The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Golly, you know about the last thing you need in these pandemic fueled partisan times, if you’re white at least, is to be made to feel uncomfortable with our racist past. Oh sure, slavery seems like it might have been a bit, well, old school and even a tad barbaric. Jim Crow and the KKK, kind of wish we didn’t have to remember those times now and do we really have to talk about segregation and the Civil Rights movement half a century later? C’mon, it makes us queasy. Some of us at least. Some, not so much.

Take Florida, for instance. They’re trying to pass a law that makes it illegal to bring up uncomfortable stuff from the misty past, stuff that would make a grown white man wince hearing about lynchings and native genocide and, well, a lot of history that just ought to stay buried, not brought out like dirty laundry to rub in our noses. Why should we feel guilty about the actions of our forefathers? Different times, different customs. Leave those skeletons in the closet, shut the door and shut up already. Nobody wants to be reminded, okay?

That old chestnut about those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it is hogwash down in the Sunshine State. Fact is, they’re probably repeating it now and really don’t mind. They just don’t want to be made to feel uncomfortable about it. Is that so hard to understand? We’ve all got events in our past that we don’t want to talk about, let’s just let sleeping dogs lie. The thing is, we white folks want to take pride in our white all-American culture and if it takes a little selective amnesia, well, that’s what it takes. Pride is what we want and pride is what we’ll demand, even it takes a law to shut up the folks who want to muddy our flag. Is this a great country or what? Don’t answer that if you don’t agree.

Historically the South End has been a place where the lumber companies cut down the forests and the developers sold off the scrub and slash that was left as ‘view property’.  You look around and times haven’t changed too much.  Except the price of a lot now is more than all the five acre chicken ranches of Mabana sold between 1910 and 1950.

Folks wonder why it took so long to discover’ the island you can drive to’ never knew our history as an exploited backwash.  The developers didn’t worry about zoning here.  Blast a bluff down with hydraulic hoses and call it Tyee or Tillicum.  Sluice down Summerland and build a rock jetty around it out into the bay.  Dig out a canal at the country club and double the waterfront.  It was wild west stuff, all right, where a man and his bulldozer could cut a wide swath without fear of government regulation or horrified neighbors.

Nowadays we look askance at dynamiting bluffs to make waterfront or dredging a lagoon to create lakeside gated communities or draining the wetlands to make quality 18 hole golf courses.  Judging by the agonized screams of the developers, you’d expect growth would reverse, forests woulde expand, housing starts would sit half finished, abandoned and rotting.  Oddly the juggernaut of gated communities and developments with names like South End Estates, Elger Bay Meadows, Tyee Vista all seem to be doing just fine with more on the way, thank you very much.

Clear Cut Cul-de-Sac, Blast Zone Barrio and D-9 Trailer Court are going to struggle, but the South End is gentrifying now that some of the trees have grown back and the chicken farms are broke and the Dot.com retirees are priming the pumps.  Won’t be long before we South Enders celebrate Back Wash Days and the rough and tumble no-holds-barred pioneers who carved out our civilization over the past century.  Thank you boys!

I know, you’re wondering how all these people around you have decided logic is bogus, crackpot conspiracy theories are real, Donald Trump is still their President and climate change caused by billions of CO2 spewing humans in a greenhouse planet couldn’t possibly be happening. And the reason you’re still wondering who stole their brains is simple. You don’t listen to hot talk radio. No, you’re too busy tuning into podcasts and FM jazz on NPR, thinking here’s serious news and quality music. Let the buffoons listen to Info Wars for all you care, you got better things to do with your time.

The trouble is, millions of your fellow countrymen, your friends and family and neighbors, tune into the rantings and the ravings of the Glenn Becks, the Sean Hannitys, Alex Joneses, Laura Ingrahams, Dan Bonginos and dozens of other angry anti-vaxx, anti-government, deep state paranoids who feed on fear and resentments. You probably never even tuned in to Rush Limbaugh. But if you did back in those good old days before Trump, you might not have been surprised that the guy won.

There’s plenty of profits in pandering to fear. Forget about journalism, we’re talking entertainment for the aggrieved, for those folks who think the country has been sold down the river by immigrants and gays and people of color, by Hollywood or the elites, by Moslems, by outsiders, by communists or the news media. The Nazis used the same tactics, the Tutsis demonized the Hutus, it’s the same old story, find a scapegoat for your fears and anxieties, make them your enemy, rail against them daily, feed the beast, crank up the volume, stoke the furnace.

Folks listen to these demagogues all day long on their radio while you’re getting your unbiased news feeds or reading your morning newspaper, happy no doubt that you’re able to make rational judgements on the events of the day. Give me a break. These people are talking civil war, insurrection, putting Trump back in the Oval Office … and the ones who are paying attention are the politicians who fear opposing them. Better to be a hypocrite and stay in office. Better to subvert the Constitution, suppress votes, rig the system than to stand up for principle. The Culture Wars are here to stay. Whether they remain non-violent is a little less clear. Turn your radio dial a little further to the right some days. You won’t like it but it’ll give you some idea what’s happening.

Most of our crime on the South End is local. You got basically one way off the island, even most criminals can figure out how easy it is to put up a Roadblock by the bridge. But occasionally we get Outside Trouble. Rare, but it happens. Last year one of my old band members, who rents his castle a little to the south of us, dropped by his tenant where he planned to meet his realtor so he could discuss why his house hadn’t sold in, oh, four or five years.

His tenant, when he knocked on the door and finally shouted inside, came down the stairs in a state of disrepair, having been tied up, pistol whipped and shot in the shoulder by two ‘friends’ from Seattle who’d purportedly come by at 7 or 8 in the morning to, what she claimed!, give her some money they owed. Instead, I guess they decided to keep the money and take hers. Happens all the time …. Just not a whole lot on the South End. Did I mention our victim denied being shot?

It’s probably lucky for us that most criminals think the police are as dumb as they are. If not decidedly dumber….

My ex-band member — I did mention EX band member, didn’t I? — believed every word, even if the deputies who arrived later were somewhat more suspicious. Still believes she wasn’t shot, last time I talked to him, even when I asked about the hole in her shoulder, entry and exit. Probably doesn’t believe the Band 86’d him either. So when she gets released from the hospital, he takes pity on her and lets her stay rent-free until she can get back on her feet.

About two days later he gets a call from another ex-band member, neighbor Jim, who informs him there’s a box truck loading up in the driveway and maybe he ought to come on down and see what’s what. Which he does. Only to find two guys busy loading his artwork and furniture into the truck. He politely tells them this stuff belongs to him and they apologize and say they’re helping his tenant load her stuff and didn’t realize. All a misunderstanding, an honest mistake, see? He puts his stuff in the garage so they won’t misidentify it from hers, goes home satisfied that things worked out, and of course, they load up all his paintings and furniture and hit the road, where, since he’s a trusting sort, no roadblock awaits them at the bridge off the island.

If there’s a moral to this story, hell if I know what it is. Other than to say, if you’re ever starting your own Band, be sure you audition your prospective musicians.

Used to be, in the spring, we’d haul our firewood in.  The winter storms blew part down and we’d cut the rest.  The slash, we’d stack up and burn.  Sometimes for a couple of days, sometimes for nearly a week.  Keep dragging the downfall over to a bed of coals so deep it’d catch the root systems of the long-gone old growth firs on fire and they’d smolder for weeks, spreading along 500 year old tributaries of pitch, sort of an underground river of fire.

We knew every square inch of our nettle forest.  The places where the bleeding hearts had gotten established.  The gullies where nothing but ferns grew beneath the cedars.  The salmonberry savannahs and the nettle jungles.  We found the old shelter where Yazel’s kids had made a fort and built a temple with homemade idolatrous animal gods.  We discovered the pioneers’ dumps with the old dishes and the linament bottles.  We knew what their favorite whisky was and when they got lightbulbs.

You explore your woods and you discover the past.  The stumps of those giant Doug firs with the gash still there where the loggers shoved a springboard so they could saw above the rock hard wood at the base — you still see em.  You find the barbed wire strangling a maple, then finally it’s swallowed inside where the fence line kept the cows.  Cedar snags charred from the fire of the 1890’s when the entire South End burned.

Some of the past is too far gone.  The old barn didn’t have good timber left.  The pig pen barely did.  Some of my own shelters and outbuildings are long gone now, leaving not a clue for the next folks.  The woods is a history book.  It’s a museum going to ruin.  It’s a lesson to me every year that what we do will be swallowed and lost and forgotten.  Something about that I find a comfort, I guess.  Knowing that we’ll disappear back into the rot and the rust as surely as the trees will fall — something humbling about this.  Something part of something relentlessly ongoing.

Every year we go back in there.  And some day we won’t come out.  Someone else will burn the tree that grows on me.  Someone else can warm themselves on that…  I just hope they pay a small respect.  We aren’t the first.  We sure aren’t the last….

The Pope came out the other day to issue one of his proclamations to the World. He said the people who had pets instead of children were selfish. God meant us to procreate, not pamper Fido. Ordinarily I don’t pay much attention to the Holy See, not being Catholic and not being a very religious sort even, but this caught my attention, I suspect, because we never had kids and for quite awhile, and I’m a little embarrassed to tell you, we had a dog, old Dr. Gonzo who has now gone to Pet Heaven along with our cat Kitty. And while I’m in full confessional, we had some goldfish too, albeit briefly, plus some tetras and a couple of angelfish. But no kids. Not one.

How were we to know the level of selfishness this was? And now, of course, we’re a bit beyond child bearing age and probably couldn’t even adopt kids from some agency even if we wanted. Not even Afghani orphans, I’m betting. At any price. We didn’t know we were egocentric back when we made our choice. We thought, geez, there’s billions of human beings crowding up the planet, maybe a few of us ought to resist the urge to make babies. We thought we were being moral, magnanimous even, for slowing down our carbon footprint by a helluva lot, taking one or two or six future mouths to feed and clothe and buy I-phones for out of the equation. We thought we were doing the Right Thing.

Besides, we didn’t really want kids, tell you the truth. Me, I didn’t think I’d be a very good Dad. I wish a lot of folks took that into consideration. There’s way too many grandparents taking care of their kids’ kids once their children realized drugs were way more fun than child rearing. And who knows, maybe having kids made them turn to drugs. But I’ll leave that to the psychologists and the Pope himself. All I know for sure is if you want to have kids, you ought to really want to have kids, not fall into it by accident or because you were lonely or your friends were having kids or your parents wanted grandkids. You should want them because you want them. Period. And with apologies to the Holy See, I think it’s okay to have pets too, you know, if you plan to take care of them. Even if you don’t have children.

I suspect most of you slip into the Metaverse with an avatar that’s, well, for want of a more polite description, just this side of reality’s Goodwill fashion. Let’s assume that you’re new to the Meta, just feeling your away around the virtual possibilities, not exactly comfortable yet, sort of like the new student in the big high school your family just dropped you into when their job transferred them. Been there myself so I understand. But c’mon, it’s time to up your game. You want to hang with the geeks and the losers, fine, but if you want to play with the In Crowd, you need shoes. I’m talking NFT,non fungible token Nike sneakers, bro. I’m talking about taking a walk in style through the Metaverse.

And that’s just the first baby steps, Amigo. The Metaworld can be your oyster if you learn to navigate. It’s the wild wild west meets the raw excitement of venture capitalism. Need some digs to crash between adventures? No problema, pal, we got real estate, comfy and virtual. We’re selling properties and the market is red hot. An investment today may mean riches tomorrow if you’re courageous. The folks who think oh, land isn’t real, houses aren’t real, those Nike fashion statements on your avatar’s feet are only virtual, well, I got news for those slackards, the virtual world is most definitely real, as real as a bitcoin, brother and getting more real every nano second.

You got something you want to advertise, rent a billboard in Virtual World! You want to make some fast crypto, buy the billboard and rent it to the rest of the Metaverse. Grab up some mall properties and become the next gen’s landlord! The Meta is expanding, my friend, and you are at the threshold of dreams. This is no time to be a shrinking violet. This is not your mama’s world and you are no longer mama’s boy. Grab the virtual reins and boldly go where no corporeal man has gone before. If it sounds fantastic, BINGO!, you’re right on target. So snatch up a pair of those NFT Nikes and stride into the virtual universe. The future belongs to the brave!

Down here in the soggy trailers of the South End we got plenty of folks who find it impossible to throw out anything. We call them Hoarders. Cars sit strangled by blackberry vines out back, garage is full of old parts rusting slowly, closets are jammed with clothes that haven’t been worn in years, sheds are piled high with lumber being eaten by powder beetles. You ask them why they keep that crap and they’ll give you the fish face like you were a complete idiot and tell you they might need that lawnmower that stopped running a decade ago for parts. The lumber they might build another shed with … you know, to store more crap.

Believe me, I’m not casting the first stone. I got way too many sheds myself filled with stuff from 30 or 40 years ago when money was tight and all those plumbing and electrical left-overs were kept ‘just in case’. Just in case comes along about as often as sunshine in November down here. Truth is, we’re too lazy to haul it to the dump. Although, some of us are serious and serial Hoarders. I have a buddy who has tunnels in his shack to navigate between the kitchen and bedroom and bathroom. He lives like an ant, burrowed into the ground. His place is a Black Hole, the gravitational pull sucking everything in, allowing nothing out.

We recently moved my old man from his house in Wisconsin to an apartment at the assisted living joint down the road, a downsizing that required tossing half his stuff. Considering that we moved him from Georgia over 15 years earlier and tried to downsize Mom and him then, encountering nothing but resistance, we told them we’d be back in 6 months with a U-Haul so they needed to do it themselves, no ifs ands or buts. We ended up needing two giant U-Haul trucks to move them. Most of what we moved was worthless junk. So years later we still had that worthless junk to sort through, toss, take to Goodwill or find someone to take the stuff. It took us nearly a week. Then a month later we had to move him again to a less independent apartment. Took us four days. And a month ago we moved him again into the nursing unit. Three days. Same drill, same junk.

Believe me, you do that for your parents, you’ll take an unjaundiced eye to your own closets and sheds once you come home. I took three large loads of clothes I hadn’t worn in years to the thrift stores. The dump loads barely make a dent, but it’s a start. Someone offered me a very nice cabinet the other day, something a few years back I would have grabbed, but not now. No more stuff! It’s the wrong direction now. It’s time to let go of these things. I don’t want to live in an ant farm when I’m decrepit. And I don’t have kids to clean out the debris of a lifetime.

January 6th is today. Donald Trump and his kids were just subpoenaed a few days ago. Jeffrey Epstein’s pimp was found guilty of procuring underage girls for their pleasure palace and the Theranos CEO was convicted of corporate fraud. Omicron is lashing the country with record infection rates and I’m noticing more and more folks in the grocery stores defying the mask mandate. It’s a wonderful day in the neighborhood.

The Civil War, yeah, that Civil War, rages on. And you thought it ended at Appomattox when Lee surrendered to Grant. Or when Clark Gable walked out on Scarlet…. C’mon, the War never ended. We call it the Culture Wars now, but it’s the same battle. White vs. anyone not white. Fundamental Christians vs. anyone not their sect. Heteros vs. anyone different. Rural vs. Urban, Fox News vs. Hollywood. Trump roared into office with dog whistles and barely concealed racism. Build the wall, build the wall! Keep em out, lock em up, knock em down! Don’t let them tear down the statues to the Confederate heroes! Don’t teach any history that blemishes our proud heritage! Whitewash it! Our kids don’t need to hear that stuff!

Make America Great Again! Bring back the Eisenhower era and declare Joe McCarthy the courageous commie fighter, bring back Father Knows Best, pretend to go to church, the True Church, not the synagogue or the mosque. Worship the True God, not Allah. Abide by the scriptures, no homosexuals, no equal rights for women. Times were good back then. People knew their place! We knew who the Enemy was.

The Enemy is us, we the people. January 6th is a day of reckoning. Democracy, that great experiment, is a far more fragile enterprise than we thought for most of our lives. Maybe we were just naïve….

My neighbors in the suburb across the road have a Homeowners Association. Which is a simpler way of saying they have created a set of complicated bylaws that promote factions between themselves to fight for – or against – additional dues on tree cutting – or growing if they’re over 17 feet tall – water restrictions, weed control, building requirements, paint color schemes, roof materials, on street parking restrictions, beach trail maintenance, bulkhead repairs and nationality of their prospective spouses. In essence, they’ve manufactured the potential for their own small civil war.

Of course if they didn’t have covenants, bylaws, rules and regs, board meetings and various committees, I’m sure by now anarchy would rule, neighbors would be shot, trees would block views of the Sound and the Olympics, vacant lots would grow weeds and abandoned lawnmowers, windows would be boarded over, some houses would sport fuchsia paintjobs and the whole she-bang would look like our very own Kabul.

Welcome to the South End! Welcome to my neighborhood! When the turnip truck I rode in on dropped me off back in ’77, the ‘hood was a cut over woods across the road. For 40 years house after house got built, one or so a year, folks came and then left, the politics shifted, money rolled in, new owners remodeled, outbuildings were added, the well was updated, the bulkhead was replaced, the wealthy outnumbered the less wealthy, and, of course, dividing lines shifted accordingly. Welcome to America!

Lately there’s a new disruption in the Force. The Big Storm of ’21 knocked multiple trees on the current bulkhead built decades ago and knocked a 30 foot section out into the wind and waves which promptly tore the logs away. Replacement had already been on the table, some folks arguing against it, some for, some wanting to wait, some wanting immediate action. The Storm left a gaping hole in all those plans as well as in the bluff behind the breach. Think of a hornet’s nest slapped with a big stick. Think of million dollar houses sticking off the bluff. Think of refugees pouring in from across the road to our side, tent encampments, razor wire, U.N. aid, cholera, a community gone mad. Welcome to the World!

All I can hope for now is me and the mizzus become the new waterfront. Good luck, I guess, to the old neighbors. They may have to relocate to some other island with less stringent covenants.