The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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….

Yeah, I thought it was a fake news story, some halfwit click bait pitting two giants of the tech industry in a cage match, kickboxing themselves until one or both succumbed to blows to their fat heads. But no, these two are engaged in a back and forth social media chest pounding, no holds barred, your mama’s uglier than my mama throwdown. There’s even talk of a pay-for-view match in Vegas.

These are the people who control your destiny, adolescent testosterone-overdosed schoolboys, punks with too much money and too little maturity, stuck with some sadly huge lack of self-esteem, hoping maybe to impress the prom queen. With bush league deficients like these mapping our digital futures, what’s to worry about? I mean, try to picture Albert Einstein challenging Thomas Edison to a boxing match, see who’s got the biggest swinging dick. But this is the pathetic state of our own local geniuses, two clowns calling each other names, thumping their fists on the ground, grunting like gorillas in tweets and taunts. C’mon, seriously?

Why not a game of chess, maybe? Or a duel on Jeopardy? Not manly enough? Not sufficiently primitive for ya? Real men would use pistols at 20 paces. You boys afraid of mortal injury? Are you cowards? Put your billions where your mouths are, I say. Fight to the death. From where I sit in the pay-for-view stands, any result would be a good start.

I’ve always maintained, rightly or wrongly, that if necessity is the mother of invention, boredom is the midwife of art. Most of my artist pals would probably disagree, but I can only speak for myself. If I were busy with a job or a family or any of a countless other enterprises, I doubt I’d stay up late to find the time to make art.

Course my pals would point out that I somehow chose art over careers and family and all the rest and I’ll grant the point. But … I suspect it was my laziness or contrariness that kept me from those and so ultimately I ended up living hand to mouth with part time jobs, as a recluse on this American backwash, too much time on my hands, not enough TV maybe, but eventually succumbing to the siren song of art as a cure for ennui. I sure didn’t intend to be an artist anymore than I planned a career as a business executive.

No doubt there are plenty of folks who do — just not me. A friend of mine who rode cross country moving his divorced daughter from Seattle and Gomorrah back to Madison, Wisconsin with me for four days told me us artists with our mantra that we’ve found the perfect ‘job’, one that we love and doesn’t even really qualify as ‘work’, just screws it up for the people who need to take some crappy job in order to live, to raise a family, buy a house, all that stuff we call the American Dream. They don’t need to hear some yahoo like me telling them art isn’t work, it’s a passion, gee, just find your own passion and you’re all set.

Bullshit, he says. You want society to operate, people have to work jobs that they’re, no way, going to be passionate about. But they’ll be fine, even fulfilled. Shut up, he told me, giving folks false hope.

So … I’m telling you, if you’re not bored, be happy. Life is good. Sure, us artists are probably passionate, but maybe not happy. If I’m bored, rest assured, I’m not contented. But if you think I’m going to get a job, don’t kid yourself, I’ll just go make something, keep myself busy. Not saying that’s what everyone else should do….

Not too long back I got myself invited to a ‘men’s group’. I guess I thought it was mostly a drinking society startup but after the first couple of drafts up at the new bar at Terry’s Corner, the Tippler or some name like that, the conversation detoured from politics and art to subjects on the decidedly morose side. Meaning, our old friend Death, capital D. Gotta say, I was a bit blindsided by the change of topic but these were mostly old geezer friends and they didn’t seem too perturbed, so sure, let’s get Serious.

Serious is not my usual mode for coping with life’s problems. And certainly not the End of Life, which seems to me, is the solution for all the others, welcome or not. Crazy Eddie, fresh off a brush with the Grim Reaper and sporting a new pacemaker, avowed as how he wouldn’t mind sharing some insights after his near death experience. Bobby, having just received the bad news that his chronic back pains would require major surgery, said he was In. When Ralph, the head organizer, looked over at Phil, Phil shook his head wearily. “I don’t know, Ralph.” Phil had lost his wife a month earlier to pancreatic cancer.

Ralph bored in. “Do you a world of good to unburden yourself of some of that grief. What harm would it do?”

One by one Ralph roped them in, old fellas like himself, probably frightened of the waning light … or whatever poetic metaphor keeps the dark glasses off. Of course he had a reading list, most on the subject of How to Cope with the Big D, a syllabus, apparently, for those of us in the Final Stage.

Ralph no doubt will assume I’m in denial. And who knows, maybe I am. But I’ll be damned if I’ll spend one lousy hour of whatever time is left to me on this green planet sitting around with my geriatric pals talking about coping strategies for death and dying, I don’t care how good the beer is. Worst case I’m gonna find some younger friends to drink with.

I’m organizing an exploratory committee to determine the logistics of running for President on the GOP ticket. Why not, everyone else and their 3rd cousin is shooting for the moon, hoping Trump is so under siege with multiple indictments and possibly even incarceration, that the odd man out will become the next candidate for the Republican Party. I’m not going into this naively, don’t even think that for a nano-second. I’m aware that my usual leanings will have to plumb up a bit if this longshot is going to have a snowball’s chance in the hellbroth of today’s politics.

To that end my platform will need to be tweaked a tad. Trans, of course, will now rise to the top of my Greatest Threat to the American Way of White Life. Little girls will no longer have to contemplate suicide worrying about some so-called, maybe not, man coming into their bathroom and scarring them for life. And of course no man turned woman will be allowed to play in the sports of their new gender. In fact, all transgendered people will be required to return to their original sex.

The point here to my future constituents is that I will be running far to the right of my competition. Very far. Guns will be mandatory in every household. Bibles too. Jobs in construction and the service industry will go only to white kids. At a reduced minimum wage. An iron curtain, a Great Wall, will be built not only along the southern border but between us and the lib/woke Canada. America for White Bread Americans, that will be my slogan. All others, those not like us, will be asked to vacate the building. Who needs the complaining?

Welfare and food stamps will be eliminated and those motel and burger flipper jobs will be offered instead. After all, work gives a person dignity. A free lunch sure doesn’t. Rather than waste the country’s time which could be better spent on listening to podcasts debating which books should be banned in our libraries, I will simply ban libraries, saving taxpayers fortunes in wasted money. My first act in office should you, the happily unwoke, elect me, will be to close down Disneyland and Disneyworld. Mickey has had a long enough run. Time to move on.

And, of course, count on me to pardon Donald J. Trump and eliminate the weaponized Department of So-called Justice. The man has suffered enough. We’ll let the local police handle things from here on out. I think you can plainly see, I’m the far right candidate for these right wing times. Victory will be ours … if we can stop the opposition from voting. And after all, isn’t that the American Way?