The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I can’t tell you how many people think I ought to retire, figuring maybe I’m mostly washed up, too old, too tired, too burned out. Retirement’s a lot like religions, you want to share your newfound paradise with those who haven’t yet found the Light and the Way. Either that or they feel guilty they called it quits while I toil valiantly on. Okay, they probably think I’m stupid.

Most of my buddies have thrown in the towel. Years ago. It’s hard for them to understand why anybody wouldn’t. I get it. If I’d worked some thankless job 40 hours a week, I’d probably … wait, I did work a thankless job. You try making art and worse, try selling it! Thankless? Don’t even get me started. I could write the Wikipedia article.

Let’s face it — I’m not going to get a pension. Social Security, yeah, but see how much you’d get if most of your wage earning years were less than 3 figures. Not that I’m complaining, I’ll take whatever the returns on my crappy investment in myself were. Serves me right, I guess.

An artist — and this is just an unscientific survey — probably makes way more at the tail end of a career than the early years. Dead artists make even more. Not that it would do this one much good. All those glass panels left down at the studio, sure, quadruple the worth, buy me a Cadillac coffin why don’tcha?

Meanwhile I’m hoping for some returns on work pre-demise, maybe the best earning years, maybe not. Okay, probably not. Nobody went into art thinking to get rich, trust me on that and engrave it on my tombstone. HERE LIES A STARVING ARTIST.
Course, he didn’t die of malnutrition, he died because he refused to retire.

Maybe it was the long winter and no getaways to relieve the solar deficit on the rain-sodden South End. Or maybe I just needed an excuse to build another structure on the property, some companion piece for the other 25 or so. Could be too it was just boredom, give me something to do while waiting for spring. In any case I decided to build a greenhouse.

Now we’ve had two prior greenhouses. One we dismantled and one we loaded on a flatbed truck and donated to a small neighborhood community garden near the Head. Looked like a mobile Gitmo with those neighbors holding it down on the two mile drive south. Those two greenhouses weren’t mine – they were mizzus’. This one, by god, would be mine and I wouldn’t be giving it away.

Back behind a shed near where the woods starts I had about 50 tempered sliding door glass panels, some from the previous greenhouse, some from the glass roof in the shack, some must’ve been the result of nocturnal matings since I can’t imagine where so many came from. But I had plenty enough to build two or three greenhouses when I move into commercial growing in my golden years. For now, one would suffice.

Sure, I could have constructed one the usual size you see for sale at the local nurseries … but I had bigger plans. Bought some treated lumber, plenty of cedar fencing boards and went to work. Mostly cleaning off years of scum on those stashed glass door panels…. But a week later and voila’ I had myself a 10 foot by 15 foot greenhouse, stained glass door and side panels, stained glass in the back wall, work benches on one side, growing area on the other. I’d barely closed this in when the sun came out on a 50 degree day and the inside temperature hit over 80. For all you global warming deniers, all I can say is go pound sand in the Sahara.

So I realized I needed a way to vent this accumulated heat if a 75 degree day would fry my tomatoes on the vine in this hothouse. Cut a couple of openings in the back and made hinged cedar door panels. We’ll see what happens on a really hot day. For all you Deniers, good luck cutting a vent hole in the earth’s roof. Course by then I won’t need this greenhouse….

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.

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.

Right on the heels of the ex-President’s high end sneaker offerings, he’s followed up that sales pitch with the USA Bible, the King Donald version, asking price a mere $60. I suspect it doesn’t have all ten commandments, maybe not even half of the originals. And if you thought maybe it would have pictures featuring porn stars and ex-wives to jumpstart sales, you’d be disappointed. Somehow — and forgive my cynicism — I just don’t see this Pres-in-Exile as a Bible hawker. Sure, there are evangelicals who subscribe to the idea that he’s the Orange Jesus, the latest Savior, the Sneaker Salesman sent by God to fix the sins of America and smite his enemies. Maybe they’ll buy that Bible.

There have been Trump vodkas, Trump perfumes, Trump Universities, Trump steaks — the man is worth billions but he’ll stoop to making a few extra bucks on about anything. Maybe this is how you get rich in America. I sure didn’t so maybe I’m just jealous. But c’mon, Bibles? Sneakers? I’ll say this, our country will vote in about anybody. Movie stars, reality TV hosts, racists, serial liars. George Santos says he’s going to run as an Independent in New Yawk after the House booted him out as the consummate con artist. I guess that’s what democracy is, the inalienable right to vote the Ignorant ticket.

Our cities are filling up with tents for the homeless, poverty is pandemic, there are still way too many people without health insurance, the planet is sizzling, there are wars in Gaza and Ukraine, you bet folks are looking for someone, anyone, to come to the rescue. Maybe the answer is the Trump Bible. Maybe we should buy those sneakers.

My own advice is this: buy the Trump Vodka, mix a tall one and pray this year passes quickly. It’s looking like a long strange trip….

I was up at a farm on the North End recently and a couple of us homesteaders got to swapping chicken stories. Roosters, mostly. You think maybe chickens are silly little cacklers scratching up worms and grubs for dinner or they’re benign little birds dropping eggs for your breakfast, you haven’t been properly introduced to the male of the species.

Maybe you’ve heard the expression Cock of the Walk? That’s these bad boys. Vicious attackers of the unwary. Aggressive, fearless birds that come at you with beak and spurs. They’ll open you up before you can say chicken cacciatore. And you’ll never turn your back on one again, trust me.

Well, we swapped a few whoppers before Professor Bob mentioned he’d been up to Darrington for the cockfights awhile back, a couple hundred Tarheels betting their moonshine earnings on birds bred for vicious violence. When I first came to Camano Island, the cops were busy busting cockfighting rings in Stanwood and Gomorrah. I know what you’re thinking: didn’t this sort of bloodsport die out in the 1800’s? And the answer is apparently NO. Down south where I grew up, they fight dogs in Dixie. Yeah, it seems barbaric. But … we still got boxing and now we got kickboxing. And if you want mayhem, tune in some Sunday to NFL football. They’ll study us someday like we were Romans, professional gladiators. Only real difference is we figured how to make it profitable.

Maybe the cockfighters need to sell television rights. Line up some advertisers. Sell beer and hotdogs. Make it respectable for more than the Tarheels and a few UW professors. On the other hand, maybe it wouldn’t generate a mass audience. After all, we got politics now 24/7 if you like your violence vicious. Course, maybe they should sell beer and peanuts and advertising rights. Monday Night Congressional Cockfights. Probably take a few months to balance the budget with the profits. Think about it is all I’m asking.

I must’ve been about 10 years old one April Fool’s Day back around 1960 when I came downstairs for my bowl of tasty and non-nutritious cereal. My mom waited til all us boys were face deep in our General Mills products before she announced she’d just heard on the radio that school was canceled today. You want your cereal to snap crackle and pop, this is how you do it. No school! Free at last, free at last, an entire day to spend on our own mischief. Hallelujah!

Needless to say we were jubilant, hopping on one foot then the other, clapping hands, laughing like baboons. Until finally she couldn’t help herself, she’d been waiting for the precise moment when she could pop our happy balloon, hollering April Fools! Call it sadism, call it cruel — we weren’t amused at our childish gullibility but you best believe our dear mom laughed herself nearly sick. People need psychotherapy for less trauma than this. Years after even.

Doesn’t seem like April Fool’s Day holds the same place in our modern culture. Maybe moms still jerk their kids’ chain, I don’t know, but I suspect we’re more reluctant to pull rugs out from under one another. We got the internet to do that. Social media. Biased news. Now even Artificial Intelligence. Every damn day is April Fool’s. And you ain’t seen nothin yet!!

Wait’ll you get the coming political ads, realistic animation of an opponent speaking in his own voice, all plausible, all looking and sounding exactly what you’d expect … but all bogus, all created to deceive you. And it will — at first. Every day, like the boy who cried wolf. Until you won’t believe anything, you won’t trust your own eyes or your own ears, you’ll just finally believe whatever you want to believe, why not? And the funny part — the machines will be the ones who get the last laugh. April Fool, Human!

Stanwoodopolis is a fine town. IF you’re from there or still are…. If you’re not, it’s a little less than friendly. When I first moved here I had a buddy roll in and I said, hey, let’s go to town for some pizza and beers and a few laughs, just like the old days back in Wisconsin. So about 8 or 9 at night we rolled into Jeno’s Pizza, what’s now Jimmy’s, a family place. Jeno’s had a liquor bar and all the 21 year olds liked to drink there and get sloshed quicker. Rough place some weekends.

Me and my pal ordered a pitcher of beer and a pizza. We were the only two in the joint, it being a Monday night, We did a little catching up on the old days, ordered a second pitcher and pretty soon we were laughing and reminiscing and laughing some more. Pizza came and we ate and told more war stories, laughing so hard our pizza grew cold. Pretty soon we noticed a policeman watching us. Wasn’t much ELSE to watch other than the cook and the waitress.

Some folks think cops are there to protect THEM. I’ve never really thought that way. I mostly think they’re there to protect THEM from ME. Maybe it’s the 60’s, you know, tear gas, riots, cops and National Guard rioting too. I just like to avoid the law and if that means going the speed limit and behaving myself, it’s a small price to pay. In fact, I recommend it to most of you citizens.

The cop watched us for 10 minutes or so, mostly us telling jokes and stories , sitting in a back booth, nobody to bother. He finally went over to our waitress/bartender and said, “They seem okay to me.” Our waitress obviously didn’t think so, but the officer left and we were alone with Miss Sourpuss. I guess she preferred the drunk kids fighting in the parking lot after being overserved — you know, so long as they were Locals.

We paid our bills, left a tip even, and drove back to the shack. I never went back much to Jeno’s. And tell you the truth, I don’t go to Jimmy’s either. I’ve decided once an Outsider, always an Outsider. I think we both

The Umpcrickomish live in government housing in the valley they once had a name for but don’t anymore. All of us in UpCreek would live there if we could imagine a reservation or remember our elders or if television wasn’t invented because we’re all part of the same tribe, we just don’t know it. Charlie Johnson, who owns the Otter Creek Trading Post, who sells us our cigarettes and canned meat and our 24 ounce high alcohol beer, he knows we’re all kin whether we’re great grandsons of immigrant loggers or the grandparents of native babies left in our care by drug addict parents. We all would dream the Ghost Dance but the ghosts are all us now and the drums long ago stopped beating. Charlie, just like the rest of us, stopped Spirit Chasing and went after the money.

There’s a playground in the center of the dilapidated government houses, mostly rusty chainswings and a slide that’s tilted toward Whitehorse Mountain where the concrete beneath it heaved over and cracked. Walking by the other evening, I watched Jimmy Walks-the-Talk sitting on the rotted seat of one of the swings, head bent forward, pushing himself slowly back and forth in the fading winter light which looked to him like his future. Laughter left this playground a long time ago and took its friend Hope with it.

Maybe if the reservation had been nearer the freeway, we could’ve built a casino, sold cheap gas and untaxed cigarettes. But we’re a world away from an interstate teeming with gamblers and chainsmokers. No one would come to our Las Vegas. But those are the dreams we dream now, not the ones we’ve forgotten. The kids have computers now and their own cellphones. They live where the river has dried up and the mountains have crumbled and the skies are grey with microwave grids. So do we. The real world is dissolving into the past. We don’t see it yet, but so are we.

Jimmy, I know without seeing him now, is swinging in the dark, eyes closed, sightless as the windows across the unmowed football field with no curtains and the flickering blue electronic lights. He should go home. I should go home too. We’ve just forgotten where it is, is all.

As an itinerant and persistent South End researcher, I was called this week by my old pal Bob Friel, the author of the Barefoot Bandit, now a documentarian for an environmental group up on Orcas Island, the Sea Docs. They’re making all manner of films about the Salish Sea and had heard South Camano was where the grey whales came into our shallow tidelands to feed on the ghost shrimp, scooping huge craters of sand into their baleens and capturing tonight’s dinner, thousands of the mud shrimp. Needless to say, Bob and his pal Joe Gaydos needed an experienced guide for the hike out to the whale holes to avoid the ever dangerous quicksand shallows that swallow boots and shoes, threatening to trap the less vigilant adventurer. Plus they needed a dummy who would carry half their gear. Which was about as much as what a Hollywood movie scene would require….

The grey whales migrate every year from Mexico to the Arctic but some take a detour into our neck of the woods … or sea … to fatten up for a month or so before hurrying to catch up to the herd already up north. We got about one zillion sand shrimp out front here, so many the sand is porous from their burrows, making walking out to the eelgrass where the crabs rule a hazardous and arduous endeavor. The old timers here remember playing baseball on the flats when the sand was firm but in my 47 years here I haven’t seen any ball games out there. Or many people either, the quicksand is plenty intimidating.

Well, we did some filming, scooped up a few shrimp, wandered the whale holes and pondered the whole whale/shrimp relationship to firmness of the beach and health of the greys. The boyz had hip and chest waders recently purchased for this excursion but I went barefoot, a nod, I suppose to the Bandit of Bob’s book. Three hours later I couldn’t feel my toes. Small price to pay for science. But in the course of filming and studying, I realized there was a bias favoring the whales. The poor shrimp, well, they were just a food source for our heroic cetaceans. Didn’t seem right, didn’t seem fair. Granted, I was freezing more than my toes off and maybe my deductive reasoning was being sucked up along with my feet out there on the sand barrens, but dammit, an injustice is an injustice! And so I have vowed to start my own environmental foundation, the Save Our Shrimp, SOS!

Bob and Joe had collected a few of the clawed creatures from dredging the sand with their homemade suction gun, a remodeled giant water squirter, deposited them in a special container and when they left the scene, drove the samples back to Orcas. Don’t think for a South End minute I didn’t understand their motives. They were bringing undocumented immigrants back to the San Juan Island beaches in hopes of luring the grey whales to their islands. They were shanghaiing our shrimp for their own nefarious plot!

This cannot stand! Donate now to the tax deductible Save Our Shrimp foundation. The San Juans may not include us in their archipelago, but we’re no pushovers either. Instead of an apartheid archipelago, wouldn’t it have been easier just to include us? Rather than steal our shrimp.