The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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.

One of the latest trends in trend-crazy America is to create a personal library in our domiciles. Not to amass a collection from our reading list (if we even have one) but to impress our visitors with volumes of literature and non-fiction. A well-stocked library should subtly send the message that its owners are erudite readers with broad and eclectic tastes. Sprinkle in a few Booker award novels among the classics, add some poetry anthologies, spice the biblioteca up with an encyclopedic array from the sciences, philosophies, a few avant-garde pieces and certainly oversized art books. Wow them with your extensive and expensive tastes!

But before you hurry out to your nearest Goodwill to find the raw materials for your Jeffersonian library, l should add that if you really want to impress your friends and neighbors, just piling dog-eared books on a make-shift shelf really isn’t going to do the trick. No, you need the equivalent of an oak paneled room, floor to ceiling shelving, preferably behind glass and if you have the ideal height, one of those rolling ladders necessary to access the hard-to-reach collection of rare books up at the top. First editions are a must and signed copies de rigueur in these unenlightened times of Google and Wickipedia. You are a person of discriminating tastes, my friend, not one of the yammering yokels who would ask why they would need a community library when they have a laptop.

Suffice it say it would be imperative to have a well-used armchair with adequate lighting beside it as well as a sturdy stand with one or more books ‘in progress’ even if you never plan to open another book to read in your entire life. The gesture is what counts. And hopefully your guests will never query you as to that current reading. If so, simply tell them you have only begun Chapter One and to make judgement at so early a stage would be foolish. You, needless to say, are not foolish. The library itself will attest to that. No, you sir are of finer mettle, a lord in the land of the Kindle, a giant among the unread. Relish your place above the unwashed masses. You’ve earned it!

Well, it’s a sad day down here on the South End for many of the faithful congregation who worshipped every Sunday with the man we called Father Freddy. Father Freddy was summoned home far too early to the Halls of Heaven this week and his sudden departure was a terrible shock to his many followers, many of whom have held vigil at the make-shift church that once was the Tyee Grocery. Candles flickered in the old concrete block store, giving a mournful reminder to traffic out on the highway that one of our own has passed.

Father Freddy died the way he lived, doing what he loved. He was what the press called — with so little real understanding — a Nettle Handler, one of those men who believed that the Word of God could be divined through manipulation of the dangerous weed. Every Sunday, as his congregation held their collective breaths, Father Freddy would grab those eight foot stalks of Itching Torment and squeeze Testimony from each and every one as the congregation moaned and swayed and sang and prayed. Every Sunday, until this last, Father Freddy would wrassle those stinging stalks to their Rightful Place, prone against the homemade pulpit of stacked Coca-Cola crates left over from Tyee Grocery’s halcyon days.

“Get thee BACK, you poisonous serpents,” he’d yell, wrapped in their toxic embrace. “You hold no fear for those assembled here!” he’d holler, soon to be victorious. And as One, the entire flock, exhausted from exhortation, would wail their Hosannahs on High, their faith once more confirmed and restored.

Last Sunday, Father Freddy succumbed to the hideous stings of a 10 foot monster he’d grown under halogens in the nettlearium behind his trailer, a greenhouse filled with stingers of every size and variety. Parishioners wanted to call 911, but Fred avowed that his faith would sustain him. Horrified, they watched him slowly scratch himself to death. Services will be held this coming Saturday in Father Fred’s special grove of wild nettles back in the ravine behind the church. Gloves are recommended. Donations can be made to the Nettle Survivor Network in the name of the Nettlecostal Church. Father Fred, I know, will be Sorely missed!!