The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Coming home the other day, I was listening to National Public Radio — mostly for further education credits — and they were talking about somebody working in the Inner City who went around to the homeless to offer them free health checkups. These folks were, as our reporter tactfully put it, probably on drugs or booze or were mentally ill or any combination thereof. Probably all three.

We always talk about the street folks this way. Poor sad souls who fell through the societal cracks, who might have, if not for drugs or booze or rock and roll or psychiatric reasons, might have been happy productive members of society. Almost exactly the prognosis for me and my neighbors here on the South End!! I mean, who wouldn’t want to work at Twin City Foods on the ‘line’, who wouldn’t rather drive to McDonalds and flip burgers for minimum wage, no benefits, no health insurance, no kidding???? Who wouldn’t want to go back to school, get that GED or a PhD. and become a 6 figure a year attorney?? You’d have to be CRAZY not to!!!!!!!!!! You’d maybe have gotten so dependent on drugs and alcohol this wouldn’t APPEAL to you! whatsoever, not at all!?

Holy Cowpie. Maybe our reporter never worked in a factory dawn to dark, 6 days a week. Maybe our Good Samaritan never thought of the American Dream as a rat race through the labyrinth of Hell in search of moldy cheese. Maybe our sociologists, who work for the universities, have full tenure and pensions and fat salaries, maybe they see unemployment or poor health care or an Insecure Future, as something, oh, I don’t know, something WORSE than a dead end job, a horrible boss, a joy-draining life on the assembly line of ‘respectability’.

Send those researchers, those professors, those academicians down here! Give me a couple of days, that’s all. After that, they’ll be on drugs or booze or sudden retirement. Probably all three….

My pal Joey who’s been laid off now, oh, about 5 years ever since the recession hit back in Ought Eight, has turned from cynical to bitter. Used to be he hated his employer for poor wages and lousy benefits, now he hates the government for no wages, no benefits and no jobs, not even ones he hates. He spends a lot of his day e-mailing buddies, myself unfortunately included, screeds against the President and Congress (mostly the Democratic side, what he calls socialists and traitors and worse) rather than look for work.

I always wonder why he doesn’t spend his bile on Wall Street and the banks who sent the economy on a wild ride of greed, which finally plummeted to terra firma, crashed and burned and pulled the economy into the smoldering crater with them, but I guess you got to blame somebody.

“Joey,” I say. “Now that you’re a dyed-in-the-wool Republican, how come you don’t become a Job Creator? Be the capitalist you dreamed of being? Start a bizness?” Joey looks at me with pity and shakes his head in disgust. “You and this damn government, Skeeter. You’ve set up regulations and roadblocks. Too many taxes. How’s a Little Guy like me gonna get off the ground? It’s like running a race carrying a 50 pound concrete block. Guaranteed to fail.”

“Too small to succeed, that it?” I can’t help saying. “They all started out small, Joey.”

Joey’s exhausted a long stretch of unemployment compensation. He’s pulling 401-K retirement money too early to live on and that ticks him off, all those penalties. Michelle, his wife, works part time at Jolene’s Beauty Salon, but even with tips, she’s barely clearing minimum wage. Course, Joey’s against raising minimum wage because if he ever did start being a Job Creator, that 50 pound block holding him back would be 60 pounds.

Joey’s never going to work again everybody but Joey knows. He’s retired at 55, another casualty of the Recession, and for his remaining years he can aim his wrath at the illegal immigrants who take the jobs he might have wanted, at the government which ended his unemployment compensation with only two extensions, at the IRS for taxing his 401-K withdrawals, at his old employer for sending jobs overseas, at the people on welfare who’d rather take a handout than look for work, at the women who’ve joined the labor market….

The American Dream withered on the vine for Joey and his fellow victims. He doesn’t have Clue One why it all went wrong, but he’s angry and he’s scared. I don’t know how many Joeys are out there, but too many, that’s for sure. The party’s over for them. Now all they got is the Tea Party and that one doesn’t look like much fun, not for Joey and certainly not for the rest of us. Even on the South End, anger is contagious.

The Saratoga Landscaping and Lawn Service used to be Don’s Lawn and Brawn. Don had a couple of used Sears 22 inch cut rear-baggers, an overhauled Stihl weedeater for the hard to reach places and the ditches, plus a little edger that a few of his fussier clients required. He hauled all the tools of his trade in a 1978 Datsun flatbed pickup with a handlettered sign on each door DON’S LAWN & BRAWN 387-LAWN.

Don worked six, sometimes seven days a week, rain, shine or fog, but he invariably fell behind when the monsoons came in the late spring, early summer, and never really caught up until the droughts of August. Shortly after, his workload dropped in the opposite direction as the barometer that usually stayed high until October.

When his knees started to go, about 1996, he bought his first rider. 4 speed, 40 inch cut, headlights, battery start. And he hired his next door neighbor’s dropout kid to mow half the clients with a self-propelled Honda model, figuring he’d upgrade to another tractor if everything worked out. New folks were retiring here by the droves, folks who wanted their postage stamp lots immaculately manicured … by someone other than themselves. Retirement meant just that — retire the damn mower.

Bizness picked up, his neighbor’s punk kid absconded with his new self-propelled and the other tools and Don went through a series of similar help, young guys with poor work ethics and low ambition coupled with various substance abuse issues. Clients were irate and business, being mostly word-of-mouth references, suffered. And Don sure didn’t want to go solo any more. Retirement looked further away the more he yearned for it.

Fortunately he hired Miguel, a 35 year old ‘immigrant’ from Ensenada. Worked hard, didn’t complain about the poor wages and didn’t steal Don’s tools, didn’t do drugs on the job and spoke enough English to communicate with the clients. Before long Miguel’s uncle Juan signed on, then most of his extended family entered the U.S. Labor Force through the backdoor of the South End.

Don retired a year ago, sold the business to Uncle Juan and now most of the lawn services up and down the island are done by a lawnmowing cartel in fleets of shiny red Ford 150’s with professional lettering on the side DON JUAN’S LAWNS. They’re reliable, they’re honest, they’re industrious, they’re the new Americans, documented or not, simmering nicely in the South End melting pot.

Psychiatrists this week announced the discovery of a new mental malady: Sluggish Cognitive Tempo. This apparently is a sub-order of Attention Deficit Syndrome and is sure to raise a controversy in the medical community as to whether it is really a proper psychopathological disorder. Apparently it is characterized by slow learning, chronic daydreaming and lack of interest in the world around the victim. Patient, I mean. What we used to call Stupid before we became more touchy-feely and enlightened.

No doubt the next step is a pharmacological breakthrough, something akin to coffee, but not as potent as crystal meth, and hopefully (unless you’re the pharmacology company) not overly addictive. Bring the patient back to reality gradually, no point trying to make it TOO interesting. This is great news for the South End, you no doubt realize. All those artists and musicians have been struggling for years with stargazing, cloud watching, daydreaming and other similarly wasteful idle pursuits. We just didn’t have a name for it, but now, thanks to psychiatric research, we not only have a name and a diagnosis, but possibly the hope for a cure.

With counseling and the proper drugs, we South Enders can imagine the day when our idyllic but lachrymose lives are given new leases. Jobs, responsibilities, duties and a focused commitment to meaningful undertakings. Finally we can put down the banjos, drop the paintbrushes, store the blank canvases in the cellar and look forward to normality. We can drive to our satisfying new job at Boeing, we can balance a checkbook, we can scan the TV guide for exciting new programs, we can do all those things the rest of you take for granted, but for us were always far far away.

It is undoubtedly a New Day down here. We’re going to take that sluggish cognitive tempo we’ve been sleepwalking with most of our adult lives and kick it up a notch or three. Multi-task! We’ll be able to juggle half a dozen activities at once while making appointments on our new cellphone for job interviews and doctor visits and financial planning and car repairs and ….well, I get goosebumps just thinking about it. The future is wide open, just like my eyes, and I trust you’ll understand if I don’t finish this, but hey, I haven’t got time for literary nonsense now. It’s a big world out past the garden and I’ve got to make up for lost time so if you’ll excuse me, I have to go march to a similar drummer ….

Now as you might’ve guessed, I’m almost always in favor of any and all new technologies, unproven or not. Get those government regulations out of the launch path and let the good old profit motive dictate the future. As we well know in this Job Creating culture we love, let the marketplace rule. If you can’t trust a capitalist, who CAN you trust?

I just read they got a new 3-D printer for creating new life forms. Program in a funky DNA sequence , load up the amino acid mix and hit a button. Pretty quick you got an iridescent houseplant or a 6 legged, 4 eared puppy, whatever you want. Experiments are fine. A few new viruses introduced out among the billions we got already the old fashioned way, well, what’s the harm? Might be some human-friendly ones in there and that hobby lab you got turns into the next venture-capitalized pharma farm. The possibilities are endless. The profit potential immense! Sure, the naysayers will worry about some 3-D printout creating the next pandemic, but hey, nothing ventured, nothing gained. You think God didn’t roll the dice?? Check out some of these South Enders we got down here ….

I heard this week Amazon wants to use drones to deliver their goods. The Star Trek teleporter isn’t on-line yet, I guess, so this is their fallback. Oh, I suppose the Luddites will fight this. Skies filled with more drones than starlings. Collisions in congested areas. Free gifts for the earthbound after the crashes, if nothing else. Put some armaments on these birds and UPS package theft on unguarded porches ought to drop significantly.

The future is in the rearview now, closer than it appears maybe, but we’re accelerating fast and there’s no time in this multi-tasked, info-deluged world to start worrying about the dearth of deep analysis. Fasten your seatbelt, download a program for an experimental lunch and keep your twitter feed on 24/7. It’s a brave new world and you don’t have the luxury of fear. Sit back and enjoy the ride.

Once again our intrepid entrepreneurial spirit has raised its banner on the globally connected South End. In the face of a newly invigorated craft distilling industry across the state, our own liquor suppliers have risen to the challenge. Admittedly hobbled by government laws and regulations set by the State Liquor Board and unable to advertise for fear of police intervention, they have been forced to raise the bar once more in order to compete with their well-funded and legitimate adversaries.

Just last evening I was huddle at my kitchen table with Whisky Bob, a moonshiner of some repute down here for his double distilled mashes, a white lightning so powerful Bob enforces his No Smoking ordinance with serious vigilance. If a ‘client’ ignores the admonition, Bob tells them the story of old man Jeffries who tried lighting his cigarette with a mason jar of High Octane Hooch open in his lap driving home to his doublewide in O-Zi-Ya. He survived, but his eyebrows never grew back and without going into gory graphics, let’s just say the miracle drug Viagra was of little use thereafter. For years he would relive the explosion every time he struck a match. The Post Stress became so severe he gave up smoking altogether.

Whisky Bob tells me he’s ready for the Next Stage of distilling, gonna dial back the alcohol a mite and go for the niche market in boutique boozes. I said it sounded like a great business plan, and Bob leaned in conspiratorially, afraid, I guess, Cost-Co might have the place bugged.

“Nettles,” he said. “Nettles?” I asked. “Nettles,” he repeated, louder, maybe thinking I needed hearing aids. Nettles. I pondered it a moment. Bob said he remembered that Heavy Nettle Ale I’d made two years ago, a fine year for the green crop, good crisp bite, a telltale aftertaste that tickled the tongue. Nettles, I finally agreed. Slow Food Movement, utilize the area agriculture, stop global warming, drink Local, save the planet. “Bob,” I said, tilting a glass of his double distilled, “it sounds like a winner! And I don’t think it’s the Everclear talking.”

This week Whisky Bob will begin the harvest. I told him my own organic nettles were available if he needed more than his backyard yield. By summer Bob should have his flagship mash aged to perfection. Jack Daniels, good luck to ya….

I picked up a fellow South Ender hitchhiking this morning on my way into town. Not untypically, he was a little down on his luck. No car, license rescinded for DUI, out of work, all the usual…. He was living in a friend’s camper, he told me, now that he’d moved out of his mom’s place. “Not a real good situation,” he said. The mom’s place. He’d been shacked up with her — he searched for the right characterization and finally hit on ‘boyfriend’ — out in a trailer in the backyard. She was, if I understood correctly, living in the house with her husband, apparently not my rider’s dad.

Extended families on the South End, you may have surmised, are slightly more, oh, elastic, than those further up island. But the ties are no less binding, I’m sure. His roommate, the mom’s beau, was a bad drinker, he confided, and arguments were becoming more heated in the late evening hours, so he decided to move along before the Law was necessitated. I said that seemed prudent to me.

My passenger said his mom was upset at his departure. Misunderstanding him, I mumbled something insincere about mother’s milk or some equally half-assed sentiment. To which he said she’d thrown his belongings out in the yard during the previous day’s rain squall. “Kind of a bummer…” he admitted. “All those wet clothes, man. A real drag….”

We discussed the weather awhile. Sun was out, the rains had subsided. Life was good, we decided, just two Gentlemen of the Highway cruising the backroads of Camano. I dropped him at the Elger Bay Grocery. He was, he grinned, getting some snacks and beer, and then “I’m gonna go home, kick back, enjoy the afternoon, man.”

Yes indeed, sometimes life is as simple, as pleasurable, as uplifting as a friend’s warm camper, some dry clothes, a working TV, a bag of Cheetos and a ride back to what, temporarily, is Home. Pop a cold one before noon and say goodbye to those morning blues. Attitude — and you can inscribe this over the trailer door — is everything.

You want to learn something about Failure, ask an artist. We been there, we done that, we’ll probably do it again. Some folks think failure is an excuse to quit, chalk it up to hard knocks, move on to something else. Artists, we have ourselves on the line. We’re painting, we’re writing, we’re singing something, integral to ourselves. We can’t sell it, we can’t get approval; we can’t make others see what it is we see, the beauty of it, the truth of it, we can’t just walk away, shrug it off, pick up a hammer and become a carpenter. If we do, the house we’re building becomes the art. And I bet you dollars to Degas we aren’t going to become bond traders next.

The trouble with failure for us artists is we’re forced to make sense of it. It’s not really external, some quirk of bad luck, even if, for awhile, we rationalize it. We live in a market place society, for good or bad. We live and die by the cash register. And that society doesn’t much care about any art other than Mass Commercial Art. Odds are pretty certain, you’ll fail. So you have to ask yourself, why go on?

I had two gallery owners on the island tell me their definition of art was simple: it’s what sells. The Van Gogh earlobe ‘myth’ of a guy killing himself with only one sale to his name, then becoming discovered, was hogwash, they said. Sales, that’s the measure, darling, that’s the bar to reach if you want to be a success.

I know too many South Enders who are fine artists who don’t rack up sales. A couple are great artists and they make the least money. I would cry out loud and flush my credit card if they quit because revenues were paltry. We do what we do out of a need to recreate the world, to make it over to resemble ourselves, to make manifest that inchoate yearning we feel and need to express in some way or other. On the South End this is fairly normal — most other places, this a definition of failure. No need to tell you, but …. I sure don’t plan to move any time soon.

Back in the era when I first moved here, the island was more of a frontier, more of a lawless place, an outback backwash where crime existed, but for the most part it was either tolerated or taken care of on a personal level. Oh, we had some rumrunning and moonshining, we had some cannabis cowboys, we had a few folks pulling off trannies and axles at the Tyee Store junkyard, some out-of-season deer hunting and the usual Dungeness overharvesting. The Island County deputies had a big area to cover and way too few deputies….

Must’ve been shortly after those gas shortages from the OPEC embargo let up, real estate took off and the rich folks looked at Camano the way movie stars looked at Montana — cheap land for millionaires. And the housing boom took off. McMansions got built, hobby farms started up, vacation homes sprouted along the bluffs. Camano was discovered. For the second time.

Trouble with being an absentee wealthy landowner is you leave yourself wide open to vandalism and theft. Back then we didn’t have Costco surveillance cameras you watch on your cellphone. Hell, we didn’t have cellphones invented then. Where there’s a vacuum …. leave it to a South Ender to fill it. And so Sammy’s South End Security and Surveillance was born. Sammy had his crack security squad assembled, put out ads every week in the Little Nickel and the Stanwoodopolis Gazette, and offered his services. He’d check your hacienda once in the day and once in the evening, see if any odd lights were on or garage doors partly up or back door’s ajar or an upstairs window open. For an extra fee, he and his militiamen, Flathead Fred and Two Toke Tom, would water the plants, feed the cats, whatever needed done. All those dot.com millionaires moving in, Sammy figured he’d corner the Security Market, upgrade to vehicles that didn’t look like what the thieves were driving — and retire in comfort like his clients.

And it DID look promising. He’d just traded in his 1978 Datsun pickup with the seat springs always tearing his semi-official Levi jacket that all of the crew wore now with the lettering SOUTH END SECURITY AND SURVEILLANCE on the back for a one owner Chevy half ton with a spotlight for night shining the shrubbery and sometimes the occasional deer he poached. Things looked good. Real good. Flathead and Two Toke got a buck an hour raise, clients seemed satisfied … and then … the bottom fell out. Along came the Citizen’s Patrol and, well, now you know the rest of the story. Another entrepreneurial dream up in smoke. Sammy never really got over it. Oh, he tried dogsitting, but he never really liked dogs and it turned out he had allergic reactions to the longhaired ones.

Last we heard he was selling knock-off sunglasses out of a booth at the Skagit Mall. Flathead Fred went back to the O-Zi-Ya Auto Body Shop and specialized in scuff and buff paint jobs. And Two Toke? Well, Two Toke went underground, developing skills that serve him even today … now that marijuana is legal.

Crime — ya know, on the South End, it sometimes pays.

Awhile back I ran into one of my new neighbors out taking the air. I introduced myself as the guy across the road and he told me his name. “So, Bernie,” I asked, figuring this was his retirement house after years in a career, what he’d been saving that nest egg for and whoopee, the Golden Years had finally arrived, “how do you like retirement?”

Bernie looked a bit bemused over the spectacles he peered over to take ‘the full measure of me’, some impertinent upstart probing too deeply on first contact. “If you don’t mind me asking,” I added a little impishly. He took a little while, either pondering the question or wondering whether to dignify it with an answer.

“Not much,” he said finally. “It’s harder to accustom to than I thought it would be.” I asked why he felt that way and he said he’d had some prestige in his former career that was now suddenly missing. “I demanded respect,” he said sternly, “and I got it.”

“Well, Bernie,” I grinned, “I’d get over THAT. Nobody down here gives a hoot or holler what you did before. You get to start brand new. Nobody’s gonna salute the old generals now and anyway, the war’s over. Take a load off. Enjoy the sunsets. Walk the beach. It’s why we call it retirement.”

I don’t know if Bernie ever did get over it. Some folks hang their awards and medals on the wall, hoping, I guess, to just keep on re-living their Glory Days. Me, I say high school’s come and gone, good riddance. The South End’s a funny melting pot, mostly us yahoo retirees bent on figuring out how to make the rest of life interesting without hauling along the weight of the past. Retirement’s hard enough starting from scratch and not driving the mizzus insane being underfoot. And I know for a steel hard, take-it-to-the-bank fact, the mizzus isn’t going to salute either. Down here, we’re all privates in this woman’s army.