The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I got a friend who just bought property a quarter mile down the road, up a dead end gravel road past some recent clearcuts, cars parked along the road, mobile homes hauled in, a small community of fellow South Enders perched on their plots in Paradise.  She has a small cabin with an extension cord for power off the neighbor’s grid, an outhouse,  a hose for water from the shared well and 5 acres with a few nice cedars and firs encroached upon by nettles and blackberries.  For now, summer time, the place is more than livable, it’s sunny and private, a refuge from the island’s gridlock and gated communities.

It puts me in mind of my arrival at my own shack some 45 years ago, all agog and wearing thick rose colored glasses, ready for a new start, anxious to leave behind all the baggage of my previous life.  Helping my friend move a shed back toward the woods the other day, all I could think about was the excitement I felt when I came here, my own woods, my own house, my new garden, the joy of going back to the land, planting fruit trees, shrubs, vegetables, learning to build sheds, remodel that shack, fix the well pump, all that pioneer stuff.  No doubt some would scoff and shake their heads, the dumb kid bought a pig’s ear, a logged off acreage mostly nettled and primitive and no damn wonder it cost next to nothing.

Beauty, so they say, is in the eye of the myopic.  Or something like that.  I remember the look my old man gave the place first time he set foot on the property.  Shack leaning into the mud, blackberries taking over, salmonberry jungles and nettle barriers, a son who should have known better than to move to the end of an island at the end of civilization, no job prospects, no homesteader skills, no damn sense.  What was the boy thinking?  He saw a shabby life ahead of me where I saw a new start.  I guess we were both right.

My friend is starting over.  She’s a bit older than I was and no doubt a helluva lot wiser.  She’s gonna do fine up there.  She’s already remodeling the cabin, got PUD coming today to hook up the power, water lines next and indoor plumbing.  She can see the future from her front porch steps.  And it’s wide open, an unlimited horizon.  I envy her, I really do, but for now I’m enjoying the nostalgia.  You go, girl!

These are strange times in America.  The rest of the world is growing strange too.  Computers, cellphones, artificial intelligence – and no, I don’t mean Republicans – cloning, satellites, climate change, drone warfare – and no, I don’t mean Amazon deliveries.  The societal transitions are accelerating, the times, they are a chainging … fast.  When you hear folks say Make America Great Again, what they mean is stop these changes from happening, go back in time, I Like Ike … and Joe McCarthy, stop the sex changes, put gays back in their closets, teach white history, bring prayer — Christian prayer anyway — back into our schools.  Burn the witches!  Not just lock em up.

Folks are terrified of change now, folks are afraid of science now.  Hell, who isn’t?! Half the country worries about their jobs, their shrinking incomes, their kids’ future, global warming, Covid, monkey pox, nano trackers in their vaccine, immigration, inflation, world war 3.

If you’re a Democrat, you’re worried about Democracy itself, worried America will turn to nationalism, to authoritarianism, to totalitarianism, to Trumpism.  You’re thinking the Supreme Court just went rogue, that McConnell may be the devil incarnate, that Matt Gaetz will eventually become the Speaker of the House.  I know, we’re living in the Night of the Living Brain Dead.

But!  Before you build your zombie bunkers, consider this:  Obama was elected president.  I know, a long long time ago in a galaxy far from the America of today.  He said, quoting Martin Luther King, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”  There will be setbacks, there will be heartbreaks, there will be moments when you lose hope … but history is on your side.  Women can vote, gays are out of the closet, vaccines DO work, blacks will not return to Colored Only drinking fountains, coal mining jobs will go away … and we will not!

Gloom and doom will not prevail!  Optimism will!  Keep that in mind.  We’re the America that’s great.  We’re the party of the future, not the past.  We will prevail.  The future is what we choose to make it.  Spread the word, spread the word.  And whatever you do, go out and vote.

Some of you radical leftists out here tonight maybe remember the good old days when the Owl Party ran candidates for public office every year.  Weird policy statements in the voter pamphlet, strange photos, a real hoot, no pun intended.  I’ve been spending some quality time reading our local Island County pamphlet.  Gotta say, I miss those Owl Party chuckleheads … but … we got plenty of humor anyway if you bother to read these.

I’d like to say the funnier ones are always the Independents, The America First Party Republicans, The Maga Republican Party, The Trump Republican Party, my favorite the JFK Republican Party, but we got plenty of Democratic howlers too.  One fellow, running for U.S. Senator, claims that bitcoin will fix our broken monetary system and quote provide relief from the failing US dollar.  He advocates privacy, individual sovereignty, and private property.  ‘In summary,’ he wrote, ‘Bitcoin’.  Kinda like that scene in The Graduate where Dustin Hoffman gets a one word tip on the future.  Plastic.  Bitcoin?  I suspect that was written before cryptocurrencies’ bottoms dropped out and the US dollar reached parity with the euro.

But I’m not here to disparage folks running for public office.  We got plenty of Americans who do that every day — and I’m not just talking about Fox News.  All of these folks in politics, even the certifiably crazy ones, are willing to throw their hats in the ring out of some sense of patriotic obligation.  And sure, some are there to protect their own self interests, maybe help the rich get a little richer, but some are genuinely wanting to make government work better, lift up the underprivileged, advocate for the homeless, make our health care system work for all of us, provide social services along with better roads and adequate police departments.  Their political statements won’t make you laugh, but they do provide food for thought.  Janet St. Clair’s reiterates what she’s been doing the past four years and what she’d like to keep doing the next four years.  Personally, I’m glad to hear someone speak up for the homeless and the underprivileged, the poor and the sick.   I think maybe the rich will do okay, they’ll do just fine.

Tip O’Neill, Speaker of the House for ten years in the 70’s and 80’s, famously said all politics are local.  I guess Tip never dreamed of the Internet, never imagined Facebook and Twitter, never heard Hot Talk Radio or watched Fox News and the likes of Tucker Carlson.  In the time since he was Speaker the world has shrunk to the size of the South End, all local politics are nationalized, globalized and shrink wrapped to fit in an Amazon drone delivery.

When Karla Jacks was running for commissioner, her opponent and his trolls accused her of planning to shut down the Navy Base on Whidbey.  That opponent is still running to save Alt Field from you radical leftists.  Commissioners in Island County are powerful people apparently.  But not even Janet has managed to override the Navy and the U.S. government.  Probably just needs another term in office.  I say we give it to her.  Like the rich, I think NAS Whidbey will do okay.

Janet St. Clair, ladies and gentlemen, and you antifa too….

Lately there’s been a lot of breast beating, fist slamming, head slapping outrage over Joe Manchin pulling the plug on the latest attempt to address climate change.  Big surprise considering he has business ties to the coal industry, gets a small fortune in donations from the oil and gas industry, and basically is a supposed Democrat in a state that voted Trump by a huge margin.  Poor Joe.  He gets to be the scapegoat for us radical leftists.

But c’mon, Joe isn’t really the problem, is he?  Every single member of the Republican Party votes against any bill that addresses global warming.  Even some in the Democratic Party vote against Cap and Trade, emissions reductions, solar and wind subsidies, all those bills that really don’t have a ghost of a chance against a block vote in the Senate by all those GOP ostriches who see obstruction as their best tactic to win back the White House.

Maybe they really don’t believe global warming is a reality, just another antifa myth to throw a curveball at the gullible public.  Or, like Covid mask mandates and vaccinations, just big government telling us what to do.  You know, like save lives.  Course, to be fair, they argue that it’s better to lose a few old geezers to the virus than it is to harm the economy.  Money talks, in case you live under a rock, and big money talks loud.  You could argue that millions of hospitalizations and deaths would hurt the economy but … seriously, you still think logic works on a party of science deniers?

England just broke its all time high temperature yesterday.  By a whopping 3 plus degrees.  India is setting records.  America is setting records.  Let’s pretend it isn’t man made, just nature doing its natural thing.  But I think most of the Ostrich Party knows it is man made, they just don’t want to cut into profits, they don’t see sacrifice as a national good.  Pretty clearly, they’ve made it clear that it’s every man for himself in the Yew Ess Aye, good luck to the women, the trans, the gays and lesbians.  The Titanic might be sinking but they’ll be the first to elbow their way to the lifeboats.

Good old American independence, Marlboro Men all, captains of their destiny, Ayn Randians to the end.  Existential Threat?  Not for them.  Their kids maybe, their grandkids for sure.  But meanwhile, there’s still money to be made.  The cost for their progeny, well, let’s just worry about the quarterly earnings and let them fend for themselves.  History will not be kind.  And when the sand they got their heads tucked into reaches Sizzle, it may be too late for these birds, just an underground shish-kabob, tastes exactly like chicken.

Let me state at the outset, I am no real woodworker.  This is not false modesty, trust me.  My real woodworking friends will tell you I’m a screw and glue carpenter, a 90-10 guy, the sort who possibly tries to be better but loses interest part way through and figures 90% is close enough.  Really more like 80%.  I could make excuses, lack of good tools, insufficient training, a shop that’s a shack on its way out, but the truth is I’m too lazy to learn joinery techniques, good finishing skills or more exotic methods of the trade.

What I figure, see, is the design is the thing.  The design, if it’s artsy fartsy enough, will more than compensate for primitive building strategies.  Plus, use interesting woods, laminate them, draw the viewer’s eye to those rather than give a close inspection to the slightly off joints or the rough finish.  More than likely I’ll attempt a difficult design, get in over my head, then have to adjust on the fly.  Real woodworkers proceed with a set of plans.  Me, well, not so much.  Let me give you a case in point, my latest project.

I have an old colonial maple hutch that’s a little too wide for where we have it so I thought maybe I would make a replacement, one that would actually fit the space.  But naturally I wasn’t going to duplicate the old one in miniature.  I am, if not a woodworker, supposedly an artist.  Hence, I needed to make an art piece.  What I did was, first off, laminate these narrow strips of wood I had laying around the shop, maple and walnut lengths until I had a pretty sizeable pile of 2×3 lengths, some with a maple strip in the middle, some the reverse.  Lots of them, enough to make a skeleton framework, no plywood carcass, no plywood back, no doors in the lower cabinet.  My goal was to create a sort of intricate ghost cabinet, bones but no skin, everything visible.

Naturally I didn’t have a finished design in mind, just figured I’d build it piece by piece and hope for the best.  Sometimes this actually works.  Sometimes not.  I have 5 acoustic guitars I could show you that would illustrate both.  This, though, I wanted a lower cabinet and an upper bookcase with shelves, the bookcase resting on top of the bottom, slightly narrower.  The shelves, since I’d laminated everything in the bodies of both, got made from strips of maple and walnut and some left over bubinga from the guitars.  A ton of glue went into this hutch, let me tell you.  Clamps by the dozens squeezed glue out of joints that had to be cleaned up when it dried.  There was lots of sanding, 60 grit to 100 to 150 and on and on.  A real woodworker would have taken it to 350 to 400 and even to 600 grit.  Me, I quit at 220, figuring further sanding would be wasted on my finish techniques.  Plus, think about a framework of so many pieces of laminate and imagine nice finish work in those hard to reach spaces.  I couldn’t either….

Yesterday I put the final shelves on the bookcase and oiled the entire hutch.  There’s a joy in watching plain sanded wood come to life as the Danish seeps in and gives it color and depth.  And a small sense of accomplishment … despite the limitations of my woodworking skills.  What I think, and what I want to convey, is that you don’t need to be a professional woodworker to build your own stuff.  There is no satisfaction like doing it yourself.  Although, I have a couple of guitars that convinced me that might not always be true.  And why I quit building them.  But they do look nice hanging on the wall….

Techno Tom was morosely stirring half a pint of sugar into his coffee, no doubt figuring the sugar blast would quadruple the jolt from the Diner’s caffeine.  Freddie Fairlane, one table over with the other Flatheads, the vintage car guyz, watched for awhile then moseyed over to sit at Tom’s table.  “You seem a little down in the mouth, amigo,” he said.  “Lose your best friend?”

Techno didn’t even look up, just kept stirring that coffee he was apparently never going to drink, maybe just let it congeal to a cold pudding.  “I didn’t lose my best friend, Fred, but I’m losing my shirt … and maybe my marriage too.”  Freddie grabbed his plate of half eaten heart attack, chicken fried steak, greasy potatoes, side of four eggs and made himself at home beside Tom.  He wolfed down a couple forkfuls, then, mouth crammed with cholesterol, asked him what the hell he was talking about.

“I put most of my retirement funds into bitcoin, that’s what I’m talking about.  Seemed like a sure bet at the time … not so much now.”  Fred swilled his coffee, took another shovel load of breakfast, then asked what was bitcoin.  Techno Tom put his head on the table next to his undrunk coffee cup and made a whimpering noise that attracted attention from most of the Flatheads, men who had known defeat themselves at the hands of rusted bolts and impossible to diagnose electrical problems, defeats they mostly kept locked inside their garages or simply expurgated with howls of rage out of hearing from their fellow enthusiasts.  Misery may love company but most of us aren’t looking for an invitation.

Fred had quit chewing his chicken fried steak.  The spectacle of his seating companion head down on the formica table top made eating, even for Freddie, an unhelpful remedy for whatever problem Tom was unable to cope with.  He looked back at the table of his automotive pals who were all staring at the strange tableau before them, one that even in the notoriously eclectic Diner seemed a bit out of place during a quiet breakfast.  Fred put down his fork and raised an eyebrow to the onlookers before shrugging helplessly.  “Any of you guys know what a bitcoin is?”  Tom, without lifting his head, quietly groaned.

Prior to Trump the Republican Party was about 85% normal conservatives, fiscal devotees, less government types and about 15% John Bircher, radical Tea Party, full blown paranoids and complete whackjobs.  The percentage now is reversed.  Qanon, Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, White Nationalists, Freedom Front, the list is long and their legions march in lockstep.  Whatever happened to the middle of the road GOP is something for historians to analyze for decades.  Blame it on Donald, blame it on hot talk radio, blame it on Fox News or blame it on the lady with the alligator shoes, the truth is that Republicans have embraced authoritarianism, conspiracy theories, anti-vaxx, anti-science and moved into their own version of the Dark Ages, superstitious, half crazed and apparently convinced government, technology, big business, all are conspiring to enslave them.  Reason with them?  Not at this point.

Let me offer an illustration from the Georgia Senate race where Herschel Walker is in a statistical tie with current Senator Raphael Warnock.  When queried about climate change, the ex-football star made his position abundantly clear.  “Since we don’t control the air, our good air decided to float over to China’s bad air, so when China gets our good air, their bad air got to move,” Walker explained. “So it moves over to our good air space. Then now we got to clean that back up.”

This is the current state of the GOP.  No doubt breathing the mixed up air circulating on the troubled currents of Sino-American atmospherics causes this sort of muddy thinking.  Any sentient human older than eight years old would listen to this mumbo jumbo and decide the person espousing this was unfit to hold a job, much less public office, but the good folks of Georgia, half anyway, plan to vote for a man who obviously took too many blows to the head on the gridiron.  At least Herschel has an excuse.

I don’t pretend to understand what has happened to the Grand Old Party.  A virus maybe, bad air, reality TV, onset dementia, lasers from other galaxies, nano-trackers in their bloodstream, who knows?  But obviously whatever the cause, this is viral and spreading faster than monkeypox.  I seriously doubt another mask mandate will prevent its spread.

I got a call today and yeah, I know, who the hell picks up a phone these days, especially when you don’t have caller ID, but okay, I picked up.  Hello? Hello?  I usually wait a few seconds before hanging up, but this time I was expecting a call from the mizzus so I gave it a few seconds longer.  Finally this low volume, sad sack lethargic voice comes on the line, Hi, I’m Sam, do you want to sell your place?  Occasionally I like to stay with these calls, see where they lead, maybe learn some skillsets I can use to market my own stuff.  Sam, I admit, didn’t seem promising for sales techniques.

I said sure, I’m dying to sell the place, what you offering?  Sam, a little delayed in his response, finally asked if I had a price in mind.  Sure do, I said, but I’d rather hear your offer.  Long pause.  Real long pause.  I said, hey Sam, buddy, you still with me here?  You awake or should I call 9-1-1 for that overdose antidote for fentanyl.  Maybe give me your address.  Sam eventually returned to the semi-living, wondered how much I might want to sell my hacienda and land.  How about 2 million dollars, Sammy, how’s that work for you?  You know where I live, what the place looks like, or is this a cold call?

Sam, no last name, just Sam, seemed to be pondering this.  Finally, wearying of the fun, I said, hey, Sam, wake up, you need to up your game a little, show some enthusiasm if you want to scam the unwary, you can’t be drifting off into your own ozone between dialogues.  And here’s another suggestion: lay off the drugs or at least tweak the meds down a bit, you’re scaring us potential clientele.

Whether Sam was with me on the last minute of his sales pitch, who could tell?  All I know is I missed a great opportunity to make two million dollars.  Maybe the next call….

You tell me how a political party that welcomes immigrants, LGBT’s, Moslems, minorities, the disabled, the poor, the blue collar folks, how a Big Tent party like that can lose to folks whose main appeal is racism, xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny and religious intolerance, a party of the corporations and the country club rich.  How the party of Wall Street can manage to stay a viable political force by trotting out wedge issues like abortion or church and state separation or the right to own assault weapons?  C’mon, something stinks in Denmark here and it isn’t the caviar.

I know, I know, it’s called the United STATES, emphasis not on the united but on the states.  The Founding Fathers, those demi-gods of yore, the ones who owned slaves and huge tracts of land, they managed to unite the squabbling states by compromising to give little Rhode Island the same power as New York.  Fair?  Democratic?  Not really, but who said America was fair?  Women couldn’t vote in the United Colonies elections.  And don’t even mention the slaves.  In fact, don’t even teach that stuff anymore.  The Wise Men, the ones who wrote the inviolable Constitution, give Wyoming with its meager population, the same number of Senators as California.  Don’t talk to me about fair.

So now we have a country divided.  Red states mostly rural, mostly western or southern, poor, religious, aggrieved.  And blue states, coastal, wealthy, educated, urban, aggrieved.  Not to generalize too much.  You could almost divide the country by urban vs rural.  Washington, Oregon and California, cross the Cascades or the Sierras you got rural red.  Coastal side, blue urban.  The suburbs, call them purple.  The South, the Confederates, almost all red.  The Yankee states, all blue.  The vast territory in between, the Dakotas, Kansas, Nebraska, Idaho, Montana, Utah, call it the Big Empty, huge expanses, not too many people, red red red.

And we have a Congress that rarely compromises.  Democrats vote in a block, Republicans vote in a block.  How the devil do we solve problems if nobody meets the other halfway?  It’s all or nothing, do or die, any bill that needs passing requires 60% and with Congress equally divided, 60% might as well be the moon.  No wonder polls show most of us think the country is on a handbasket ride to hell.

With social media driving the wedges deeper and deeper, how do we find common ground anymore?  How do we hear the other side, their concerns, their fears, maybe even their hopes and dreams?  Maybe the chasm is too wide now, the animosities too deep.  If we’re not united, why not accept it?  Maybe we should rethink the Civil War.  Let the South go.  Re-establish the Confederacy.  Let the states decide which country they’ll join.  It may be time to consider the unimaginable.

Two Toke and I were taking the sun at the picnic tables outside the Pilot Lounge the other day, one of the only warm days of the so-called summer, a fine opportunity to thumb our noses at melanoma and global warming.  There was a warm breeze , the squabbling of seagulls and the gentle lullaby of Port Susan lapping at the dock.  Two beers in, we decided life was good, the world could manage without us and gee, why not order another elixir.

About that time we were joined by a small group of rowdies, evidently fresh off the back 9 up at the Camaloch links, who parked a table away and proceeded to whittle away at our heretofore sunny mood with commentary on the Jan. 6^th congressional hearings, mostly to the effect that they were a scam.  Two Toke and I are old politicos, addicts to the news, veterans of Watergate and more than a bit cynical in our old age.  Me, I try to avoid confrontation of a political sort, figuring, I guess, that debate is a complete waste of time.  T.T., well, let’s just say Tom is a live-and-let live sort of hombre … until his space is violated.  And these golfing yahoos, loud as a megaphone in the hands of the Proud Boys, definitely intruded on his personal boundaries.

“You two locals?”, one of the group asked and his compatriot chimed in, “or just Locos?”  which caused the group to erupt in belligerent laughter.  Before the bile could rise to our throats, another asked what we thought of that bullshit kangaroo court the Democrats were holding on the January 6^th protests.  “You’ve heard of them, right?”

“Gentlemen,” I said, “we’re just doing our part to keep the economy of the island humming, having a quiet beer, not really looking for a debate with you Proud Boys.”

“Who you calling a Proud …?” one of the militia asked but Two Toke interrupted him with a firm, “You. We’re calling you one, you hard of hearing?”  Holy insurrection, I thought, Tom’s looking for a skirmish if not an outright assault here at the Pilot Lounge, one look in his direction and I could see things were going to go south asap.  One of the golfers was up out of his deck chair and another was gripping his Budweiser like a potential club.

“Gentlemen,” I practically shouted, “let’s not ruin a perfectly good day with a political debate.  My friend here is a bit volatile on the subject and I’m sure you meant no disrespect calling us locos, just a friendly icebreaker but a serious faux pas, nevertheless.  Why don’t we all settle down, make a little toast to the gods of summer and drink our drinks in peace?”

Well, the South End is not known for its barroom brawls.  Arguments, sure, disagreements, you bet, but fistfights, not so much.  Two Toke is a Viet Nam Vet, no stranger to sudden violence, I knew, but I had never seen this side of him.  It was like seeing a Zen Buddhist priest swerve into a white knuckled rampage over some perceived slight, maybe taking umbrage over someone clapping with one hand while he was meditating.  The golf boys must have noticed, even slightly inebriated, that things had gone from clubhouse jeers to full blown Danger.  The locals, obviously, might actually be loco.

Reluctantly they removed themselves back to the safety of the Lounge’s interior, tossing a few snide obscenities as they retreated.  “Well, that was ….” I said, not quite coming up with the what it was part.  T.T. shrugged.  “I fought in Nam, not my fight, not my war, just a drafted guy too young to know better, but dammit, I won’t have morons in my face who think the country I fought for is a joke.  Kangaroo my ass.  You still want that beer,” he muttered, “I’ll buy.”  When he got up and started for the bar, I motioned for him to sit back down.  “I’ll buy, not you, maybe save a life or two.  You already served your duty, guess it’s my turn.”