The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

More and more of us South Enders are losing their religion, don’t ask me why. I just read a survey that showed a quarter of us don’t believe in a Supreme Being, too bad for Donald Trump. That’s way up since the last survey. But here’s the odd part: the number of us who don’t believe in God but believe in an afterlife doubled. Faith based Heaven, I suppose, or maybe just bad logic, a trend that seems to be more and more prevalent.

Down at the Little Church in the Ravine, Rev. Paul makes it a point most every Sunday to exhort his flock to eschew sin. Live a holy life, he preaches, and if you mess up, ask the Good Lord for forgiveness. Believe on the Lord, he says, or surely Hell will follow.

Now, I may be mistaken here, but I’m guessing most of the folks who believe in an afterlife are talking about Streets of Gold, not Beelzebub’s BBQ. You don’t believe in a deity, you probably won’t buy the quaint notion of the Devil. And if you think Heaven is waiting for you no matter what, why not enjoy a little sinning while you’re waiting for the Pearly Gates to open? No punishment waiting, no purgatory for the wicked. Believe me, Pastor Paul doesn’t pound that pulpit with his ragged Bible to tell parishioners they got nothing to lose if they covet their neighbor’s wife. Go right ahead, cheat the other guy on that used car you said was running great when you know damn well the engine isn’t getting oil up in the cylinder head. You can make a little extra money and still get a reservation in the Angel Motel after your last breath.

Shirley, my neighbor who runs the Pampered Pekingese Pet Grooming service, claims she’ll be reincarnated. As a pup. The Hindu believe the Wheel rewards those who do good, but I guess now we think we get what we want, not what we deserve. Shirley better hope she doesn’t end up at the pound with all the other unwanted pets. Not everyone gets pampered in this mean old world.

We got a lot of folks on the South End making a living the hard way, meaning, they don’t work. In the pioneer days when I first scratched out a meager existence in these played out nettle farms, people survived on piece work here, odd jobs there, some bartering, some horsetrading, the usual indolent country skills. But the new folks, they do some of that, but mostly, due to some serious drug maintenance problems, they got more pressing issues. You want to maintain a heroin addiction, you probably aren’t going to commute to McDonalds and take a job as fry cook. No, it’s easier if you just steal what the neighbors got.

This is more or less what I left the city to escape. No, not jobs or employment. Neighbors stealing from neighbors. What was really sad back then was how the poor folks stole from the poor folks. Easier, I admit, to slip down the alley and come in a nearby backdoor than to drive up to the white folks’ suburbs even though the pickings would have made it more than worth the effort. Course then you have security alarms and motion sensitive cameras and a police force that patrols those tonier neighborhoods. Me, I had Dr. Gonzo.

Dr. Gonzo was a refugee of the Humane Society, part boxer, part hound of Baskerville, a fearless brute of a dog who had been abused by its previous owner who was, judging by her reaction to men, male. If you happened to be a black male, she ratcheted up her snarls about double the decibels. And if you were a fat male, she was nearly unmanageable. Frighteningly so. But if you were a black and fat male, she wanted to hurt you. She probably wanted to kill you. My assumption is her abuser might have fit that exact description and it might explain why she ended up at the pound. Her tormentor probably realized he wasn’t going to cow her and one of them had to go.

She was well known to my neighborhood. It was also well known my house wasn’t usually locked. Not with Dr. Gonzo inside. You wanted to walk in, maybe see if my TV was worth stealing, have at it and good luck. Men knocked on my door and I’d say, kicking a snarling growling Gonzo back behind me, come on in, why dontcha? “Naw man, let’s talk on the porch here,” they invariably replied. And invariably they would want to know if I’d consider selling Gonzo to them. “Maybe you’d like to get to know her better,” I’d suggest, opening the door a crack to let them see Gonzo trying to get her snapping jaws through and I’d say it doesn’t look as if she likes you, man. “How about you breed her, sell me the pups?” And I’d shake my head sadly, naw man, she’s been spayed.

I didn’t have much trouble in that high crime neighborhood even with the 10 units next door that were nothing but a breeding ground for drugs, gunrunning, sex trafficking and fencing. Still, it seemed, I don’t know, a corrosive atmosphere, a breeding ground for cynicism, a hard place to practice peaceful meditation. For both Gonzo and me. So we packed it in, bought a 1910 shack up here on the South End and made a new start, both of us. She died some years back, broke my heart. But at least she never lived so long she had to see the ghetto boys living next door once again.

Ben Whitaker up at Mabana Financial Services calls me up every 6 months or so to inquire over beers at the watering hole next to his office if I would like to consider a few opportune investments he’s uncovered. I tell him if I’d have put my money on the micro-beer company, the one we usually buy their beer at our usual tavern, I’d be set for an easy retirement.

“Well, that right there is what I’m talking about,” he told me.

“What?” I ask, “you mean I missed the boat on an early retirement?”

“Naw,” Ben says, “you missed another golden opportunity. But give me a few minutes — I’ll even buy the beers — and I’ll set you on a path to fiscal sanity.”

Ben talks like this, just can’t help himself, and maybe his clients don’t get the implication that he’s just diagnosed them with fiscal insanity. Or in this case, me. But I like Ben and I like even more that he usually buys the beers, probably writes our tab off as a business expense, no doubt it’s legitimate, and I have noticed he always asks for a receipt. “Is the tip a write-off too?” I asked one time and got his stock answer: “everything’s a business expense in this line of work.” I can only imagine what the Big Boyz, the corporations and their hired guns the accountants and tax lawyers, what they declare as business write-offs, maybe why I pay more than some of them.

So after Ben orders our IPA’s, ever the optimist that the alcohol will soften me up for his newest sales pitch, he leans across our corner table and practically whispers, “AI.” He says, “Artificial Intelligence can make you rich. Guaranteed. Stock market is on fire, Nasdaq’s going through the roof, all of it driven by AI. Jump in Skeeter, the sky’s the limit. You’ll hate yourself if you sit on the sidelines.”

Ben had a couple of hot prospects, so he claimed, said I’d be on Easy Street no time flat, very little risk. “Be a pain to change addresses, Ben. Stationary, business cards, drivers license …”

“Go ahead and laugh, but you’ll be missing the chance of a lifetime.”

“My lifetime is almost run out, Ben. More money isn’t going to give me more years. I’ve got a nice little nest egg, no debts, Social Security, Medicare. I might be on Easy Street already, Ben. Why would I gamble that on the bet I could make it even easier?”

Ben’s heard this every pow-wow for years but it’s hard for him to imagine someone who wouldn’t want More, it’s practically un-American to him. At least un-patriotic. When we finish our 2nd round of beers I offer to pick up the check.

“Naw,” he says with a laugh, “this one’s on the IRS.”

So I’m sitting in the South End Clinic filling out paperwork they lost the last and only visit many years ago … when a young guy comes in with what he tells the receptionist is a very bad cut on his hand from work. His hand is wrapped in a dirty handkerchief held in place with duct tape. The receptionist explained they don’t do that kind of emergency — he’d need to drive himself to the next clinic down the road in Stanwoodopolis. About 10 to 15 miles.

But wait … did he have insurance, she asks. He did, but then he was told the clinic about two pints of hemoglobin away wouldn’t accept the insurance he had. Could he drive 15 to 20 miles further?

Healthcare, at least from my seat in the waiting room, seemed hazardous to this guy’s health, if he even makes it the 40 mile drive before blacking out at the wheel. No one asked him how bad the cut was, whether fingers were missing, if a transfusion was necessary. I know it’s not an emergency room, but it is, supposedly, a part of the health care system.

My brother, back in our days together in college, wanted to be a doctor … until the night he did a drunken back flip and hit the radiator in his dorm room with his head. His roommate ran him to the University ER where he sat for a couple of hours with other patients bleeding and vomiting and oozing fluids. By the time he got stitched up he had changed his major from Pre-Med to Don’t Know. Probably good to learn he was squeamish around pain and blood before he interned.

Sitting my turn at the South End Clinic, I know how he felt. Trouble was, I was a patient. On the South End we’ve always relied more on Self-Reliance than health insurance. But sadly, the time comes to all of us when we need outside help. Course, chances are good they’ll tell you to go further on up the road. Keep the gas tank full is what I’d suggest. And carry a tourniquet.

Art Center Hubbub

One of my buddies asked me, after about our 2nd pint, why Stanwoodopolis wanted to build an Art Center. Hadn’t we artists done enough damage already? Mostly he was joking, tweaking me as usual, but on some level he really did wonder why we would spend 13 million dollars on a building for art. I’m sure he’s not alone. There are plenty of folks who not only could live without art in their lives, they’d prefer it. Ralph is one of these. He just doesn’t need it. His life, if you asked him, is full and I’d be the last guy to suggest he could make it fuller. Especially after 2 IPA’s on empty stomachs.

Ralph isn’t the first — and won’t be the last — person to ask why we want to build an Art Center in Stanwoodopolis or anywhere else. I make my living doing public art, parking large glass murals in new public architecture. You bet I get angry taxpayers asking why their hard-earned money should be spent on art. And so, over the years, at countless dedications, I’ve had to justify adding art to the architecture the Ralphs think are just fine without extra flourishes. For a new elementary school in Kent in front of hundreds of kids and their teachers, I gave this explanation:

People ask me all the time why do we put art in schools anyway? Why do we spend money on pretty little do-dads and frills when we could buy more books or hire more teachers? It’s a good question. When I first met with the art committee for Panther Lake here in Kent, we were in the old school. It was falling apart and pretty ugly. But now you got a new school. Which is drop dead gorgeous. Beautiful architecture, state of the art teaching equipment, books and computers. I’d be willing to bet you buckaroos learn better in this school than the old school.

But the last thing we add to all this is ART. Some folks don’t value art very much, but I’ll tell you what, art is all about a couple of things. One, it hopefully makes your school a more interesting and beautiful place. And if it’s good art, it makes you look at it and wonder about it. It makes you realize there are other ways of seeing the school, of seeing the world.

I hope when you look at the art, it makes you want to wonder what it is, what it means, what maybe the artist meant. Good art makes you think about it. It isn’t just pretty, it’s different and it asks you to examine it.

I called the glass murals we put in Panther Lake the Metamorphosis Series. You know, like tadpoles turning into frogs, or caterpillars making cocoons then coming out as butterflies. They both change into something totally different. It’s a little miracle, really. I built a pond where I live just so I could have a place for the frogs to lay eggs and hatch into tadpoles and then grow into adult frogs. Amazing.

But the REAL DEAL is that you guys are the tadpoles. You guys are going to change as you learn and grow. Who knows what you’ll be, right? I didn’t know I’d learn to be an artist. But I did. What we want for all of you is to understand that life is WIDE OPEN. You can be whatever you want. We want you to see this school and your life as full of opportunities and options. We want you to explore and be curious. What we want you to SEE, what we want you to understand, is that the one real art is making YOUR own life. You get to create yourself. But to do that you have to see what possibilities there are out there. You have to develop your IMAGINATIONS and your CREATIVITY.

And that’s why we put art in, to give you some small idea of what your imagination can do. Not so you can become artists like me necessarily, but so you’ll bring art and imagination to WHATEVER you want to do. So you’ll make everything you do more interesting, more unique, more YOU. And if you can do that, I guarantee, you’ll turn into a butterfly and you’ll learn how to fly and that’s really why we put art in schools and libraries and all the other public buildings we can, not just for you kids, but for us big kids. We all need to grow wings.

Well, maybe if Ralph and I had ordered another round … I might have laid this on him. But we called it a night before I could get up on that pulpit. Sure, we might have flown home on new wings but instead we just drove our beat up rigs back home, saved beating our wings.

I was in the South End Trader Jimbo’s the other day looking for those hard-to-get-down-here items in their Land O’Yuppie aisles. Somehow I got waylaid by the organic pine nuts. Organic? Are we growing pine trees in nitrate infused woods now? Further down the aisle I found gluten free kettle corn trumpeting stuff that never had gluten in the first place. Not only that, they were guaranteed nut-free. The products, not Trader Jimbo. When I turned the corner, drove past the chutneys and the soft cheeses, I discovered Aisle 6, the no preservative, no additive, no GMO, no growth hormone, no antibiotic, no gluten, no soy, no MSG, no transfat, no caged animal row. About middle of the aisle there were three cans in a pyramid. Cave water. 12 ounces for $10.95. I took all three. Just so the row would be immaculate for a moment.

A friend of mine has a futon mattress that contains organic cotton. Softer maybe, like his head. Course I grew up with virgin wool — as if I care what the sheep do at night. These are dangerous times. Who knows what’s in those nettles I’ve been brewing beer with? They don’t come with an organic certification and what with acid rain precipitating out from Chinese pollution, I may be toxifying myself inadvertendly. My entire garden may well be a seeping cesspool of multi-syllabic compounds from the prevailing winds of Seattle and Gomorrah or contaminated from the tailings and runoffs of the South End industrial era. Natural? That’s no longer a designation to give anyone peace of mind. No government certification for natural, pal.

They tell me our water has elevated levels of natural arsenic. The neighbors on water systems filtrate for that and other minerals. We’re on our own well. Which means just that, we’re on our own. Forget worrying about contaminated nettles in my homebrew. The water’s got poison in it.

So where do you go to find the purity we so desperately seek? Where do you retreat to escape the toxic leaching of modern society? And where can a yahoo go to avoid the steady drip drip drip of new warnings, new labels, new GMO salmon species, new BMO milk products, new irradiated foods, new afflictions? The South End??? Sorry, we got the bio-hazard tape across the road now. No wonder people are signing up for the Mars mission. Even if it is one way only.

These are fast times we live in. You maybe remember when we talked about the Rat Race, that post-Eisenhower era when the corporations took over the South End and America too in a bloodless coup, ran a few efficiency studies, then busted the unions and paid us serfs paltry wages for long hours. The ‘modern’ citizen isn’t just in a rat race — we’re watching the information tsunami breaking over us, rocketing us forward on wave after wave of googled crap disguised as news or finance or sports, but is really a vehicle for advertising and a prescription for attention deficit when we’re tossed on the rocky beach of a fearful future.

You ask a friend or family member how their summer’s going, they say ‘crazy busy.’ We’re on our own treadmill now. Cellphones, laptops, text messaging, e-mails, sexting, online dating, online shopping, online everything. The truth is we’re not busy, we’re just half crazy, bored to death without a ‘device’ in our hands, constant stimulation but not anything with depth. Couple minutes max. Short text, quick internet search, got to move on to the next stimuli….

We don’t have time anymore for a walk on the beach, for reading a novel, for growing a garden, for learning new pursuits or new hobbies. No, we have to check our e-mails, messages, stock markets, ball scores and Facebook. We have to stay ‘connected’ and being ‘connected’ means keeping up with an accelerating digital glut. Not metaphorically — we’re rewiring physically. I guess you could say we’re evolving if you’re not a faith-based computer user, intelligent design if you are ….

I rowed out in my boat today, fighting wind and swells, to drop some crabpots. From far offshore I could see our house up in the trees back off the road, mostly obscured, but peeking out. I suspect my life is like that now, an anachronism peeking out from behind a woods no one ventures into anymore, a very long distance away as the waves pushed by a new wind crash up against my little dinghy and I’m in two places, but both are growing smaller and smaller, just specks on a receding horizon.

The other day I overheard a conversation at the Diner between Fairlane Freddie and Janet Jorgenson, actually more an argument, precipitated by Fred when he complained about Stanwood upgrading its streets, putting a landscaped separation between lanes, erecting a metal and art entryway coming into town, all upgrades Fred declared were a waste of money. “My god, Freddie,” Janet shot back, “give that town some credit. They’re trying to make improvements.”

“Gimme a break,” Fred retorted hotly, sloshing coffee on the formica between them. “Like that walking trail around the sewer lagoon? You think they needed that?”

Janet shook her head and forked in a mouthful of pancake. When she finally swallowed, she asked, “You ever walk that trail?” Fred, of course, had not. “Why would I?”

“I dunno. Maybe the view of the Olympics, the Sound, the river, our island? They’re making a new park at the Ovenell farm, another by the train depot and I think one past the library, you know, that corner at the Y.”

Fred didn’t know and furthermore, Fred couldn’t care less, all a waste of time and money, he said. “Now they want to build a damn Art Center,” he practically shouted for the rest of us to hear. “Just what we need, more stupid art!”

“Just gonna draw more stupid artists.” Yeah, I said that from two tables over, happy to stir this particular pot. Janet seemed relieved to watch the argument move downstream, give her time to finish her cold pancakes. Anita, our waitress, groaned, half done refilling my coffee mug. “Wind him up,” she muttered, “all we need this morning.”

“You guys never stop,” Fairlane replied. “Took Terry’s Corner off the tax roles to build your goofy Visitor Center, run that Mother’s Day Tour that clogs traffic every year — who asked for all that? Used to be a nice rural island and Stanwood was a quiet little town. Couldn’t just leave well enough alone?”

“Aw, Fred, you know us artists, the last thing we could do would be to leave well enough alone. You drive that ’63 Ford, plenty good enough for you, but big fins and dual exhaust dinosaurs got to make way for the Jetsons’ flying cars, probably EV’s.”

“I spoze you’re all FOR that new art center,” he sneered.

“What, me?” I said. “What have you got against new growth down in the floodplain? Give it some new life, maybe draw folks down to the Pearson House, The Floyd Cultural Center, the History Museum. Hell, Fred, you could stop in at the old library, probably hate our new one on the island. Stanwoodtown is up the hill now – you want to save the old, might as well embrace the new down below.”

The couple at the table between ours, figuring they’d stumbled into a DMZ no-man’s land, hastily finished their breakfasts and headed for the safety of the cash register by the door, no point becoming collateral damage in the Culture War.

“We better stop, Fred — we’re scaring away the tourists,” I said. Janet laughed. “Pretty soon they’ll be coming to that Art Center,” she said.

“Swell,” Fred grumbled. “More damn art.”

“You’ll probably survive the shock, Fred,” I told him. Anita was going to get a big tip from me this morning….

I got a friend who has turned into a Day Trader, buying and selling stocks, ebullient that in the past year or more, the Market is running wild, setting new record highs, making him even richer than he was before. The rich, maybe you’ve heard, are getting richer. Most of consumer spending isn’t spread across the nation’s demographics equally, it’s the result of spending by the wealthy. If you think they’re worried about the cost of groceries or the price of gas, you obviously aren’t in the 1%, maybe not even the 10%. Should have maybe taken out a second mortgage and tossed it into the S&P 500. Or better yet, any of the stocks hitched to the Artificial Intelligence bet.

Folks I know who are betting their farm on the AI wave think all stocks rise on an expanding bubble. The Dutch who paid thousands of guilders for rare bulbs thought the price of tulips had no ceiling, same as the banks who collateralized shaky mortgage loans, same as the investors of the Roaring 20’s who bought on 10% margins. I’m not envious of their profits — while there are profits — I just hate the collateral damage when the bubble bursts and the economy crashes.

What goes up, I tell my friend, inevitably comes down. But he doesn’t believe that old chestnut. AI is different, he claims, nothing like the tech bubble of the 90’s, totally impervious to the laws of gravity. Sure, I reply, and rare tulips still hold their value today.

Probably time to buy Trump meme crypto, if for no other reason than to hedge the bets.

I was in the checkout line of the local pharmacy — and no, I don’t mean the Bud Hut — behind an older fella who had a joint remedy, some kind of modern snake oil guaranteed to alleviate arthritis, hair loss and lack of sexual desire. Wendy, the cashier, rang his cure-all up, something like $19.99, cheap, I guess, for a panacea. “My husband takes this too,” she told the geriatric gent. The customer nodded imperceptibly, swiped his credit card and waited for his receipt.

I’m always annoyed at folks who treat their checkout people the way they’d treat a store mannequin, just seems rude to me. The auto checkout was tailor made for these yahoos. So I asked, just to fill the awkward silence, “Well, did it work for him?” Our customer perked up at this; after all, this is close to a testimonial if not a full-fledged pharmaceutical double blind test. Wendy paused. “Jimmy says it does, so I guess it’s worth the money.” Her tone of voice suggested maybe Jimmy was BS’ing and the money was going down a rathole. “I hope that works miracles,” she said to the Arthritis Kid.

Exactly, I thought. We’re hoping for miracles at $19.99, why not throw the dice? I was over at a buddy’s house later on and asked him how his girlfriend’s broken arm was doing. You ask health questions at my age, you’re either desperate for conversation or you need counseling yourself. “Not great,” Billy said. “It isn’t healing up like it should. But … we’re taking Bone Broth.”

“Bone Broth?” I asked. “Yeah,” he answered, “lemme show ya.” Dr. Billy went to the fridge and extracted a quart jar of brown jello with lard on top. He gets bones from the local butcher, dumps them in a crockpot and boils em down for 3 days. Bone Broth!

“And you what?” I asked, “rub it on as a liniment?” “No, man,” Billy said, “you heat the liquid up and drink it.”

This, I guess, is homeopathic remedy writ strange. You got a broken bone, drink bone broth. You got hair loss, boil up some hair. Osteoporosis, well, bone broth again. Alzheimers, okay let’s not get into sweet meats. If you’re in pain, you’ll try most anything, if looks like, I get that. And maybe the placebo effect will actually kick in and work. What I don’t want to see are new ads from the pharmaceuticals for bone broth, replete with the warnings, may cause permanent rigidity, hardening of the spinal cord and permanent priapism. Course, they won’t call it bone broth, something pseudo-scientific like fibulagelomex or osteoglanulax. Or maybe just Elmer’s Glue.