The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Some years Halloween comes early to the South End … and some years it never seems to leave.  Down here in the nettle regions the kids get driven north to the Stanwoodopolis Suburbs where the candy flows like bottled mineral water and the sodium lights force phantom predators back into the shadows.  This season we just got the fright-filled statistics from studies that show philanthropy by the wealthy dropped by nearly 5%, wealthy being those who made over $200,000 a year.

I guess the candy jars are going to empty a tad earlier when our little ‘Takers’ roll up to the festooned front doors of the Tricklers.  Forget that trickle down theory of supply-siders, I think the drought of charity may be a prolonged one.  And no, it isn’t the result of Global Warming….  Next year we’ll probably see moats around the castles and the gated communities will add spikes to the fences.  Treats for the beggaring poor?  Fuggedaboudit!  When times get tough, some hearts get harder.

In the same study they found that the poorer folks had actually increased their charitable giving by as much as the wealthy had decreased theirs.  I suspect when we belong to a community, we think of neighbors as real people struggling with the same problems as the rest of us.  We don’t think of folks who can’t afford health care, folks who lost a job, folks who had their house repossessed as vampires feeding on the Body Politic.  They’re us.  They’re not who we ‘Unfriend’ when they need help the most.  They’re who we look at in our own mirror.

It would be way too easy to demonize the rich.  Oh, sure, we could send the kids out this Halloween in tuxedoes and Armani suits.  Wearing fangs.  But charity, like our mothers said, begins at home, so maybe we should trickle some down to them.  And no, I don’t mean give them another tax break.  They already got Christmas 365 days a year.

Eco-activists are at it again in the art museums.  Following the tomato soup assault on Van Gogh, this week we have the mashed potato splatter on Monet.  I’m at a loss to connect the spud dots on this movement to turn art into a food fight, but I wish the anti-oil crowd would pick something other than museums to demonstrate their rage.  Although … I can understand using mashed potatoes.  After all, one of the better stories of Donald Trump as a kid was the one where his brother got sick and tired of Donald bullying him and finally dumped a plate of the stuff on the future president’s head, a humiliation that haunted him throughout his never ending childhood.  Let’s just say that Trump was a more appropriate target for the eco-spudsters than the Monet.

Hard to say what metaphoric point these folks are trying to make.  Other than maybe we ought to do something to save the damned planet.  Monet painted impressionistic ponds and flowers, nature through the lens of astigmatism, what’s not to like?  Maybe throw pies at Francis Bacon’s horror laden paintings instead.  Or toss spaghetti at Dali’s surrealistic melting clocks.  As if any of that would make sense to a public addicted to violence and social media trolling.

I mean, what’s next, strangle puppies at the dog pound?  C’mon, kidz, dumping on art is best left to the critics.  Even the philistine ones….  Go trash an elevator playing Muzak.  Superglue yourselves to a sports stadium.  Lash out at Hallmark cards or protest car commercials.  Go down to Wall Street and sling hash at the bronze bull.  Gotta be a hundred better pillars of greed or crappy art to make your statement.  Why pick on the best our culture has to offer?  You gonna actually kill the fat lady singing in the opera?  Piss on the collected works of Shakespeare?  Burn some books but only the really great ones?   Smash a Stradivarius using a leg of lamb?

I know, it’s hard, but if you want to be taken seriously, you have to pick up your game.  It may take a little imagination … or a lot.  Kind of why you might use Monet or Van Gogh or a few others as your muse, not your target.  Just saying….

Right off the get-go here I want to declare I’m a Plague survivor.  Two vaccinations, three boosters, fairly careful the past two or three years (who can keep track anymore?).  But so far so good.  So imagine my dismay when our President comes out and warns us we might be on the verge of nuclear annihilation.  And you thought climate change was something to worry about.

I guess you don’t have to sweat Long Haul Covid, forget about long haul anything when they drop the Big One!  I was twelve years old, a snot-nosed kid in Georgia when the Cuban missile crisis was putting us on the brink of … Atomic War!  Neighbors were building fallout shelters, stocking them with food and water, guns and ammo, figuring, I guess, they’d survive the holocaust and kill the mutants who banged on their door.  My school was conducting ‘duck and cover’ drills.  You think ‘Active Shooter’ drills are messing up kids’ heads, try Dr. Strangelove on for size — as the real deal.

So okay, there’s always some kind of existential threat, some virus or asteroid or robot apocalypse, some unexpected menace, government overthrow, a new war, famine and drought, another ice age.  You could maybe get used to one of those … but all of them coming at you at once?  I don’t think so.  Maybe just pull the sheets over your head, call your boss and tell him you’re sick, turn off the TV, cancel the newspapers, avoid social media and imagine a happy place.  A place you once lived in but forgot how to find again.  A place where the sun shines and children play, a Shangri-la-la far from the maddening crowd.  Puppies romp and butterflies fly.  Laughter fills the air like puffy clouds and worries drop away and evaporate.  Does that place really exist, you ask?

If it does, you know how to find it. It’s not on your GPS, you won’t find it online, you can’t find it past a secret door the other side of your Closet of Anxieties.   You want to worry about the future, it isn’t there.  The future is the last place you want to look.  Try right here….

In the aftermath of 9-11 when the Trade Towers were destroyed, I noticed a lot of friends, couples mostly, broke up.  Maybe just a coincidence, but it sure seemed like that event led to questioning everything from politics to marital compatibility.  After a couple of years of Covid isolation, I bet something similar is going on, folks trapped in their homes and apartments, slowly reassessing jobs and marriages and lifestyles, taking a hard look at new realities.

The South End String Band started up right after 9-11.  You need help with the math, that was 21 years ago.  We started out as a back porch ensemble, mostly beers and potlucks, pickin and grinning, no big expectations, just play some music, bbq, socialize, anything goes.  We ended up with two dozen folks but eventually whittled that down to 11, then started playing benefits, small gigs, eventually larger concerts, made 4 CD’s, ended up with 5 of us going into 2022.  Last two years we didn’t play very often, didn’t do concerts, didn’t even practice much, just waited for the Plague to run its course, no need for the band to be Super Spreaders.

So when the first member quit — by email —maybe we shouldn’t have been too surprised.  Next day, the second one quit … and shortly after that the third, all by email, nicely impersonal, definitely socially distanced.  21 years … and we get a digital WE QUIT.

Bands don’t generally have a long expiration date.  Tough life, a musician’s.  Road trips, groupies, drugs, crooked promoters, disruptive spouses, the inevitable corrosion of fame.  21 years is longer than the Beatles, longer than the Who, okay, maybe never catch the Rolling Stones unless we get blood transfusions like Keith Richards, and even then, probably not.

But here’s the deal: don’t write us off.  We got a banjo, we got a fiddler, we got a bass from one of the original band, we’re the South End String Band, dammit, and we’re not going anywhere … fast!  Stay tuned.

In case you haven’t been tuning in to the midterm election debates and their talking points, you might have missed the shocking news that schools around this once great nation of ours are installing litter boxes for the kids who identify as felines.  Yes, you heard right, there is an outcry from the far right, those defenders of family values, patriotism and birth gender to stop these extreme left wing radicals from turning our institutions of learning into a veritable zoo of children claiming cat status.  I know, it’s hard for me to believe too, but if candidates for school boards are sounding the alarm, you know it must be true.

What’s next? you ask.  Fire hydrants in every hallway for the canine identifiers?  Pastures for the equine crowd?  Milking stations for the bovines?  Is there no end to the madness of these leftist anti-MAGA’s?  I don’t know about you, but I for one think it’s time to get down to the PTA and demand that this animal transference stop!  Bad enough the kids want sex changes, now they want equal status as bestial middle schoolers.  By high school they would be fully devolved … and don’t get me going on evolution.  Another good reason to ban those books with extreme ideas.

Historians one day will look back at these troubled times where homosexuality was condoned, where children with sex changes could use the opposite sex’s bathroom … or the same sex bathroom … or, well, you know what I mean … where abortions were given out free to any and all, and the only thing stopping this all-out assault on our Christian values, our American values, was the vigilance of the folks who understood that Hollywood and the Sodomites planned to undermine everything dear to this society.  Like to keep and bear arms, just to name one fundamental right.  If kids are allowed to trans-species, how will the law abiding gun owning hunters know what is fair game and what might be someone’s feral kid?  Litter boxes are just the first step in the decline and fall of this once proud nation.  Make em use a toilet!

We got a tradition down here on the South End that when we want to purge our bounty, clear out our closets or empty our sheds, we drag the unwanted possessions down to the highway, slap a FREE sign on the treasures and let the passing motorists fight for the spoils.  Usually only takes half a day before someone slams on their brakes, jumps out of their pickup, does a cursory investigation, then grabs what items would fit in their closets or their sheds.

Sure, we could haul the stuff down to the thrift stores up north but they would charge money selling them to pay for their overhead and rental so why not skip the middleman and reach out directly to our fellow indigents?  I carried out two nice maple colonial chairs circa 1950, cushions reupholstered, mint condition (okay, pretty good condition), set them at the end of the driveway with a woman’s Schwinn bicycle and a rug.  The rug was gone in an hour, the bike in a day and the chairs — well, I suspect the new owner needed to find a truck or van, but they disappeared today, two days later.  Saved me that hellish trip into town, saved the scroungers mucho bucks, probably saved the planet too although I don’t want to get overly carried away here, just doing our part, no need to thank us or even throw a good review on Yelp or whatever social media you still think is worth the End of Democracy and Civilization as You Know It.

All I’m saying: down here on the island’s Banana Belt, capitalism has evolved.  The barter system still works, garage sales outpace the mercantiles now that Tyee Store is ancient history, non-fungible tokens have taken root at the History of the World Gallery … and roadside thrift stores bypass the backlogged goods waiting in ports from San Diego to Vancouver.   Future economists, no doubt, will study us.  Meanwhile, anyone need a perfectly good microwave, come on down tomorrow.  Satisfaction guaranteed!

I was visiting a friend who has a farm on the north end of the island last week, got a tour of the new calves that will be hamburger for us next year, a spin around the gardens and orchard, then a detour past a dilapidated building he planned to tear down.  He figured he could just jerk a couple of beams in the middle with his tractor and the whole kit and caboodle would collapse, easy as pie.  Naturally I told him about tying a rope to my old shed, hitching it to the pickup and driving away … only to have the entire shed, instead of collapsing in a heap, fall toward my truck, missing me by only a couple of feet.  Always happy to give advice based on my own idiotic misadventures….

Which got me to telling the story of the day when I had already finished framing and roofing our new house back in the last century and needed to cut away some studs in the downstairs for the massive masonry stove’s brick wall to be exposed to the bedroom for heat.  No big deal, I thought, as usual neglecting small details like bearing loads and beam calculations, just knock out a 2×6 or two, probably add some structural support …  you know, later.  But after removing the first stud, I didn’t notice the adjoining studs were starting to bow.  At least not until I knocked out the second 2×6.  Then I could actually watch the next ones in line bending with the weight they couldn’t support by themselves.

I tried to jam the last missing stud back into place but too late, the first story floor had descended too far for that so I ran into the next room, lopped off a few inches of the 2×6 and rammed it into place.  Whereupon it too began to bow.  If you can imagine what it’s like to watch your entire house slowly collapsing, you might have some notion of the panic I was feeling.  The question that ran through my fevered head went something like this:  at what point do you save yourself even if you lose the house, your life’s savings, your months of work and sweat?

One more shortened stud, I figured, and if that didn’t work I would have to get out from under the falling tonnage of a two story house succumbing to gravity.  It too was bowing once it got in partly in place and I’d beaten on it with an 8 pound maul I used for splitting rounds of firewood.  Amazingly, miraculously, the slow descent of the house stopped.  I rammed another stud into place and listened for creaking or cracking.  Nothing.  Completely wasted, I sat down to ponder what had just transpired.  And to count my lucky stars.  Later I would have to rebrace that bearing wall.  But … definitely later.

There is a nearly incalculably small margin between luck and catastrophe, success or failure, happiness or misery.  For me that margin is about an inch and a half.  The distance I never quite managed to raise the floor back to its original level.  It’s okay, it’s just fine.  You watch your world tilt on its axis, you maybe won’t mind if it doesn’t come back completely to its former orbit, just so long as you weren’t spun off.

This past week eco-activists protested the fossil fuel industry by lobbing tomato soup at Van Gogh’s ‘Sunfowers’ in England’s National Gallery.  Their purported goal was to demand a halt to all new oil and gas projects so when they finished glopping Vincent’s iconic painting then they superglued their hands to the museum’s walls.  The tomato soup was Heinz brand, which was too bad when they could just as easily have splashed Campbell’s, channeling the Warhol silk screens, possibly giving credence to some smattering of legitimate art criticism along with their environmental concerns.  The Van Gogh was protected by glass so no real damage was done to the painting.  Heinz got some free advertising and the protestors were hopefully hauled off to remedial art classes.

“Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of our planet and people?” one of the protesters asked.  Well, as a so-called artist myself and a lover of tomatoes too, I can try to speak for my fellow planet killers to say, gee, I don’t really know.  If the choice is between Vincent and the death of the earth, I might go with Vincent.  If it’s between Warhol and a can of soup, I’m with the soup.  So … kind of a hard call if you’re lumping all art against the extinction of life as we know it.  At least for me.

Now maybe if the eco-activists had superglued themselves to a gas pump and asked which I preferred, driving my old pick-up vs. the slow broil of the planet, now, that would give me some pause.  I suppose I could hitchhike into town for my supplies.  You know, if it would save the Earth.  I’m selfish, I realize, but not that selfish.  Although, don’t ask me to move into town.  Stanwoodopolis is not my idea of life worth living.

What does seem certain is that sooner, not later, the generations following ours are going to demand some real action on our part, not lame excuses.  Maybe the painters can use water based paints, not oil, and okay, it’s not a great leap forward for mankind, but hey, we could show we care.  Somehow, though, attacking art seems a bit misdirected, kidz.  Just saying, even if I am prejudiced.  Next time trash a guitar.  Or burn books.  But don’t use gasoline.  We got enough hypocrites in my generation, we don’t need more from yours….

You live long enough in one place, trust me, you’ll spend your golden years repairing the things you built.  Fences, outbuildings, roofs, gates, probably all of it if you were an itinerant carpenter like myself.  I didn’t really build stuff to last, don’t ask me why, just figured fast is good, go for the artsy-fartsy, don’t worry, be happy.  I did try to build our house to last, maybe the only thing I figured might be worth the additional effort.  And forget about that chestnut of Ben Franklin’s: any job worth doing is worth doing well.  Total BS!  Let’s move along, Ben, not every damn job is worth killing yourself over.

Needless to say, now that I’m a senior citizen, what down here on the salty South End qualifies as an Old Fart, half my time is spent tearing down, repairing, salvaging and otherwise wrestling with my too many buildings, old fences, rotting wellhouses and odd experiments in architecture and art.  It’s not as if I didn’t expect to outlive these things, I just couldn’t wrap my mind around future maintenance issues.  Probably figured when they go to rust and rot and ruin, hell, build another one.

I wouldn’t say Laziness is a virtue, but in my case, it seems to be a creed of some sort, one I probably wouldn’t recommend to the kids, but at this late date, I really hate to spend my last years re-evaluating life choices or character traits.  Besides, I have fences to rebuild, roofs that leak, orchards to prune, hedges to keep back, plumbing problems and … well, hell, the list is endless.  At some point I may have to let the past go.  All those regrets, the disappointments, even the successes … the fences can’t  be mended, what was kept out will eventually come on in, let it go, just let it go.

With luck you won’t question why you built the fence in the first place.

Most start-up businesses on the notoriously bankrupt-prone South End fail within the first 6 months, victims of over optimistic entrepreneurs who grew tired of dead end careers and overbearing bosses.  They thought what they needed was a new start and a new boss.  Themselves.  Trouble was, the new boss was pretty much the same as the old boss.  Plus he didn’t pay as well.  If at all.

The South End Storage and Moving company was different.  Ralph Monroe had acquired properties from the Mountain/Dixon line to the Head back when land was cheap and he was looking for tax write-offs for his large profits on Raging Ralph’s Appliance Centers down in Smokey Point.  Ralph was one of those hucksters who appeared in his own TV ads as a fast talking Freddy, smoking hot deals, c’mon down, c’mon down, our prices can’t be beat, guaranteed!!, a slightly overweight balding carnival barker with a bad comb-over, apparently the keys to Success with a capital dollar sign.

A few years back small clusters of storage sheds began to pop up in cleared off acreage, one near the Diner, another down by the abandoned Tyee Store, a third nearly to the end of the island barely visible from the road.  Ralph didn’t advertise them, probably because they sat in residentially zoned land, not commercial, but Rome was a long haul away still over on Whidbey Island and the South End barely hit their radar.

For a time Ralph stored his overstock in the sheds, but back when Tyee Store was the economic center of the South End, he hit on the idea of hauling used appliances out beside the highway with For Sale signs on them.  Jenny Wainright, recently let go when the Bikini Barista expresso stand was forced out of Stanwoodopolis by the morally upright citizenry and its town council up there, kept an office by the sheds where Ralph hoped the surging sales of used stoves and refrigerators might keep her busy and him even more profitable.

I took a photo of the roadside super sale and made one of my South End posters for the WHITE TRASH WHITE SALE and hung it in the Tyee Store back in the days when the store didn’t take itself too seriously.  Ralph was having coffee at one of the tables with a couple of other caffeine addicts when he caught sight of his appliances over the ice cream coolers.  ‘What the??’ he sputtered to Don, the manager who let me hang these.  ‘What does it mean?’

Don allowed as how Skeeter was probably making fun of him.  ‘Kind of trashes up the highway, Ralph,’ Randy G. chimed in, which only set Ralph on a rant.  ‘We’ll see about this!’ he hollered, citing his constitutional rights to make a buck and asking just where the hell this Skeeter guy lived.  At least until Chris, our local sheriff’s deppity, quietly said, ‘Ya know, Ralph, some kid crawls into one of your frigidaires and suffocates, you’ll be liable, probably criminal offense on top of the lawsuits.  You might want to think about that.’

And so the appliances got wheeled in off the road, the storage sheds got slowly rented to the newcomers who needed someplace to park their boats and couches and antique cars and Jenny left for a part time expresso gig on the north end.  One that she could wear clothes for.  Even if the tips weren’t as good.  And life down here returned to normal.  Whatever that is….