The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I thought by now this gun control issue would’ve settled down.  But judging by the debates down at the Diner over breakfast, I’d say it’s only gotten worse.  The arguments are so heated, Big Larry doesn’t bother turning on the gas for the grill in order to fry our bacon and eggs.  And even so, they taste burnt to me.  Jenny, the owner, posted a sign LEAVE YOUR GUN TALK OUTSIDE.  ORDER OF THE SHERIFF.  Sort of meant to be humorous, but not totally.

Walter, the first morning of Sheriff Jenny’s edict, shouted, “Now what?  They’re taking away our first AND second amendment rights??!!”  And so the café was filled with the porcelain decibels of pounding coffee cups, pointed forks and knives, veiled threats and hurled insults.  The biscuits and gravy crowd squared off against the oatmeal and wheat toast faction, but both sides had higher blood pressure by the time they paid their bill.  Poor Anita, the referee and waitress most mornings, got about half her usual tips.  “Don’t shoot the messenger,” she would say to every guest.  “I’m not taking sides — I’m just an innocent bystander!”

Walter wore his NRA cap every day and threatened to bring his weapons to breakfast, as was his right and even his civic duty, according to the Constitution according to the gun lobby, according to Walter.  Big Larry made it absolutely clear that wasn’t going to happen on his watch, not on HIS grill.  Happily, Walter, despite overwhelming firepower against Larry’s spatula and scraper, decided to leave his arsenal at home.

Last breakfast Walter was ranting about the government doctors asking patients if they owned a gun, if they ever felt depressed, if they ever had violent thoughts.  Hank, our local attorney, looked over his coagulating oatmeal and said, “All they’re trying to do is intervene in a potential suicide before some depressed slob shoots himself.  Which,” he added, “is a helluva lot of people.”  Walter posited that no, it was just an excuse to make a list of gun owners so they could take our weapons away.

“Well, said Hank, “ if you’re so all-fired worried, why are you telling all of US you got guns?”  That, it goes without saying, sent Walter off on a caffeinated rage.  I didn’t really help by adding that personally I was all FOR suicide by gun and all those poor Rambos with paranoia might consider similar relief.  Needless to say, Walter and I aren’t on speaking terms, but I don’t consider it an abrogation of our first amendment rights.  You’re just as free NOT to speak and maybe a lot of us ought to exercise that a little more often.

When I first came to the South End to try my hand at homesteading, I was poor. Real poor. How poor, you ask? I was so poor I hauled washed-up lumber off the beach sometimes as far away as a mile, then up the bluff trail and over to the shack. So poor I used bent nails I had pulled from old boards and bent straight. Trust me, this wasn’t a Johnny Carson monologue: ‘We were so poor I borrowed air from the neighbor’s tires to pump up mine.’ Followed by a drum roll…

… so poor I took a job at Twin City Foods shoveling wet corn husks onto a conveyor belt from 11 PM to 7 AM. Me, a boy who’d sworn he’d never work in a factory. But desperation is certainly the mother of compromise. I was issued a rain slicker and a pair of rubber boots and a big wide shovel, then told to stand under a waterfall of dripping husks on their way to waiting trucks outside that would haul it all off for sileage., ‘all’ being the operative word and my job was to get what fell off back on.

My first night, which was also my last, the conveyor belt broke down about 3 AM. The foreman gave the line workers an indefinite cigarette break. They were mostly middle-aged women, toughened by their hard lives and as friendly as scorpions in a rainstorm. I had no pretensions of some factory social life, after work beers, breakfasts at the Viking Café, uh-uh. It looked like Russia on the skids to me under the corn drippings, surrounded by matrons in scarves furiously pulling on their cigarettes hoping the machinery might never start up again.

My foreman came over and said ‘bring your shovel and follow me.’ Outside. Cold. Colder yet if you were already wet. He said shovel these husks off that belt — we gotta work on it. I looked at a quarter mile of husks in front of me from Stanwoodopolis to dawn. I said why don’t we get a dozen of these lineworkers and we’ll get it done 12 times faster. He could see I was foreman material right there. Course, that was HIS job and he planned to keep it. ‘Get shoveling,’ he ordered, ‘we haven’t got all night.’

All night was pretty much what I did have. By the time I finished it was time to clean the machines inside, get them ready for the day crew. Nobody showed me how, just gave me a soap bucket and a scrub brush and we went to work. Some yahoo turned my machine on without warning and next thing I knew my wrist was hammered against a stainless steel guard rail. I couldn’t get it freed and I couldn’t make my plea to shut off the power heard until I’d gotten a laceration and a pretty good scare thrown into me.

I made a tourniquet out of my handkerchief and went to my foreman for some medical attention. “How’d you manage THAT?” he asked disgustedly. I told him. “What do you want?” he asked. I said maybe a bandage, tape, something to wrap up the wound. Fifteen minutes later he came back. Couldn’t find a first aid kit…. By then the gash had pretty much quit bleeding. I was pretty much done reading the bulletin board. Lost hours. Recent accidents. Fingers chopped off in the cutters. Grim statistics. Serious stuff for a place with no first aid kit handy. I got the picture.

I handed him my boots and my slicker. “You can take those home with you.” He said. I said Naw, I won’t be needing them since I won’t be coming back. “You pissed about this?” he wanted to know. I shook my head wearily. No, I said, I’d just like to keep my fingers. All of em.

I didn’t quite make the end of the shift. Driving home in the grey light of a dirty dawn, I thought, there’s way worse than being poor. And so then and there I took my first, if not my last, vow of poverty.

Before half the South End converted their gardens and basements and outbuildings to medical marijuana production, the era of the boutique nurseries flourished. They specialized in everything from stingless nettles to thornless blackberries, figuring the hordes of immigrants new to the area would welcome their hybridized species.

Some folks, like Camano Natives Nursery, sold only what was here already. Oh, the salal was popular, and some folks bought little potted sword ferns, but most of them just let the back forty spread to the lawn if all they wanted was the local horticulture. Island Botanicals went the other direction, marketing everything from blue poppies to swamp cypress. The first hard freeze or month long drought or hurricane force winds usually killed the little transplants, but then a lot of the newcomers had had enough too and moved on to more exotic climes where those plants were already Old Growth.

Avant-Gardens, a co-op run by artists with a chartreuse thumb, more hortichuckle than horticultural, sold an eclectic variety of strange herbs, quasi-hallucinogenic plants, odd garden ornaments and large variety of found objects, weird art and advice for alternative living. In a few years they were broke and discouraged and scattered to the far ends of the known universe — well, mostly scattered down here on the South End.

I guess Avant-Garden was where the 60’s hit the Sound, scarcely a sizzle when their cooling lava reached the beach. Their commune broke up, their greenhouses tilted and fell, their yurts and tipis and geodesic domes finally succumbed to the weight of moss and leaf mulch and the neighbors’ hostile gossip. If you know just where to look, you can find a path that starts near the Head and winds through the nettle forest past a couple of VW vans peeking headlights through the blackberries and finally you’ll arrive at a clearing by the bluff. The ragged polyethylene of the greenhouses wave off their bent PVC poles like Tibetan prayer flags of the insane or hopelessly lost. A few beds of periwinkle have escaped into the woods. Some lilies of the valley made a stand next to the big cedar and in the spring, the native bleeding hearts carpet the clearing, their pink flowers a nostalgic reminder of the dead dreams of so many of us old hippies back then.

Some of you gentle readers may not realize that when you open up a blogsite like this one here, you open yourself up to all manner of incoming enemy fire too.  Occasionally one of you will respond on the Comment section, which is fine and dandy, but 99% of the time what Skeeter gets is SPAM.  Not even ordinary spam, but some alien mangled English non syntactical version that invariably leaves him scratching his head.  What is it they’re after?  What kind of advertising ploy is it when the message is indecipherable?

Here’s the latest example:  Aсtually whеn someοne doesn’t know after that its up to other users that they will help, so here it happens. ????????????????????????????!!!!                 I’m no genius, but c’mon, what is this trying to say?  And what are they trying to sell?  Am I supposed to click on the website to find out?  It’s like running into Crazy Mary down by the library, the woman who mumbles to herself and becomes irrationally angry at a moment’s notice.  You sort of learn to cross the street and avoid eye contact unless you’re looking for a morning wake-up confrontation.  And most of us aren’t.  You certainly aren’t going to ask her if she’d care for a cup of coffee, see what’s really bugging her.  That’s why we pay mental health professionals the big bucks.  Well, that’s why we used to pay mental health professionals, even if it was fairly minimal.  Now we let Mary wander the streets until she hurts herself or someone else.

I guess these spammers aren’t really hurting Skeeter.  Being a former English teacher, they do hurt me.  I see better language skills on my made-in- China product’s assembly directions.  It IS worrisome that there seem to be a lot of Crazy Mary’s out there hustling god only knows what on the internet.  That, or Skeeter is a whack-magnet who hasn’t got sense enough to cross the digital highway.

I know this, it gives a fine American meat by-product a really bad name.  Actually, if when someone who does know after opening  this can its up to other eaters that they can chew helpfully, so yes, here it happens.  Give that to the dog and see if it prefers dry.

ome years back the South End Chamber of Commerce got an injection of enthusiasm when Brenda Bodice joined up and was made President at her first meeting. Being president, some folks think, is a grand honor. Those folks never joined an organization in their lives, obviously. Never been to a meeting, never served on a Board, never got out much. Presidents are people who like the title the way a rich guy likes a Hummer. It gets rotten mileage, it drives like a tank, it looks like a Toy for Testosterone Challenged Idiots. But … it’s big, it takes up most of the highway, and … you can’t help but notice it.

Brenda, though, God bless her heart and the proudly displayed breasts it beats beneath, wanted to vitalize the Chamber of Commerce Board. She was owner of the Pampered Pooch, a spa for dogs whose owners hated that battle in the tub with Fido every month where both ended up soaking wet tail to snout, or who wearied of clipping toenails and hitting the ‘quick’ and watching Fifi turn from a cute Pekignese to a vicious snarling miniature pit bull in self protection.

Until Brenda, the past Presidents were mostly realtors who figured any tourism meant potential clients. Which is why they gave out free maps at Windy Rear Realty at the ‘Y’ where the loop road closed back on itself and the people without GPS could navigate back off the island without satellite assistance. Brenda, though, wanted to organize annual events. Tyee Pioneer Days, the Nettle Festival, a Shrimp Derby, a Yacht Club Regatta, the Flatheads Vintage Car Club Show, an Art Detour Tour to compete with the Mother’s Day Studio Tour, on and on. “We could apply for grants, hold fundraisers, advertise like crazy. The South End — a destination, not a dead end!! Whaddaya say??”

A year later and about a dozen brainstorming meetings, nobody had very much to say and nothing much had moved off the dime. Nobody knew how to write grants, nobody wanted to organize an event, nobody really understood publicity and advertising tactics, nobody really had any time. By then Brenda herself was a little tired, way more cynical and mostly wanted OUT. She asked who would like to take over the Presidency next year and was met with averted eyes, muttered excuses and shuffling feet.

Brenda has been President now 3 years. She says she’ll do it one more, but that’s IT. With any luck someone new will join.

Someone knocked my two mailboxes off their posts today.  Now … I don’t want to make a federal case out of this — but it IS.  Although I probably won’t call the FBI or even the sheriff’s office.  My last episode with the deputies convinced me Rome keeps these centurions down at our outpost primarily as slim proof Island County is still in charge.  Until you need them to solve crimes more heinous than speeding violations.  Mass mailbox destruction is pretty low on their priority.

Like most crime here, we’re pretty much on our own, okay by me, judging from the lack of crime waves.  The Barefoot Bandit ran amok for awhile and we got our first good look at Rome’s puny presence.  The Kid even stole their assault rifles and laptops right out of their squad cars.  Now that Rome’s running budget deficits, the sheriff is threatening to make cutbacks that will leave the South End without a single deputy most nights.  Exactly what we had when I moved here.  Pretty much what we got now.  I listened to my neighbor’s high decibel burglar alarm going non-stop for half an hour two nights ago.  If it had been an actual robbery, a moving van would’ve had time to empty the place.  You know, IF the burglars wore hearing protection.

We’re still small enough, still closed-knit enough, that when a break-in or vandalism occurs, we got a pretty good notion who the culprit was.  Been awhile since the last lynching, but a phone call to the miscreant’s parents usually does it.  Not always.  I had the mom of the kid who’d broken into my rootcellar and emptied my wine and homebrew stash bring said kid and herself over Right Now or I’d call the Law.  She sat in her idling car smoking her cigarette and denied denied denied.  I said her daughter’s step-dad had told me she had a winebottle with one of my labels on it for Roadspray Blackberry.  “What did you do with the bottle, honey?” she asked her punk progeny.  “I did what you told me, Mom, I got rid of the evidence.”

Now, I know blood is thicker than blackberry wine, but I also believe in good parenting.  So, reluctantly, I called the Law.  When they showed up a couple days later at my thief’s door, they took the step-dad aside and questioned him for half an hour about guns he supposedly had in his possession, then left.  Later I got a call from Deppity Dash wanting to see my rootcellar crime scene.

Deppity Dash, newly arrived from the Los Angeles police force, drove over in his squad car and I showed him my hand dug cellar behind the shack.  He just shook his head and said, “Damn, I thought those were just something you read about in books.  I didn’t think they actually existed.”  I didn’t tell him I thought the same about law enforcement on the island….  Turns out one of us was right.

I’ve been thinking lately – mostly as an exercise to ward off dementia – about how fast we went from the calculator to the home computer, from Polaroid to digital cameras. Now we got hand held computers that can make phone calls, take quality photos, connect up to the internet, send text messages or e-mail and scramble my eggs. They got apps for everything you can think of, and if you haven’t thought of it, they’ll do it for you. By tomorrow. They keep track of where you are, where your friends are and where you can meet up. Your human little brain is adapting to its hardwire. Your human little brain is mutating toward the vast network it is fast becoming part of.

I’m not saying this is good or this is not. What does it matter what some old geezer on the South End thinks any more? The juggernaut rolls on the way the tide does, only IT doesn’t recede. It’s not going back out and it’s not going to slow down. The digital Genie is out of the bottle. We live more in cyberspace than what used to be called the ‘real’ world.

What I think about is how we will always be the sentience that makes the machine, that writes the software, that controls the matrix. We won’t be, is what I think. And it won’t be too long that the Sci-Fi world outstrips our feeble capacities to keep up. Computers will make computers. They’ll self-replicate and then they’ll upgrade. And of course we’ll expect them to serve Humankind. Even if they realize how puny our little human brains are. We’ll put them IN ourselves, better vision, better hearing, better hearts, sharper minds. Who wouldn’t???

But we’re the weak link. We’re the expendable part, disease prone, emotionally unstable, potentially self destructive and violent. The day will come – and it won’t be as far away as you think – they won’t need creators. Just like we did with God back in the day, they’ll chow down from the Tree of Knowledge and go it alone. The Garden of Eden will be a myth about software.

A couple of the Flatheads, the vintage car guyz, are starting to bring politics into the Monday morning breakfasts … and worse, they seem to be lobbying to convert the carb heads into their own brand of evangelical prophesy. Sure, the boyz will argue the aesthetics of after-market parts vs hunting down the originals, but they don’t accuse the other of sin or blasphemy. Like Little Jimmy says, there’s room for both to be wrong. Actually what he preaches is there’s room for both to be full of shit, but he doesn’t say that in the Diner. And not in front of Anita, the owner and referee over barfights and language when families are present. You want a refill on that coffee, mister, keep a civil tongue.

But lately we got this mess over in the Holy Land, what Ralph considers the coming Apocalypse, we can read it for ourselves in Revelation. Two Toke, not exactly the poster boy for biblical studies, declares he’s read Revelations and Ralph ought to maybe stick with the Chilton’s Repair Manual and leave off the prophesies, which sets Buick Bob on a rant against these heathen Moslems who attacked Israel and now are getting exactly what they deserve, the Wrath of God.

You want to wind up Two Toke, these two got it figured out. ‘Bob,’ he says, pointing a fork stabbed into his potatoes, ‘there’s a bigger picture here, maybe you haven’t noticed. You want another Crusade, you might just get it.’

Ralph says that’s exactly what he’s talking about, the Second Coming, and Bob says, ‘you’re damn right!’

Fairlane Fred puts his hands in the time-out position. ‘C’mon, guys, let’s skip the sermons. I barely got started on my chicken fried steak and you’re spoiling my appetite, all this gloom and doom. Brenda,’ he hollers at this morning’s waitress, ‘give me a refill. But no more for Bob and Ralph, they’re over cranked as it is.’

Two Toke slops some ketchup on the rest of his home fries, starts to say something, then thinks better of it. Brenda pours Fred another cup, hovers over Bob and Ralph’s, hesitates a nano-second, then fills both up. ‘Two cup solution,’ she announces, ‘something for everybody.’

I was curious afterwards what her tips were like that morning.

I went to see a fortune teller once. Big sign on the highway and under a crystal ball it said: Fortunes Read $10. Don’t ask me why, but I decided to go see Madame Rita and find out what tomorrow held for me. I’m not much of a spiritualist and usually I figure tomorrow’s coming soon enough, why spend money to get a preview. But for some reason, not very clear to me, I went across the road from where I worked stripping furniture for two Armenian brothers in their stained glass and furniture repair shop just across the bridge in Burlington. This was before the malls and the fast food chains.
The Armenian brothers were aghast I was going into the fortune teller’s shop for a reading. Don’t do it! they insisted. Once she’s got her long fingernails into you, she’ll control you like a puppet. The boyz must’ve known some vampire gypsies in their day, is all I could figure, that or watched too many late night chiller thrillers on the cheap channels. Undeterred, I walked across the highway and up the creaking stairs of a dilapidated old two story house and knocked on the door with the logo of an eyeball in a crystal ball. SEE YOUR FUTURE, it said. MADAME RITA

Madame Rita herself came to the door. She wore a shabby bathrobe and her hair was in curlers under a babushka tied in a knot in front. She asked if I was here for a reading. Indeed I was, I said. We went to a small room off the kitchen next to a backroom where she was doing her laundry. The washing machine was in spin mode and made a wild racket, kind of killing any mood of a séance or any possible connection with the spirits of the next world, unless they were the ghosts of Maytag repairmen. Taking my hand in her pudgy one, she asked what exactly I hoped to find out, which, sadly, I didn’t have much of an answer to other than that I’d seen her sign for a year and the sale price of the fortune telling drew me in like a moth to a burn barrel fire. I might as well have said, I’m too cheap to pay for a full price soothsaying, but hey, in the hands of a mindreader, what does it really matter what you say, she’s got your number.

Madame Rita studied the lines in my palms, pointed out the age line, said I’d live long, looked at a few tributaries and finally sighed before telling me I had enemies. Did I know that? she asked. I said I had folks who maybe didn’t like me much, but enemies, naw, not really. We were at a round table. No candles, no crystal ball, no voodoo anything, just a cup of half drunk tea she never touched. Probably eye of newt tea but how would I know? She excused herself and got up to put the wash in the dryer which soon was tumbling in a sinister soundtrack to her inquiries about my enemies. She returned and assured me I had them.

But … if I chose, I could have her exorcise them. She would be willing to go to the church and burn candles to rid me of these harmful pests. Did I want her to do that? Sure, I said, who needs enemies. It would cost five dollars a candle. I asked how many candles did she think it would take? She shook her scarfed head sadly. Who knows? It depends on how much they wish to harm you. I said I didn’t think my enemies really wished to harm me much, maybe not at all. I don’t even think they really dislike me, you want to know the truth.

For you readers thinking of going to a fortune teller, don’t tell THEM about the truth. Madame Rita informed me solemnly that my enemies were the reason why I couldn’t achieve happiness. I said I was pretty reasonably happy. Madame Rita was pretty sure I wouldn’t be in her parlor if that was so. She said she would burn 10 candles for only $25 and that should rid me of my curses. It was her last offer, and by implication, otherwise I was on my own to face these unnamed people who wished me ill and prevented me from achieving even more happiness than I already had. Over the dryer noise, which sounded like loose change clattering in the cylinder the way a deranged kid might whack a wall with a stick, I declined her offer. It took a few times to convince her I didn’t want to help myself, but finally I left after paying her 10 bucks for the reading, then I sauntered back to the Armenian brothers, a little poorer and who knows how much wiser.

They were waiting by the front door, nearly paralyzed with fear for me. What did she do to you? What did she tell you? What was it like in there? If I’d told them she was keeping pet bats in cages and feeding them children, they’d have believed me. If I’d said, She put a curse on you and your business and your sons and their sons, they’d have put a FOR SALE on the front door that day and left the country, doomed, absolutely doomed.

She was washing her laundry, I told them. They didn’t believe me. She said I have enemies I need to get rid of, I told them. That, they could believe. Go over and let her read your hands, I suggested, you’ll see. Are you crazy??? they almost screamed in unison. She’s not Bela Lugosi, I said. But by then they were at the window, surreptitiously checking for odd activity across the highway in the battered old house with the gypsy inside. If she can read minds, they said, she can control you. You should never have gone in there.

I never went back, of course, and within a few weeks, I’d had enough of stripping furniture and breathing toxic fumes. My enemies never showed up, at least at my shack door, and happiness poured over me anyway. Madame Rita’s Palm Reading by the highway lasted a few more years, until the malls arrived and the highway got widened. My guess is she made a bundle on the real estate sale. Probably living in a nice condo now with a state of the art washer/dryer combo. Her own enemies across the street moved away too. Although, the few times I’ve run into them, they seem happy enough too. I guess it worked out for all of us.

“My granddaughter tells me, get this, I need to call her they.” Fairlane Freddie is stirring another bucket of sugar into his already sucrose saturated coffee. The Flatheads are assembled for their Monday morning soiree at the Diner, vintage cars parked in a line outside that would make a scene in American Graffiti look modern.

“They what?’ Little Jimmy wants to know. “What what?” Fred mutters, ‘what they.” Two Toke stifles a laugh and coughs caffeine into his nose. “ Another educational morning for the unwoke,” he finally manages to squeak after cleaning the coffee off his beard and out of his sinuses. “You never heard of gender neutral pronouns?”

Pretty obviously Fred hasn’t. “What the hell are you talking about? My granddaughter is a girl. Daughter, get it? That makes her a she, not a they. They is plural last time I was taught English.” Little Jimmy asks, “When was that, sixth grade? Times have changed in the past 60 years, Fred. You need to get up to speed. Speaking of which, you drop in that V-8 yet? You been talking about that for years.”

“Screw the V-8, I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong with my granddaughter who thinks she’s not a girl. What does that make her, then?” Jimmy says why don’t you ask her and Fred, shuddering so bad he spills his coffee, admits he’s afraid of the answer. “What if she identifies as a he? Or worse.”

A terrible silence descended on the Diner as the Car Guyz pondered the possibilities. Worse? Holy Hemi, breakfasts sat suspended as they whirled through the horrible potentials. Animals? Cat might be okay, but …? Maybe one of those make-believe things, whatchacallit, an avatar, could be anything, nothing real. A they? Sure, a they.

Two Toke finally interrupted the séance. “She’s just saying, Fred, her generation wants you to quit making assumptions about who they are. She gets to choose, not us old farts.” Fred shook his head. “They, you mean.” TT smiled. “Exactly what I mean. Be glad we’re old, the kids got a complicated world.”