The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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.

Don’t ask me why but many years ago I went on a fast. No solid food, only liquids. It wasn’t that I wanted to lose weight or purge toxins, just decided to see what fasting would be like, go without for a few days, experience a yogic mind over body experiment maybe. Mostly I was hungry the first couple of days but that subsided although I sure thought excessively about eating. I told myself it was good to deny myself that pleasure, actually that necessity, but I never intended to fast longer than a week, if that.

Once, earlier on a solo summer’s road trip back in 1976, I lived on a few nuts, some raisins and a handful of Triscuits. By the end of that 3 months, down from 175 or so to 135 pounds, all fat gone, I was just a skinny 6’2” 26 year old who could hike barefoot and run across gravel. Maybe I was training to be a Buddhist monk or something, but not consciously. Mostly I was testing myself but hell if I could tell you for what.

This past month I’ve been doing something similar, stopped drinking, cut way down on eating, quit the homemade bread, exercised more and dropped, so far, 27 pounds, nearly a pound a day. Maybe I just want to lose weight, maybe go on the wagon awhile, maybe just prove to myself I have the will power to push limits. I am, after all, an old man of 76, easy enough to ease into geriatric complacency, stick to old habits and routines and tell myself it’s too late to change much of anything anyway.

Besides, life is good, no need to upset the apple cart looking for an imagined bruised one. Next thing you know, I’ll be planning a pilgrimage to some Holy Land, Stanwoodopolis or Smokey Point, find myself a Zen Master, take a vow of silence, live in a cave and meditate all day long, write koans and listen to the sound of one hand clapping.

On the other hand, maybe I just wanted my pants to fit without buying a wardrobe one size larger, no need to turn this into a metaphysical quest. And sure a lot cheaper than paying prescription prices for Ozempic. Big Pharma has enough profit already.

Down at the Norse Village in Stanwoodopolis the liquor store has sat shuttered ever since the voters of Washington decided we should get government out of the business of selling alcohol. Actually most of the Norse Village is pretty much out of business. Got a Dollar Store and a laundromat, all of it anchored now by the ever resilient Uff-Da Shoppe, purveyors of fine Scandihoovien knick-knacks.

I noticed recently the Chapel of Praise has moved into the vacated liquor store. We all know it’s not the building that’s important, it’s the Spirit that moves inside. Or spirits in this case. But … ever since I moved here in 1977 the only liquor store in town was this building and this location. And now it’s a House of God, a concrete block sanctuary for folks the liquor store probably brought to their inebriated knees. With a bottle, now a hymnal.

Bernie Slivovitz, my neighbor down the highway, is a newly minted convert. He’s been pretty religious about his AA meetings at the toxic mold county-run Blue Building, formerly the Senior Center, every Thursday night and now he’s washed in what he calls the Blood of the Lamb. Sounds like a meatpacking house to me, but I don’t make light of Bernie’s newfound salvation. His drinking cost him more than a couple of jobs plus a wife and his kids still won’t talk to him, they aren’t as forgiving as Jesus. They think his sobriety, like always, is as temporary as the rain and wind stopping in November. The wagon he’s riding, driven by Jesus or Bobby Ryder, his best friend who takes him to the grocery store after the last DUI, will knock him to the ditch sooner, not later.

Maybe so, but Bernie’s doing okay so far. A little righteous for my cynical tastes, but hey, you think you found the Right Path, you hate to see your pals and family wandering, lost and forsaken. The road is narrow, Bernie’s pastor tells him. And for those who stray, get ready for the Big BarBQ in the sky.

“It does seem strange,” Bernie confides to me one day last week over a cup of black coffee and his ever present cigarette, “to attend services in the old liquor store. But ya know, the Lord moves in mysterious ways.”

Being a South Ender, I couldn’t agree more.

Haunting the near empty halls of our island library, I ran into an old friend, a retired librarian no less, both of us latter day bibliophiles in an era of Tik-Tok, short news blurbs, gaming videos, Facebook and all media non-literary. These days in the New Dark Ages feels like the few of us remaining are a small cloistered secret society, the last of the letter writers, book readers, newspaper subscribers and fact checkers — monks passing one another in the abbey, pausing for furtive conversations, careful that no one is listening.

After the usual How Ya Beens and Whatcha Been Up To Latelys, we slipped into politics, the War, the tired singsong of spectators watching a losing ballgame. Just before we threw in the towel and forfeited, she asked if I knew what kept her awake at night, what frightened her the most.

“Global warming?” I guessed, picking the first existential threat to our species that came to mind. Gee, so many options these days … we could go on until the library closed and still need to continue our list at the tavern next door, finally adding alcoholism to the dozens of societal ills that hide in our closet of anxieties.

“No,” she said, “and anyway, it’s really climate change, not global warming.

“So okay,” I asked, “what spooks you the most?”

And she said, “That Trump will interfere in the elections this fall,” whispering.

And here I was worried about the Iran War, the Android Apocalypse, global warming or however you want to label it, new Pandemics, nuclear holocaust, major droughts and wildfires, ginormous data centers coming to the South End or just about all of the above, now too big to fit in my little closet of night sweats. Not that further subversion of our short experiment in democracy isn’t alarming, but I still have hopes we’ll right the ship this Administration is busy drilling holes in its hull. Call me an optimist. Or call me an idiot.

I guess we all have our worst fears. All I know these dark days, there’s plenty to choose from.

One of my last public art commissions was for the new high school here in Washington State. This was during Covid, meaning our meetings were virtual on Zoom. My original proposal was for two 60 foot long murals, one at the entry, the other facing the main highway. Both were approved by my committee but subsequently overridden by … well, I never knew. The administration maybe. Or a school board. But as we say in the biz, back to the drawing board.

But first the project manager had to tour me through the building again, hopefully choose alternative sites which, oddly enough, weren’t plentiful. When we entered the library on the second floor, there were sidelights at the doorways and over the main entryway just below. About when we decided these might be appropriate sites, the librarian, curiosity aroused by intruders in her fiefdom, strolled over to inquire what we were up to. The project manager informed her we were considering placing artworks here in her biblioteca.

Now you might think this would be cause for some small excitement, possibly even mild interest in what sort of aesthetic enhancement … but then you obviously have not dealt with that public that is so prominently spotlighted in the nomenclature of Public Art. Our librarian, alarmed now at this invasion of her sanctuary, asked, “Why do we want this?”

Indeed. Why do we put art in our new buildings? Before I could posit a possible explanation, my project manager beat me to the punch. “Because,” she stated matter-of-factly, “we have 1% for art money and we need to spend it.”

Simple as that , no further justification, no fancy hyperbole on my part, just basic economics, skip the rest. Sure, I wanted to ask why my librarian thought books mattered, why maybe she became a librarian in the first place and not an accountant or why in god’s name did she think a philistine should be allowed to teach our kids.

Nope, I kept my mouth shut and drove home sadly, considering lopping off an ear. Art … mostly for the thick-skinned. Public art … only for us crazies.

Crabbers are like fishermen, only worse. They’ll exaggerate, lie outright, then tell you the most wild-eyed outlandish whoppers only the chronically gullible would believe. Three Finger Fred loves to hold up his stubs and tell any newcomer who’s unfortunate enough to gravitate into Fred’s barstool orbit, how he was pulling traps in a full gale out of his 10 foot dinghy one terrible November.

“You don’t mean …?” the poor unsuspecting stool neighbor would invariably ask in horror.

“Yup,” Fred would nod, finishing his beer in a final gulp … and ordinarily the newbie would tell the bartender to give Fred another, on him.

“Terrible storm,” Fred would continue once his glass arrived. “Worst we’d seen all year. But I had traps to pull and by god, no storm ever stopped Fred Jensen, not before, not since.” Fred would glance at his victim, raise his glass and toast the courage of a man such as himself. “I almost swamped on the first trap gettin her in. Full pot, top to bottom with the clacking monsters. I no sooner opened the side hatch than half the beasts were in the boat, grabbin on to my boots, crawlin up my rainpants. It was awful those 8 legged bastards all trying to get at me. And the wind was blowin awful too. And the rain was comin in sideways. I knew right then I’d have to row out of there, crabs or no.

“I was kickin em off me, rowing into the wind and rain was an inch deep in the bottom so the crabs were sloshin back and forth and up my legs. About halfway to shore two of the biggest buggers made it up to my chest, clackin those nasty claws, tearin at my life preserver. It was a nightmare, me tryin to row and swat at the beasts same time. I was half crazy … and that’s when the big one got hold of my swattin hand. Took those fingers right to the bone. I had to beat him with the oar before he’d let go.

“My god, man!” his listener would cry, “give this man another drink!”

Fred, of course, would drag the story out until the drinks stopped coming. Sometimes the boat went over crabs, oars and all. Sometimes the crab that amputated his fingers was kept by the U.W. Science Department, it being the biggest Dungeness ever caught in Puget Sound. Sometimes he rowed back out for the second pot, undeterred by blood loss or hurricane winds, a saltier dog than any in song or story.

Usually, though, one of us South Enders would yell down the bar, all of us yahoos laughing and hollering, “Hey, Fred, didn’t you say you lost those in a saw accident?” And another would shout, “Naw, he took em off in a nose picking incident.”

Fred would growl. Fred would swear. Fred would give us the finger … even if it was nothing but the stub. And if it was late enough and he was sufficiently liquified, Fred would tell the saga of the saw. “I was cuttin through this old growth maple, see? Harder than iron and my saw had a 52 inch blade I’d just sharpened, ran it off a Plymouth slant six I’d rebuilt the week before….”

Haven’t you ever wished you could go back and ask the guy who invented the spinning jenny if he had foreseen where that small invention would lead? Did he figure all those weavers’ lives would be made easier with the advent of a machine that would take the drudgery out of their lives of spinning? That the world would be a better place if he could automate those tasks and have those folks run the machines that would ultimately do their jobs? If he could imagine a future of industrial factories and cities teeming with assembly lines, clogged with workers and choking on pollution?
Maybe ask Galileo or Newton or Einstein or Crick and Watson if they envisioned the future their discoveries would eventually create? Could Crick and Watson imagine cloning? Imagine gene therapy ? Imagine Frankenstein? I don’t know, but I always figured Steve Jobs and Bill Gates changed the world because they could see the world they would change it to, visionaries who imagined the future they would whelp into existence.

So when Gates was interviewed recently regarding his views on Artificial Intelligence, I was all ears. What would the guy who brought us the Digital Age think about his Revolution? Had he imagined computers we carried with us every waking hour of the day? Could he have imagined our social media? Did he ask himself if androids dream of electric sheep? Where did he think Artificial Intelligence would take us?

Well, he thought probably it would be a benefit to mankind. For example, he posited, robots on the warehouse floor would be able to see spills that humans might miss. They would also, he said, notice if flesh and blood workers had on their hardhats, thereby preventing potential OSHA violations and industrial accidents. He went on to list a couple more banal benefits of Artificial Intelligence and I guess maybe he hadn’t given this a whole lot of thought, probably busy with his Foundation work, but Holy Hal, what it seemed like was this dude missed the last bus that was going to the 21st Century. I was hoping his bubbly interviewer might ask him a few probing questions, but no, the world was in good hands if our super intelligent cyborg pals could mop up a floor before someone human slipped on a spill.

So much for the crystal balls of visionaries. Henry Ford probably just wanted to sell automobiles. He could have cared less about future automation and humans becoming cogs themselves in an industrial machine. Gates figured out how to market a computer, make it smaller and smaller, more and more ubiquitous, keep the software proprietary and cut the legs out from under his competitors. The future is mostly unintended consequences, judging by Bill’s astute commentary. The bad news is we’re going to be slipping on all those spills he missed.

I got a friend who’s a very good sculptor. When he couldn’t find clients or galleries or museums to appreciate his work, he blamed his lack of commercial success on the dearth of culture here in the Yew Ess Aye, a nation of philistines and nabobs, according to Ed. Fine art was beyond their limited aesthetic comprehension. And probably their checkbook too.

Ed worked in classic forms mostly but he also created modern work too. I have a few of his sculptures, some bronze, some plaster castings. The man was good at his art, I’ll say that, but like a lot of us artists, not so hot at self-promotion, networking or sales, totally different skillsets. Disillusioned with the American art scene and America in general, he packed up and moved to Europe where, he was convinced, his talents would not only be appreciated but remunerated. I guess Café Society sounded its siren call, good friends, fine coffees, excellent food and wines. The guy never made another sculpture, far as I know, but he found happiness, no small substitution.

You might think Ed studied fine art in some University to learn his craft. The truth is he was a painter when he moved to Seattle and Gomorrah where he bought a city log cabin and met a cute neighbor woman who had a young daughter. Knowing Ed, the woman was the draw. But he spent hours on the living room floor playing with the kid, and one of the amusements was making stuff out of Play-Dough, lots of stuff.

Eventually Ed substituted real clay for the Play-Dough, got himself hooked on creating clay sculpture, learned how to make wax castings and cast his own work in bronze where he’d volunteered his time to apprentice free for a foundry. Say what you will about his fiscal success, this is a great story, rags to … okay, not riches, but still an inspirational story.

And maybe Ed wouldn’t agree with me on this, an archetypal American story.

It’s not uncommon down here on the much maligned South End to be at the leading edge of the breaking wave. So far ahead, actually, that those trailing behind misunderstand us. And of course misunderstanding leads to mistrust and mistrust leads to avoidance and avoidance leads to contempt and contempt leads to fear and fear leads to hatred. We artists understand this implicitly. Or at least we like to say that is why our work is reviewed with such negative criticism. We’re just ahead of the Curve. We’re misunderstood. We’re too sensitive for this world.

Redemption sometimes comes too late to do us much good. Down here, we’ve been stigmatized for our handicaps and ostracized most of our lives. We’ve been badly misunderstood, isolated from the island mainstream and treated as third class citizens. Maybe it’s too late to help most of us, but in light of the medical community’s latest findings, we can at least take some cheer that we were victims of ignorance.

Branded as shirkers of work, lazy lay-about and shiftless men of leisure, we now have the full backing of the AMA that ours was a bona fide, certifiable physical affliction, not some bogus hypochondria intolerance to work. Just recently the Institute of Medicine called for a review of the malady we South Enders have lived with most of our lives, one that heretofore was considered, not a disease, but a psychosomatic condition. Those who have never known its symptoms easily viewed us as whiners and misfits, slaggards and sloths. We were treated as psychological lepers, shunned by our newly arrived neighbors and subjected to their silent scorn, just as those with depression and anxiety were once similarly abused before science substantiated the underlying root cause. We suffered silently, secure in the knowledge that we were victims of a disease little understood or studied by the medical community.

Until now. What previously was diagnosed by our decidedly non-medical neighbors to the north as chronic laziness or chronic fatigue syndrome has now been deemed a true physiologic pathology deserving of a proper name: Systemic Exertion Intolerance Disease (SEID), a crippling affliction most of my buddies and me have lived with for years with little sympathy from our mizzuses. Well, guess who’s going to have to apologize now, eh, little Miss Critical?? And, with a kinder gentler healthcare system in place, maybe now we can get the care and treatment we need … and even a sizeable disability check to help us cope with our difficult lives.

So next time you feel see a South Ender balking at work or employment, maybe you’ll show a bit of compassion. All I can say is you better hope this isn’t contagious.

I was doing a little supper shopping today at Island Foods up the road. Had my little baby cart half filled with about anything that didn’t seem double-the-price and fell in behind a lady whose overflowing groceries indicated a resident who didn’t worry much about little things like prices or specials or coupon discounts. If she’d been sporting a mink coat, I wouldn’t have expected less.

Tina, the checkout clerk on register #4, the one labeled ‘Utsalady’ as a nod to our island’s sketchy history, was scanning items faster than a TSA agent on meth. She turned to Marie Antoinette and said in her usual cheerful greeting, ‘How you doing today?’ By this time Zsa Zsa had a smart phone in her bejeweled ear and ignored Tina as any High Lady would when an impudent commoner affronted her status. M’lady was now occupied with a conversation about the horrific traffic resulting from a fender bender we’d both apparently passed earlier. It had been a terrible inconvenience to her schedule for Tea Time.

They say time is money, but they don’t say it on the South End. Tina, who lives half a mile north of me in a small ghetto subdivided with a zoning variance that made some commissioner’s friends rich, well, Tina makes minimum wage plus a buck. Time, I seriously doubt, is mostly money to her. It’s a bad back, varicose veins and a wrist brace for her carpal tunnel syndrome that will soon doom her fabulous career. Half the people she checks out never say boo to her. A quarter are on their cellphone. A few are just unfriendly like she was price gouging them.. And the rest don’t see or hear her, she’s just the checkout girl.

Tina has a husband, Billy, used to be a contractor before he crushed a disk in his spine that ended his career. He gets some disability and between that and Tina’s largesse, they make the payments on their double-wide, but barely. It’s a scrape every damn month, but I’ve never heard her complain. She’s glad to have this job. “You have a nice day!” she smiles to Her Majesty who’s still chattering on her cell. Tina turns to me and asks happily, “How’s it going, Skeeter?” If she and I weren’t happily married, I swear to God I’d propose to her on the spot.