The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Back before the building booms when Camano was discovered by the denizens of Seattle and California seeking low cost gated communities, the Piranha Brothers plied their trade in the South End backwash. Their motto, We Don’t Need No Stinking Permits, explains why they worked after hours, on weekends, often times in the gloom of night, anything to avoid the dreaded building inspector. They worked fast and they worked cheap, hammers strapped to their construction belts slung low the way a gunfighter hung his .45, safety off, trigger filed.

They used recycled materials gleaned from tear downs and salvaged structures, not so much out of environmental concerns as a strategy to building on the cheap. Sheds, garages, chicken coops, artist studios — no job was too small, no building too demeaning. They moved surreptitiously from site to site, word of mouth spread to prospective clients the way a virus travels by stealth and speed. The jobs they turned down were those that might arouse the neighbors or were visible from the highway. Cash only, the Brothers demanded. Leave no trace.

It was only a matter of time, of course, before the long reach of the Island County Building Department tracked the two men to an unpermitted barn south of Tyee Store where Jimmy Kennedy found the pair hammering rafters into place three stories above ground. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. ‘I’ll need to see a building permit, boys,” the lawman shouted above their hammers’ racket, ‘and I’ll need to see it now.’ Even though they’d never laid eyes on the county’s agent, they knew who this was and they knew too the jig was up now that their cover was blown. It was, Josh told his partner Pete over a long afternoon of beers at the Stanwood Hotel after paying their fines and receiving their reprimands, inevitable.

‘You aren’t suggesting we go legit, are you?’ Pete asked bleary-eyed. ‘No way, partner, that’s for other construction outfits, not the likes of us.’ And so, maybe sad to say, maybe not, the heyday of the Piranha Brothers seemed at its end.

There are some who say the Piranha Brothers never really existed, just a rumor from the scofflaw days of the island when we built our own homes without permission or permit, us pioneers of Camano. Others claim they retired, drifted back into time and the backwash where even today they construct odd buildings that defy gravity and the law. But if truth be told — and it seldom is down here at the end of the island — the boys drifted into legend. Even if it was only in their own minds.

Did you know the world’s richest 8 people had more wealth than the poorest 50%? You think maybe this is an April Fool joke? Faux facts? No, eight people had amassed as much riches as 3.7 billion people at the bottom of the heap. Stop and think about that for more than a nano second. Stop in your tracks. Let your jaw drop down to your knees. 8 people – 8! — with more money than 3.7 billion people combined!! 3.7 billion people in poverty, some starving of famine, some refugees from wars, some just us South Enders who maybe didn’t want to work very hard and never started up a Tech Company.

I guess I knew we had some income inequality, growing wider every year, but c’mon, this seems slightly skewed. I don’t begrudge Gates and Bezos and Buffet and Zuck a few billion, but show me the trickle down. Better yet, show the 3.7 billion people at the bottom whose only trickle is maybe a golden shower. Oh, I know I got a lot of neighbors who think whatever we do, don’t tax the rich! Because they think they might be rich one day…. You know, get an inheritance from Uncle Bezos or finally get around to that start-up tech company or reap the gains from those bitcoin investments or … more likely, win the Powerball Lottery. That, or just bottle lightning and sell it to the poor.

God forbid that we redistribute wealth!! Wouldn’t want to be accused of communism or social engineering or even basic Christian values. Those eight fellows made their money the old fashioned way, with lobbyists and sweetheart deals, with ruthless monopolies and cut-throat capitalism. Why on earth would we tax them exorbitantly when we can take the money from regressive taxation, user fees, sales taxes and other old fashioned usury? Sure, we could use those trillions to feed the poor, cure diseases, fund scientific advances, stuff like that, but you know and I do too we’d probably just build a bigger military. Kill the poor, let them die of disease and starvation, pay them as little as possible. After all, they’ll get to inherit the earth, right? Not that I’m blaming those 8 fat cat rich guys, no sir, they’re probably nice fellows, the way we’ll be when we win the Sweepstakes. I’m just saying there’s billions of folks who maybe deserve a slightly bigger piece of the pie. And I don’t mean Humble Pie.

Yep, everybody seems really really happy that the debt ceiling crisis got resolved. Me, not so much as some. I don’t really care to negotiate budgets with a threat to bring down the economy, instigate a recession and ruin our financial standing in the world. Don’t ask me why, just doesn’t seem like the way to run a government. Unless the goal is to run it into the ground.

I particularly don’t like deals that spare the rich and rob from the poor. Okay, maybe rob is a bit over the top. Borrow, you like that better? We’re compromising, you like that word?, we’re compromising by agreeing not to raise taxes on the wealthy by cutting 20 billion from the IRS in return for asking food stamp recipients to find a job. It might seem fair, free food but you have to work. Unless of course you can’t find a job because maybe you have a criminal record and no employer will hire you. Or where you live doesn’t have many job openings and the commute into high-priced cities makes a minimum wage job a joke. Or maybe you have kids and working means hiring child care for more than you make. Lots of reasons but none that matter to the compromisers.

Back when I was on unemployment the Social Services people would always send me and my ilk to a sawmill 30 miles north of me, minimum wage, bad shifts, basically a sweatshop … but… if you turned down a job there the good folks at Social Services stopped paying you unemployment. For me and probably a lot of us down-and-outers, it was better for our mental health to turn that job down. Good racket, though. For that sweatshop and for the bureaucrats who bought into the scam, money saved all around.

They say work gives a person dignity. What they don’t say is that a lot of work does just the opposite. What they also don’t say, ever, paying your fair share of taxes might give the rich a deserved sense of dignity too. And maybe even an honest sense of patriotism. Just saying….

Now, a lot of us South Enders look a little dubiously at Dad’s Day. It sounds suspiciously like one of those STING operations for deadbeat dads delinquent on child support payments. Get us all down here, then throw the net. We can already see the headlines in the Conway Chronicler: South Enders nabbed in Paternity Sting.

NOT that I’m saying I’m a deadbeat dad. I know being an artist and a banjo picker sort of doesn’t help the image, but we all been down on our luck. Little Jimmy understands that. His mom’s a little less forgiving, but when the CD sales start rolling in and the big art commissions, she’ll change her tune.

What with all these studies proving that more than a quarter of men in this country aren’t the genetic fathers of their children, Fatherhood on the South End has taken on a whole new meaning in these modern times we live in. DNA tests take all the romance out of relationships, you ask me. The old family tree’s got some extra branches now. And I guess that’s good, but it sure takes some of the mystery away from sparking and courting. Personally I don’t care to find out half the South End String Band is related.

But it IS father’s day coming up. Won’t be long before dear old dad is just a Test Tube in some sterile lab. Sample # 74 Double X, blue eyes, dark hair, long fingers for the banjo. I like to think I got more to offer than a Petri dish. Although, Little Jimmy’s mom might not agree.

The Band was thinking of maybe lobbying for Father’s Day being a day of amnesty. You know: Give a Dad a Break Day. Or even a whole month. NOT that I’m saying the boys down here are looking for a way to skip the June payments. We were just thinking a little breathing room ….. you know, til the CD sales pick up.

Clyde stopped by our place yesterday, wanted to know if I wanted some wood flooring. Clyde’s notorious for scrounging lumber — beams, 2×4’s, plywood, chopped off rafters and joists full of nails — he takes it all, he and his partner Fred. They’re true South Enders, no building parts are too unworthy for future projects. No oddly shaped root or burled tree trunk couldn’t be imagined as a trellis or a doorway or a garden gate. Their greenhouse/apartment is a testament to homesteader ingenuity, from the recycled plumbing for a radiant heat floor to the gnarly limbs of a cedar tree that frame a window made from sliding glass door panels. The roof is raftered with bridge beams and salvaged lumber, all covered with earth and plantings, a green ecosystem.

So when Clyde asks if I want some wood flooring, red lights go off and a siren shrieks deep down in my hippocampus. “You don’t want it yourself?” I ask, meaning, what’s wrong with this flooring if you boyz are turning it down? Clyde avows how they don’t need flooring and anyway, it’s all mismatched remnants. Like they don’t have mismatched remnants from one end of their property to the next??? “Use em for furniture,” I advise. “I took my leftovers and made cabinets and bookcases, banjos, hell, it’s hardwood.”

“We’re jammed up,” Clyde says sadly. “Stuff we got now is getting powder post beetles. We couldn’t use it all in the rest of our lifetimes.” Which is true! They’re beyond Scroungers now, heading toward Hoarders. It’s a fine line, I know, and only a packrat like myself who’s scrounged most of his life is qualified to define the slip from Collector to Psychopathology. Clyde, I diagnosed, had stepped back from the Abyss. Enough was finally enough. Clutter was one thing, tunnels to the kitchen and bathroom quite another.

No mas! There comes a time when a sane man knows implicitly to STOP. Before it’s too late. Before madness descends like a dark curtain blotting light and reason.

Today I picked up 10 boxes of hardwood flooring, enough to lift the front end of my truck. No, I don’t really need flooring. But, you never know, right? Now if I can just figure out where to store all this wood until I need it….

I identify as a guy, a cisgender, actually, and yeah, I had to look it up. It means I kept the same sex as I got tagged with when I was born. I’m pretty happy with the designation, not planning to start experimenting at my advanced age, not having gender doubts, not really worried about others who do. Folks have to figure this stuff out themselves and it probably doesn’t help one bit that we’ve politicized the journey for these people, hard enough without the whackjobs taking their jabs, passing their laws and generally just being, oh, for want of a better word, un-Christian. Live and let live, do unto others, all that peace and love stuff, let’s just learn to get along, children.

I know, for some it’s really hard to accept the idea of a man wanting to be a woman … or vice versa. But c’mon, you’ve all known people who were caught in between hormones, tomboys, sissy guyz, macho women, some who loved people of their own sex, some who wanted to be the other sex, some who couldn’t make up their minds, some who loved both. It’s a complicated world, for sure, and if the pronoun preference bugs you, okay, I get it, but look, not too many years ago gays were relegated to the closet. For a long time it was illegal to love someone of your own sex. Seems like ages ago, but believe me, it was yesterday and worse, it still is yesterday for a lot of states in these not very united states.

Uganda just passed anti-gay laws, some that trigger a death penalty. We got nations that are anti-woman, much less gender bending. In this country we like to think of ourselves as enlightened. Progressive. Although progressive is now a pejorative word in plenty of sectors. Movies, the internet, television, streaming, you name it, pretty much an across the board acceptance of LGBTQIA2S+, the plus being a catch-all for whatever part of the sexual spectrum we missed. But now we have a political party that thinks demonizing Hollywood or Disney or permissive parenthood is a path to winning office in the Land of Grievances. Too late, boyz, your hormones are too toxic! Plus, you’re on the wrong side of history. Homosexuality isn’t going away. Trans aren’t either. The closet doors are open, fellas, and if you look close, you’ll find a few of your friends and family. You might even, if you open your eyes, find yourself. Scary, I know….

Be careful what you wish for, all you anti-woke yahoos. A Utah library has taken the Good Book off its shelves after complaints that it is unfit for young readers. Pornographic and excessively violent, some concerned parents said and apparently the librarians agreed. These are tough times in partisan America so it should come as little surprise the ‘woke’ Bible-phobes are up in arms. Put another title on the banned list, probably just arouse the curiosity of those teenagers itching to get their hands on the burn list, see what the hub-bub is all about. What was Jezebel up to in Chapter 6?

Course, kids could just log on to their devices and google porn up while their parents are out lobbying their local libraries and PTA’s to keep undesirable books off the shelves. I’m sure these same parents insure their little precious doesn’t get his or her hands on violent video games or listen to music sung by people of uncertain sexual preferences. The world outside their insular home is a bit too dangerous these days when the latest surveys show 20% of teenagers checking the box regarding gender preference as Uncertain. Oh my….

Books and music and Hollywood, all that evil. Now the Bible. Where does a Mom turn? What can a Dad do? Well, for one, demand that their church quit teaching from pornographic and violent texts, that’s what. Keep those impressionable youths indoors, take away their devices, stop going to the library and definitely take them out of public schools and probably even private ones too if they’re affiliated with churches. Evil is everywhere now. Ignorance is not only bliss, it might be the only option.

So a duck walks into a drugstore, picks up a box of Trojans and walks to the counter with it under his wing. The pharmacist rings up his purchase and asks, ‘you want me to put this on your bill?’ The duck, aghast, quacks, ‘I’m not that kind of duck!!’

So I’m walking into my own local drugstore and this kid and his girlfriend are palavering in the aisle I’m walking by. She’s crowbarred into torn designer jeans that must cost a hundred bucks and he looks like he shops Goodwill. ‘How would I know where to find them?’ she asks the boy, ‘I don’t shop here.’ At which point I leave eavesdropping range, get what I came for and head back up to the checkout line. The girlfriend is waiting some ways away, but says, loud enough for everyone to hear, ‘I’m not going to stand there too. You can do it by yourself.’

I queue up with the lad who has a package of Trojan condoms in his mitt and we’re behind two elderly ladies who are waiting for their turn at the register. It becomes a long wait, but finally the two women move to their respective registers and finally I say to the kid, “ya know …

when I was about your age I went into a pharmacy to buy prophylactics for the first time. You had to ask the pharmacist for them back then, didn’t want to leave them out for the prurient public. I was a little nervous, being a kid, so I asked the druggist for Trojans, just like you got right there, and the guy asks, ‘what size?’ Geez, what size? Not something I counted on, I guess figuring one size fits all or something, but finally I mumble, ‘I don’t know, mediums, I guess.’ ‘Naw,’ he says, ‘what size box, a dozen or what?’

I’m sure the guy pulled that on every underage kid who bought his first condoms from that store, probably howled with his buddies every time too.” My kid gives out a nervous little chuckle, not quite sure what to make of this old geezer telling his story, but he’s saved when the counterguy says Next. On the way out of the store, reunited with his girlfriend, I’m wondering if he’ll maybe tell her he bought the condoms but forgot to check what size, see maybe if she’d fall for it. Naw, I think maybe he had other things on his mind….

My neighbors are up in arms. A year ago a cluster of alders blew down in a storm, crashing into the bulkhead below and opening a wide gash exposing the bank to the sea. Our trail down to the beach was threatened — and more importantly a few houses close to the bluff’s edge were threatened. The obvious solution, of course — no, not put those houses up for sale — was to repair the breach in that bulkhead.

So permits were applied for and meanwhile the homeowner’s association decided the old bulkhead, rotting pretty fast, might as well be replaced too. More permits, more delays, more time to gather estimates, hire experts, obtain bids, attend meetings and divide up sides. Take a million plus dollar estimate and divide by 25 or so properties, you’ve got a microcosmic snapshot of America, the Haves vs. the Have Nots, the folks on fixed incomes vs. the Boeing and Microsoft retirees. Annie, get yer gun, we’re going to war.!!

I’m not exactly an uninterested bystander in this shoot-out. We have beach rights and since the trail is a necessary component of those rights which the bulkhead protects, the argument has been made that we are equally responsible to pay for the repairs. This, you can infer, is why attorneys were invented. For the time being I’m biding my time.

The irony of this imbroglio, this War Between the Houses, is that we live across the highway where bluff erosion really won’t impact us and our buildings for a millennia or so, unlike the folks perched precariously a few scant feet from potential disaster. And … the path to the beach is steep which means only a few of us geezers ever venture down that trail, mostly me.

Meanwhile the permits languish, attorneys are hired, acrimony builds, guns are loaded, secession seems possible … but wait! The State has revised its rules on bulkheads in the meantime. Possibly, probably! the government won’t allow a replacement. Peace in the hood might be restored. Neighbors might once again speak to one another. Guns will return to their closets. Happy Days?

Not likely. Now they got the new lawsuits concerning a building application that would block the views of the Sound and the Olympics of two other neighbors. Don’t put those firearms away just yet! They just might still be needed.

Kind of makes your head spin, this 30 plus trillion dollar debt we have. I can remember back in the day when we had a debt. Took eleven years to pay off 24 grand for our shack’s mortgage but when we did, we vowed never to incur another one, not for a car, for credit cards, for a plasma TV, not for anything, just stop paying interest on money we didn’t have. Trust me, there were times the money ran out, like halfway through building our house, when a loan looked like the only recourse, but we just stopped buying lumber for awhile until we managed to get enough to continue. And yeah, I know, a lot of folks have to feed their kids, pay for college, all that stuff … so we count ourselves lucky more than smart.

This past month we’ve been enduring the continuous chatter about hitting the national debt ceiling, that point where the federal government cannot borrow another dime and sets off all kinds of mayhem. The GOP is suddenly alarmed by the 31 trillion we owe and want to cut back on spending for increasing the budget of the IRS or welfare programs. The Dems want to spend more on those but pay for it with rolling back the tax breaks the Republicans under Trump gave the rich and the corporations which of course added plenty to the national debt. Wasn’t troubling then but it is now with the Democrat Biden in office.

I’m all for a balanced budget, probably even for a reduction in the national debt. Most folks are. The issue really isn’t balancing or reducing, it’s how we get there. Neither party thinks we can cut anything from the military or Social Security. Medicare is pretty much off the table. So that leaves … not a whole lot of places they can cut. Welfare programs, school lunches, Medicaid, stuff that helps the poor, what we call a safety net. Of course we could raise taxes. I know, verboten! Especially raising taxes on the rich. You know, the folks we gave tax breaks to under the last regime. But we probably won’t and if you need proof, consider that part of the deal this week was to cut money from the IRS. Sure don’t want auditors probing the tax filings of the rich or the corporations. Sure don’t want to collect money from those folks even if it might help bring down the national debt.

Maybe the poor ought to call up their banks and their credit card companies, tell them No Way are they gonna pay one more red cent on their loans until the government does something about cutting down that national debt. And further, maybe they should demand that those same banks, those same credit card companies and all the corporations who are bilking the IRS because nobody’s checking the henhouse, only then will they pay one thin dime. I know, kind of a fantasy….