The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Don’t ask me why … but this last week I decided to do something radical. A late life crisis maybe or a mild case of heat stroke, but I decided to lose a few pounds, try to regain my girlish figure. Or if nothing else, lose my Milwaukee Tumor, that midriff bulge that threatens my pants wardrobe by expanding another inch. I know what you’re thinking — what’s radical about this?

What’s radical about this is that I’m not running to my doctor for GLP-1’s like half this country. I’m just eating less, drinking less and exercising more. Okay, so it’s only been two weeks, not really enough to earn me a sponsorship from Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig, if they even still exist in this era of weight loss pills, but I’ve dropped ten pounds already and my trousers aren’t so tight.

In America we all think we’re overweight. Me too. Course … a lot of us are overweight, one of the reasons why we have an increase in diabetes and heart attacks. Our self-image suffers, probably a major cause of depression or at the very least a reduction in happiness. Our movie stars and models give us inferiority complexes and our doctors tell us these excess pounds will kill us but they don’t say when.

These new wonder drugs that decrease our appetites, for food, for drugs, for alcohol, even for joy, turns out they’re great for addictions and depressions too, quite a happy surprise for Big Pharma and anyone who bought their stocks. Not to mention all the millions who lost weight. And who knows, maybe we’ll all be happy anorexics before long, the fast fat foods will go bankrupt and the price of groceries will plummet once the demand drops in half. Probably then our role models on stage and screen will be voluptuous and rotund, content to eat and drink heartily.

Meanwhile I got a few more pounds to shed. Me and the rest of this selfie nation….

The Monk was uptown last week making his once a week shopping trip. You live down on the South End, you schedule your trips to town as infrequently as possible unless you’re driving a Prius or you’re one of the new folks who couldn’t tell you WHAT the price of gas is and couldn’t care less. The Monk drives a beat-up Ford 150 pickup that gets about ten miles to a gallon of gasoline, about two gallons to town. It runs, barely, and if he could afford something better on his Social Security, he’d gladly own a hybrid, buy better food and probably become a howling environmentalist.

He was squeezing melons over in the produce section. No, not organic melons. Did I mention he was scraping by on Social Security? The Monk buys what’s on sale. The Monk eats on the cheap. The Monk — I’ll give him this — cooks his meals from scratch. The only Hamburger Helper he’d dream of is himself. He’s not much for boxed anything, he doesn’t care how long the preservatives will keep it edible. He makes his own spaghetti sauce, his own salad dressings, eats mostly fresh. He’s not exactly the poster child for Good Health and Living, but he tries. “You are what you eat,” he tells me. The Monk is about half broccoli.

He was squeezing that melon, I think I mentioned, when this guy comes by him with a parrot on his shoulder. The Monk stops squeezing his melon and holds a hand up to Long John Silver and his bird. The Monk, maybe I haven’t mentioned, is not exactly Live and Let Live. He’s ornery and he’s opinionated and he doesn’t suffer fools with parrots lightly. “What the hell, Bluebeard?” he asks the man with the bird. “That some kind of Service Animal?”

“It’s a parrot,” Sinbad replies, smiling, probably pleased his antics haven’t gone unnoticed. “I KNOW what it is,” the Monk says. “It’s a damn disease carrying bird in my food store. You need it to locate the crackers for Polly here?” Well, one thing led to another, the manager finally came down to the produce section and the Monk demanded this pirate wannabee goofball get that flu-bearing bird away from his chard and his tomatoes. The manager, noticing Cap’n Hook didn’t even have a basket, much less a cart, sided with the Monk and asked if he could leave his bird back in his car. Or his schooner.

“You believe that shit?” the Monk asked me when I dropped by when he was unloading his groceries from the truck. “These are tough times, Monk. Them that died be the lucky ones. The rest of us, well, who’s to judge?”

He gave me a dark look from over the melons. “The Monk, that’s who.”

Over a month ago I made the soonest appointment I could with the Dep’t. of Licensing to procure an enhanced driver’s license. In the time since, a buddy, my old partner of the Piranha Brothers, asked if I would join him for a sailing adventure into the San Juans. He was going for two weeks but, rather than cancel my appointment, I said I would only sail for a week, then catch a ferry home. Which is what I did, a little heartbroken not to finish the trip with Cap’n Joe. Weather was good, temperatures were warm, the seas fair. Looks like a great week coming up to be on the waters of the Salish Sea.

This morning, the day after leaving the voyage, I traveled 40 miles to the DOL office for my interview, got there 15 minutes early and found a small group of muttering fellow citizens staring at the CLOSED sign above the posted hours that told us today they opened at 8:30. My appointment was for 9. It was 15 minutes to 9. Some people sat in their cars waiting to see if anyone would show up and open the doors. One of the men said he figured the closure was due to budget cuts, probably give that money to housing for the poor. Pretty obviously he thought the poor should be left on the streets.

At 9 one of the group googled if by chance there was another office nearby or if maybe this one had moved. Indeed, there was a DOL office a mile north and a few of us jumped in our rigs and drove up there, only to find that office issued tabs and not enhanced or regular licenses. The secretary told me, yeah, lots of folks come to them when they find the office closed and yeah, that office has a history of insufficient staff.

So, being an optimistic idiot, I drove back to the other office hoping to find an OPEN sign with a full or even partial staff, but found instead another cluster of incredulous and pissed off folks, one who’d taken time off work, another whose license had expired, some who had driving tests scheduled. All pretty incensed, all shaking their heads, most blaming government.

When I got home two hours and 80 miles round trip later, I found an email sent exactly 5 minutes after I’d left the house informing me my appointment was canceled and … sorry for any inconvenience. Do Not Reply to this message, it informed me. I think I understand now why these are sent without any possibility of a reply. And I’m starting to understand why people hate the damn gummint.

I got a lot of friends who are O.C.D., obsessive compulsive disorder folks, what we on the South End call Anal. Harsh word, anal, so for our purposes here we’ll stick with OCD. Don’t want to offend anyone, but linguistics can be a two edged knife. My pals suffering from OCD are mostly engineers, but they don’t see their symptoms as suffering. Or a disorder even. In fact, they would argue that the orderliness they demand of themselves is quite possibly the panacea for the problems the rest of us have. Course, they don’t factor in the fact that the problem I have is mostly them.

But let’s be fair. The new psychiatric diagnostic description for myself is: S.L.O.B. Seriously Lacking Obsessive Behavior. Poor toilet training as a kid, I guess. I don’t have to wash my truck every damn week. I don’t wash it every year some years. I accept that the universe is falling apart, what we call entropy down here in the South End Scientific Community. It’s just how things work. They go to hell in a handbasket and if you want to spend your life pushing rocks up a hill like Sisyphus, be my guest. They’re going to make a nice rock wall for yahoos like me when they end up down my way at the bottom.

I don’t make my bed. I don’t clean my windows. I don’t dust my shelves. I don’t edge my lawn. I don’t stack my firewood in nice rows. I don’t organize my files. I don’t follow directions. I don’t even look at the damn directions. I don’t follow a recipe or write one down either. I mean, why? The next batch of bread or homebrew or the next meal will be different, maybe better, maybe worse. C’est la vie, amigo! Routine is the killer, lists are for someone closer to death, order is for the delusional, life is chaos and the sooner you accept it, the better off you’ll be. So yeah, I’m SLOB.

I’m sure there’s a pharmacological cure for my ailment. But hey, I’ve got a pharmacological cure for lots of my ailments, why add one that might have side-effects for the others? In the final analysis, I suppose there’s a nice equilibrium between me and my OCD cronies. They draw in the lines, I draw the rest. When it works, we got a great little homeostatic community. When it doesn’t, well … we’ll find out what happens when gravity hits anti-gravity. Probably sounds like

Down here in the start-up labs of the South End we’ve been printing DNA. Got ourselves some sterile vats full of 4 major amino acid groups, hooked em up to a 3-D printer, ran a USB port to a laptop and went to work experimenting with interesting combinations. Make our own stem cells with unusual variations of chromosomes, another year or two, you’ll see Wal-Mart offering kits for the kids. Make your own sibling! Puppy in a test tube! Fun for the whole family!

Course we’re still working out the bugs, literally sometimes. South Endomex Technologies made a fast mutating paramecium that ran rampant in the dumpster behind their lab a couple months ago. Two or three cats lost more than their allotted 9 lives before Billy Brandon, the night manager, noticed clumps of matted fur behind the building and alerted Frank, South Endomex’s project manager next morning. “Looked like they’d been turned inside out and twisted,” he whispered before giving notice.

Kind of a wake-up call, I guess. They double bag unwanted recombinants now, no point taking unnecessary chances. Not that anyone’s very worried. I mean, what are the odds of escaped life forms surviving in the hostile environment of the nettled South End? Humans barely eke out an existence, what chance does an unstable pile of amino acids have?

Still, always good to err on the side of caution even if the government hasn’t gotten around to clamping down on the profit motive with overly burdensome regulations.     Yet….     Which only makes us all that more inventive. Time, after all, is not on our side. But judging by the influx of venture capital, the potential is nearly unlimited. Forget Silicon Valley. This here is the Next Big Thing. This is the new Garden of Eden, a chance to get it right this time. You want an apple, Adam? Tart or sweet? Red or yellow? With or without seeds? Just punch a program, Big Fella, no need to disobey orders from On High. But … maybe keep an eye out for any odd looking worms. Still got some flies in the ointment….

My old construction partner, boat building mentor and former roommate nearly 50 years ago is sailing up today from Seattle and Gomorrah to pick me up for a second run into the San Juans, that snooty archipelago that refuses Camano entry into its ritzy island club. Our last adventure ended in a flipped sailboat, my prized Pelican, the S.S. Pterodactyl, off the shores of Lummi Island. We did not drown, but we were more than slightly embarrassed to be rescued by the Coast Guard and other boaters, after which we hightailed it to solid ground near Bellingham.

Undeterred, bent but not broken in spirit, a great deal older and probably no wiser, we’re off again in his 15 foot sailboat, cramped quarters but we’re not Mark Zukerberg who needs 3 mega-yachts to boost his puny ego. No, we have what we need. And hopefully calm seas, a steady wind at our backs and stars to steer us by. Cap’n. Joe wants to cruise for two weeks. Me, I have one week before I have to return to shore duty.

Enjoy some time off yourselves from these Daddle diatribes. We both deserve the respite.

I guess since all my cronies are throwing in the towel and taking retirement on schedule, it’s only reasonable I’ve been getting calls from the Mabana Financial Services asking if I’d like to come on down to their lavish offices overlooking the Port of Mabana and discuss fiscal strategies for my upcoming Golden Years. Ho ho, would I ever? Course, like I tell Ben, the head honcho down at MFS, it’s a little like saddling up the horse that ske-daddled when I left the barn door open back in my earning years. Earning years. Old Ben loves expressions like that.

I said I’d talk to him, but only over beers down at the newly opened Bar 282, named after our zip code’s last three numbers, probably some numerology factoid that becomes apparent deep in the cups. Better, I suppose, than 666, what the Little Church in the Ravine refers to it as. So if Benjamin and I are going to discuss finances, what better place? At least that’s what I told him when he asked, why there?

We got through the first two schooners okay, managed to navigate around my Social Security numbers which, admittedly, were poor, a reflection of my life as a fiddling grasshopper while my neighbors labored as productive ants. My mistake, at least from the vantage point of an old grasshopper, but I wouldn’t change anything even if I had a time machine. Ben commiserated the way a funeral director would offer comfort to the bereaved, not totally heart-felt, but what his job calls for. What’s he gonna say, you deserve poverty, Skeeter? Instead he mentioned annuities, aggressive equities, municipal bonds and a dozen other financial instruments. Instruments. I kid you not, that’s what he called them. Like something in a fiscal orchestra and he, I guess, was the maestro.

By the 3rd beer we were both convinced it was hopeless. I wasn’t going to catch up to Warren Buffet, not in the remaining years, not if I worked until I was 300 years old. “Ben,” I said, “I appreciate you trying to help. But you can’t prime a pump if you don’t have water.” Ben shook his head wearily. “You change your mind, Skeeter, drop by and we’ll strategize some more.” I haven’t been in since, but I might go for another beer with him. Maybe some of that high rolling fiscal firepower will rub off. That, or I could trade a few of my banjos for a couple of his instruments.

Judge Jack was kicking himself. Down at the South End Senior Center a sculpture they’d thought had been donated 12 years ago was now in Limbo. The donator’s brother had seen it there, seen it for the first time, and since they had owned it when they ran their restaurant into a backwash bankruptcy, he now wanted it back. The Center had grown fond of the carved basswood dolphin over the years and they were more than reluctant to give it back. Statue of limitations, apparently….

What to do, what to do??? Turn it over to an arbitrator, of course, some poor sap who would willingly step into the vise. Who you gonna call? Judge Jack. And Jack had said naively, sure, he’d mediate. Now he regretted it. No King Solomon decision here, he soon learned to his dismay. Someone was going to be sorely disappointed and he would take the fall, maybe lose a friend. “Let em flip a coin,” Two Toke Tom advised. “The Gods of Fate, my friend. Better than the judicial system, you ask me.” Two Toke, naturally, thought a septic system was superior to the judicial, having been harassed for most of his so-called adult life over recreational preferences and underground agriculture. Two Toke was legendary for a life of minor cannabis crime and he was a man who held a grudge.

Judge Jack sipped his latte thoughtfully. Tom was usually in geosynchronous orbit a bit too far out to take seriously, but he had a point. Flipping a coin might be the way to go. Nobody right, nobody wrong, no judge hung on his own petard. Just bad luck calling that head over tails. Way of the world. Keep the dolphin, lose the dolphin. Jeez, who cares when the Middle East is collapsing into sectarian war? Just art, after all and Judge Jack knew better than most that art in corporate America was worth about what bitcoins were on the South End. And sinking fast.

Flip a coin and walk away. “How you gonna rule, Judge?” Tom smirked over his coffee. Jack shook his head sadly, shoved his mug into the center of the table. “Refill?” Brenda asked, holding the coffee pot, working the tables. Jack said mournfully, “Hell if I know, Brenda. Come back in five minutes. I got to give it more thought.”

Tom fairly howled. He slapped the table. “Hit me again, Brenda.”

My shack has ghosts. Poltergeists. Gremlins. Whatever you care to call the little demons that are turning my lights off intermittently, then turning them back on. I don’t really believe in phantasms, but I know my lights are flickering off, then going off completely, then later suddenly snapping back to life. It’s disconcerting, I do know that.

I pulled the breakers outside, replaced them and for awhile, they seemed to work. But only for a day or so. Now the lights are turning themselves on and off again. It’s driving me batty. Yesterday I tore into the walls, jerking out switches and outlets, looking for a loose wire, a faulty switch, a connector come undone. So far nothing…. Now more lights are turning themselves off, turning themselves on. I was convinced there was a logical explanation, but more and more I’m starting to wonder.

I wake up every day to strange stories in the news. Sexual harassment, Russian probes, Senatorial races with a bigot and child predator, lies and faux news, it never ends, just drives me crazy. The nation seems stuck in a reality meltdown where paranoia reigns and obvious lies are uttered without embarrassment. I need meds. Lithium, valium, anti-psychotics, whatever it takes to reduce the brain-fever. The truth is flickering on and off. The news is driving me insane. Faux news, real news, on and off, on and off, day after day.

Today the lights in the house went off. I checked the fuse box and nothing was amiss. No breakers were OFF, but the power was. To half the room I’m in right now. Half on, half off. I’m sure it has a logical explanation. I’m sure an electrician could explain this phenomenon in a nano-second. The truth is out there somewhere. But somewhere isn’t here.

I shut off the power entirely to the shack finally. I turn it on when I’m down there working, but I’m afraid to keep it on when I leave the building, something might spark and the place will go up in flames. I should probably do that with the news, just turn it off, but I’m afraid the country will go up in smoke if I don’t pay attention. Am I crazy? Are we all going crazy? Maybe I need to turn off all the lights once and for all. Before they turn themselves off. Except that seems illogical. Doesn’t it??????????

Every blue moon or so a new entrepreneurial startup appears in the sleepy hollows of the South End. A computer repair shop stuck out a shingle ten years ago, some techie kid who figured the retirees would need his skills first time their desktop Dell froze up — and he was right. Trouble was, there aren’t enough of us old timers. There was that dog groomer place, the Pampered Pooch, who specialized in poodle pompadours but quit shortly after Jenny Winesack’s fox terrier took issue with the jetted bubble bath and bit her on the face, nearly taking out an eye. The neighbors claimed the terrier was vicious even without the water torture treatment and advised her to sue Jenny, but she said no, she guessed she just wasn’t the Dog Whisperer she’d thought she was.

So when I saw the wooden sign down past Tyee Store nearly to the Head where the road hairpins back north toward our place, I shook my head, figuring Ralph’s Old Time Tonsorial Emporium would last a month or two. I also figured I ought to get myself a trim before the place closed its doors forever and so I rode my bike in one sunny day down the long overgrown driveway into the nettle festooned interior, surprised to discover Ralph had added a room off the old Stuart place where he’d installed an old time hydraulic barber chair, a double basin porcelain sink and even a vintage barber pole spinning red white and blue on its axis by the door.

Little Jimmy was in the chair and Fairlane Fred was sitting his turn. “Take a seat, won’t be long, I cut faster’n a logger on meth,” Ralph, I presumed, said in greeting. I took off my hat and joined the crowd. The conversation was lively, political and heated enough for my liking. The cut was fair and the price too. “Come back,” he said, sweeping my locks into a metal dustpan, shaking the apron for Big Walter who’d come in behind me. “I will,” I said, and I have. And damn if Ralph’s Old Time Tonsorial Emporium didn’t make a go of it, despite all odds.