The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I guess most of us have asked ourselves the Big Cosmic Questions. We’ve traveled our separate paths looking for Answers. We’ve read the holy scriptures, we’ve chanted OM until we’re blue in the face, we’ve sat in quiet meditation or done yoga poses, mindful of our breath, listening for the First Sound. We’ve wanted something to believe in that seems, well, More. Physics maybe, maybe the Bible, maybe the Book of Mormon or the Koran. Maybe poetry or a sign held up by some mendicant on 5th and Jefferson that says Will Work for Food God Bless.

Maybe something is missing. Maybe something in us just likes a Spiritual Journey…. We go to Tibet up 15,000 feet to eat rice and sit at the naked feet of the monks. We seek a swami who hasn’t spoken in 20 years in some jungle Hindu cave. We listen for Clues in AM pop songs and signs in the numerology of license plates. We envy the natives who seem Closer to something important. We see Jesus in the stain on a box of Cheerios. We read Carlos Castenada and watch for Omens, we’ve smoked ganja, we’ve eaten magic mushrooms, we’ve consulted psychiatrists, we read self-help books.

We’ve searched for the Wise Man, the Guru, the Priest and the Monk and come up short. We thought Happiness was an answer. Or Wisdom. Or all you need is Love, yeah yeah yeah.

I’ve lived 74 years in this body, in this mind, and I have yet to meet anyone that might come close to that Enlightened Person. I sat once with the Head Honcho of the B’Hai. Nice guy. Something to be said for that, I thought at the time, and still do.

The world is a riddle and maybe the riddle is the world. There comes a time, at least for me, when the paths seemed … oh … dead ends. That the questions themselves were wrong. That the seeking itself was the problem. That the mysteries would always be mysteries. That this life is just exactly what you think it is. That the universe is exactly what you experience. If there’s More, what does it matter?

So be careful, I guess, what you think this life is. Down here on the unenlightened South End, it seems plenty. And try to be good to your neighbor, it might be me.

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.

There are islands and then there are islands. Manhattan’s an island, but the real estate agents bulldozed down its palm trees long ago. A lot of islands are isolated, a bump in the sea. Some islands hang out together. Geologists call them an archipelago. The islands by us didn’t get invited into the San Juan Archipelago Club. I think they knew we’d put bridges up and drive right on like we weren’t proud to BE an island. Naw, we wanted an umbilical to the mainland.

A Real Island sneers at the idea of the Mainland. A real islander doesn’t commute to a job back on the Mainland. A real archipelagist doesn’t shop at the QFC on the Mainland. An honest-to-God rock huggin, brine snorting, bent back barnacle covered island hermit doesn’t jump on a ferry every chance he gets so he can stand on Terra Firma in the Wal Mart parking lot.

A Real Islander is hoping deep down in his seaweed filled boots that the Tectonic Plates are moving him OUT past the Straits, out past Dungeness Spit, out past Neah Bay, out past the 3 mile territorial limits. A Real Islander came, not so much to Come to an Island, as to LEAVE the Mainland, physically, spiritually and meta-damn-phorically. They’re Escapists. They’re refugees from Real Life.

Our island hedges its bets. Way up at the cold north end, folks hardly know they’re ON an island. Down at the equatorial jungles of the South End, we’re unemployed, the drive just to the bridge is too horrible to contemplate, the only fast food we got is growing in our gardens and TV reception’s poor.

When the earthquake knocks down Camano’s puny little bridge, we’re gonna have some folks real surprised to learn they’re gonna have to make a choice finally. Course, when they build the South End Bridge to Everett, we will too.

Louisiana just legislated the 10 Commandments be put in every schoolroom in the state. Doesn’t bother them that the Supreme Court has already ruled on this, might as well spend some tax dollars on defending that decision. It is, after all, the Word of God. Well, at least the God of the Christian Louisianans. Not so much some other religions’.

When I was a pup in the school system of Georgia back in the early ‘60’s, we had to recite the Pledge of Allegiance every morning first thing and then one pupil would be required to read a verse from the Bible at the front of the class. I must have been in 5th grade at the time but even then I resented being forced to listen to Bible passages. Much less have to read one myself out loud. When my turn came around I read the shortest passage in the King James version: Jesus wept. Then sat down. Some of my audience snickered but most assuredly my teacher was not amused. Even though I had kept to the exact requirement she had laid out. And so she sent my Yankee ass down to the principal’s office, I guess to teach me some sort of lesson I hadn’t gleaned listening to my fellow classmates’ recitals from the Good Book.

It did teach me a lesson, although not one Mrs. Gilroy might have hoped I’d learned. It taught me I didn’t want the Bible or any other religion shoved down my throat. And so, back around 1980 when I heard the Stanwoodopolis high school was bringing in a Creationist speaker to argue against Darwin and that evil theory of evolution, I went to my one and only school board meeting to protest. I mentioned the Supreme Court decisions and argued that this school administration was wasting us taxpayers’ time and money pushing an agenda that was sure to end up in court and cost plenty in attorney fees. Gary, another concerned citizen, echoed this sentiment.

So naturally the following day I found religious brochures stuffed under my shack door and Gary, caretaker at the time for Cama Beach resort, woke the next evening to a carload of Chapel highschoolers apparently intent on intimidating him, honking their horn and spinning gravel down the long drive. When they arrived at his cabin, Gary was waiting in the shadows, shirtless, sawed off shotgun in hand and in no mood for these shenanigans. He tapped his shotgun against the driver window and asked to have the window rolled down. Please. Which, suddenly quieted, they did.

Gary explained that he was going to be merciful. This time. But next time …. He whacked the barrel of the shotgun on the bottom of the window frame and suggested they ought to get on home. Gary ended up getting fired from his caretaker responsibilities, a heavy price for self-protection, you ask me, but it did send a message. Some folks value their freedom. Thou shalt not take it away. Without a fight. Jesus may have wept.

The latest study on teen usage of electronic devices found that they spend over 9 hours a day texting, gaming, video watching and net surfing. And this is when they’re not in school. I can only assume teenage crime rates have dropped to near zero. When would they have time to shoplift? Or to plan a robbery?

Any way you slice it, this is one helluva lot of time spent on social media and the rest. More time than school, more time than … well, anything. Except maybe breathing. This is good news for Apple, Google , Samsung and Facebook. To call it a national epidemic, well, let’s not be Alarmists. To think of it as a national addiction, c’mon, we’ve had TV for most of our lifetimes.

One of my neighbors yesterday told me he’d bought a cellphone. I said say it ain’t so, Joe. Not you! He grinned the way a convert to Jesus grins, sins washed, iniquities atoned, born again, fresh start, brave new world. He told me the great deal he got — meaning I should haul right down and get one too. Just spreading the Good News, I guess, proselytizing the ignorant. You better believe I’ll be checking under the bed tonight for alien pods.

Join the Hive. Accept the Borg. Sign up on Facebook. Carry a cell. I’m the Last Holdout on the South End now, an anachronistic curmudgeon with one foot in the 19th Century, still got a phone plugged to the wall of my cave. Outside the cave I’m disconnected. Satellites can’t reach me, friends and telemarketers can’t call me, the mizzus has to holler or just let it go til I stroll back in. At the grocery store I have to make decisions without outside help. Do you want the pitted olives or the unpitted, honey?

Sure it’s lonely, course it’s eerily quiet, damn right it’s a life of isolation. Just the way I like it.

Am I legend? Naw, I’m just a living fossil, that’s all.

I live in a state, a blue state, that has a regressive tax system. No state income tax but a pretty hefty sales tax. Meaning, the rich get off a lot easier than us serfs. Pay 10% on that item down at Home Depot, same for the gent making 7 figures as it is for the poor clod making minimum wage, what passes for fair in these times of income inequality writ large.

The rich will argue that their federal taxes are way higher than the rest of us in the lower brackets, say 30 plus % compared to 12% in mine. What they don’t tell you is that most of their wealth is either deferred or it comes in the form of stocks and bonds, taxed upon selling at a capital gain of 15%, about what I’m paying. Except I don’t have an accounting fir and a team of attorneys sheltering my income. Don’t kid yourself, the rich didn’t get rich on an equal playing field. The rich made the laws and the rich wrote the tax rules.

You have to ask yourself why anyone needs a billion dollars. Or even multiple millions. You figure maybe they’ll become philanthropists and give it back to charities? Maybe buy you a Maserati or a village in Tuscany? One billionaire, when asked how much money was enough, replied: it hasn’t been printed yet. Personally I don’t want the billionaires deciding where the money would do the most good, even if sometimes it’s admirable. I want them to pay their fair share of taxes and we’ll let the damn people decide what’s priority. We already let them make money doing whatever the hell they want, whether it’s in our best national interest or not. You listening, Musk?

Don’t get me wrong. Capitalism isn’t the enemy to me — after all, I have a business myself. Not exactly Microsoft or Amazon … but unlike them, I pay taxes on my profits. Okay, probably wouldn’t buy the wing on a stealth bomber, but maybe a few titanium bolts, more than Amazon pitches in for.

Some people are born to be businessmen. They know how to promote themselves, they understand negotiation, they embody what Donald Trump calls the Art of the Deal. I wish I had a couple of strands of those genes in my DNA. My kin, my ancestors, my genepool — all I can say is they climbed down out of the trees, but they never figured out they could sell the timber or develop the real estate. Plus we never remembered how to climb back up so now folks want to sell US the damn trees.

I actually have a business. I know, hard to believe. My right-leaning Republican relatives and in-laws shake their heads sadly to think I’m the only one in the two families who represents their bedrock GOP values of entrepreneurial get-up-and-go, job creation, small business struggles, all those virtues they hold dear. I sell goods. I buy materials, fashion them into art and then I have to sell the product. American? Well, it sticks in their throats, but yeah, as apple pie. Mom and country. Bootstrap success story. You might suppose, after 35 years, I’d be pretty good at it. I just made a stained glass entryway window for some new arrivals on the South End. Even though I’m cheaper than any glass shop in the Pacific Northwest … and even though my stuff is original artwork … I ended up giving them a discount. And they’re rich. You tell me what’s wrong with that picture.

I bought a new truck a few years ago when my old one almost caused me to miss a huge commission for a public art project down in Portland. You think I negotiated a lower price or argued for some ‘extras’? If you thought that, you don’t know me. All I asked my salesman was sell me the damn truck sitting out there in the lot, the one without any bells or whistles, and don’t screw around, I want to leave here ASAP, I don’t want to play the game, I don’t want the sales manager showing me an invoice proving you aren’t making any money on the deal, I don’t want to hear that bullshit. Yes, I’ll pay full price. No, I don’t want to take it for a test drive. Yes, I’m a complete idiot.

But …. I’m an idiot who would rather pay the full monte than get down in the pit and wrassle for a few dollars. I’m not going to lie and say money is beneath me. I’m frugal to a fault. I’m my Depression-era parents’ kid. I shop mostly at Goodwills, I buy Chinese, I’m so stingey I squeak. Money comes hard and it leaves hard too.

Sales is a tough job, at least for the likes of me. Buyer beware? I don’t think so. For me, it’s seller beware.

It used to be that Flag Day fell on June 14th every year. Now it seems like it’s Flag Day most all of the time. The Colorado GOP just called for burning all gay pride flags. Justice Alito flies his American flag upside down and An Appeal to Heaven flag rightside up. You can find blue striped American flags, Pride flags and Don’t Tread on Me flags. Every day is flag day in these divided states of America. Upside down, inside out, backwards, sideways, all signifying something.

Just flying Old Glory itself, what used to be a fairly universal act of patriotism, now is more a rightwing ad co-opted by the Republican Party. Jam a couple in the tailgate of a jacked up 4×4 Dodge Ram and run them until they’re nothing but tatters, what better way to announce your love of country? Or run one up the flagpole upside down, let everyone know you think the country has gone to hell in a handbasket. Back in my day, the wild and wooly ‘60’s, we burned flags. Laws were passed by outraged Republicans banning those incendiary expressions of free speech. Now those same folks want to burn Pride flags. At least in Colorado.

Justice Alito claims his wife loves flags, him, not so much. He’s not really certain what his wife’s flags even mean. Probably the only guy in the country who isn’t which only proves, at least to him, how impartial he will be and why he shouldn’t recuse himself on cases related to, oh, say January 6th when those flags were used as battering rams at the Capitol.

When we built the Camano Island Visitor Center, we erected an historic flagpole from the Stanwood American Legion who apparently didn’t want it on their property. Invariably we would have outraged Viet Nam vets demanding that it be properly lighted, even before we could get around to it. Maybe you’d like to help, I’d ask. Not much volunteering other than their negative opinion of what we were trying to do. But I can attest that flags definitely get peoples’ attention, good and bad. Maybe we should just ban all flags and end all this acrimony. And while we’re at it, let’s ban Flag Day too. Run that up the pole and see who salutes….

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.

I guess I live in a country of Whiners. Crybaby pissed off yahoos who think the world or the government or their parents owes them an apology for the injustices done to them daily. Take a few hours to listen to hot talk radio, you know, if you can tear yourself away from the trolls on social media. Angry angry people, raging against … well, near as I can tell, just about anything and everything. These aren’t the folks living in their cars, the ones working minimum wage, the people without health care … naw, they’re doing fine. Just not fine enough! They got axes to grind, they have beefs with the System, they’re unhappy and someone else is to blame. That someone needs to be punished.

Gas costs too much … even though they drive SUV’s that get piss poor mileage. They want a house bigger than their parents’. They want cheaper groceries but not the stuff they’d have to prepare themselves. They think people on welfare are stealing their taxes. They think the cities are cesspools of crime and corruption. They think minorities and folks with different definitions of sex are morally bankrupt. Immigrants are taking their jobs, immigrants are getting free health care and food stamps. Immigrants are replacing them!

The libraries are filled with pornography. Drag queens are corrupting their kids. Transgender predators are stalking the women’s bathrooms. Drug addicts are pampered and criminals are let loose. Moslems want sharia law in their state, elections are being stolen, the country’s gone to hell. Even our ex-President complains constantly how poorly he’s been treated, the worst in the history of the world. This from a guy who claims to be one of the richest smartest most successful people on the planet! If he has gripes, how pitiful yours are.

He promises to be your Warrior, your Avenger, your Salvation. He feels your pain. More than you do by a factor of a thousand. Pain? You couldn’t handle his pain!

So much for self-reliance. So much for that much touted Can-Do gumption. So much for the myth of the tough guy American. Naw, we’re pathetic victims now, mewling whiners, aggrieved citizens. Look at what they’ve done to us, the bad mean people. Better to hide in our houses and listen to the other whiners. Nothing we can do. Other than gripe and complain.