The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I got an e-mail awhile back from an old girlfriend from my high school daze.  How she got hold of me is no mystery since it’s how a lot of folks get in touch these days now that we’re all on the great data bank of the internet.  She probably could’ve gotten my driving history, my credit rankings, my employment information, my political affiliations and hopefully my marital status with a few clicks of a keyboard.  No accidents, no tickets, no job, no credit rating, no kids, no tea party memberships.   One wife.  Happily married.  Very happily.

We had a nice and cordial correspondence in which, in a few paragraphs, we filled in the years since we held hands in my folks’ Buick and smooched in the woods near our place before I had to trundle off to my job on the second shift at the Coca-Cola Bottling plant in Northern Wisconsin.  She would soon be off to college while I would be two more years getting out of my hellhole high school.  She was really my first love, a platonic affair that was something we both could look back on and smile at, if not laugh out loud for how sappily sweet and innocent we were.  Outside the Amish community, those relationships are as unlikely now as a horse drawn carriage.

I don’t think she had any interest in one of those Facebook affairs or anything like that.  You know:  look up an old flame and see what they’re doing now that maybe we’re lonesome or divorced and the kids have moved on and our parents have died.   Send a few photos to see if we’ve grown a bad paunch or lost our teeth or maybe our smiles or gone to seed and old age.  If not, maybe make a date for dinner or drinks, fall in the sack, fall in love, give that 45 year hiatus a kickstart and see if our adolescent judgement was still okay.

Happens everyday on the internet.  Nothing to smirk about either, you ask me.  Love is a commodity in short supply these days and I wish folks the best at finding it, whether it’s a seedy bar or an e-mail to that kid they dated back in the good old days who went off with old so-and-so and found out 20 years later it was a bad marriage.

But it is odd to have the distant past come around the corner at you.  A sort of ‘what if?’ moment.  Not just what if for some imagined life with someone you knew when you were sweet 16 and never been kissed, but all the forks in the road, all the imagined possibilities one choice made unfeasible for all the others.  I am not immune to such flights of fantasy, having gone back to find a love thought lost, hoping beyond reason she would not be married, would not have kids, would not have a life real enough to make any fantasies of mine dissolve like a cold fog in a summer sun.  No, if anyone understands the impulse to go back, to take the fork not taken, you bet it’s me.  It is a rare thing to backtrack, to see the mistake and go back for a possibly well-deserved rejection, then to have it fall the way your mind’s eye imagined it, corny and uncynical, an old Hollywood love story nobody could sell today.

I’m fairly certain my childhood squeeze isn’t looking for anything more than some spark of nostalgia, a small suspended friendship from across the gulf of years, a gentle reminder that we parted friends, no hard feelings either, and went off to live lives totally apart and different from the other’s.  She does, after all, have a husband, kids, grandkids, a complete life in a small town near where she was born.  Teaches Sunday School at her church, goes to her kids’ weddings, just retired from her job even though her husband still has a year or two.  She’s not looking for a romance novel here.  Although the missuz may not be as certain.  And I’m not looking for a bodice to rip.  Unless it’s the missuz’s….

In today’s newspaper there was a groundbreaking study showing ‘beautiful’ people have significant advantages over ‘ugly’ people.  Better jobs, better chances for advancement, better salaries.  Likelier to be happy, likelier to get bank loans with lower interest rates, likelier to marry a highly educated and equally attractive spouse.  I double-checked to make certain it wasn’t a study funded by the Plastic Surgeons of America.  Needless to say they’ll be inundated soon by unemployed college grads so wattle-neck deep in student loans already that another debt won’t matter much.  A little liposuction might mean an extra 6 figures over a lifetime, so say the experts.

It came as a shock to me too that attractive folks have a leg up on us toads.  Explains everything from TV commercials to beauty contests to presidential primaries.  And here I thought brains and talent were my downfall all these years of unemployment, low wages and marginal socialization.  If I’d only know …. A nip there, a tuck here, some botox occasionally, I might have had a chance.  I coulda been a contender, not some chump sent packing to Palookaville’s South End.  But back then our fearless researchers hadn’t defined beauty yet, which I had sadly been informed at an impressionable age, was in the eye of the beholder, not a scale or a matrix or a scientific formulation.

The study even calculated that beautiful people will make $230,000 more over a lifetime than those with ‘below average’ looks.  I wish I hadn’t done it, but I took out a calculator and ran a study of my own, put my lifetime earnings up against the neighbors’, graphed out the disparities and concluded — scientifically — how really ugly I must be to make so radically much less.  And … that’s assuming most of them are extremely good looking.  If they’re not, I’m going to need a helluva lot more than some plastic surgery.

I was going through a cabinet drawer the other day where I kept VHS movies. Big black plastic spools of brittling old tapes. Course I don’t have a machine to play them on anymore. Kind of like having an 8-track to go with my CD player. Although my CD player still has a hole for cassette tapes and I remembered I have another drawerful of those.

Anyone remember floppy disks? All those computer storage stragtegies now as obsolete as print film? I got a drawer of those too … plus the zip disks, plus the drivers. Be worth a cool million on E-Bay someday or else I’ll be hauling them, along with my Beta Video Player and my 35 mm Nikon, to Antiques Road Show next time they roll in to the Stanwoodopolis Convention Center. If you don’t think the world is racing right along lickety split, dig through a couple of boxes in the back of the basement or the top of the closet. It’s a time capsule of the 2nd half of the 20th Century, the century disappearing in the rearview of your Prius.

Trouble with living at the beginning of the Industrial Age — or now the Digital Age — you got one foot in, one toe out, sort of like Stanwoodopolis and the mainland drifting breakneck away from the island. The bridge gets rebuilt every few months and some of us just figure it’s easier to stay home. Stay long enough and we’ll be swimming to get into town. Fancy transponder, pay-as-you-drive booths, no cash or credit accepted. Sign up on your computer, but you better have DSL and on-line checking.

I tell my buddies here on the South End who figure Time must stand still or else they’ll die in the Mabana Sunset Villa before they’re left hopelessly behind, fossils frozen in drying mud, they better get off their rocker and take a couple of computer courses. Another few years and they won’t know how to turn on a TV much less figure out the latest changes in Windows 27. Then we’ll see how Old Age in the 21st Century looks to them without American Idol or Wheel of Fortune to fill an evening with electronic pablum.

Holly Burgess has been singing every Sunday since 1991 at the Little White Chapel in the Ravine, our South End church, which, despite its declaration by the road as non-denominational, collects every denomination in the collection plate passed for tithing right after the incantation of the Lord’s Prayer and the ever popular 23rd Psalm.  Yea, though she walks through the Valley of Death, Holly will sing a joyful noise.

Pastors come and go with alarming frequency down at the Chapel.  It’s some kind of ecumenical banishment to the nether regions apparently.  The last Reverend, Pastor George, was promoted to some outpost in heathen Kenya and within a week had packed up his Spartan belongings and his long suffering pinch-faced wife Elizabeth (NOT Liz), a woman who kept to her bed during the winter drizzle, then administered a stern sermon laced with promises of Cotton Mather style penalties for the sinners in the congregation and left the South End immediately after the final hymn in a mudcrusted Chevy SUV with a crumpled quarter panel never fixed after a run in with a six point buck  four months prior.

Holly and two other robed choir members were the only congregants gathered to wave adios at the pastor’s driveway and she was aghast at the dearth of well wishers.  Perhaps, she wondered aloud to her fellow singing compatriots, that last sermon WAS overly pointed.  She herself was no stranger to sin and venality, but …. my Lord, a Sea of Eternal Fire seemed a bit extreme for some harmless gossip.  Pastor George was practically apoplectic from the pulpit, the vein on his tanless forehead positively throbbing to the beat of his thumped King James version, the spine finally splitting open at a particularly vehement whack.

“Well,” she sighed to Kate and Kate’s boyfriend Leo, all hands still aloft in farewell to the padre’s departure, “our loss is those poor Africans’ gain, I guess.”

“I guess so,” Leo agreed, starting to head down to his truck left in the church’s rutted parking lot.  Kate hesitated a final moment longer, watching the exhaust cloud of Pastor George’s SUV dissipate after the car had disappeared up over the hill.  “You suppose Sin is the same over there?” she asked.  Holly, caught off guard, considered that, started to say ‘of course’, then thought maybe she had a point.  Something to consider.  Definitely something to consider.  Maybe even something to ask the new Pastor.  If he stayed long enough.

You see folks everyday who are more stressed than a government service employee in a GOP administration.  Stress, as we should all know by now, is a Killer, capital ‘K’ and I don’t mean Jerry Lee Lewis.  Traffic tie-ups, hellish commutes, bad bosses, a co-worker who needs meds or a capital K for Killing —- we all know what that does to our blood pressure, our marriage and our equanimity.

On the South End we definitely believe in Equanimity.  Let the rats race, we don’t really have a finish line, so why hurry?  Some of the boyz down at Karls Kustoms Hot Rod, lounging around the lift, were comparing notes on headers and 4 barrel carbs over a few cold ones and inevitably they got around to jobs they hated the most.  It’s an old list, something to talk about when politics goes stale, and better than worrying about whether to take Social Security early or hold on a few more years of odd jobs and piecemeal work.

Karl used to run the service department at the Ford dealership a few years back.  Long commute, pressure job.  Unhappy customers.  Unhappy Karl.  But like the rest of us spinning socket heads and imagining ourselves behind the wheel of the cherry red little Vette Karl was putting the final touches on with an artist’s concentration, he’d tossed in the grease rag one Friday payday, told the boss to shove it and  took the long way home past every tavern and dive from the dealership to the cold dinner, then began living off his wits and his savings, neither a gold mine.

Poverty, of course, can be the cruelest stress of all, wondering week to week if you can tread water a little longer, not really expecting your ship to come in or even sail by, just holding on.  Course, the months pass, then the years and there finally comes a day when every South Ender worth his salt decides to quit worrying.  History is on his side.  Precedent.  Patterns.  And now … probability.  Truth is, we’ve learned the art of Making Do without making much money.  Hard to believe for a lot of folks.  But … belief is what we had to learn.  Things usually work out fine and worrying about em won’t help.  We leave that to the folks up north.

I got an e-mail today with a link to the ‘best’ and ‘worst’ jobs in America. Gotta tell you, I dreaded opening it up, fully expecting to find Artist probably the worst. In all honesty, I almost hit the DELETE button, but this had come from a friend and he probably expected a response or a confession or a vow to do better in my next career choice, one from the ‘best’ list.

Turns out the ‘best’ jobs were pretty much judged on the basis of salary. Actuarials, statisticians, mathematician(!), no kidding: high paying, technical, number crunching corporate gigs. Boy oh boy, if I’d only know known back when I drummed out of school and began my desperate search for a ‘meaningful’ job. Nobody told me the best careers were the highest paid ones. I thought maybe they would be the ones that made me the happiest.The ‘worst’ jobs were the dangerous jobs. Like Lumberjack. Probably cut your leg off or be killed by a miscalculated cut in a leaning Doug Fir. Poor pay, hearing loss, amputations. And forget health care or vacations or sick leave or a pension. Not gonna get to pension age anyway….

No mention of Artist in the group. I guess poor wages, no bennies, no pension, not really the ‘worst’ job if it isn’t dangerous too. Although I got to thinking how about those glass installations I did back when I was too eager and too stupid, climb up on a skinny ledge two stories above a concrete floor to hoist 30 square foot panels of stained glass into place with barely a few toes on secure footing at 3 a.m., every cell in my body screaming NO NO NO! and the sweat smelling like fear. Fear, in case you don’t know, that kind of fear at least, smells like excrement. Truly, unforgettably.

Anyway …. I didn’t find my ‘job’ listed on this link. I’m just sort of glad I got something I can call a job. Although, between you and me and the pegleg lumberjack, I never think of what I do as a job. Someone asked me about retirement two nights ago at an art gallery opening. Would I — could I — just stop? It’s not like punching a time clock, I guess. It’s not about making the money. And it’s not about being afraid of the danger. My danger was really starvation, poverty, failure and humiliation. Too late for that now. The fear now is the creative well drying up, the days growing longer and emptier, the boredom settling in like a slow metastasizing dread. I don’t know yet, but I bet it still smells the same.

Down at the Little Church in the Ravine, our non-denominational chapel of praise here on the South End (which is apparently a hotbed of iniquity according to the Bible thumping Pastor Paul), the sermons lately have taken on a slightly political overtone. I guess with the IRS busy with fact checking the major corporate filings for errors or outright fraud, they really don’t have the time to question religious incursions into politics. Not that the Little Church in the Ravine would have much to worry about insofar as tax emptions go on their modest sanctuary, but nevertheless, it’s disheartening to us transgressors that we’ve become the object of that fine tabernacle’s scorn.

Even the school system has earned Pastor Paul’s righteous wrath, declaring them groomers of aberrant sexuality. Having been a school teacher myself for a brief time, this is disturbing to hear. I certainly didn’t groom my classes in sexual anything, kind of verboten then and I’m betting it is now. Except, of course, the classes here on the island. ‘Satan,’ Pastor Paul is happy to exhort his disciples in their hard metal folding chairs, ‘Satan is among us!’ I never like to hear that the Prince of Darkness is wandering the nettle fields out back, apparently in broad daylight, even in our elementary schools. According to Paul and the Book of Revelations, this was all foretold. Maybe, I guess, I should have read the book.

But of course Pastor Paul is breathing fire and brimstone about the books in the library too. Lucifer is everywhere, near as I can tell, even lurking around the Camano Library, offering tempting tomes that would lure the unwary into sinful and immoral wickedness. He’s pretty sure that this is how drag queens got their start. We don’t have a whole lot of drag queens down here, not even many transvestites. Got plenty of lesbians and gays, even a trans or two, but no drag queens. Yet. Pastor Paul is predicting a tidal wave of them before too long. Thanks to the schools and the library.

He wants the congregation to know that Evil is out there. Cannibalistic sexual predators in a D.C. pizza shop basement are only the tip of what’s coming if True Believers in the King James Bible don’t step up and confront the evildoers. Apathy won’t cut it! Drag shows and gay marriages are spreading. This is Hollywood’s doing. And it is sanctioned by one of the political parties which has sold its soul to the devil.

‘Wait a minute, Pastor!’ a lone voice from the back of the temple cries out. ‘You saying my party is Evil??’ Betty Lou asks. ‘I got a daughter up at Elger Bay Elementary and the only grooming they’re doing is maybe hair. There’s more grooming going on at Pampered Poodle than there is in that school, I can tell you that.’

Well, Pastor Paul told Betty Lou he would be more than happy to discuss this with her after services, but for now, he was trying to reach his flock, to warn them of the dangers within and without. Betty Lou shook her head, snatched up her purse and said, ‘Okay, Paul, I’ll go without.’ And stomped out the back door. Pastor Paul, unperturbed, suggested they all pray for Betty Lou’s eternal soul now that she was alone to wrestle with Beelzebub. I give the Devil about equal odds on that matchup.

Some of you grizzled up, gnarly nail pouchers maybe remember the era before Cascade Lumber.  Those terrible dark ages when we got our 2×4’s down at Copeland or Woodinville Lumber.  We were remodeling a lot back then.  Roofing, adding a deck for a new large appliance.  Prettying up the back shack for guests.  Maybe adding a skylight, couple of bedrooms.  Fixing up that grungy kitchen.

Pretty soon we were tearing down these 50’s and 60’s cabins.  Putting in new homes.  You boyz remember when they auctioned off Finistere Heights, top lot going for an unimaginable 160K??  We thought the tsunami must’ve crested up there  …..  but only a few years later and we found out that was just the low tide lapping gently against the bulkheads.  Camano Hills, Brentwood, Utsalady …. folks found Camano finally, cheapest waterfront, cheapest views, half of Seattle and a tenth of California rolled up in their Lexus SUV and paid cash.  I remember the day our assessor rolled in — old Fred — and said he had some bad news for me.  And I said we better have us a cold one then.  And he said, actually I got two pieces of bad news.  So I said, well, you know what I said, and he told me about my million dollar absentee neighbors’ evaluation across the nettle ravine.

It’s nice to rub shoulders with wealth, as you know, but it’s quite another thing to pay their same property tax.  All boats rise with the incoming tide — or so they say — but none of us ever imagined the money that was headed onto the South End’s shores and bluffs.  I just try to remember our roots, our humble beginnings, and thank our lucky stars we got property and a little shack and bright prospects from neighbors who are looking to buy our parcels so they can tear down our casas and put up fancy boathouses or an architect designed slave quarter or a simple hangar for their Cessna.

Course, that was before the real estate meltdown of ’08.  Meant we’d all have to stand pat for awhile longer.  Give us more time to clear a landing strip in the nettles for the next owner.  And to stock the fridge for the next assessor’s bad news.

I guess I’ve been working in art for about 35 years. Some of it I’ve been doing okay at, even made a so-called Living at, and most of it, well, I’m not the poster child for Starving Artist, but maybe Anorexic Artist. We artists have a tough row to hoe in corporate America, that’s the truth, and so we try all sorts of strategies ranging from art fair booths to just giving up and getting a job, a real job. But probably too late for one that pays well or offers benefits and pensions. The money belongs to the Job Creators. Us creators, well, good luck.

I went up into the mountains this past weekend with a box of the Skeeter Daddle Blues, hoping to do a book reading and maybe sell a few copies. Ever since my old outlets for book sales dried up, I’ve been headscratching how to market these babies, get them out of my basement and into the hands of folks hungry for great literature. Tyee Store closed up and so did the Copy This Mail That office supply store that sold the first book Skeeter Daddle Diaries so well I ordered a second printing. The South End String Band CD’s sold like hotcakes too at those places, but when they closed shop, the only show in town was the Snow Goose Bookstore. And now they’ve shuttered their doors too. We probably sold two to three thousand CD’s before that. I sold maybe 1000 books. Not bad for a backwash.

This past year I haven’t sold more than ten books and the band is giving CD’s away at concerts for ‘the price we finally figured they were worth’. For free. One concert alone we handed out 150 CD’s.

A high tech, fast charging friend convinced me to try Amazon. Against my better judgement I signed on, figuring I’d be sending them a box of hot sellers they could pass out faster than candy on Halloween. But no, they wanted me to send one book at a time, priority mail, to their warehouse in Maryland or someplace far far away. I spent about $5 per book for mailing envelope and postage, losing a couple of bucks on each one. This went on for a couple of months, never enough sales apparently, to justify shipping them a full box. I might have continued this brilliant sales strategy right into bankruptcy but one day I noticed Amazon, love these guyz, had used copies of the Skeeter Diaries listed at 1.99 plus shipping. This was great. Me competing against me and the only winner was Amazon. It took me awhile to get out of this crummy cycle, the company not really responsive to any inquiries. In fact, they had no way to make inquiries.

I finally just kept sending them messages on the sales requests that the book was Out of Print. Which, finally, it was. Sadly, I buy my own book back from them occasionally just to have a few copies around. Cheaper than reprints by far. Bookstores competing against Bezos, like I mentioned at the last Snow Goose reading before they closed shop, are like Godzilla vs Bambi, it won’t be long before they’re toejam. Now I see where they’d like to be my printer too, print on demand. Probably ship them to me, then have me ship them back each sale. Lose even more money on every point of sale.

So I wish I had a tried and true strategy for you prospective artists out there looking for ways to sell your wares, I really do. It was always dog eat dog, but now we got Godzilla too. My only advice is to be like the little furry creatures during the Dinosaur Era, stay low, keep a close eye out, maybe move at night. I know, not much help, but the trick is to survive.

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