The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

In the wake of the Stanwoodopolis Chamber of Commerce’s spectacular crash and burn, numerous groups have jumped in to fill the vacuum left by the now defunct Chamber. Over the years the Camano Chamber attempted to join forces with the city’s group without much success. Given that the island entrepreneurs vacated their own Visitor Center years ago, big surprise neither managed to create a larger vision. Stanwoodopolis, of course, suffered from the ‘twin city syndrome’, the toxic vestiges of east vs west that dates back to the pioneer days. Separate cities with their own city halls, schools, fire departments, all within a rock’s throw from each other, prevented mutual trust. Put a weekend art show on the east side, the west side felt slighted. History, for those who ignore it, has a way of getting the last laugh.

But … where there’s a vacuum, fools rush in. Jimmy Slattery, owner of the now defunct Rock and Gem Shoppe, stated recently that he is looking into a new group that would take the place of the old Chamber. “We’re going to call it the League of Capitalism,” Jimmy told the Cracker in an exclusive interview. “Fresh start, new blood, lower dues. We have some pretty adventurous ideas for reinvigorating the downtown flood zones. Nothing solid just yet, but you wait and see. I think the citizens of this town will be excited by what we’ll have to offer.”

Me, I’m not holding my breath. I’ve lived in a lot of places, some small, some as large as Stanwoodopolis, a town metastisizing fast as new suburbs can be built, roads paved and the slap-boxes annexed, but none with a Chamber of Commerce run completely into the swamp. In its dying breath this Chamber needed to keep its final summer music venue in order to fulfill its fiscal obligations. Maybe they just needed a name change, something other than commerce in the title. At any rate, probably a merciful death. Out here in the hinterlands the Island Chamber plugs along, offering the Stanwoodopolis chamberites a membership if they want to join up with the realtors. Business as usual, boyz, business as usual. And Jimmy, best of luck.

Maybe I’ve neglected to mention that before I graduated from the Univ. of Wisconsin with two useless majors in Sociology and English, I panicked and took some courses senior year in Education. If nothing else, I could at least teach youngsters grammar, punctuation, syntax, political science, demographics and the like. Not as if I had a passion for teaching kids stuff they couldn’t use either — at least for jobs and careers — but we humanities majors are a bit more ‘high-minded’, meaning, we weren’t in it for the bucks.

Today I drove past my old school, Cherokee Middle School in Madison, Wisconsin, still standing albeit a lot more shabby than the shabby it was when I taught there in 1972. I taught 8th grade English and no, not sociology, history, a subject I had never seriously studied, one my principal decided I could study a night or two prior to each class. Which begs the question, why the hell did I need a college degree?

My last professor in Education, the aging hag who made my last semester miserable, called me in for a conference to offer me her nomination to Phi Beta Kappa in exchange for my commitment to teach secondary rather than pursue a masters or doctorate. Since none of the above mattered one whit to me, I said, yah shure, u betcha. Some bargain. But I took a job teaching. A deal’s a deal.

This, like I said, was 1972, hot on the heels of the campus riots, student strikes, ROTC bombings, radical outrage. You think I was going to be an orthodox teacher? C’mon, we were tearing down walls. My kids got the full-bore, no grades, no seating chart, no authoritarian prison guard teacher expecting to revolutionize his classroom with guerilla tactics. We read outside with kids in the trees, made movies of zombies who were the kids in other classrooms, created our own syllabus, butted heads with fellow teachers and the administration and even some conservative parents. Oddly enough.

The kids were confused, the staff was confounded, the administration was concerned and I was pretty sure my career was kaput. We were all correct. C’est la vie, I guess. And so, ironically enough, the rest of my life my college degree wouldn’t be guaranteeing me employment. Lucky break for me.

In the tidal wash of the Silicon Valley Bank debacle, concerned citizens are making a run at our local banks, fearing that the dominoes are falling fast now. Right wing commentators are blaming the woke culture of the SVB, don’t ask me how that might be the underlying cause of a bank’s default when they’re actually due to large investments in long term federal bonds locked in at interest rates pretty low when inflation is driving those rates steadily upward, an awkward moment when investors started pulling out and the bank was forced to sell at losses in the bazillions. Maybe the woke CFO was cow-towing to the Tech Boyz’ interest in promoting trans agendas, but … somehow I doubt it. Personally, and in full disclosure, I didn’t graduate from Wharton with a bizness degree, but I think maybe the Trump administration’s easing of banking guardrails might have been more of a reason than woke cultural concerns. Just saying….

Time maybe to haul down to our own local fiduciaries and relive the runs of the Depression Era, line up at dawn and hope to pull our life savings out before the bank goes into default. No doubt their own woke agenda makes them vulnerable to blatant mismanagement. Not sure what exactly but if you can’t trust the True Conservatives, who can you trust? George Soros? Just because he’s a billionaire? Savvy investors probably should know that their individual accounts are guaranteed by the government up to a quarter of a million bucks, an amount maybe 1% of local depositors have socked away in the Bank of Stanwoodopolis. I guess folks never watched Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life tossing out his own money to nervous citizens to save the bank and of course the town. Where’s Jimmy when we need him?

Jimmy, needless to point out, is a Hollywood creation. Part of the woke culture. Trans, Black Lives Matter, critical race theory, litter boxes in schools. That Hollywood. Time, maybe, to pull your money out of the bank. Before it’s too late. Which is why, in this time of existential fiscal peril, we at the South End Fiduciary Strategies are here to serve a nervous public with creative options for that cash you’ve had the wisdom to withdraw from your local woke banks. No need to bury it in the back yard behind that dead 1967 Chevy van you intend to restore some day or gamble it on cryptocurrencies. At Fiduciary Strategies our team of investment counselors will assist you in low risk, high return monetary tactics guaranteed to weather the turbulent waters of today’s uncertain bank viability and the unsettled equities markets. Stop in today and put your hard earned dollars to work for you, not your woke banker. We might not be Jimmy Stewart but we aren’t Hollywood either. South End Fiduciary Strategies. We’re the team you can trust.

The guy who was once President of the greatest country on earth, you know who I mean, the self-confessed pussy grabber, is going to be indicted this week, at least according to his highness, and you, his loyal minions, should turn out en masse to protest m’lord’s unjust incarceration. Well, at least he says he’ll be locked up. Which, of course, is fairly improbable, but hey, the point is that he’s being scapegoated once again, another of the interminable witch hunts, endless investigations, non-stop attacks on a poor innocent president-in-exile.

Maybe it’s fitting that the first of those indictments is the one regarding the hush money to keep his short but spectacular affair with the porn star Stormy Daniels from sinking his political aspirations. It’s not a crime to pay off Ms. Daniels, but it may very well be if it was an unreported campaign contribution. Mr. Trump —‘Tiny’, if you care to use Stormy’s nickname — has been tweeting a usual storm about his paramour, the usual bullying stuff, but he’s met his match with the porn queen. So, Tiny it is. No doubt a reference to the man’s intellect.

Tiny wants us to hit the streets this week. Take back America. You know, the one he made great again, that one. But now the MAGA crowd wants you to stay home. It’s hard to know quite what to do in these complicated times. Their argument is that, apparently unbeknownst to Tiny, the Feds and the cops will imbed agitators in the crowds protesting Tiny’s arrest. Or more likely, his indictment. Either way, just like the January 6 protests where patriotic citizens were compromised by evil FBI agents who turned a peaceful gathering into a bloody and violent insurrection, a similar event is likely given the entrenched Deep State who hate Tiny and America. Obviously these people will stop at nothing to destroy our country.

I’m at an impasse here, I guess. To protest or not to protest, that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. To die—to sleep, no more; and by a sleep to say we end the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to: ’tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep; to sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub.

It’s an age old quandary. But I suspect we’ll get more than a few chances to decide whether to hit the streets to support Tiny or stay home to prevent the damn government from co-opting us. Either way, Tiny’s day in court is coming. Not just once, but plenty more where that came from.

The Storm is coming! Or so the Qanon predicts. Or maybe it’s Armageddon. At least that’s what the evangelicals think. After the apocalypse, everything should be much improved. A world without gays or uppity blacks, without the WOKE crowd or elitist college grads, immigrants, liberals, environmentalists or anyone else like me. Okay, a Paradise for Them, not necessarily for You. Probably something akin to present day Afghanistan after the return of the Taliban. Heaven in the eyes of the oppressor.

The January 6th insurrection — or protest if you were one of the folks merely wanting to make yourselves heard while on vacation — might give you an idea of what the Storm might bring to the table to make life new and improved. If you don’t get a seat next to Jesus, you might still get one near Steve Bannon. No, Donald Trump isn’t going to let you anywhere near, stop deluding yourselves.

So after a brief but vociferous Rebel Yell from the disaffected, the aggrieved, the racists and the folks who now think democracy might as well be junked if they can’t get their way and no longer want to wait patiently for Armageddon, how do we re-unite the late great USA? Compromise seems an archaic notion when bargaining with Satan, probably even an impossibility given the increasingly insular bubbles of social media. We live in separate fortresses of rigid belief, each side lobbing flaming oil across a vast chasm, a no man’s land of mines and memes littered with fallen heroes, debunked saviors, discredited Founders among the broken statues of Confederate generals.
As the great philosopher Pogo once said, we have met the enemy … and he is us.

Hard as it is to believe, inside the center of the earth there’s an iron and nickel ball of metal, hot as the surface of the sun, that rotates inside us.  It changes speeds, it even changes direction.  Sometimes it wobbles.  Scientists, if you still believe in anything they say, assure us there’s no reason for alarm.  Although, they really don’t understand exactly what’s going on down there beneath our surface.  Welcome to the club, boyz.

It’s comforting to know that we don’t even understand the dynamics of our little home here.  What, me worry?  Deep down below us there’s strange goings-on, a spinning orb of hot metals, changing polarities of the planet, time of day shorter sometimes, longer another.  Wobbly core, temperatures hotter than hell itself, time out of synch, what’s the alarm for?  The science guyz tell us that the ice ages didn’t roll in slowly, they came on in as short a time as a couple of  generations.  Asteroids occasionally whomp the earth, resulting in major die-offs, nuclear winter and planetary burial grounds for the dinosaurs.  Some folks, but not the science wizards, believe all this happened in the last 6 or 7000 years and that theories of evolution or much of anything else are phony baloney.  Probably even still people who think the earth is flat and there’s no core at all, just a magic hole where oil comes up if you drill to the other side.

This wobbly little metal core underneath us might explain those Jewish lasers in space.  Or that actually the earth is hollow.  Or the moon landing was more likely a subterranean mission, not one into outer space.  I don’t know how, but maybe, just maybe, this iron and nickel ball caused viruses to mutate into the coronavirus.  Actually, this core might be the hidden server for the Matrix and what we’re all living is nothing but a simulation created by Tech Masters.  The moon is a fake and so is the earth.  Nothing is as it seems and more worrisome, nothing is real.

So where does that leave us?  Qanon might be real.  Trump probably won the election.  JFK was never assassinated and he’s living with Adolph Hitler in a secret bunker in Antarctica.  Why not?  What you believe may be the only reality.  If so, I suggest you come up with better ideas.   Just saying….

I bought my first house in a government auction. I’d moved to Seattle and Gomorrah to reconnect with my wife at the time after a summer’s hiatus from each other who’d connected instead with a new boyfriend who she lived with while I lived with a houseful of University students who mostly majored in drugs. My wife and her beau were intent on making a fortune in real estate so they’d gotten licenses and were working as realtors. Don’t ask me why, but my missuz — let’s call her Alice — decided we should buy a house together, live in it long enough to defer capital gains, then sell it for the profit and repeat the above until we were rich.

My roommates were people who stole my food and beer, never washed a dish until there were none clean and then only the dish they would use. I was ready for a new place to live and a house of my own looked more than okay. Not having much money and virtually no sources of income, the pickings were poor. But Alice found a HUD house for sale down in the ghetto, a large two story house with no distinctive features other than a hardwood floor that had been ‘rehabbed’ top to bottom and was offered up for bid at a minimum price of $18,000. We bid $24,000 and won, according to our realtor who specialized in HUD houses, by a few bucks and change. A mortgage company his real estate office must’ve owned gave us a loan and we became homeowners for the first time.

Alice stayed with her boyfriend/business partner and I rented rooms to friends and weirdoes and psychopaths at $50 a month. It paid the mortgage of $180 a month and it kept life interesting at a time of my life that welcomed demented and derelict diversion beyond the dreary bottom feeding neighbors that surrounded me in my introduction to true urban depravity. Life, I thought, certainly can take some odd turns. I looked at myself as a character in the modern novel I planned to pen, no doubt a tragedy, but hey, an interesting one. The house, I gradually realized, tied me to my wrecked marriage, to a city on the skids, to my own broken dreams, to a real estate fantasy I wanted no part of and on and on through chapter after chapter.

I could see a bad ending coming. I could even see myself taking the ride down, accepting my Fate as some kind of Lord Jim contrition, blaming myself, becoming bitter and no wiser. It might be a good book, but hell, it didn’t look like a good life. Maybe the squalor and the crime and the low life neighbors were the rewards for a life of laziness and dreamy inattention. Maybe I was in some subliminal atonement for my own failings. Maybe this was Just Desserts.

But I’m not much for martyrdom. I’m not much for contrition either, it turns out. I guess, thinking myself a writer by inclination, I decided to write a happier ending even if it made for a second rate novel. I’ve heard it said that happiness is overvalued. But I’ve never heard it from those folks who are happy. And you won’t hear it from me. Life isn’t a novel and us would-be writers would be wise to remember that.

Love on the South End was never a bowl of cherries. You try to woo a prospective mate after she’s set eyes on 8 foot tall killer nettles menacing the front door, you’ll see what I mean. Course, the Rottweiler barking all night from its pen next to the neighbor’s travel trailer which no longer travels, the one Mr. Dog Lover lives in with the hound chained close by for affection or protection, that doesn’t endear new girlfriends to the neighborhood either.

Most of my single friends have about given up on the local scene. They’ve dated every yahoo, unemployed or otherwise, down at the Hotel Watering Hole and Dating Service, and those memories they’d like to forget. Or at least suppress. I know. I had to mail order my bride. She probably sensed the muted desperation in my throb-filled love letters, but she took pity, I guess, on an old hermit. I sure didn’t mention the banjos. Or the ivy holding up the shack walls. Or the well on its last legs with an ancient piston pump wheezing and gasping just to haul up a glass of water. Love, I knew, would overcome all those drawbacks.

Course we were younger then, still ‘marketable’. My friends, my single friends, have grown a bit longer in the tooth. Some are missing teeth. More than a few have turned to internet dating to meet future partners, figuring, I guess, the ‘pool’ around here has grown shallow with mostly only geezers fossilizing in the puddles. Now they got a pool of millions of prospective mates to choose from. Just sort through the criterion, run the data and preferences, make allowance for some creative exaggeration, then set up a date. “Non-smoker, loves to walk the beach at sunset, enjoys good literature, would rather snuggle than watch TV, loves puppies and quiet conversations.” True translation: psychopath, possible killer. “Fit, but could lose 5 pounds, enjoys an occasional glass of merlot, young at heart.” Translation: obese nursing home escapee.

Fat chance of finding an honest person in the era of Facebook selfies. The mizzus is counting her lucky stars, but our friends — Mr. Right is fudging the facts. He’s balding, morbidly obese, 15 years too old, drinks until he blacks out, watches any sporting even on TV day or night, eats exclusively Doritos and beer nuts and has the conversational equivalency of Cheetah the ape and a literary proficiency that stalled with Archie and Jughead. He wants mostly to get laid, then left in peace with his TV show. He is, if you haven’t guessed, 6 farts shy of being a heart throb.

Love is an elusive realm. It takes a lot of compromise to share a life, a whole entire life. With a person who has faults and idiosyncracies that have to mesh somehow with your own. And on top of that there’s the cultural overlay of physical beauty and … well, physical beauty mostly. And sex. Let’s not even go there, the rest is hard enough. Although for the guys, the rest is sort of superfluous.

I know this isn’t exactly an Advice Column and by now you know any advice I got is seriously suspect anyway, but … for those who still believe the AM radio bubble gum pop song notion of True Love, don’t give up. But DO keep in mind, bad love is worse than no love. I’ve had my vaccination of bad love. Loneliness usually won’t make you miserable. Or cynical. Or suicidal. But love gone south … love on the rocks … love turned sour and rancid and mean? Be choosy is all I’m saying….

I’ve heard it said that Camano Island is the fourth largest island in America. The continental America anyway. We’re on the biggest island in all of America this week, Hawaii. 13,800 foot volcano – above sea level – taller than Everest if you count the distance to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, the entire island black cinder spewed from the lava still forming the island. The volcanoes divide the island in half, one side dry, the other side with the rainiest city in the United States, Hilo. Right now we’re in Hilo. And yeah, it rains a bit.

If you think of Hawaii as a lush, tropical jungle of a place, you’d be right. But only half the time. Most of it so far is fairly barren, lava fields without much vegetation, volcanic mountains sides devoid of trees, long stretches of semi-arid countryside. Maybe what you’d expect from the top of a huge mountain building up from the ocean.

The Big Island, Hawaii, is the largest island in the chain, but the sense you have here is these islands are small outposts on the planet far far from anything else, pinpoints on a map smack dab in the middle of the Pacific. If you were the type who wanted to escape, this might look like a likely candidate.

Maybe I’ve lived too long on an island with an easy escape route, but living here with volcanoes still active nearby or right underneath, maybe it’s a little too primal, still unformed, altogether too close to the crater’s edge for my comfort level. Sort of like living in Pompeii far out in the Aegean Sea with nothing else close by. Pele looks like an angry god, not a kindly one, breathing all the time right down my neck.

The End of the Road Tavern isn’t actually where the road ends, but it’s close. A few Forest Service roads branch into the mountains and there are a few cabins up Rainbow Creek, but otherwise most traffic stops at the tavern. Donny Butler owns it, bartends, cooks and breaks up fights. He closes Monday and on Christmas, but otherwise Donny is always open. No one around UpCreek recalls him taking a vacation and if he’s ever been sick, it was on a Monday. His cabin is in the woods behind the bar, but none of us regulars have ever set foot inside. Most of us can’t imagine him in such a domestic setting and the others think the house is just his storage area.

You want to know what’s happening around UpCreek, the End of the Road is where you can find out. Who’s poaching what and where, who’s catching cutthroat and what size, whose wife is cheating with who and whose kid is going to prison for what crime. Two years ago Donny got a license to sell hard stuff, figuring to double his profits like a lot of the taverns downriver. Which he did. A lot of profit in a bottle of Jack, not so much in a keg of beer. Donny noticed even the women started coming around, ordered cocktails he had to learn how to make and these were very profitable, plus the ladies brought a fresh clientele and a new atmosphere. He put some checkered tablecloths on the stained tables, tidied up a bit and added salads to the menu. The End of the Road seemed like the Start of Something.

This hunting season a couple of Seattleites celebrated two buck kills a little too exuberantly. “Double Shots!!” they shouted deep into the night until Trapper Jim, also deep into his cups, took umbrage at the out-of-towners’ good luck and his own lack thereof. Later Donny admitted at the trial, he should have quit serving all three. Hindsight doesn’t need a high magnification scope. Jim was untying a 6 point from the hunters’ Range Rover roof when they stumbled into the parking lot. Words were exchanged, push came to shove and Jim pulled his 30-30 Winchester off his Chevy pickup’s rack and shot one of the men.

Who lived … fortunately. But that’s why the End of the Road no longer serves booze and why women drink downstream. Or quietly at home.