The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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 ….

Now as you might’ve guessed, I’m almost always in favor of any and all new technologies, unproven or not. Get those government regulations out of the launch path and let the good old profit motive dictate the future. As we well know in this Job Creating culture we love, let the marketplace rule. If you can’t trust a capitalist, who CAN you trust?

I just read they got a new 3-D printer for creating new life forms. Program in a funky DNA sequence , load up the amino acid mix and hit a button. Pretty quick you got an iridescent houseplant or a 6 legged, 4 eared puppy, whatever you want. Experiments are fine. A few new viruses introduced out among the billions we got already the old fashioned way, well, what’s the harm? Might be some human-friendly ones in there and that hobby lab you got turns into the next venture-capitalized pharma farm. The possibilities are endless. The profit potential immense! Sure, the naysayers will worry about some 3-D printout creating the next pandemic, but hey, nothing ventured, nothing gained. You think God didn’t roll the dice?? Check out some of these South Enders we got down here ….

I heard this week Amazon wants to use drones to deliver their goods. The Star Trek teleporter isn’t on-line yet, I guess, so this is their fallback. Oh, I suppose the Luddites will fight this. Skies filled with more drones than starlings. Collisions in congested areas. Free gifts for the earthbound after the crashes, if nothing else. Put some armaments on these birds and UPS package theft on unguarded porches ought to drop significantly.

The future is in the rearview now, closer than it appears maybe, but we’re accelerating fast and there’s no time in this multi-tasked, info-deluged world to start worrying about the dearth of deep analysis. Fasten your seatbelt, download a program for an experimental lunch and keep your twitter feed on 24/7. It’s a brave new world and you don’t have the luxury of fear. Sit back and enjoy the ride.

Once again our intrepid entrepreneurial spirit has raised its banner on the globally connected South End. In the face of a newly invigorated craft distilling industry across the state, our own liquor suppliers have risen to the challenge. Admittedly hobbled by government laws and regulations set by the State Liquor Board and unable to advertise for fear of police intervention, they have been forced to raise the bar once more in order to compete with their well-funded and legitimate adversaries.

Just last evening I was huddle at my kitchen table with Whisky Bob, a moonshiner of some repute down here for his double distilled mashes, a white lightning so powerful Bob enforces his No Smoking ordinance with serious vigilance. If a ‘client’ ignores the admonition, Bob tells them the story of old man Jeffries who tried lighting his cigarette with a mason jar of High Octane Hooch open in his lap driving home to his doublewide in O-Zi-Ya. He survived, but his eyebrows never grew back and without going into gory graphics, let’s just say the miracle drug Viagra was of little use thereafter. For years he would relive the explosion every time he struck a match. The Post Stress became so severe he gave up smoking altogether.

Whisky Bob tells me he’s ready for the Next Stage of distilling, gonna dial back the alcohol a mite and go for the niche market in boutique boozes. I said it sounded like a great business plan, and Bob leaned in conspiratorially, afraid, I guess, Cost-Co might have the place bugged.

“Nettles,” he said. “Nettles?” I asked. “Nettles,” he repeated, louder, maybe thinking I needed hearing aids. Nettles. I pondered it a moment. Bob said he remembered that Heavy Nettle Ale I’d made two years ago, a fine year for the green crop, good crisp bite, a telltale aftertaste that tickled the tongue. Nettles, I finally agreed. Slow Food Movement, utilize the area agriculture, stop global warming, drink Local, save the planet. “Bob,” I said, tilting a glass of his double distilled, “it sounds like a winner! And I don’t think it’s the Everclear talking.”

This week Whisky Bob will begin the harvest. I told him my own organic nettles were available if he needed more than his backyard yield. By summer Bob should have his flagship mash aged to perfection. Jack Daniels, good luck to ya….

I picked up a fellow South Ender hitchhiking this morning on my way into town. Not untypically, he was a little down on his luck. No car, license rescinded for DUI, out of work, all the usual…. He was living in a friend’s camper, he told me, now that he’d moved out of his mom’s place. “Not a real good situation,” he said. The mom’s place. He’d been shacked up with her — he searched for the right characterization and finally hit on ‘boyfriend’ — out in a trailer in the backyard. She was, if I understood correctly, living in the house with her husband, apparently not my rider’s dad.

Extended families on the South End, you may have surmised, are slightly more, oh, elastic, than those further up island. But the ties are no less binding, I’m sure. His roommate, the mom’s beau, was a bad drinker, he confided, and arguments were becoming more heated in the late evening hours, so he decided to move along before the Law was necessitated. I said that seemed prudent to me.

My passenger said his mom was upset at his departure. Misunderstanding him, I mumbled something insincere about mother’s milk or some equally half-assed sentiment. To which he said she’d thrown his belongings out in the yard during the previous day’s rain squall. “Kind of a bummer…” he admitted. “All those wet clothes, man. A real drag….”

We discussed the weather awhile. Sun was out, the rains had subsided. Life was good, we decided, just two Gentlemen of the Highway cruising the backroads of Camano. I dropped him at the Elger Bay Grocery. He was, he grinned, getting some snacks and beer, and then “I’m gonna go home, kick back, enjoy the afternoon, man.”

Yes indeed, sometimes life is as simple, as pleasurable, as uplifting as a friend’s warm camper, some dry clothes, a working TV, a bag of Cheetos and a ride back to what, temporarily, is Home. Pop a cold one before noon and say goodbye to those morning blues. Attitude — and you can inscribe this over the trailer door — is everything.

You want to learn something about Failure, ask an artist. We been there, we done that, we’ll probably do it again. Some folks think failure is an excuse to quit, chalk it up to hard knocks, move on to something else. Artists, we have ourselves on the line. We’re painting, we’re writing, we’re singing something, integral to ourselves. We can’t sell it, we can’t get approval; we can’t make others see what it is we see, the beauty of it, the truth of it, we can’t just walk away, shrug it off, pick up a hammer and become a carpenter. If we do, the house we’re building becomes the art. And I bet you dollars to Degas we aren’t going to become bond traders next.

The trouble with failure for us artists is we’re forced to make sense of it. It’s not really external, some quirk of bad luck, even if, for awhile, we rationalize it. We live in a market place society, for good or bad. We live and die by the cash register. And that society doesn’t much care about any art other than Mass Commercial Art. Odds are pretty certain, you’ll fail. So you have to ask yourself, why go on?

I had two gallery owners on the island tell me their definition of art was simple: it’s what sells. The Van Gogh earlobe ‘myth’ of a guy killing himself with only one sale to his name, then becoming discovered, was hogwash, they said. Sales, that’s the measure, darling, that’s the bar to reach if you want to be a success.

I know too many South Enders who are fine artists who don’t rack up sales. A couple are great artists and they make the least money. I would cry out loud and flush my credit card if they quit because revenues were paltry. We do what we do out of a need to recreate the world, to make it over to resemble ourselves, to make manifest that inchoate yearning we feel and need to express in some way or other. On the South End this is fairly normal — most other places, this a definition of failure. No need to tell you, but …. I sure don’t plan to move any time soon.

Back in the era when I first moved here, the island was more of a frontier, more of a lawless place, an outback backwash where crime existed, but for the most part it was either tolerated or taken care of on a personal level. Oh, we had some rumrunning and moonshining, we had some cannabis cowboys, we had a few folks pulling off trannies and axles at the Tyee Store junkyard, some out-of-season deer hunting and the usual Dungeness overharvesting. The Island County deputies had a big area to cover and way too few deputies….

Must’ve been shortly after those gas shortages from the OPEC embargo let up, real estate took off and the rich folks looked at Camano the way movie stars looked at Montana — cheap land for millionaires. And the housing boom took off. McMansions got built, hobby farms started up, vacation homes sprouted along the bluffs. Camano was discovered. For the second time.

Trouble with being an absentee wealthy landowner is you leave yourself wide open to vandalism and theft. Back then we didn’t have Costco surveillance cameras you watch on your cellphone. Hell, we didn’t have cellphones invented then. Where there’s a vacuum …. leave it to a South Ender to fill it. And so Sammy’s South End Security and Surveillance was born. Sammy had his crack security squad assembled, put out ads every week in the Little Nickel and the Stanwoodopolis Gazette, and offered his services. He’d check your hacienda once in the day and once in the evening, see if any odd lights were on or garage doors partly up or back door’s ajar or an upstairs window open. For an extra fee, he and his militiamen, Flathead Fred and Two Toke Tom, would water the plants, feed the cats, whatever needed done. All those dot.com millionaires moving in, Sammy figured he’d corner the Security Market, upgrade to vehicles that didn’t look like what the thieves were driving — and retire in comfort like his clients.

And it DID look promising. He’d just traded in his 1978 Datsun pickup with the seat springs always tearing his semi-official Levi jacket that all of the crew wore now with the lettering SOUTH END SECURITY AND SURVEILLANCE on the back for a one owner Chevy half ton with a spotlight for night shining the shrubbery and sometimes the occasional deer he poached. Things looked good. Real good. Flathead and Two Toke got a buck an hour raise, clients seemed satisfied … and then … the bottom fell out. Along came the Citizen’s Patrol and, well, now you know the rest of the story. Another entrepreneurial dream up in smoke. Sammy never really got over it. Oh, he tried dogsitting, but he never really liked dogs and it turned out he had allergic reactions to the longhaired ones.

Last we heard he was selling knock-off sunglasses out of a booth at the Skagit Mall. Flathead Fred went back to the O-Zi-Ya Auto Body Shop and specialized in scuff and buff paint jobs. And Two Toke? Well, Two Toke went underground, developing skills that serve him even today … now that marijuana is legal.

Crime — ya know, on the South End, it sometimes pays.

Awhile back I ran into one of my new neighbors out taking the air. I introduced myself as the guy across the road and he told me his name. “So, Bernie,” I asked, figuring this was his retirement house after years in a career, what he’d been saving that nest egg for and whoopee, the Golden Years had finally arrived, “how do you like retirement?”

Bernie looked a bit bemused over the spectacles he peered over to take ‘the full measure of me’, some impertinent upstart probing too deeply on first contact. “If you don’t mind me asking,” I added a little impishly. He took a little while, either pondering the question or wondering whether to dignify it with an answer.

“Not much,” he said finally. “It’s harder to accustom to than I thought it would be.” I asked why he felt that way and he said he’d had some prestige in his former career that was now suddenly missing. “I demanded respect,” he said sternly, “and I got it.”

“Well, Bernie,” I grinned, “I’d get over THAT. Nobody down here gives a hoot or holler what you did before. You get to start brand new. Nobody’s gonna salute the old generals now and anyway, the war’s over. Take a load off. Enjoy the sunsets. Walk the beach. It’s why we call it retirement.”

I don’t know if Bernie ever did get over it. Some folks hang their awards and medals on the wall, hoping, I guess, to just keep on re-living their Glory Days. Me, I say high school’s come and gone, good riddance. The South End’s a funny melting pot, mostly us yahoo retirees bent on figuring out how to make the rest of life interesting without hauling along the weight of the past. Retirement’s hard enough starting from scratch and not driving the mizzus insane being underfoot. And I know for a steel hard, take-it-to-the-bank fact, the mizzus isn’t going to salute either. Down here, we’re all privates in this woman’s army.

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.