The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Just up the road from where I buy my homegrown eggs, being too lazy to raise chickens anymore, there’s a sign that says: URIGANDA. I suspect it’s Hindu, roughly translated: Dead End. You wouldn’t know it was there except there’s a constant stream of traffic in and out and it IS the last place on the dirt dead end road. I figured at first just another house going up, tradesmen going in. But I was wrong. It is, in actuality, a commune.

More factually, it’s a chain commune. They have franchises down near Seattle and Gomorrah, but rumor on the dirt street is that they’re hoping to feed the flock with what they grow up here on the South End. Their neighbor, a goatherder and cheesemaker met them and offered her expertise, but they’ve retreated back into the nettles for now, no doubt googling info on Nubians and Alpines and hybrid goats with milk yields in gallons, not quarts. Today’s communes, I’m fairly certain, aren’t consulting Whole Earth Catalogue or Mother Earth News for hippie bargains or tips on how to build a greenhouse out of discarded shower curtains from the local thrift stores.

I don’t know one small thing about them to pass on as juicy gossip. They haven’t taken over the county government like the Bhagwan down in Antelope, Oregon back in the ‘80’s. They don’t patrol the perimeter with armed paranoid zombie members. They don’t poke their heads up much at all. Seems to me they came to the exact right place for the exact same reasons as the rest of us refugees from corporate America. They just like to flock up more than us apparently.

I say welcome to the party! And good luck to you folks no matter what flavor Kool-Aid you prefer. Life’s a winding road and I guess we’ve all looked for a good roadmap or an intuitive GPS to help us navigate the shifting terrains and the dirt road potholes. Like us, you’ve found a detour. Hopefully the South End will prove more a destination than a wayside, but remember, there’s always another Path if this one proves too difficult. Worst case, you can do like a lot of us who arrived with starcharts in our heads and dreams of spirits guiding us. You can always become an artist. And if that doesn’t cut it, Windy Rear has plenty of room for another real estate agent.

Sure, she seems like the Great White Woman, billionaire artist, role model to millions, what’s not to admire? She’s even got a football hero boyfriend. Can you say Hetero Love? But trust me, the MAGA hate her … and for good reason! She’s not what she seems. She’s a menace dressed to kill, a Barbie with a brain that’s gone rogue, a femme fatale who plots to use the Super Bowl to bring America to its knees. She’s the Manchurian Candidate, a shill for the progressives hoping to invade the minds of her followers. She’s going to ask them … are you sitting down? … she’s going to ask them … to vote.

On the surface it sounds innocuous enough. Just go out and cast a vote, exert your American right to go to the ballot box, do the patriotic thing. But the MAGA know better. They always know better. She’s a wrecking ball in tights, a destroyer in sexy garb, a songwriter singing the death dance of democracy. They see through her little game. Riches aren’t enough for her, fame isn’t enough for her, a football star boyfriend isn’t enough for her. No, she wants Power. She wants what they want, control of America. But not for Good, not like their Chosen One, the One denied the last election when it was stolen from them. She wants to keep the Evil Man in the White House.

Today is Super Bowl Sunday. All eyes in America will turn to the duel in Las Vegas. If you think this is about football, take the blinders off! Will Taylor be in the stands? Will her boyfriend be on the winning side? Will they pass secret messages between themselves, messages that will decide the fate of this once proud country? Watch for yourselves but in the end MAGA will decipher the clues. MAGA will tell you who won. And more importantly, who lost. In any event it won’t be a football team. Football will be collateral damage. All part of her sinister plan. Enjoy your woke Bud Lite. If you can.

Maybe you’re one of the few people left who doesn’t listen to Taylor Swift’s meteoric music, just a person who reads about her and about her boyfriend, Travis Kelce,the Kansas City Chief’s star tight end. Music and the NFL. A mega pop star and a football hero, what could possibly be more American? What more, if you were a patriot, a true one, could you want for the Patriot Poster? Attractive kids, filthy rich, admired by millions, perfect smiles, perfect people. Who’d have thought they were out to destroy the country that loves them.

But they are doing just that! Well, not yet. Their insidious little scheme is still to be hatched, but don’t for one commie minute think they won’t set it into motion before the coming election this fall. If the Chiefs win the Super Bowl, bet your Grammy the pair will launch the most nefarious plot to take over the White House and possibly the Congress too. Trust the folks at Fox News, they see the conspiracy for what it is, nothing less than a brazen takedown of the government. Swift has shown her true colors in the past when she asked her fan base to register to vote. That fan base, unless you live in a colorless world devoid of social media, is huge, millions upon millions who would gladly obey her every command. And her command? To vote for Sleepy Joe. To vote to end democracy as we know it. To vote to destroy America! That’s what her command will be.

And the creepy part? They seem on the surface to be exactly what America idolizes, successful, clean cut, smart rich people. We all want to be them, don’t we? We all want what they want. We all want millions of fans, millions of dollars, millions of Instagram viewers. Don’t we? Of course we do. But don’t be fooled, don’t let those white tooth smiles deceive you. They want to destroy the very country that made them famous. That, my friends, is what is so terribly creepy.

Walter walked into the South End Diner last Friday morning carrying his Winchester 30-30 under his arm, a rifle meant primarily for hunting deer. He’s a card carrying NRA member and he takes his membership as seriously as a truck driving Teamster or an artist in the Camano Arts Association. Walter thinks the government wants to take his arsenal away from him and apparently, to protect his right to bear arms, he intends to bear them in the Diner.

Anita rolls her eyes from behind the cash register when he walks in with his unintentionally comic John Wayne swagger. “Whatcha got there, Pilgrim?” she asks. As owner of the café, she’s basically the sheriff, judge and jury in this one horse town. She makes the laws here and Walter, well … Walter’s not sure if the 2nd Amendment actually applies in the Diner with Anita at the City Limits, but by God, he intends to make a point and the Constitution should back him up and all the other Gun Toters in America and Anita, well, Anita can just shove it, he figures.

Like usual, Walter figures wrong. Anita holds a hand up like a traffic cop stopping cars. “We already killed the meat, Walter. Bacon, burgers, chicken, they’re dead. You want to be sure, order em well done. But … you aren’t hauling that gun in my restaurant, I don’t care if it’s loaded, empty or stuck up your keester, no way, no how. Comprende?”

Walter starts into quoting the Amendment but Anita’s out from behind the counter before he can hit the ‘right to’ and she’s got him by a twist of hair, turning him like a rusty screw toward the door and he’s yowling in pain so much she lets go. “Dammit, Walt, you give me indigestion, you really do. Give me the rifle and you can have it when you’ve finished your breakfast. But I can’t have the Wild West here with families and tourists. Take your protest to Stanwoodopolis, if you need to demonstrate. I got a business to run, probably into the ground, but I sure don’t need your help.”

In the end Walter’s politics took 2nd fiddle to eggs and bacon and his usual chicken fried steak. And Walter never brought his Winchester in the Diner again. But I don’t know about the Starbucks in town. Altho …there’s probably some enterprising entrepreneur who’s opened up a Barista Balllistic just to cater to the Walters of the world.

We were down at the Columbia Gorge trailhead last year, emptying bladders and filling water bottles. A woman emerged from the restroom and whispered to her companion in a conspiratorial voice, “There’s no flush.” Her friend shook her head in incomprehension. “Not working?” she asked. “No, there’s nothing but a hole.” “A hole?” her friend asked incredulously. “Just a hole in the ground and no flush.”

I felt like a Cro Magnon listening in on aliens from some advanced galaxy. How could they possibly understand my dependence on a polluting gas engine? Or something as totally primitive as a cellphone? These two debutantes had missed their exit, apparently, on the way to the Ritz. A pit toilet was incomprehensible and if it weren’t such a sordid subject matter, it would have made for the nucleus of many a future discussion over bridge and tea at the Country Club. “But where, Charlotte? where does it Go???”

Indeed. Not that our two ladies could answer that question in regard to the plumbing matrix from their Beverly Hills manse to the sewer system it connects to. What matters is that it be whisked away, out of sight, out of smell. We don’t know how things work anymore — but so long as they do, we don’t need to care. The world is less and less natural to us; it’s electrons and silicon, computerized and digitized, all packaged in Black Boxes that create the new universe.

The trouble is, Charlotte, we’re still of the natural world. Body functions, pheromones, appetites, all that genetic coding of mammalian evolution in a world that’s more and more alien to us. We’ll fix that eventually. We’ll adapt to the virtual world, the one we make not so much in our own image as a clever cyber image. The natural stuff will be obsolete soon and we’ll replace the old ‘parts’ with new and improved engineered ones. The robots aren’t going to take over us humans. Us humans are going to become cyborgs.

And Charlotte, the best part is you won’t need a flush. Or a toilet either.

You can tell volumes about South End history by examining our garbage evolution, sorta like counting rings on an old growth fir or the layer of ice deposits in a glacier. Science, a powerful tool. Well, for about half of us these days….

I still find old bottle dumps on our place — and back in the woods there are ravines that have entire cars, bedsteads, wringer washers, complete antique stores if this stuff wasn’t all rusted half away now. Back in the disco 70’s, we still drove our garbage up to Camano Hill where Frank guarded the official dump, pulling out future artifacts he brought home south of me, most of which are probably still there in a strata or two beneath the 21st century. Quite a few South Enders I know like to keep most everything they ever owned — usually just outside the back door where the nettles and blackberries claim it all. It’s an archeologist’s dream, for sure, someday centuries hence.

When the county closed the dump and sent Frank into an early retirement, we got a couple of coin operated dumpsters at our present location about 1980. Drive up, drop your quarters in, a lid lifted and a piston crunched what you tossed into an oozing pancake. Okay for a few trash bags, but not for, oh, roof shingles or construction debris. Pretty quick we got scales and semi-trailer size bins.

We even got primitive recycle. This was when you could sell aluminum and bottles back in town … and a lot of us penny pinchers did. At the dump you sorted your glass by color and watched out for yellowjackets drunk on stale beer and wine dregs. You had to tear the labels off all your cans, cut off the bottom and crush em first. The trash Nazis checked, believe me. A lot of work to throw away your bottles and cans back then…. Now it all goes into the Omni-Bin, paper, bottles, cans, boxes, all of it sorted out somewhere, somehow, by someone or something.

Most folks now have garbage pick-up, big green Waste Management trucks stop in once a week by the driveway, curbside service, E-Z payments. Me, I like hauling my own litter, oh, about every few months. Otherwise, how would I keep tabs on the island civilization? History, after all, is about half what we take to the dump. The other half is still back in the woods.

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 ….