The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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 No car, license rescinded for DUI, out of work, all the usual….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.

In 2007 the County and Friends of Camano Island Parks asked the South End String Band if we would be willing to take on the role of caretakers for little Hutchison Park, a 5 acre parcel once the playground for juvenile delinquents, drug transactions and the occasional late night sex. Since it was the only county park on the South End and we were, after all, the South End house band, we said, yah shure, u betcha. In the beginning the band threw in whole heartedly, cleaned up the area and mowed the lawns. FOCIP brought a few volunteers in to widen the trails and put up signage. So what if they misspelled Hutchison, the guy’s name who donated the land.

Course, after the initial flurry of philanthropic excitement the Band sort of lost interest, not only in the Park but the band and the music too. Basically the way of bands. Probably the way of volunteers as well. So for the past 16 years the de facto role of park ranger fell to the banjo player, last guy standing, me and the fiddler who, unfortunately had moved off island and far from the idyllic South End. In that time more than a couple of lawnmowers have given their lives, one or two chainsaws have bit the dust, the caretaker has grown old and gnarly like a few of the second growth firs in the park, sculpture has been placed (and most stolen), a little library has been installed in the 1960’s phone booth that mysteriously appeared one year and trees, shrubs and flowers have been planted.

Admittedly, not many people use the Park, mostly dog walkers, midnight lovers and pharmaceutical salespeople. Rarely are the barbecue grills used. Grill, actually, since the second one was stolen the first week and never replaced by the county. Occasionally bikers rest there, once or twice picnickers. It’s a lonely place but it’s my place. This week I went on the FOCIP website looking at their list of county parks we maintain gratis for Island County. Hutchison was not one of them. So I went to Island County Parks looking for a map or a mention. Nada. Zip. Zilch. My park has been stolen from the records!! Happens all the time on the South End, you’re thinking. And me too.

What I can only assume is this: the County has abdicated its little park down here. For what reason, who can say? But I want to say this, being the ranger there for the past decade and a half, I’m publicly declaring the park mine by right of county abdication as well as adverse possession by yours truly. Skeeter Daddle Park. Nice ring to it, don’tcha think? Who’d have ever guessed volunteerism would have more than its own reward.

I guess we’ve all seen these folks at the freeway entry ramps with their mournful mendicant faces and their homemade signs that say they’re looking for work or money or food or a kind word and can you help, God Bless! They stand like stoic poster children for the poor, the homeless, the forgotten losers in the economic gears of a capitalist machine. They don’t seem to be on drugs or carry a bottle in a paper bag. They seem like us — okay, like me — just a bit down on their luck.

Myself, I’m a sucker for a panhandler on the sidewalk. I’ll empty my pockets even if I KNOW it’s going toward the purchase of the next bottle of Mad Dog 20/20. Maybe it’s the suspicion that there, but for the grace of God, go I …. Some wrong turns, a round of bad luck, an accident, a disease, you name it, that guy with the glazed eyes, the bad breath, the shabby clothes — he could be me. On my dark days, I think maybe he IS.

But the folks on the freeway ramp, looking like the one at exit 205 or 216 or, well, all of them, I have this uneasy suspicion they all work for an outfit run by some smooth operator registered with the State of Washington as Legitimate Beggars, Inc. or BumsRus, LLC or just Freeway Freeloaders.com. The signs are hand scrawled but they seem remarkably uniform like they were copied from a foreman’s template or made down at the home office.

Maybe it’s that I’m enclosed in a steel and glass vehicle, window up, eye contact minimal, that makes me more critical than I am with the guy on the street asking for spare change. They certainly don’t look like they’re flush with income. They never look anything but gaunt and underfed. They seem Totally Authentic and yet … I never roll down the window, I never dig for loose change or a spare buck, I never quite see myself working that intersection.

Course, when they’re finally standing by Elger Bay Store, hands out, signs lettered in the same printed childish script, maybe they’ll melt my heart. Then again, we got plenty of needy down here now. They just don’t stand all day at the closest busy intersection. Maybe why they’re still needy…. They just need a little organizing and we got plenty of artists who could help me with those signs.

Thank God for medical science and the pharmacological industry. Finally, finally, they’ve discovered a weight loss drug. Turns out the medication for managing sugar levels in diabetes also kills the user’s appetite. Just what our narcissistic society needs in these turbulent times, an easy way to shed those pounds. No muss, no fuss, no exercise necessary. If you haven’t bought stock in the companies manufacturing this cure, sell your crypto right now and get a few shares. The very thing that makes you thin will make you rich….

We all think we’re overweight. We’re all a little anorexic. How could it be otherwise when we’re bombarded by fashion models and professional athletes, slim, fit, svelte, buffed, beautiful people. By comparison, hell yeah, we all ought to lose a few pounds, skip dessert, stop eating crap, get off the couch and head to the gym. But c’mon, this national pathology of poor self-esteem, all this fat shaming, the proliferation of diet fads and weightwatcher memberships, the obsession of all things weighed in pounds, it’s time to throw away the bathroom scales, stop checking the mirror and grow up, learn to live in your own skin and quit judging others.

So yeah, thanks Oprah, thanks for plastering your svelte new figure on your magazine and half the rags in America, telling your listeners and your readers how finally, finally, you can move beyond your shame at being the ideal weight you have in your fantasy. Just get that new drug, skip the exercise and the latest diet, shed your fat and hey, you too can be Oprah or whatever other role model you pick from People magazine, your shame will dissolve like an icicle in the sun. Happy days are finally here. And Oprah, thanks again for Dr. Phil and that other nutcase, Oz. Happy now?