The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Back in 1977 I bought a HUD repo house in the ghetto of Seattle. First house I ever owned and so, being a neophyte, I thought maybe I should go whole hog and get a dog too, a companion, a man’s best friend. I always had a fondness for boxers so I looked in the paper, found someone selling pedigree boxer pups and went over to take a peek at the litter. One of the little guys was far and away the most active so unfortunately I picked that one. I named her T’Ashi, which I was told by a Sioux Indian I shared a Greyhound bus and a bottle with a few months earlier, meant ‘friend’.

T’Ashi made the Energizer Bunny look like a rabbit on tranquilizers. She was a bundle of mindless energy with legs like pogo sticks and a brain the size of a pea. A dumber dog I never saw before or since. If I threw a ball out into the Sound, she would go under to find it and if she didn’t find it, would stay down until I rescued her. Not many animals lack even the minor brain activity required for self survival.

Couple all that energy with a love of chewing, you got a recipe for mayhem whenever I left her alone in the house. She chewed through drywall, she chewed through closet doors, she pretty much chewed through a post in the basement that held up the two stories above. I drove nails into that post when I discovered it eaten a quarter way through and T’Ashi chewed through those. In despair I took her to a dog training class where the woman with the German accent told me, when I mentioned I didn’t think T’Ashi was trainable, that all dogs were trainable by her.

Great, I thought. Maybe she can save my house from being nibbled to death. Four weeks later she told me not to come to classes anymore. My beloved brainless dog was incapable of learning. In defense, I had tried to tell her. But now I was tethered to the monster I had brought into my new home.

Some months later I threw in the towel. It was the dog or the house. I put an ad in the Seattle Times: Pedigree boxer free to good home. I got plenty of calls, but when I asked if they planned on leaving the dog alone in their house, I patiently explained that that would not be a good home for T’Ashi. Not for long, anyway. People tried to argue with me, but I was firm, I was stubborn even, I was trying to protect them from themselves. A week of declined offers to take my dog for free left me thinking suicidal thoughts. And then Linda Rae Starr called.

“Would you be leaving the pooch home when you go to work?” I asked and was surprised and ecstatic when she said she wanted a dog that would NEVER LEAVE HER SIDE. “Come on over,” I said. “T’Ashi is yours. You got the perfect home.” I told her why that was, told her she was eating my own home down stud by stud, nail by nail, every time I left the house. “I’d never leave her,” Linda Rae Starr told me sweetly. “I’ll take her everywhere with me.”

Linda Rae came right over to what was left of my ghetto house. I gave her dog food and dog toys and dog dishes and dog leashes, everything she needed. “Just one thing,” she said right at the end and I felt my heart crash into my guts, figuring she was backing out at the last minute. “What?” I whispered.

“I’d like to change her name, if that’s okay.” My heart soared, my mind spun dizzy little circles of joy. I told her she could name T’Ashi anything she wanted and she clapped her hands, put T’Ashi in her beat up car and the last I saw of the two of them was when they drove away. I did call Linda Rae up a week or two later, just to be sure, just to relieve my guilt at inflicting a hound of hell on her. “Oh no,” she said in response to my concern, all was well in the Starr House. “Cleopatra and I go everywhere together. I thought maybe you wanted to take her back.”

I assured her that was not my intent. “Cleopatra is yours, Linda, forever and ever.” Linda Rae thanked me again and again. And I thanked her. Again and again. And still do…..

So I’m at an old buddy’s kid’s bar mitzvah reception after the shindig at the synagogue which I skipped, not being a fan of religious ceremonies and not versant in Yiddish. But it’s the kid’s day, he’s 12 and I guess now a confirmed man or adult or, hell, I don’t know, some passage out of childhood celebrated by family and friends. Okay, not by me. I really did not want to come to this thing but my buddy, after my firm rejection, went behind my back to Karen who said okay, which precipitated an argument that ended in a compromise to skip the Temple and show up at the reception. So what if it looks like we came for a free meal and an overdose of this klezmer band they’d hired to annoy the gatherers.

My pal’s mizzus barely spoke to us, no doubt peeved we’d boycotted her boy’s big deal. His brother, a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, wouldn’t return a hello. Later he asked who the jerk with the hat was and learned the jerk was his brother’s best man at his Chicago wedding to marry the wife who now comes on cold as ice. Sure, I was having a good time.

Klezmer music is the equivalent of Scottish bagpipes, they’re weapons of war, a caterwaul meant to soften the will of the opponent, possibly force an early retreat, probably a route. Karen and I sat by ourselves, me stewing in a slow simmer, hoping for a quick retreat myself. By the third song by the band, I’d pretty much written off my pal. No friendship can survive these insane clarinets!

About then the kid wandered through, an official grown-up now, saying hello to any and all, probably no idea we’d met many times. Don’t ask me why, but for some ungodly reason I asked him what his plans for the future were. Criminey, didn’t we all hate adults asking us that bullshit question?

“I’m going to be an osteopathic surgeon,” he informed me with a certainty that to this day, I have no doubt he did. 12 years old. Jehovah almighty — kids shouldn’t be allowed to grow up that soon, I don’t care what religion you got.

So I’m in the grocery store frequented by the high school crowd at lunch breaks and on the wall of their latrine I find scrawled with a knife: Dare to be Normal. Driving into the parking lot minutes before, I had noticed a young girl dressed hat to boot in black, adorned in all manner of body puncture, looking for all the world like a poster child for National Sado-Masochism Day. Except for the pink stuffed animal strapped to her backpack. Inside the rough exterior of our would-be dominatrix lurks the soft heart of an innocent adolescent, apparently.

When I left the store I noticed a small knot of teenagers waiting at the crosswalk beside the highway for the light to change. All identical to the teddy bear toter, sans the teddy bear. Sure, it occurred to me to roll down the window and yell Dare to be Normal! but …. And here’s the rub …. These kids were normal. When we went to high school, we all pretty much looked homogenous — go check out your yearbook if you still got one. I don’t really want to dare anybody to be normal. Vote Ike again. Drive a Chevy. Drink Coke. Eat a Popsickle. Listen to the Beatles. Join the Army. Get a Job. Cut your Hair! Take out the Nose Ring!! Buy something at the Mall!!! Get married !!!! Have a family!!!!!!! Get a cemetery plot ahead of time!!!!!!!

Next time I’m in the grocery store, I’ll be looking for my little graffiti writing conformist. I assume he’ll be the one who isn’t dressed Goth, doesn’t have tattoos, wears blue suede shoes and a letter jacket and sports a butch crewcut regular color. He’ll look like my old man, is what I figure. And Dad, if it IS you philosophizing on the bathroom wall, knock it off! The kids will turn out like you after all, count on it.

United Airlines, always on the lookout for a good publicity story to promote their quality service, had a passenger forcibly removed from his overbooked seat. Judging by the viral videos, he didn’t seem agreeable to have someone else take his place. Probably had somewhere to be, people to see, maybe a meeting to attend, something that made him reluctant to leave the plane and hope United would get him a seat later that day or next week.

United stated they’d asked nicely for volunteers but no one came forward. So … what else is an airline to do but grab someone by the feet and drag them to the front exit door in front of all those other overbooked passengers who, if they were the thinking types, might see themselves in a similar position. One fellow passenger gave full throated support: “Way to go!” Course, he was rooting for the air marshals, not the fellow who might have been him. Probably thought the guy being dragged away was a terrorist.

I fly United occasionally. And yeah, they overbook all the time. They ask if there’s anyone who would take a voucher and fly another time, free flight or a pretty good discount. Great for folks with no family, no job, no hurry to get anywhere in particular. But for those of us who need to be someplace, well, I wouldn’t want my name chosen at random by the desk jockeys for United. And it does make me wonder, how did they choose this man to drag off? Alphabetical name place? Last passenger to book, other than the ones overbooked? Profiling? Name pulled from a hat? Eenie Miney Mo?

Personally, dragging a passenger off a plane seems pretty consistent with airline policy these days. Crammed overhead cargo, narrower seats, no leg room, extra fees for … well, everything, more and more delays, lost luggage, smaller options. I haven’t flown a friendly sky in a long long time. Next time, though, I suppose we should count ourselves lucky that we aren’t dragged by the feet off the flight we booked and paid for. And to the guy who yelled Way to Go, let’s hope it’s you next time when they need a ‘volunteer’ to give up an overbooked seat.

Well, okay, about a third of us in this country have been hacked. Social Security numbers, driver’s license, date of birth, all the necessary ingredients some crimninal in Belarus can sell to identity fraud specialists. I didn’t realize there were 3 or 4 companies that kept credit databases, much less 3 or 4 companies who were wide open to hackers. Silly me.

And here I was worried about Big Brother. The Damn Government, I mean, not Mark Zuckerberg. Turns out all of us are just one big happy data family, smooshed together in some internet Cloud that knows everything important about us. Now we’re sharing that information with hacker hoodlums. Swell. Just swell.

Back in the dark days of the 1970’s I lived with a bunch of freewheeling yahoos in Seattle and Gomorrah who majored in various studies at the University of Washington, but spent most of their time experimenting with drug abuse of various sorts ranging from hash oil production to laughing gas theft. They grew pot and they raised psilocybin mushrooms. They scored opiated hashish and they drank legal whisky. The place we lived in was a veritable criminal operation. ‘Honest, Officer, I only rent a room here.’

On our bulletin board we had a Social Security card pinned up. Ralph Speidel. The kidz had gone down to the local cemetery and searched for a deceased child, then gotten a card in Ralph’s name, they told me when I asked who Ralph Speidel was. ‘Just in case,’ they said. Just in case of what, I asked. ‘You never know,’ they replied. ‘We might need to go underground. Set up a new identity.’

Jeez, I thought at the time, these are drug addled paranoiacs. But they were playing with fire, stealing canisters of nitrous oxide from hospitals, selling various illegal drugs. Nixon was gone by then, the VietNam War was lost and the draft was over. These weren’t SDS roommates or Weathermen, they were college students doing a little research, nothing the FBI would find particularly interesting. Yet.

When I moved out a few months later to my ghetto home and some fresh roommates, I considered taking Ralph’s card with me but I left it on the bulletin board, just glad to be shed of these goofballs finally. Now, of course, in light of current events, I wish I’d snatched it. You just never know when a new identity might come in handy.

The South End Advisory Committee met last night in emergency session. The last time they convened a similar gathering was back in 2001 following the Trade Tower attacks when an alarmed citizenry demanded they beef up our shoreline defenses to counter what, at the time, seemed like imminent terrorist incursions. Since then the South End has pretty much kept its head in the sand, so to speak, ignoring the Great Recession (which seemed to most of us just a continuation of our unemployment woes), the Iraq War (we’re pretty much all too old to enlist) and the rise of ISIS (it’s hard to behead those with theirs buried in the beach). But sometimes events arise that demand attention, demand action, demand a committee meeting.

And certainly this was one of those times. Now that the Trump Tweet presidency has left the station, small groups around the country have declared themselves Sanctuary Zones. Sanctuary cities, sanctuary universities, sanctuary Starbucks, sanctuary nursing homes, sanctuary daycare centers. The question on last night’s table: should we declare ourselves a sanctuary too? Ethel Birmbach, current President of the Council, called the meeting to order. “Deportation is not an option,” she declared almost immediately. “These are our neighbors and friends, not our enemies.”

Randy Primplucker, a realtor for WindyRear Realty and the only member on the council actually born on the South End, argued for a quick vote “to protect our neighbors”, but Betsy Birdcall took him to task. “We don’t really know who some of these people are, Randy. Sure, you might have sold them their property, but beyond a credit check, how do you know what their backgrounds are? I’m not arguing for detention camps or even forced deportation, I’m just saying we shouldn’t assume there’s nothing nefarious going on in our community. The government won’t be looking out for us, that’s for sure.”

“These people already have detention camps,” Ralph Van Vleet practically shouted. “They put up their own gates! What are they hiding behind those gated walls? Why are they so nervous? Who are they trying to protect? Who do they think they’re fooling?”

“For godsake, Ralph,” Patty Plankton replied. “These people pay the lion’s share of our property taxes. Let’s don’t charge in half-cocked.”
Ethel pounded her hard rubber mallet on the desk that served as podium. “Calm down, everybody,” she commanded. “Randy, we all know you have financial ties to these folks. Maybe you should recuse yourself on this issue. This is way too important to have monetary issues clouding our judgement.” Randy protested meekly, but finally acquiesced.

In the end the Council voted 5 to 3 to declare the South End a Sanctuary. Up in the gated communities the 1% breathed a collective sigh of relief that, for the time being at least, their taxes would not go any higher. At least not until after the Trump presidency or a turnover in the South End Council. Down here we protect our own.

Randy Thornton has been a contractor since we first met back in about 1990 when I was thinking about building my own house and leaving the shack we’d lived in for 17 hardscrabble years. He wanted me to have him build it, you know, go to the bank, get a 30 year mortgage, pay the interest, stay in debt most of my damn life, something I told him I wouldn’t do.

“I get it, Skeeter,” he confided. “I’m going to build my own home some day, same reason.” Yah, two boyz with hammers, limited skill sets, plenty of spit and sass. Took me two years, cost me a total of $43,000 start to finish. Randy, in the meantime, built plenty of houses, the first just remodels, additions, simple affairs, but by the end, mansions for the rich, all the while living in the 1930’s house he’d originally rented but now owned along with 17 acres that adjoined our 7.

We’d pretty much lost touch over the years, mostly after he’d found Jesus and was admonished to avoid us sinners. The church did provide him with plenty of clients and maybe that’s proof enough as to the rewards of faith. But one day I found him under his 4 wheel ATV in a blackberry thicket where he’d been spraying weedkiller along the property line. Jesus wasn’t going to get that half ton vehicle off his chest but he had me to help so maybe it was the same thing. Might have saved his life, nobody nearby to hear him calling for help.

I guess Randy was appreciative, maybe even a bit sheepish about dropping our friendship when, after all, we’d been close for quite a few years. But bygones, as they say, are bygones. To celebrate his survival we went up to the shop next to the barn and he popped a couple of cold ones, religious strictures be damned. Temporarily.

“So you never built your own house,” I said, sitting in the fanciest shop on the South End, arched mahogany doors, stained glass by someone other than me, beveled leaded windows, architectural beams overhead, a Taj Mahal of a workshop. But he still lived in the little house down by the road.

“I keep trying to. But Janie can’t make up her mind what kind of house she wants. First it was a Victorian farmhouse, lots of gingerbread, even had Harold at Puget Architecture draw up plans. Then she changed her mind. Too old fashioned. We went through I couldn’t tell you how many design changes. One story. Two. Modern. Frank Lloyd Wright. Two or three different architects, a couple of designers. Every time I thought we were ready to go, nope, she’d think of something better. Mostly worried that the latest pick wouldn’t be up to snuff. Afraid to pull the trigger.”

“I got clients like that,” I said. “Keep changing their mind, find something wrong with the design or the colors or the weather that day. Some just bag the whole thing, no way they’re going to take a chance and be wrong. They want something that’s perfect. I try to tell em art isn’t about being perfect, maybe just the opposite. I spoze Janie thinks houses are the same way. Plus you got to live in it if you make a mistake.”

Randy muttered something under his breath. We opened another beer. I guess heaven could wait. Why not, heaven might not come even close to our expectations, just a colossal disappointment?

The ‘Population Bomb’ author, Paul Ehrlich, just died. Old age mostly, not starvation brought on by world famines, over populations, water wars or cataclysmic migrations. Probably had clogged arteries from too much over saturated foods. Or … just too much food, period. For awhile back there in the halcyon days of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s, Paul was our most famous Doomsayer, the guy who predicted civilizational collapse, major famines, a world breeding itself to death, a planet too small to support billions and billions of us humans. He made a bundle prophesying our demise. The End is Near — not predicted by a cult nut but by a rational guy.

The population of the planet when he wrote the book was 3.5 billion. It’s now 8.3 billion. We could each have gotten a McDonald burger but maybe not fries. Paul was right about one thing — the population exploded! And there were a few famines and still are. What he didn’t factor in was the steep curve out of world poverty. Or the advances in agriculture, medicine, pharmaceuticals and technology. Who’d have guessed, right? Well, not Paul.

The trouble with folks who cried ‘Wolf’ too early is when the wolf shows up, nobody was listening to the alarms anymore. But … the future may prove him right posthumously. We’re fishing out the seas, watching the insect and bird die-offs, polluting our waters then pumping the aquifers dry. All us billions of people are pumping CO2 into our greenhouse and if climate change isn’t a direct result of population, well, kick some dirt on Paul’s grave and whistle through the graveyard.

If you want to be a prophet, all I can say is don’t be too specific about the day of the week Doomsday is coming. The End is Near, Not Tomorrow. Maybe not even next month. We’ll need some time to get ready.

Down at the Kustom Kar Body Shop the latest news of declining life expectancy for us Americans was met with some degree of skepticism at closing time. Fairlane Fred had looked up from reading the article in the newspaper he’d brought to the shop and the assembled hangers-on were smirking and laughing even before he’d finished the last paragraph.

“Gee, Fred you think those statistics apply to us?” Jake asked, lighting up a Marlboro. His empty beer can served as make-do ashtray where it balanced nicely on his beer belly and barely jiggled as he popped his third Bud. Quitting time at the Kustom was early today, it being Friday and all. George, the owner, had sent his crew home already and the Flatheads had assembled for their usual Friday wrap up. A ’62 Malibu two door sat in the paint room, its butterscotch epoxy gleaming behind the makeshift plastic sheet doorway that separated the finish room from the body shop’s clutter and mayhem. Monday George would put the wax to it, seven coats at least. Today he was more interested in putting the finish on the week. He had the fridge loaded with two cases of beer.

“Says here we’re dying faster than we did four years ago. Only going to live to be 78. Hell, Jake, you’re 73 now. The Japs get six more years than us. Time’s running out, buddy.” Freddie tipped his can at Jake. “Here’s to an early grave.”

“You believe that crap they put in the paper, go ahead, Fred, but I plan to live a long happy life.” He took a drag on his cigarette, a good pull on the Bud and laughed. “Clean living will do it every time, boys. That and a clear conscience.”

“I don’t know, Jake,” Big Ralph said, one foot on the mangled rear bumper of a Camry the towing company dropped off that morning. “You don’t look like the poster boy for ObamaCare to me. More like the Before picture of erectile dysfunction. And didn’t your doc tell you to quit smoking that last stent?”
“Doctors!” Jake snorted, “what the hell do they know?”

This sent the shop floor into waves of amusement. Half the assembled Flatheads were on doctor’s orders to quit drinking, quit smoking, get some exercise and maybe even eat right. Only Little Billy was thin enough to avoid qualifying as obese and that was barely. Little Billy didn’t really eat much of anything. He was like one of those bromeliads that attach to trees and live only off air and beer. 78 wasn’t likely to be in Billy’s cards. He said, “I haven’t been to a doctor in 40 years. And now they want to force me to buy insurance.”

“Here we go again” Phil growled, “another bitch session about health care. Trump’s gonna get rid of all that, let’s skip the crying for once.” He crumpled his can and tossed it in the industrial sized waste container George filled at least twice weekly. “Who’s ready for another beer?” he cried, rubbing his hands and heading toward the fridge.

And so another weekend got off to a great start at the Kustom Kar. Mercifully, no one would be keeping statistics down there. Or as Jake likes to say, what you don’t know can’t hurt you. Words to live by on the South End.

A few weeks ago some Silicon Valley bazillionaire announced he thought it was highly possible this little reality we live in is some sort of computer simulation. Yesterday I read where two physicists were theorizing the universe is actually two dimensional, not three or four, but similar to a holographic image. I guess they’ve all been watching too many reruns of The Matrix.

It’s a discouraging notion, this idea that the Creator is a computer programmer, at least to me, a boy with nary a binary bone in his body. The tech boyz must think God was created in their own image, but I suppose if I’d invented the silicon world and made a fortune, I might see it their way too. Life, as the Bard once said, is but a dream and maybe it’s a cyborg dream after all, some simulation by an artificial intelligence where we all live in a fractal virtual world.

I’ve never been much interested in this kind of speculation, the stuff that religions are based on and faith revolves around. The universe is way too large for me to get my mind around and I only get to live an incredibly brief lifespan in the big scheme of things. I just figure there must be better ways to spend my time than dream up explanations that aren’t provable, then try to convince others they’re true and maybe have them worship at the font of this ersatz wisdom. Maybe even have them give me money. Maybe fight wars with the infidels who refuse to see the Light and the Way.

I know it’s appealing to create a world in our head. We probably do it all the time, every day, year in and year out. At least I do. Reality is pretty slippery and if you don’t believe it, you haven’t done psychedelic drugs or you don’t have friends who have lost their moorings. Reality is pretty much a misnomer, something I hate to admit in this newspeak world of ‘alternative facts.’ The truth is (if I can still use that word), if reality is relative, we haven’t got any solid ground to stand on. But I can still walk the beach, hike the woods, till the garden. One day I may wake up and find it’s all gone. More likely, someday I just won’t wake up. Then, maybe, we should reprogram, check for updates, add some apps, reboot. Hopefully then things will revert to normal. You know, if you believe in normality.