The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I have it on good report that the happiest people are us old people. If that is true, the youngsters must be miserable as hell, burdened by anxieties of global warming, AI Apocalypse, Gaza, Ukraine, pandemics, income inequality, not to mention the upcoming elections they see as the last gasp of Old White Guy Geezers engaged in political warfare. Kind of puts a cold blanket on breakfast every morning, I bet.

When I was young and foolish, I lived with a lot of anxiety. Bad marriage, bad jobs, bad apartments, crummy cars. Viet Nam, Nixon, Civil Rights, the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. The future, what little I could conjure, didn’t seem bright. Throw in the Bomb, Cuban Missile Crisis, we all had the nuclear jitters to boot, the very real possibility of the end of mankind as we knew it, one dystopian nightmare after another. Maybe we all have to create our bogeymen then learn to live through it.

Course now we have all this existential angst to contend with, climate change going to end civilization, Trump going to end democracy, new diseases going to finish off what Covid couldn’t, the world gone mad! China ascendant, Russia back to the Cold War, social media making zombies of our kids, the Middle East about to erupt, immigrants pouring in over every border, not just here but everywhere. Droughts, famine, plagues and pestilence! Lions, tigers and bears, oh no!

But maybe, who knows, the world isn’t going to hell in a handbasket just yet. I know, some evangelicals wish it would, Second Coming, good times right after the Apocalypse, signs everywhere if you have the right kind of eyeglasses and a few Bible verses to consult. I sometimes think we manifest what we believe, call it my own brand of hocus pocus. Maybe we create reality, not the other way around. Why not? Meaning, at least in my cosmology, better to be optimistic and a much safer bet to think positively. If I’m wrong, tell me after the End Times, why don’tcha. Meanwhile, stay calm and carry on.

The much beloved, right leaning hardware store that anchors the river town of Arlington has been using a local artist’s designs for some of their clothes and sundries. When she confronted the store with proof, they pulled the goods off the shelves but said, well, since she hadn’t bothered to copyright her work, their use of her art was perfectly legitimate. Too bad they didn’t consult an attorney first, one who could explain that us artists’ work belongs to us, no need to file a copyright claim. It’s ours. Period.

When the hardware store did get an attorney, his response was that the issue was basically settled and if the artist didn’t shut up they would hit her with defamation and harassment lawsuits. Whoa ho, Goliath is gonna roar! Who doesn’t love a bully? Well, Ms. Eells didn’t. She called up a few of the companies whose work Arlington Hardware had also borrowed or stolen (?) to let them know theirs, like hers, had been used to sell everything from T-shirts to sweats, folks like Coors and Harley Davidson, Rainier and Marlboro, AC/DC and Tim McGraw, formidable allies.

The irony of this is that Arlington, the city, has reimagined itself as a town that features public artworks from the river to its southern city limits, sculptures and murals, metalworks and fused glass installations. Maybe the hardware store was just embracing this aesthetic collaboration, despite the slogans featured on some of their clothing, fun stuff like the assault rifle with the words ‘Come and Take it’, or ‘If This Flag Offends You I’ll Help You Pack’, maybe not the friendliest or most inclusive.

In full disclosure, I am an artist myself. Or so I like to think. But even if the art isn’t museum-worthy, the art is mine, not some company’s to use to sell their merchandise. And no, I never applied for copyright on any of it. Don’t have to, don’t need to. The law is pretty clear, especially in this state. Common law copyright, look it up. What Arlington Hardware is probably doing right now if they haven’t already.

I can only hope they don’t see this little blog as harassment or defamation of their esteemed character. But hey, if you’re reading this, A. H., contact my sales staff for information on price lists for my designs. Cut you a helluva deal on the train station clock design with ‘Time to Wake Up’ underneath.

The Navajo Nation is upset. Seems some private rocket is going to haul cremated ashes up to their sacred moon. My sacred moon too. Probably lots of folks’ sacred moon. But theirs, so they claim, is a religious objection owing to the hard fact that earth’s satellite has always been a sacred object. The Hawaiians think the same of the volcano folks want to desecrate with an observatory. Golly, this opens up a wide door. First a volcano, then the moon, what’s next, all the stars in the galaxy?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not real keen on turning the lunar surface into a graveyard for rich folks’ ashes or caskets or whatever this private company is hauling up there. And while in my woke respectfulness of people’s right to worship the sun and the stars and most of Nature, it’s a Long Leap to laying claim to the Universe, even if I like to think my own claim is equally valid, not that I ever bought naming rights to a star like many did back when some company was selling trademarks.

Then again, maybe we should all get on board with the Navajos. We got so much space debris orbiting the planet we should complain about turning the atmosphere into our own planetary junkyard. Bad enough we filled Earth with plastics, from the North Pole to the South, all of us gunked up with nano-plastics just like every other creature on this fragile orb. Time maybe to make the moon off limits to our garbage and dead bodies.

But you know and I know too, the Navajo objections will fall on deaf ears and we’ll trash the moon same as we did our sacred little planet. The Musks and the Bezos will fly the rich there, corporations will lay claims to minerals and whatever else they can dig up, governments will build military outposts and orbit satellites there too. We might even have colonies up there. If we do, I don’t want them sending their ashes back here. We got our own mess, sacred or not.

In 2007 the County and Friends of Camano Island Parks asked the South End String Band if we would be willing to take on the role of caretakers for little Hutchison Park, a 5 acre parcel once the playground for juvenile delinquents, drug transactions and the occasional late night sex. Since it was the only county park on the South End and we were, after all, the South End house band, we said, yah shure, u betcha. In the beginning the band threw in whole heartedly, cleaned up the area and mowed the lawns. FOCIP brought a few volunteers in to widen the trails and put up signage. So what if they misspelled Hutchison, the guy’s name who donated the land.

Course, after the initial flurry of philanthropic excitement the Band sort of lost interest, not only in the Park but the band and the music too. Basically the way of bands. Probably the way of volunteers as well. So for the past 16 years the de facto role of park ranger fell to the banjo player, last guy standing, me and the fiddler who, unfortunately had moved off island and far from the idyllic South End. In that time more than a couple of lawnmowers have given their lives, one or two chainsaws have bit the dust, the caretaker has grown old and gnarly like a few of the second growth firs in the park, sculpture has been placed (and most stolen), a little library has been installed in the 1960’s phone booth that mysteriously appeared one year and trees, shrubs and flowers have been planted.

Admittedly, not many people use the Park, mostly dog walkers, midnight lovers and pharmaceutical salespeople. Rarely are the barbecue grills used. Grill, actually, since the second one was stolen the first week and never replaced by the county. Occasionally bikers rest there, once or twice picnickers. It’s a lonely place but it’s my place. This week I went on the FOCIP website looking at their list of county parks we maintain gratis for Island County. Hutchison was not one of them. So I went to Island County Parks looking for a map or a mention. Nada. Zip. Zilch. My park has been stolen from the records!! Happens all the time on the South End, you’re thinking. And me too.

What I can only assume is this: the County has abdicated its little park down here. For what reason, who can say? But I want to say this, being the ranger there for the past decade and a half, I’m publicly declaring the park mine by right of county abdication as well as adverse possession by yours truly. Skeeter Daddle Park. Nice ring to it, don’tcha think? Who’d have ever guessed volunteerism would have more than its own reward.

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

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

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

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

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

Thank God for medical science and the pharmacological industry. Finally, finally, they’ve discovered a weight loss drug. Turns out the medication for managing sugar levels in diabetes also kills the user’s appetite. Just what our narcissistic society needs in these turbulent times, an easy way to shed those pounds. No muss, no fuss, no exercise necessary. If you haven’t bought stock in the companies manufacturing this cure, sell your crypto right now and get a few shares. The very thing that makes you thin will make you rich….

We all think we’re overweight. We’re all a little anorexic. How could it be otherwise when we’re bombarded by fashion models and professional athletes, slim, fit, svelte, buffed, beautiful people. By comparison, hell yeah, we all ought to lose a few pounds, skip dessert, stop eating crap, get off the couch and head to the gym. But c’mon, this national pathology of poor self-esteem, all this fat shaming, the proliferation of diet fads and weightwatcher memberships, the obsession of all things weighed in pounds, it’s time to throw away the bathroom scales, stop checking the mirror and grow up, learn to live in your own skin and quit judging others.

So yeah, thanks Oprah, thanks for plastering your svelte new figure on your magazine and half the rags in America, telling your listeners and your readers how finally, finally, you can move beyond your shame at being the ideal weight you have in your fantasy. Just get that new drug, skip the exercise and the latest diet, shed your fat and hey, you too can be Oprah or whatever other role model you pick from People magazine, your shame will dissolve like an icicle in the sun. Happy days are finally here. And Oprah, thanks again for Dr. Phil and that other nutcase, Oz. Happy now?

The South End Gun Club meets every 3rd Thursday of the month, rain, shine, Hell or High Water. They have a short meeting, discuss New Bizness, welcome the new recruits (mostly women these days), then move right on out to the Range. Drinking used to be allowed, but after the incident with Fast Draw Davy, the club reluctantly voted to make abstinence a requirement. Probably a wise decision.

Davy was always, drunk or dead sober, a hothead. He could shoot the eyes off the Obama photo the Club loved to use for a target at 50 yards with everything from his Glock to a favorite semi-auto to a full auto. Some of the boyz had mixed feelings about this. No, not the President as target — they were almost universally hostile to a Muslim as Commander-in-Chief — but whether Davy should brandish his AR-15 at the Range, considering it was illegal to own a weapon of mass mayhem. But Davy had helped half the membership in conversion techniques and they felt somewhat reluctant to take a stand against a gun they themselves now owned … or coveted. Davy was damn proud of that machine and its undisputed firepower. He meant to show it off every chance he got.

The Range has a long and checkered history of late night firefights and high decibel debates, and the new arrivals to the adjoining properties, once pastures or woods, but now expensive McMansions whose professional owners liked their peace and quiet, didn’t much cotton to all these NRA zealots with their high caliber hi-jinx. As always, one man’s rights are another’s pain in the ass, but … welcome to the land of the free, home of the bravado.

When the sheriff’s deputies had come out on successive Thursday night meedings responding to the neighbors’ complaints that there was automatic weapon fire, Davy, being Davy, had become belligerent. He could quote the 4th Amendment backwards and forwards and by god, no tin star punk kid was going to tell him what gun he could or couldn’t own. Maybe the fact that he was holding his prized rifle in one hand a beer in the other set off alarm bells in Deppity Richards playbook, but fifteen minutes later every available cop on the island was parked with blue lights strobing at the Club’s back lawn next to the shooting range and they were moving in, shotguns up and safeties off, and for a few moments it looked like an O.K. Corral showdown. Everybody but Davy put their armaments on the ground — obviously this was out of hand.

Davy, though…. Davy seemed to be considering his options. Seriously considering them. Which, if you’re an officer of the law and you’ve asked an armed man once, in a not polite way, to drop his weapon, you are expecting an immediate acquiescence, not a fidgety wild-eyed hesitation. When Davy set his beer can down, the Gun Club stepped backwards almost as one crowd. The cops brought down their riot guns and holy moly, what seemed almost comical a minute ago, wasn’t at all funny right now.

Billy Wasserman, the current president of the Club, said, ‘Jesus Christ, Dave …” about the time Deputy Richards repeated his demand the gun be put down NOW!

Well, Davy did. The officers handcuffed him, put his AR-15 in a squad car trunk and that night’s practice on the Range turned into a late night conference where alcohol was banned from all future meetings. As well as illegal firearms…. Davy got his gun confiscated along with a steep fine and two years of probation. He got himself another semi-automatic, converted it, but he never tries to bring it to the Club. Just like the rest. Laws might be made to be broken, but not flaunted. Even on the wild South End.

For the past 35 years or so the mizzus and me throw a big New Year’s Party here on the South End, partly so we don’t get to know the sheriff’s deputies any better than we do now, which is what we tell the neighbors, but the real reason is a bit more shrouded in the mists of lost memories. I got a call today from Brent, an old friend now in Alaska, and it triggered a couple of neurons into firing spasmodically once more and voila, I was back in, oh, 1985 down at the shack with just a few of us struggling mightily to make it to midnight so we could toast the new year and pass out in our bunks.
My brother was here with his wife and we had Brent and Liz visiting from Portland. My brother is what you’d call a spark plug for party stuff. Meaning, when conversations lag, he springs into instant action. ‘Let’s go around the room,’ he says, ‘and tell what the best day of the year was for each of us.’ So Brent goes first and he relates a warm summer day when he and his collie were at the park and the sun was shining and the Frisbees were sailing and it was just a golden day, a boy and his pooch, fetching the Frisbee. Not maybe what my brother had in mind, I bet, but just a hippie dippy zen day that stood out for Brent more than some birthday or Christmas or the day he got a raise or the usual dopey stuff we trot out when you play Name Your Best Day.
I don’t remember what my favorite day was. I don’t remember Karen’s or my brother’s or my brother’s wife’s favorite day. But I remember Liz’s turn, Brent’s girlfriend who I’d know a long time. A real long time. A way too long a time. And as the clock ticked glacially toward 1986, gears needing oil, glasses waiting for that toast and then goodnight everybody, my brother sez, ‘Okay, Liz, what was your favorite day?’ And to this day I can remember Liz turning to Brent who was rubbing his collie’s head, probably still warm in his remembrance of a summer day in the park, and the clock’s hands stopping forever, the wood stove throwing a heat nothing like what she was focusing on poor Brent with a laser look that would burn through titanium like it was cheap plastic, and our glasses with champagne broke in the sudden stillness before she said, ‘My favorite day …. (and the ‘my’ was a small caliber bullet) My favorite day was the day we got back together, Brent.’
Maybe you’ve had a New Year’s ‘Party’ like that. The room emptying of air and sound and mirth, as if a stopper had been pulled from the tub of our happiness and no matter how hard you try, and Brent desperately tried, that stopper won’t go back in and all the merriment drains out by your feet and deep down in your cold curling guts you know, you know absolutely this is not the way you wanted to ring in the next year. You know what they mean by ill-omened now and all the months to come you will dread the next New Years’ Eve the way you would dread death itself. And of course Liz and Brent broke up and Brent moved to the furthest corner of the earth and my brother admitted maybe that wasn’t the best holiday icebreaker of all time and we decided either to forsake New Year’s altogether or bring so many people in we couldn’t possibly go around the room and play parlor games like Stab Your Lover.
And that is how the South End got its gala New Year’s Extravaganza Potluck and BYOB Party. And of course, you’re invited! Unless you got some serious issues with your girlfriend or boyfriend, lover or husband, wife or mistress. Then I think you got a new parlor game for you and a few select friends. Happy New Year anyway.

Fat Jack’s was the Second Hand shop half a mile down from South End Realty. Jack wasn’t fat and the second hand furniture and tools were mostly 9th or 10th hand. You wanted a kitchen chair all the glue had dried up, Jack had a couple. Dull chisels, hammers with half a claw broke off, screwdrivers with a broken handle, saws missing teeth, power tools without a cord, Jack had the tool for you. “Better’n that crap you buy new nowadays,” he’d say if you mentioned the defect, hoping to get a better price. You never — and I mean Never — got a good price at Fat Jack’s.

Fat Jack’s was a garage with the sliding door seized in the overhead position, a shed off the side and a small barn leaning precariously into a predictable future. Jack lived alone in the house where a few rooms were filled with artifacts, clothes, antiques and nondescript items he apparently thought enough to haul inside with him. Us customers could look past shelves of unpriced housewares, knickknacks and baby toys right into the dirty pots and pans breeding in the sink and on the filthy peeling countertops. Only the insane or the hideously desperate, would ask to use the public restroom. It was rumored even Jack used the woods behind the barn.

The year Jack called it quits, he had his Going Out of Business Sale. Three quarters of the South End showed up on a rainy windy December weekend and by Saturday Miller Time, most of the barn was empty, the shed bare to its dirt floors and the garage was ready for a couple of cars to come home. What he didn’t sell, he burned Sunday out back in the tall wet grass of the field. What didn’t burn, well, it’s still there, waiting for the 30th Century archeologists.

Fat Jack was the last of a breed, although we didn’t know that then. He was a salter of mines, a bait and switcher, a snake oil salesman, a Tennessee horse trader. He lived for the deal and he rarely wound up on the thin side of one. E-Bay and the internet pretty much ended services like his, relegating him and his con artistry to rural backwashes far from the nearest pawnshops and the perforated memories of geezers like myself.

When we first pow-wowed about retaking Hutchison Park away from the punk kids who used the hidey-hole for their illicit goings-on, I met with the woman who ran the Island County Parks. Me and a fellow artist who was also involved with myself in transforming the Old Blue Building by the tennis courts, another project with County. We had Big Visions back then, let me tell you, a merry band of artists who might do aesthetic make-overs of parks and ugly county buildings. We’d built the Visitor Center and Art Park, we’d established a public art program for the schools, we were on our high horses and hoo boy, we thought the future was so bright we bought shades.

This would have been 2007. A few of us gathered in the overgrown parking lot of the park to brainstorm how we might improve the little 5 acres, make it the Crown Jewel of the South End park system. Okay, the only jewel in the South End park system. We discussed some tree cutting, blackberry removal, possible new plantings, grass seeding, picnic tables, the usual park management stuff. At some point it was made clear that a perimeter fence would be necessary, by code apparently, chain link. Thinking out loud I wondered if maybe we could install our own fence, an art fence of sorts, maybe something that would de-institutionalize the thing and my fellow artist asked if we did that, could funds that might have been used for the cyclone fence be allocated to our fence.

Maybe it was a bad day for the Park Chief, I don’t know. Things had been going uneventfully enough, ideas thrown out, some rejected, some considered, the usual give and take, but all of us there to make improvements. My cohorts in the South End String Band had agreed to be caretakers, lawnmowers, tree trimmers and the like. The art crowd would throw in. All in all a fine collaboration, maybe even a paradigm for government partnering with the community. But the mention of money, the crass notion of it, the grimy reference, well, Ms. Park Lady came unglued. ‘You’re all alike,’ she fairly shouted, ‘always looking for the money. Well, that’s not how it works. We’ll put in a chain link fence and that’s that.’

My artist pal was stunned into near stuttering incoherence, tried to make it clear she wasn’t grubbing for the pesos, she only meant …. But our Park Lady was only cranking up. No, she was sick and tired of this game of trying to profit off them, sick … and … tired …of these self serving ….

‘Whoa’, I said, hands up in a gesture of Stop This. ‘Let me get something straight here. We’re the ones volunteering our time. We’re the ones not being paid to stand here right now. We’re the ones who will be mowing and landscaping. All we asked was would there be some possibility of using money that was intended for park upgrades for maybe art that would substitute. It’s done all the time in the public art realm. Same budget, just pay for materials. If that’s your idea of greed ….’

It was. That was 16 years ago. We’ve added some sculpture, we’ve planted a few shrubs and trees, we’ve maintained that park mowing and bucking fallen trees, created new trails, added a phone booth little library and since then we’ve never seen the Park Chief again. Okay with me. I’m a little busy grubbing for money elsewhere.