to get out of the way, let the corporations do their job competently and no doubt whatsoever with your best interests in mind too. If competition was once thought the way to keep your prices down, be advised, it’s a brave new world now. Apple, Google, Nvidia, Microsoft, Tesla, they’re all gobbling up the little companies. Banks are consolidating, grocery chains are buying up the losers, airlines are merging. The New Capitalists aren’t wasting time competing with the hangers-on, they got bottom lines to watch, stocks to tend, CEO salaries to pay. Don’t worry, you’ll get yours too. Eventually. Didn’t we just raise the federal minimum wage? Sure we did. Some states even raised it more than that. The red states didn’t but that’s because they understand the importance of letting business run business, not government run business. Just the way you voted.

Sit back and get ready for your votes to pay dividends. First to the wealthy, sure, but down the road, you’ll get yours. Truth is, you’ll get exactly what you deserve….

The South End String Band didn’t start out planning to be a band — they were mostly a back porch drinking society with music as a viable excuse to offer their wives for staying out til after midnight. What most of them didn’t know was how grateful the mizzus was to have a peaceful evening to herself. Well, at least until Shelly joined the band.

For years the boys hauled out their guitars and banjos, pulled their fiddles off the wall and strung up all those mandolin strings, met up down at the South End Grange Hall where Tommy the fiddler was Master. In the beginning they were all much more proficient on the jug than on their own instruments, but as often happens with practice, they got better. And as they got more proficient, they drank a little less and began to talk playing in public. When the South End Historical Society asked them to perform for their annual salmon bake fundraiser, they jumped on the opportunity. “Can’t pay you anything,” Edith Wonkszeski told the boys, “but we’ll feed you. And the beers are on us.” That sounded more than fair, Tommy told her and warned her to stock up on those beers, you might lose money on this band.

And so the newly named South End String Band went public. If they liked drinking and strumming, they loved live performances for an appreciative audience twice as much as both put together. Trouble was, they soon found out, none of the boys could sing outside a shower worth a hoot or a holler. Billy on the banjo tried, but he sort of talked his way through, not really sang. And then Shelly came up to them after a gig at the Mabana Sunset Villa Nursing Home and said, “You ought to give me a listen.”
Which they did. She came to the next practice wearing a low cut cowgirl dress and even if she’d sung out of tune, the boys knew she’d be their new vocalist. It didn’t hurt either she could outdrink every manjack of them.

The South End String Band still performs, but after a couple of divorces, the personnel have shifted frequently. Shelly fronts the band now and she’s pretty much the last remaining original member. You can always find a banjo picker in the backwash here, but not another Shelly. The Band practices at her cabin these days and when the night winds down past midnight, Shelly shows the boys the door and always says, “Jug’s empty, boys, time to face the music.” It would be funnier if it wasn’t so godawful true.

I drove my jalopy down to Bellevue and Babylon this week. They got a new Pay-as-you-Drive lane system now, fast lanes for the folks willing to pay up to $10 for a commute to Microsoft and the high tech cubicles, more if you’re like me, the occasional traveler without a transponder and a special bank account. I thought I’d already paid my gas tax and license fees, maybe now I could drive the same roads as the rich, especially since percentage-wise, I was paying even more than them.

I figured wrong. As usual. I’m used to sitting in the back seats of planes jammed in like a chick in the crate going to the slaughterhouse. I’m growing accustomed to feeling second class. Nobody said life was fair, even in a democracy. You pay to play. College. Jewelry shops. Opera. State parks. National parks too. High speed internet. Politics. You maybe thought your taxes give you a free pass to Yellowstone or equal opportunity at the ballot box, think again. It costs $10 to drive into the State Park and I not only throw more optional money at them on my driver’s license fees, I maintain a county park us Friends of Camano Island Parks maintain so the county can use the saved dollars to enforce boat launch fees when I haul my sailboat down.

Maybe the rich do deserve their own lane for commuting. Maybe they deserve every break we can give them. When the King’s carriage rolled through on the highway to the castle, you better believe us peasants pulled over, doffed our caps and bowed ceremoniously to M’Lord. Call me cantankerous and slap me with a macaroni, but I don’t like it.

Probably won’t be too long, though, the gated communities down here will demand their own lane over the bridge onto the island. That, or they’ll go whole hog and insist the state retrofit a drawbridge, just for them, the rest of us, buy a boat. It is, after all, an island. If the riffraff can’t swim, all the better. A few less of us and the property values will go up. The free ride is over. For now, the boat ride’s fairly cheap.

If you didn’t know it before, after this last election, you do now. Billionaires are running the country. Truth be told, they always have, but occasionally we get a President or a Senator who came up from more modest means and worked their way up the social and economic ladder. Not this time in the year of our Lord, 2024. Nobody said life was fair. And yeah, I know, it could be a lot fairer than it is.

What we need to understand about our very very rich overlords is that they are not like you and me. Do you think Donald Trump has ever gone shopping in a Safeway? Maybe get a hankering for a diet Coke after the servants have gone to bed and thought, gee, why wake the cook up, I’ll just pop over to the all night Quickie-Mart and grab a cold one, maybe rub shoulders with some nocturnal citizens, might even chat it up with the Pakistani graveyard shift guy, see what’s on his mind these days. Might buy a Slim Jim while I’m at it….

First of all, these billionaires don’t walk to … well, anywhere. And if you think they drive themselves to that anywhere, smarten up, they summon the chauffeur to fetch the limo or the town car. Buses, taxis, light rail … think some more. The rich don’t use mass transit. They have their own private jets for anything beyond the city limits. These are privileged people. They do not venture into drug stores, they do not shop at Target, they have their people do that stuff. Sure, you say you saw Trump serving hamburgers and fries at MacDonalds’ drive up window, just a regular joe, the guy who called his opponent a liar for claiming she had actually worked at a MacDonalds. C’mon, how gullible are we? They closed that store, put him at the window, handpicked the customers and videotaped the ad. Unless he had his team of accountants with him, he probably couldn’t make change for the ten dollar bill that got pushed at him.

George Bush Sr. tried the plebian act too. Went into a grocery store like nearly every other American, probably figured playing the Common Man would get a few votes, but embarrassed himself at the checkout when he admitted he’d never seen a scanning machine before. Apparently they don’t use scanning devices in the mansions of the rich. And even more apparently he’d never been shopping in a store that had one.

No, my friend, the rich are a bit different. They don’t know what the price of milk is, what a dozen eggs go for, how much hamburger costs a pound, what a gallon of gas is at the pump. They don’t have to. But when they tell you they feel your pain, well, they don’t feel any pain at all. They have someone on staff for that.