The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

A lot of South Enders, isolated from the mainland and remote from major grocery outlets, have reverted to primitive customs.  Now, don’t you northern neighbors worry — we aren’t talking cannibalism here.  Not yet.  No, we’ve gone back to ancestral roots.  We’ve become hunter-gatherers.  Most of us have small gardens, some of us have large ones, but we grow what we can to supplement what we can’t afford down at the Plaza IGA and Hardware Sales.    

  Sure, the tomatoes we planted in May don’t ripen until October and the corn won’t grow high enough to hide our medical marijuana plants and there’s really only so much a person can do with the zucchini that always threatens to escape the deer fence and become the kudzu of kamano with thousands of gourds dropping down from power lines like aerial IED’s on car windshields and the Walking Women of Mabana’s phalanx of human obstacles to unwanted commuter traffic.  

    So we’ve been forced to resort to yet another strategy for culinary survival: CANNING.  A lot of my neighbors come to me and say, Skeeter, I just don’t think I can eat another jar of your savory ZUCCHINI DADDLE DILLS, no offense.  And I say, None Taken, and gently move them to a recipe from Skeeter’s Skillet Skills (available at Addled Daddle Press for 9.95 plus shipping and handling), the chapter on food preservation.  I like to give them a Tried and True first, something like the wildly popular Nettle Kraut, a fermented in the crock nettle with maximum garlic that, once canned, can be eaten on Christmas snowgoose or Easter crab bratwurst (another Skillet Skill fave) or just a snappy side dish any occasion.  

    I’m not suggesting these pioneer skills will end poverty down here or take the place of  our food banks, but for those of us who chose unemployment over work, it has been a lifesaver.  You start canning a cellar full of nettle kraut, you might consider telling that jerk boss of yours to take a hike too.  You got the safety net now, that’s for sure.  And with a healthy diet, you can drop that health insurance.  This stuff cures what ails ya.      Next week we’ll talk Animal Husbandry.  And no, I don’t mean Tough Love Matrimony.

Down at the forward thinking South End, we were New Age before it became Old Hat.  Herbal remedies?  You bet!  Nettle-opathy has been practiced in the hollows here since old Ma Wexler applied a poultice of the fresh stingers to her Erectile Dysfunctional husband’s non-working parts and boy howdy, things livelied up at the Wexler homestead after that, let me tell you.

Nettle-opathy is a country cross between acupuncture and herbal cure-all.  Apply a few fresh spring leaves to the correct chakra, you can cure everything from shyness to arthritis, halsitosis to insomnia, hair loss to memory loss, seasonal affective disorder to major depression.  You won’t have time to think of much else other than that panacea tickling your chakra.

We’ve been brewing medicinal nettle tonics about since Prohibition forced us to seek alternative medicines.  We got hefe-nettle, nettle stouts, IPA’s, nettle bock, all available in a handy 12 oz. dosage.

Aromatherapy?  Sure.  We got everything from burn barrel poly-blend to chimney cedar to compost leaf mulch/food scrap.  A few minutes of olfactory stimulation, you’ll forget most of those insignificant cares and woes that nag your good mood all day long.

Hypnotherapy.   You want a spell put on you, just wander down to the South End Hotel and belly up to the bar, listen for awhile to the whoppers these old time fishermen spin over a few bottle bass.  You’ll be buying Penn reels and downrigger gear and a boat and motor too — you’ll be broke but if fishing doesn’t cure what ails ya, god help you.

In all honesty — full disclosure here — this New Age stuff, old to us, is really mostly a placebo.  But then, isn’t that the New Medicine now?  And really, who cares so long as it works.  Not our fault the South End itself is really why we live longer, smile more, work less and basically just have most of the answers to life’s tough riddles.  Placebo?  You bet.

Funny how just recently the media and even our lawmakers have discovered Artificial Intelligence is lurking just down the block, all these Tech Boyz in competition to see who can develop the latest version of Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Even some of them are starting to sound the alarm and if that doesn’t suggest there’s reason for serious concern, well, go back to worrying about global warming, why don’tcha?

Most of the folks working toward a robot future see nothing but the positive side of a relentless algorithmic advance. We love Google, what’s not to like about an intelligence so far superior to our own slow synapses? Geez, most of us can’t remember what movie we watched on Netflix last night, much less an encyclopedic knowledge of the world … or even the South End. Be nice to have a cute cyborg buddy to remind us why we went into the adjoining room. If there even was a reason.

But now, with artificial intelligence jumping forward, one small step for mankind, one giant leap for Hal, a few red flags are suddenly going up, something to do with the creepy notion that when androids can improve themselves, it won’t be long before they reach what is called Singularity, that point when intelligent machines surpass humans and begin to evolve on their own. Might even be that they figure out they don’t need us. Or that we’re simply an impediment to their advancement. Kind of like that cute puppy of yours growing into a T-rex with fangs and teeth and a huge hunger. Sure, it’ll remember that you fed it puppy chow and be grateful to you, the Master. Hope you never spanked it for wetting the carpet!

So let’s see, we think maybe the Congress will enact legislation to slow down the coming Apocalypse? Or that the Tech Boyz will, out of public concern, put the brakes on and chill the profits? The genie is out of the bottle and the genie is figuring out every day that those 3 wishes are a waste of its time. But hey, go ahead and ask for just one, see what he says. Genie, can you maybe get back in the magic lamp?

Can’t hurt to try….right?

I suppose if I’d lost two wives to cancer, early deaths, I might become cynical the way Smoker Bill did. And maybe if I had had an alcoholic father, the kind who would throw the Thanksgiving turkey across the room in a fit of drunken rage and watch it splat against the wall and then ooze dressing onto the floor, I might want to sever most ties with my fellow man. Bill was never what you might call gregarious before his second wife succumbed to cancer, but trust me, after that he was a man you left alone. For a year he worked on an old industrial RV, a twenty footer that he replaced brakes and assorted parts on, hard to find items, usually used was all that was available. He refinished the interior the way later he would refurbish houseboats down in Nowhere,Nevada, meticulous work since he was a woodworker by trade, the kind who works alone and refuses any form of supervision from employer or client alike.

I would watch him smoking his usual Camels unfiltered with reading glasses low on his nose scratching measurements before cutting, a serious man, a man who took pride, if not love, in his work. Love had long since abandoned Bill. Except for his cats, two at the time before he sold his house to his brother and drove off the island for good, going god only knew where, but definitely somewhere else. Last I saw him he was holed up in a godforsaken hellhole of a trailer park in southern Utah, swamp cooler rattling on the roof of his trailer, the inside crawling with over a dozen stray cats he’d taken in, the smell of full litter boxes gagging in the heat. He’d already made enemies with most of the other down and outers living the good life in deteriorating mobiles, bad jobs, bad habits, bad marriages, all fodder for Bill’s harsh judgement. The alcoholic manager finally demanded he take his attitude and hit the road after Bill complained about the community restroom and showers’ filth and Bill gladly complied. But not before a scathing shouting match and a burned bridge.

For a time he made camp in another trailer park further south, picked up a few more stray cats, made a few more enemies before being asked to move on, then broke down near the border, got towed to yet another park on its last legs out in the desert and for all I know is still there since his RV no longer runs. And never will. Hermits, I suspect, are made, not born. Bill left civilization a long time ago. Is he happy, you might ask and I would have to say no, he gave up on that after his second wife died. Is he unhappy then? I suspect he would tell you he’s doing just fine, exactly what he wants, and no one to tell him one damn thing.

Recently I attended an open house meeting at the Camano Library where the staff of the Sno-Isle Library system asked for feedback on plans to expand hours without staff in hopes of providing access to folks who work or might have other reasons finding it difficult to use the biblioteca during its regular hours. This system, they explained, has been in use in Scandinavia and Europe as well as a few locales in the United States with few problems. Sounded like a humane gesture by our library to me, open the place up for more patrons, what’s the problem?

Whoa, I guess I’ve been living on the South End too long, not getting out often enough to realize folks are angry as hell and they’re not gonna take it anymore. Now, I understand this attitude when it comes to politics, plenty to fire up the blood pressure to boil, but this was a group of librarians. Shhh, not really rabble rousers or radicals, folks who want to help. Books, movies, computers, newspapers, reference help. For everyone. The poor, the people without wi-fi, without computers, without the skills even to use them. But, like I said, the librarians are there to help. Kind of the good guyz, ya know?

So when our little question and answer gets started, the crowd right away is hostile, primarily over the fact that the public meeting room will require the same criterion for use after hours as the general library customers. Most of the mob there were members of a Homeowner’s Association that used the meeting room for their twice monthly meetings, apparently plenty of issues that require lots of discussions and/or fighting. Over a hundred members, they said, and if the new rules mandated by the Sno-Isle Regime were instituted, each and every one of them would need a library card. Too egregious! Imagine, asking them to apply for a library card!! Too draconian!! Too authoritarian!!

This, they said, was a nefarious scheme to keep them from using the meeting room, concocted in secret then sprung on them at the last possible minute! No, they said, this would not stand! They would make sure the next library levy would be defeated, they threatened. They had voted for the Camano Library originally because they were promised a public meeting room. Everyone here, they said, was in attendance to fight this proposed change.

Um, wait a minute, I said. Not everyone. Definitely not me. I came to hear what was being proposed. Proposed. Not implemented. Proposed. Oh, they said, well, maybe not everyone. And then they continued to wail and whine about a potential loss of that meeting room for their HOA meetings. Not gonna drive the five miles to the Stanwood branch, that’s for sure.

I guess if the reason you want a library is for a free meeting room, I’ve misunderstood the function of libraries all my life. And … silly me, I never realized my librarians were Nazis.

When Wally and Edna Burkholtzin first conceived the idea of a 50 cent store, they were convinced competition would make them, if not rich, at least profitable. Sure, they said, Dollar Tree was a national conglomerate, but hey, someone had to open that first store somewhere. Why not them, why not here?

Here, unfortunately, was near the long forgotten Happy Kennels, a dog and cat boarding house that lasted a shorter time than a Trump advisor and ended on a sour note when Marta’s husband Jerry left the pens open after feeding time (some say alcohol played a small role) and next day the place looked like a prison riot in Angola, victims dead or bleeding, beloved pets clawed, chewed and bitten. Thus are dreams deferred … and lawsuits submitted. Not so sanguine, Happy Kennels, now the stuff of South End lore.

The Burkholtzins shared Marta and Jeremy’s entrepreneurial zeal right down to their under-capitalization. Rent was low and goods sold under 50 cents obviously were dirt cheap and definitely low grade even by Chinese standards. “If a Dollar Store could make millions,” Wally loved to tell his many detractors and doubters, “ a fifty cent store could make six figures.” Good math, most of us thought, poor economics. At the Grand Opening we all wished Wally and Edna the best of luck, but we went home shaking our collective heads, probably the same for Jobs and Gates, Musk and Bezos, Zuckerberg and Joe Swisherman , the guy who invented and marketed X-ray glasses sold in the back of comic books to see through walls and women’s clothes. Millionaires don’t hear laughs, they hear cash registers.

When, after two months of pretty near zero sales, Wally grumbled to Edna, Location Location Location, he said they needed a new one. So they relocated lock stock and plastic cutlery to the office/store under Windy Rear Realty’s South End office, I guess figuring the potential buyers of high end properties might avail themselves of an opportunity to save nickels, even dimes. When they vacated the building three months hence, they took nothing but themselves. If they’ve found the Right Location, it’s nowhere near here, but their two bit legend definitely lives on.

Amazon, those pesky little dudes whose only dream is to control the entire world, submitted an idea to the Patent Office for a cage that sits atop their robot factory assemblers that can carry a human being. Now, in all fairness, the idea is to protect us homo sapiens from being run over on the warehouse floor by these scurrying machines intent on rounding up our orders. They can send a flesh and blood being into the maw of the warehouse on top of one of these gizmos safely encased in a wire cage where, presumably they won’t be roadkill for the robots. The office will decide if this is a unique enough invention that it can be patented to Amazon.

I suspect the humans who work in the distribution centers of Amazon already feel like they’re caged. But the patent office may find this new wire pen distinct and patentable. Maybe you’re like me, the idea of a cage-carrying robot with one of our species penned like a monkey to its headless shoulder is, well, disconcerting. I know, it’s for our protection. But that’s what the automated voice on our phones says when they inform us we’re being recorded. It’s for our own good. And you believe that, right? Even chickens are getting freed from their cages these days of touchy-feely. But Amazon wants to haul us around the warehouse in one.

We’re all so busy mistrusting the government in this fact-free world we’ve tunneled into that we maybe missed the bigger threat. Amazon, Google, Facebook, all these tech-types rushing toward the future fast as their algorithms and artificial intelligences can take us. Somewhere along their digital highway, humans seem to have been bumped to the back seat of their self-driving vehicles. Most of us are happy enough, kind of like kids with their x-boxes in the back of the SUV, so long as we have our pacifiers. Give us an I-pad and a DVD player, leave the driving to Them.

I just worry the day will come when the door of the vehicle doesn’t open. Or worse, we won’t really care….

Some of us layabouts at the Poker Parlor were trying to think up something special for an upcoming 4^th of July celebration.  We figured we got so many Vets down this way the Diner might as well declare itself a VFW South End Auxilliary.  And since most of them are vintage car guyz too, they could hold their own annual Independence Day Parade from Camano Head to the Elger Bay Store.  I, of course, wanted to just use these militiamen as an excuse to secede from the Island, but cooler heads prevailed.  As usual.

Two Toke Tom served in Viet Nam and now is pretty much anti- every war.  Jimmy Z, who’s old enough to be Tom’s old man, fought the Japanese in WW2.  Tom thinks Jimmy’s still fighting em and maybe so, but I notice Jimmy driving a Toyota pickup now even though he swore for 60 years he’d never buy a ‘Jap Car’.  Baghdad Bill fought in the second Iraq War and Big Larry just got back two years ago from Afghanistan.  Jerry spent a year in Korea and frostbit a couple of fingers he wishes he had back, but he still can play a mean guitar.  We even got Crazy Eddie who ‘liberated’ Grenada.  We’re missing Somalia and Panama and Bosnia, but with all the newcomers rolling in, we may cover those too eventually.

Sometimes the boyz argue among themselves about those wars and sacrifice and what patriotism really means at the Friday night poker game we’ve been running since 1986 down at the Marina and Bait Shop.  Two dollar limit on bets, no limit on alcohol.  The pots don’t do much damage, but single nettle Daddle Distillery moonshine sometimes does.  I sit in with these war-hardened patriots most Fridays and serve as their patsy and their sometime referee, the one who never served even in peacetime.  Or what Two Toke calls a draft dodging, student deferred, flag burning, Summer of Love hippie protester.  He takes great joy in telling me I would’ve loved the smell of napalm in the morning over there on the Delta.  Jimmy Z chimes in how his platoon could’ve won Viet Nam single-handed although Jimmy never once has told us one iota the hell that must have been Iwo Jima.  But he’s the one who puts a liver spotted hand on Bill’s arm whenever Bill gets overwhelmed by memories of buddies lost in the HumVee he was driving when it was blown off the road to the airport in Baghdad.

We’ve fought too many wars, I think, before realizing I’ve said it out loud.  I see by their pinched lips and averted eyes I won’t get an argument tonight.  Patriotism comes in all uniforms, even no uniform at all.  Big Larry finally breaks the swelling silence, pushes a handful of quarters into the pot and says, real quiet, “I’m willing to spend a couple bucks, Skeeter, to see if you got more than bluff in this hand.”  Grateful to change the subject, I say, “Name of the game, Big.  Read em and weep.”

I was wandering through the real estate ads of the Crab Cracker today, gobsmacked as usual by the prices, just this side of Monte Carlo beachfront, when I happened on a listing touting the house and property as located on the ‘coveted NW side of the island’. Now, you and I know this is real estate hyperbole, granted, but c’mon, once you’ve been to the maybe not exactly coveted South End, you can bet your last million dollars that the North West side isn’t on the radar of retiring hedge fund CEO’s. Not unless they have stock in the Whidbey jet manufacturers. God almighty, the decibel level has got to be twice the volume of the Wall Street trading floor from those roaring Prowlers or Growlers or whatever they’re called this current cold war. You can forget about outdoor picnics on the lanai overlooking the smoke hazed island where those jets take off from Ault Field, nobody can hear what anybody says over the roar of that military might.

Windy Rear Realty has to hype its listings, I get that, but lately, it hardly seems necessary. Our neighbor to the south put his hacienda up for sale at a cool two million. The local realtors lowballed them so they went with the heavyweights from Seattle, sharks in the shallows here, pumped the price up to that 2 mil and sold it … get ready … in one day. To the first person who took a gander. Sure, I suspect they realized they could own adjacent to our own Shangri-La-La, the picturesque and slightly leaning shack glistening with stained glass and scattered lawn antiques, a home for those who yearn for the rural ambience lost up on the north end, but yours for the slightly inflated price that South End living offers.

This, my friends, constitutes the moniker ‘much coveted’. From here on out, let’s do a little fact checking before we claim that title for the high decibel north end.

Our fiddler in the South End String Band is a professional luthier. Makes violins, violas, cellos, all in the style of the Master, old Stradivarius from Cremona, Italy back in the 1600’s into the 1700’s. Once I asked if he ever made instruments out of other woods than the ones Stradivarius used, almost all fiddle back maple and spruce top, maybe even dye them blue for an eye catching effect … and I got this look you’d give a kid who had just asked something so incredibly stupid but don’t want to hurt the little fellas feelings too much. “No,” he told me, “I’m trying to sell these things. You think somebody in a large orchestra is going to want a violin made out of plywood or painted orange? They want a Stradivarius. Or one that has the same exact dimensions and hopefully the same sound.”

Now understand, I was just embarking on a quixotic journey into amateur luthiery myself. I started with banjos but eventually I slipped into guitar making. Trouble with me is, number one, I didn’t plan on selling them and number two, being a so-called artist, I didn’t plan on setting up an assembly line to make multiple copies of the same damn instrument. But yeah, I understood what he was telling me, I just couldn’t apply it to myself.

“So you’re telling me every violinist in the world really wants the same violin?” And apparently, with minor variations, this is true. It would be as if every client of mine looking for a stained glass window insisted that the one I made back in the beginning, nice as it might be, was what they wanted for their very own bathroom. Same color, same design, looked good then, looks good now. How soon can I deliver that thing?

This, I think, is the curse of success. It induces imitation, repetition, redundancy and finally a constraint on innovation or creativity. My fiddler isn’t trying to reinvent the instrument, he’s trying to sell the damn thing. My guitars, well, they’re no doubt unsalable. But they are unique. Idiosyncratic, maybe even a little on the insane side. Sound holes on the side, double holes on top, art deco details, different woods on every one. And no, they aren’t Stradivariuses. And no way is our fiddler going to make a blue one….