The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

As an itinerant and persistent South End researcher, I was called this week by my old pal Bob Friel, the author of the Barefoot Bandit, now a documentarian for an environmental group up on Orcas Island, the Sea Docs. They’re making all manner of films about the Salish Sea and had heard South Camano was where the grey whales came into our shallow tidelands to feed on the ghost shrimp, scooping huge craters of sand into their baleens and capturing tonight’s dinner, thousands of the mud shrimp. Needless to say, Bob and his pal Joe Gaydos needed an experienced guide for the hike out to the whale holes to avoid the ever dangerous quicksand shallows that swallow boots and shoes, threatening to trap the less vigilant adventurer. Plus they needed a dummy who would carry half their gear. Which was about as much as what a Hollywood movie scene would require….

The grey whales migrate every year from Mexico to the Arctic but some take a detour into our neck of the woods … or sea … to fatten up for a month or so before hurrying to catch up to the herd already up north. We got about one zillion sand shrimp out front here, so many the sand is porous from their burrows, making walking out to the eelgrass where the crabs rule a hazardous and arduous endeavor. The old timers here remember playing baseball on the flats when the sand was firm but in my 47 years here I haven’t seen any ball games out there. Or many people either, the quicksand is plenty intimidating.

Well, we did some filming, scooped up a few shrimp, wandered the whale holes and pondered the whole whale/shrimp relationship to firmness of the beach and health of the greys. The boyz had hip and chest waders recently purchased for this excursion but I went barefoot, a nod, I suppose to the Bandit of Bob’s book. Three hours later I couldn’t feel my toes. Small price to pay for science. But in the course of filming and studying, I realized there was a bias favoring the whales. The poor shrimp, well, they were just a food source for our heroic cetaceans. Didn’t seem right, didn’t seem fair. Granted, I was freezing more than my toes off and maybe my deductive reasoning was being sucked up along with my feet out there on the sand barrens, but dammit, an injustice is an injustice! And so I have vowed to start my own environmental foundation, the Save Our Shrimp, SOS!

Bob and Joe had collected a few of the clawed creatures from dredging the sand with their homemade suction gun, a remodeled giant water squirter, deposited them in a special container and when they left the scene, drove the samples back to Orcas. Don’t think for a South End minute I didn’t understand their motives. They were bringing undocumented immigrants back to the San Juan Island beaches in hopes of luring the grey whales to their islands. They were shanghaiing our shrimp for their own nefarious plot!

This cannot stand! Donate now to the tax deductible Save Our Shrimp foundation. The San Juans may not include us in their archipelago, but we’re no pushovers either. Instead of an apartheid archipelago, wouldn’t it have been easier just to include us? Rather than steal our shrimp.

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One of the latest trends in trend-crazy America is to create a personal library in our domiciles. Not to amass a collection from our reading list (if we even have one) but to impress our visitors with volumes of literature and non-fiction. A well-stocked library should subtly send the message that its owners are erudite readers with broad and eclectic tastes. Sprinkle in a few Booker award novels among the classics, add some poetry anthologies, spice the biblioteca up with an encyclopedic array from the sciences, philosophies, a few avant-garde pieces and certainly oversized art books. Wow them with your extensive and expensive tastes!

But before you hurry out to your nearest Goodwill to find the raw materials for your Jeffersonian library, l should add that if you really want to impress your friends and neighbors, just piling dog-eared books on a make-shift shelf really isn’t going to do the trick. No, you need the equivalent of an oak paneled room, floor to ceiling shelving, preferably behind glass and if you have the ideal height, one of those rolling ladders necessary to access the hard-to-reach collection of rare books up at the top. First editions are a must and signed copies de rigueur in these unenlightened times of Google and Wickipedia. You are a person of discriminating tastes, my friend, not one of the yammering yokels who would ask why they would need a community library when they have a laptop.

Suffice it say it would be imperative to have a well-used armchair with adequate lighting beside it as well as a sturdy stand with one or more books ‘in progress’ even if you never plan to open another book to read in your entire life. The gesture is what counts. And hopefully your guests will never query you as to that current reading. If so, simply tell them you have only begun Chapter One and to make judgement at so early a stage would be foolish. You, needless to say, are not foolish. The library itself will attest to that. No, you sir are of finer mettle, a lord in the land of the Kindle, a giant among the unread. Relish your place above the unwashed masses. You’ve earned it!

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Well, it’s a sad day down here on the South End for many of the faithful congregation who worshipped every Sunday with the man we called Father Freddy. Father Freddy was summoned home far too early to the Halls of Heaven this week and his sudden departure was a terrible shock to his many followers, many of whom have held vigil at the make-shift church that once was the Tyee Grocery. Candles flickered in the old concrete block store, giving a mournful reminder to traffic out on the highway that one of our own has passed.

Father Freddy died the way he lived, doing what he loved. He was what the press called — with so little real understanding — a Nettle Handler, one of those men who believed that the Word of God could be divined through manipulation of the dangerous weed. Every Sunday, as his congregation held their collective breaths, Father Freddy would grab those eight foot stalks of Itching Torment and squeeze Testimony from each and every one as the congregation moaned and swayed and sang and prayed. Every Sunday, until this last, Father Freddy would wrassle those stinging stalks to their Rightful Place, prone against the homemade pulpit of stacked Coca-Cola crates left over from Tyee Grocery’s halcyon days.

“Get thee BACK, you poisonous serpents,” he’d yell, wrapped in their toxic embrace. “You hold no fear for those assembled here!” he’d holler, soon to be victorious. And as One, the entire flock, exhausted from exhortation, would wail their Hosannahs on High, their faith once more confirmed and restored.

Last Sunday, Father Freddy succumbed to the hideous stings of a 10 foot monster he’d grown under halogens in the nettlearium behind his trailer, a greenhouse filled with stingers of every size and variety. Parishioners wanted to call 911, but Fred avowed that his faith would sustain him. Horrified, they watched him slowly scratch himself to death. Services will be held this coming Saturday in Father Fred’s special grove of wild nettles back in the ravine behind the church. Gloves are recommended. Donations can be made to the Nettle Survivor Network in the name of the Nettlecostal Church. Father Fred, I know, will be Sorely missed!!

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Folks are all the time making suggestions for how I can improve this South End literature I’m writing, figuring, I guess, a little tweak here, an improvement there, we got the Pulitzer sewed up. The Camano James Joyce or another Homer ready to be passed down orally generation to generation around the smoldering trash barrels. And sometimes, as much as I hate to admit it, they’re right. Doesn’t make me wrong, you understand, just amenable to perfection.

The other day some folks up north wanted me to write about the North End. I said okay, that’s well and good, but I might just as soon write about France for all I know about their customs and cuisine and odd ways of speaking. Then, a few days later, a neighbor mentioned how what I was doing was creating an Us vs. Them scenario. I said, gee, I sure don’t want to do that. Not so much because I’m afraid folks would scapegoat Stanwoodopolis or Utsalady, but I wouldn’t want all the refugees afterward.

I once offered KSER, our Everett public radio station, the opportunity to have Skeeter read these aloud. But the program manager said he didn’t want to ‘offend’ people living on the South End of Camano by inflicting these on them. God forbid! And so those poor wretched citizens will have to succeed or fail on toeing their own Straight and Narrow, no help from me.

It’s hard to tell, I guess, whether the South End is more to be pitied or more to be envied. I’d say yes, but other folks feel different. Okay by me, I’m a great believer in co-existence, not only between Us and the North End (Them), but between my editors (Them) and me (Us). As always, your criticism is welcome and your suggestions duly considered. Just remember, though, you may be the next story. No hard feelings, I hope. We sure don’t need another Rwanda on Camano.

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1. START THE DAY BEFORE NOON

At least on work days. The other five days, sleep in. You earned it.

2. LEARN HOW TO READ
Writing is no longer essential, but … the successful South Ender can tweet, twitter and text, even if spelling is marginal.

3. LISTEN TO OTHERS
Especially on Facebook and other social media. Keeping track of friends’ and enemies’ likes and dislikes is an invaluable tool in the South End toolbox. Decision making is easy, just see what the herd is doing.

4. WORK AT LEAST ONE HOUR A DAY.

No matter how severe the hangover, the lethargy, the ennui or excess hedonistic activities. Work isn’t ALL bad.

5. WORK OFF THE GRID

No South Ender worth his or her salt works in order to pay half his or her income to the IRS. Barter heavily with your neighbors and friends. Crab, clam, trap, fish, hunt or grow it! Food is free and food is fun! If you buy your dinners, food is neither.

6. LEARN TO REPAIR

Your own car, truck, toaster, wellpump, toilets, etc. You can’t barter or sell busted stuff and repairmen cost an arm and a leg per hour PLUS that service fee to drive half a day to and from your hell-and-gone address. Knowing a few handyman tricks can save you another part-time job at the fast food joints 50 miles away.

7. MARRY UP!

Chances are you’ve embraced an aesthetic lifestyle. You artists and musicians need supplemental income and unless you plan to work full time low paid minimum hour jobs, a second salary is essential. Marry one.

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On the plague-ridden South End these days, the psychosomatics among us can find any number of alternative treatment centers. In addition to the New Age Naturopathic, the Mabana Chiro-Clinic and the Elger Bay Store Supplement aisle, the aggrieved can find remedy at Kristy’s Aroma Cure walk-in (no appointment necessary) or the AA Acupuncture. Wanda’s Massage and Shirley’s Hypno-Therapy advertise treatments ranging from stress to erectile dysfunction. The wonder of it all is that maladies still exist down here, so prevalent are the preventions. And we’re not even counting in the therapeutics of the Pilot Lounge and its 4-6 Happy Hour specials. Much less the Kannabis Klinik’s marijuana line of edibles and smokeables.

Essentially and factually we have plenty for what ails ya! So why is it, even with all these panaceas, there are still South Enders struggling with depression, pain, halsitosis, divorce, joblessness and any other manner of impediments to mental health, physical well-being and, quite frankly a 4 lane highway to spiritual enlightenment? I mean, what else can we offer these suffering neighbors? More Obamacare? Medicaid coupon sales? A new religion? New and improved pharmacology? A bus ticket to Tucson for the winter’s seasonally afflicted?

Honest to Zeus we’ve got more medical solutions than Carter had liver pills, you need a Snake Oil Outlet too? Madame Petrovsky has psychic readings in the old Tyee Grocery Store, might be time to consult her crystal ball or have her read your palm. Last time I did — and don’t assume I needed psychic treatment — she informed me solemnly that I had enemies, apparently people who wished me harm. She asked if I knew this and I said, well, not really, I mean sure, maybe a few. She asked if I understood this prevented any success at happiness for me. I said I’m pretty happy, Madame Petrovsky, but she assured me I would never attain True Happiness with these ill-wishers dragging my karma downward and would I like her to light some candles at her church, only $10 each, eventually I’d ditch these enemies, might take awhile. When I balked at the potential for innumerable candle purifications, she dropped the price to $5 a candle.

Judging by the nasty replies to some of these Skeeter blogs, I don’t necessarily recommend Madame P if other treatments don’t work for you. Even with her discounted prices. Obviously a few months of burning candles didn’t eliminate my enemy list.

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I guess we’ve all seen these folks at the freeway entry ramps with their mournful mendicant faces and their homemade signs that say they’re looking for work or money or food or a kind word and can you help, God Bless! They stand like stoic poster children for the poor, the homeless, the forgotten losers in the economic gears of a capitalist machine. They don’t seem to be on drugs or carry a bottle in a paper bag. They seem like us — okay, like me — just a bit down on their luck.

Myself, I’m a sucker for a panhandler on the sidewalk. I’ll empty my pockets even if I KNOW it’s going toward the purchase of the next bottle of Mad Dog 20/20. Maybe it’s the suspicion that there, but for the grace of God, go I …. Some wrong turns, a round of bad luck, an accident, a disease, you name it, that guy with the glazed eyes, the bad breath, the shabby clothes — he could be me. On my dark days, I think maybe he IS.

But the folks on the freeway ramp, looking like the one at exit 205 or 216 or, well, all of them, I have this uneasy suspicion they all work for an outfit run by some smooth operator registered with the State of Washington as Legitimate Beggars, Inc. or BumsRus, LLC or just Freeway Freeloaders.com. The signs are hand scrawled but they seem remarkably uniform like they were copied from a foreman’s template or made down at the home office.

Maybe it’s that I’m enclosed in a steel and glass vehicle, window up, eye contact minimal, that makes me more critical than I am with the guy on the street asking for spare change. They certainly don’t look like they’re flush with income. They never look anything but gaunt and underfed. They seem Totally Authentic and yet … I never roll down the window, I never dig for loose change or a spare buck, I never quite see myself working that intersection.

Course, when they’re finally standing by Elger Bay Store, hands out, signs lettered in the same printed childish script, maybe they’ll melt my heart. Then again, we got plenty of needy down here now. They just don’t stand all day at the closest busy intersection. Maybe why they’re still needy…. They just need a little organizing and we got plenty of artists who could help me with those signs.

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When Shirley’s Hypno-Therapy opened its clinic doors just down the road from the Pilot Lounge, it instantly became the topic du jour for the barflies who regularly frequented the drinking establishment.

“Might be just the thing, Bob,” Little Jimmy was saying the evening Two Toke and I were having a pint after a hard day of loafing. “You could beat that nicotine habit, throw away the patches, get yourself cleaned up once and for all.” Bob and Jimmy and a few others were lined up at the bar like crows on a telephone line waiting for incoming messages, not likely other than texts from the mizzus to get their sorry asses home.

“Are you insane?” Bob practically shouted. “Who in their right mind would put themselves under some spell? This Shirley person could have you giving her your passwords, your bank accounts, who knows what else?”

“What else?” Fairlane Fred threw in, “maybe a cure for your E.D.”

This, predictably enough, brought the crows to full cackle, all but Bob who surprisingly missed the humor, eliciting further speculation from the clothesline concerning potential remedies for Bob’s ‘problems’ before Bob removed himself from the group for a cigarette outside on the dock. Whereupon Two Toke excused himself and stood out with Bob against the rotting wood rail listening to the rattle of unused boats rocked against the pilings.

“What’s up?” I asked when he returned. “Nothing much. Bob said he planned to go see this Shirley, don’t mention it to the boys.”

“Kicking the habit?”

“Naw, kickstart the motor maybe. Freddie hit a nerve, I guess. Worth a shot, he figures.”

And so Shirley added another new client to her short list of us South Enders. Never did hear how it worked out for Bob but rumor at the Pilot Lounge was a lot of the boyz made appointments a few months later. Probably to the disappointment of a few wives….

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As a person fully dedicated to protecting others from making the same mistakes I keep making, let me share with any of you contemplating guitar luthiery, the sad sorry saga of my last acoustic guitar, the 5th in a series of steep learning curves, inadequate preparations, insufficient tools and, well, a dearth of about everything except moxie. Moxie I got plenty of. Too much maybe. Einstein’s definition of insanity, that repeating your same mistakes and expecting better results, totally applies to me. Sadly. But since I pretend to be a so-called artist, I can justify my guitars, not as failures, but as artistic ‘gestures’, works in progress, evolutionary aesthetics.

My last gesture was a nice little black limba guitar, what professionals in the trade would call a parlor guitar. What I call a small guitar. But big on interesting woods in the neck and body, details like tailpieces and side soundholes and pickguards that set it apart from other guitars. Trouble was, my original redwood top had sagged with the tension of the strings and an experimental bracing system underneath. Like mostly all the other four gestures, this one needed to be dismantled and repaired. The redwood top broke when I pried up after using a blowtorch to loosen the glue holding it to the body. Bummer, man. And then when I tried to remove a block holding the neck, the entire front end of the body shattered.

Now ordinarily, being prone to fits of anger management, I would have taken the rest of the ruined instrument and beaten it into shards and slivers while hollering obscenities and slapping myself in the face repeatedly. All that work, so much time, came to nothing. Not only hadn’t I learned from previous mistakes, this fifth iteration was now the ultimate testimony that perhaps I was not cut out to be a guitar luthier. Maybe not even a woodbutcher. Just a complete and irredeemable failure. Sure, I cried, I wailed, I went through depression, I swore on Clapton’s guitar I would never attempt another one.

But dammit, I’m an artist and if there’s one thing I’ve learned being an artist, it’s … well, I’m not really sure I’ve learned anything. Except maybe you have to keep going. Every painting can’t be a Picasso, every glasswork can’t go into the cathedral of Notre Dame, you just have to have faith in yourself even if no one else does, even if the last work was ruined. So I got this idea looking through my box of scrap woods and found a few pieces of matching black limba. Enough to cut away the entire front of that broken box and use it to span the breakage. Instead of a nicely rounded top where the neck attaches, mine was flat. A flat top. What most people think of as the flat soundboard versus an archtop, mine was flat both places, a true Flat Top, possibly the prototype for an evolutionary shift in guitar luthiery. Once again great leaps forward sometimes have their genesis in mistakes. Okay, not mistakes, ‘gestures.’ Feel free to try this at home. Whaddaya got to lose, right?

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After an hour in the South End Dental Clinic chair, I’m slowly starting to feel my face again. It’s been years since the last road construction in my mouth and I’d forgotten — or repressed — the uniqueness of the dental experience. Mouth dams, jackhammers, sump pumps, interrogation lighting and full disclosure on finances, assets and lienholders.

Like I said, it’s been awhile in between visits, something to do with the lack of dental insurance. You want to see the face of poverty, look at a person’s teeth, at least the ones that aren’t missing. I’m trying the best I can to keep mine. But … when the good doctor shows me the estimate for filling a cavity, $250 (not counting x-rays,etc.) versus what the bill will be if this is a root canal, $2200 —which is what he expects it to be — you can maybe understand why the frugal shopper might opt to have the damn tooth pulled right out of his head for good, skip the anaesthetic.

My last root canal and crown cost $1100. The dentist in Stanwoodopolis drilled twice and didn’t get the infected nerve cleaned out. The last visit he asked if I wanted to give it a 3rd go or have him refer me to a specialist. I said, gee Bob,I didn’t get a dental degree but since you need to ask, let’s go with someone who knows what they’re doing, which is obviously neither of us.

You want to spoil a doctor/client relationship, this is pretty direct. Course when I had to have the specialist’s temporary crown replaced with a permanent one, something beneath him apparently, I went to a new dentist. News travels fast in Podunk and I got a pretty cold shoulder from my new guy. Another last visit. Which is why, after 15 years, I’m at the newly opened South End Pain Clinic, no records transferred, no toxic gossip exchanged. Just money. The way I remember dentistry in the good old days….

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