The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Ah, it’s déjà vu all over again is what you’re thinking. Same old politics, same old global warming warnings, same old faux news, same old Covid with a new name. You can hardly stand to turn on the news anymore, same as me. Another report on the plague statistics, a plea to vaccinate or wear masks, another record warm/cold/wet/wild weather phenomenon, airline cancellations, partisan politics, the feeling that you heard this yesterday, same stories, you heard it the day before and the day before that. You have a hard time remembering if this Covid pandemic started last year or the year before that. You no longer care what day of the week it is. Or month. Or …

It was two years ago. I know, it took me awhile too. Two years compressed into one long one, a stay-at-home, quarantine time. Zoom meetings, online shopping, canceled parties, mask mandates, anti-mask mandates. Oh right, there was an election in there somewhere, then an attack on the Capitol, a Stop the Steal, a Congressional investigation into the January 6th insurrection, wasn’t there an impeachment trial too? It’s all lost in a fog. Loss of taste, loss of smell, loss of memory, all symptoms, all long haul conditions. If you believe in the pandemic at all …. And a good unvaccinated percentage of us don’t.

But here it is, another year, a not so fresh start, time for resolutions, eh? Why bother, is what you’re thinking, same as me. Nothing’s changing, nothing is going to make this one different than the last one or the one before that, nothing is the best you can hope for. So ring in the New Year if you want. We canceled the party we’d had for the past three decades, we canceled the bonfire we thought we might have with a few other survivors, we may cancel 2022. We plan to just hunker down and celebrate in the same way we’ve celebrated the past 700 or so days of the lost years. Happy New Year, everybody! Make a toast! Hope for the best! Maybe next year will be different. But don’t bet the farm on it.

Today is New Year’s Eve, plenty of time to make those resolutions for 2022. Being a South Ender, it’s difficult to conjure up anything much that needs improvement, but then again, nobody’s perfect, I guess, so I’ve been wracking my brain for some small trait that might need bettering. So far I’m kind of stumped.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like I think I’m Buddha or anything, not as if all my waking thoughts are pure as the driven snow, not like I couldn’t find a flaw or two in my persona, but jeez, you start messing with a good thing, hellfire, you might just be asking for trouble, create some distortion in the cosmos, open yourself up to worry and woe. Sure don’t want to start the New Year off on the wrong foot, stumble into 2022 when a waltz might have been more apropos.

Oh, sure, I suppose I could be more generous maybe with those donations to the Food Bank or the Senior Center. And I could probably dial up my Humility a notch, but I’m not really after Sainthood, not that I was actually in the running. At least I don’t think so …. And besides, it’s hard, really hard, to be humble as a long term South Ender. We Old Timers just try not to be Braggers, about as close to humility as we can get.

So maybe, once again, I’ll leave the Resolutions to all the rest of you. And please, whatever you do, don’t resolve to move down here on the South End thinking that migration or refugee status would suffice. It’s not that simple and honestly, some of my fellow Enders, just between you and me, could use some serious improvement. Maybe that’s my Resolution: to help these folks. To be a Light and a Way! To show them the Path!!

Then again, that attitude just puts a dent in my Humility Index. Naw, folks got to make their own Resolutions. Sorry, you’re on your own. Same as last year. Good luck to ya! You’ll be fine. Probably.

One of the things we don’t talk about much down here on the sunny South End is depression.  I know, it’s hard to imagine.  Sort of a worm in the apple of the Garden of Eden — before God made the rule not to eat it.  But we got everything from Seasonal Affective Disorder to Monday Morning Blues that last until Friday to outright disabling pull-the-covers-over-our-head-and-wait-until-spring depression.

I was always of the school of thought that depression was a symptom of bad marriages or crappy jobs or poor life choices.  External stuff but something you could change.  I don’t believe that anymore.  I got friends who struggle, who wrestle, who go 10 rounds with this stuff and in the end, lose on a TKO by the first cup of coffee.  We all know folks who try all manner of self- medication.  Sort of leads to other problems which compound the original diagnosis, maybe like mistaking gasoline for water to fight a smoldering fire.  Next thing you know, you got a 3 alarm.

I know it’s hard to believe we could suffer severe bouts of depression, living as we do in Shangri-La-La, but even Paradise has its ups and downs.  Don’t try to tell me Heaven is all sunshine and bliss — I know better.  God herself has more than a few Bad Days, at least judging by the state of the world out there.  You come home —All Alone — to the news that there’s more genocide, more torture, another couple of wars and a few new extinctions —- and that’s just on this planet, well, I bet She needs a few stiff drinks to get through the evening news.  Who wouldn’t?

I’m no psychiatrist so I don’t offer up panaceas any more.  Religion, drugs, self help advice:  might as well sing Sinatra to the wind.  I hear there are meds now, everything from Prozac to lithium, that may or may not help.  This world is hard enough without seeing it through a Blue Veil.  If you’re suffering through a cyclical bout, don’t think you’re alone.  I realize it doesn’t help much, but hang on.  Reality’s a slippery slope, but Hope is a ladder.  Even down here we always have to climb our way back up….

On some of my more uppity days, I look down the road and my nose at my neighbors’ houses, most of them running 3000 square feet with garages the size of an airplane hangar.  And I think:  how much stuff do you need that it takes 5 bedrooms, his and her walk-in closets, 3 and a half baths, plus a 3 car garage that parks a 40 foot travel trailer big as a mobile home?  All this for a family whose kids have grown and left the South End.  And while I’m up on my High Horse, I start wondering why is America so hooked on material acquisition and always wants more and needs, apparently the new and improved version of everything from their riding lawnmower to their garbage disposal with the 50 tooth slicer-dicer and odor control setting.   I can get pretty damn smug.  I can rant and I can rave.  I will even vent about living in my dilapidated 800 square foot shack, poor as a church rat, and finally end up babbling about those humble beginnings, living modestly, close to the Land.

This past couple of weeks I went into spring cleaning mode — even though it’s August now.  Started out back in the woodshop.  Tools got dragged out and junked or donated, the place got cleaned and rearranged, a lot got burned.  I moved to my bike shed, hauled out everything non-bike, paneled the interior with cedar and now I had all my boat gear in the lawn.  So I remodeled my lawnmower shed, tossed decades old tools and dead chainsaws and mulching blades and rusty junk, moved a 1930’s wringer washer out and put it in the garden shed, then went at the garden shed.

Eventually I made it to the boatshed, then out to the kayak shelter and finally into the old shack itself, now a glass studio, the living testament to frugal living, a shrine to my oh so ascetic lifestyle.  Course now it’s bigger by double, a second house really, bedroom, bath, all the comforts of home even though we have one up top we built 20 years ago.  If you add them all up — and I did— my neighbors look like the folks who downsized, who cut their carbon footprints and who probably should apply for food stamps any day.

Our 16 buildings, yeah, I said 16, from the sauna to the boathouse, the bike shed to the wellhouse, the garden shed to the studio, woodshop to outhouse, rootcellar to garden shed, woodsheds to kayak shelter, well …. I guess they seem maybe a bit extravagant, if not deliriously deranged.  Maybe not a McMansion, just a McNuthouse.  I know this:  I’m gonna stop pointing accusatory fingers at the neighbors and their piddly little domiciles.  At least until I find out they’re depressing the property values here on the politically correct South End.

Little Jimmy, a buddy of mine who’s almost exactly the same old age as me, was reflecting on what he’d like to do when he retired. He’s a glass artist – same as me – and so I know, even if he doesn’t, the kind of retirement he’s dreaming of is just that, a pipe dream. There’s as much likelihood of golden years in a hammock beside a South Seas Lagoon as winning American Idol with a tin ear and laryngitis, but like most folks who gamble on a lottery ticket, the fantasy trumps mathematics.

He’s the kind of guy who itemizes his day, schedules his week, plans itinerary into the coming months and can tell you, by rote, the exact steps he’ll take into the coming years. I can no more imagine him poolside with a Cuba Libre beside his sunglasses on the cabana table slathered with tanning lotion reading a novel than I can see him winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Little Jimmy’s a List Maker. An organized, tightly scheduled Planner. He knows far ahead what he needs to do not only this morning but the morning Tuesday first week, next month. He’s the guy who made an outline before he wrote the essay in 12th grade history class and got an A+ with the teacher’s comments: well organized. I don’t need to look in his dish cabinet to know the bowls and glasses are neatly arranged by size and color. Chaos, to him, is MY cabinet, one step shy of disaster, mayhem and death.

Little Jimmy pulls out a tape rule last visit and shows me 80 inches. “See that?” I shrug in incomprehension. “What’re we measuring?” I ask. “Time left,” Jimmy declares. “If I live to be 80, slightly longer than the average U.S. male … and I’m 71 (he puts his finger at 5’11”, then this is all you and me got left, buddy, 9 inches.” He shakes his head sadly. “Time’s short now.”

Unlike most of us and me in particular, Jimmy’s hit the End of his Calendar. No more days no more months no more years. Just inches. He wants to get more done, he’s got to speed up the Line, blow more glass, sell more stock, finish 2023 by 2022, squeeze into that retirement before the tape rule hits 80 inches. They say dogs don’t understand death. I think dogs are like me — they get the idea, all right, they just don’t carry a tape rule strapped to their collar. I guess we’re a little too busy scratching fleas.

Christmas is a lot like Amazon. It gobbles up all the other little holiday competitors. Used to be Christmas started right after Thanksgiving. For those of you who quit using math, that’s about 30 days of shopping. A month, an entire month. I was in a store last year that started putting up the Christmas decorations right after Halloween. This year most of them did. And some, I kid you not, started before Halloween. That’s over two months, 60 days in case you don’t have the calendar app.

I got neighbors who never take the strings of lights off their gutters all year round. Maybe they celebrate their own birthday for a couple months, I don’t know. Presents every day for weeks and weeks. We got Black Friday, Internet Monday, the holiday that never really ends, whoopee! Did I say Christmas was a little like Amazon? Amazon IS Christmas, 365 days, don’t forget Leap Year. One day delivery. Drones, not reindeer, next year, count on it.

I was chatting it up with my neighbor today who bought the old farm next door. He’s been out of work awhile but said he’d been doing a little consulting this past year. Consulting. I like the sound of that. Conjures up visions of bathrobe and slippers, a cup of joe and a home computer screen. “Sounds good!” I offered, semi-envious. “Well, he countered, “I don’t know about that … but it’s good to make some money for a change.” Indeed. And isn’t that the question for all us South Enders: how much money versus how much work? Or, as I opined to my neighbor, “what’s the bottom here? What’s the LEAST amount of money we need to live so we can have the time to do just that?” Live. Sure, it’s probably germane to a more global audience too, but … let’s be honest. This is THE burning question on the sloth-inducing South End. How much is Just Enough? Wen do we draw a line in the beach sand and say, No Mas!

Admittedly it’s a slippery equation, one fraught with peril. Foreclosures, collection agencies, repossessions, divorce, severe depression. But obviously we didn’t move to the end of a skinnyass island off the beaten career path looking for a management position with a high tech startup. Those people RETIRE here. The rest of us, we’re hoping to retire here too — just a lot earlier. Without a pension, without a 401-K plan.

Let’s just say it’s a high wire act without the safety net.   Sure, plenty of us slipped. Hit bottom and couldn’t scrape ourselves off to try again. You don’t get second chances down here. The bank isn’t going to offer grief counseling and Tyee Store isn’t going to extend credit. It’s a hard road when you screw up. Paradise when you balance the risk to the reward. Point is, you want to keep both in equilibrium. You need help, call me, I’m available for consultation.

I’m one of those yahoos who thinks most anything he needs to know, he can teach himself. What is they say: a person who has himself for a teacher has a fool for a student? Close enough. But over a lifetime of self-inflicted wounds from an education from the Univ. of Hard Knocks, I never seem to learn the real lesson: that what I taught myself is rarely accredited. It’s like learning Business at Trump U. Worthless paper, expensively acquired.

Nevertheless, I’ve managed to build our house, fashion musical instruments, repair plumbing, fix trucks and manage to make a living at art, all without much experience or expertise. Okay, so I nearly burned down the glass studio fiddling with a panel box with a direct feed from the power line and yeah, I had some close calls building our house, a couple that might’ve crippled or killed me. Which brings to mind another dopey aphorism: what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Oh, right, even an uneducated moron like myself knows what doesn’t kill you probably weakened your defenses, good luck with the next Near Miss. All of which is to say I’m not overly confident about my abilities, just a bit more willing to not let failures stop me, my five guitar building adventures a potent proof.

So when my glass business website got taken down by my nice host Small Orange when I missed a payment that got overlooked without offering me a second opportunity to pay belatedly before they deleted all the data, well, maybe it was anger at them or maybe it was the usual Do-It-Your-Damn-Self attitude, but at any rate, I embarked on my new career as an Information Technologist. Website Designer, here I come.

They say artists are right side brainiacs and engineers are left. Me, I’m working off the lower animal portion, the medulla something obladon’tgotta, which means a lot of cursing, yelling, spleen venting and mouse beatings. Needless to say, I like to work alone. The mizzus assured me web construction would be fairly simple. And I actually believed her!

A few days later, new host procured, domain name still mine, passwords and user names created, WordPress up and running, all I had to do was pick a ‘theme’, a template around which I could create a website that would showcase my glass installations without taking a day to load on some viewer’s computer. Of course I used images too big at first, but hey, a day or so of resizing them and they were ready to upload. The first ‘theme’ wasn’t really what I wanted so I went to another ‘theme’, wondering after the third why in hell they were named ‘themes’ and not, say, renditions, a black ops torture. There are ‘posts’ and there are ‘pages’. I don’t have time to tell you the difference but I used plenty to figure it out myself. And then comes the fun part, the program that takes those resized images and lets them be seen on a slideshow. Am I boring you? If so, think of me, three days into the labyrinth of digital hell, not quite like you, only one minute into this. I’m googling, I’m You-Tubing, I’m screwing up, I’m making a mess of my elegant website, but … perseverance, my friend, while not necessarily your enemy, can be.

Okay, you’re sick of this but bear with me a little longer. I found a ‘slideshow slider’, free of charge, uploaded it and spent a day trying to figure out its intricacies along with the rendition’s, how to order the images, how to delete, how to add text, how to … well, you get the idea. A Learning Curve. A Challenge. A Roadmap to Insanity. Call it what you will, finally I got the thing to pop up on the world wide web, the hallowed Internet, the holy grail of all digital knowledge and phony conspiracy theorists. I was ONLINE! I was back in bizness!

Until I did something fooling around trying to make the site Even Better. If I punched in archibaldglass.com, instead of seeing the previous slide show that took me five days to put up there, I got this cartoon figure that said something like Oops, Looks Like You Have Encountered ERROR 404. What Error 404 is, I have no earthly idea. It sounds bad and it certainly isn’t the message I want to send to my adoring website fans.

I spent another couple days cursing, torturing the mouse, fuming, fumbling in the dark. In the end the mizzus found the mistake I’d made, corrected it in five minutes. Is there a moral here for those of you who want to make your own website? Sure there’s a moral. Ask your techy spouse to do it. Pay her whatever her demands are. You want to do it yourself, good luck. But don’t call me.

Merry Christmas, everybody! Or, if that seems politically incorrect, happy holidays! Sure don’t want more war on Christmas in these hyper-partisan times, right? Well, it’s been a long year what with the Covid Plague still with us but as usual us Daddles have adapted! For the most part this has been a fine year for the Daddle family and as always we like to share our good news with everyone. Wife Linda’s depression has pretty much been manageable with the help of prescription pharmaceuticals. Thank god for the drug companies, eh? She spends a lot of time on the internet, but then, don’t we all? Sometimes I think she’s looking at the same thing for hours on end but I’m just happy she’s found something to do instead of stay in her room crying.

Daughter Brenda is enrolled in the local community college for studies in Business Accounting. She realized her degree in English Renaissance History wasn’t going to pay the rent, even though England seems to be hurtling back to those merry olde times, ha ha. That year flipping burgers at Burger King convinced her to get a trade with something that might pay more than minimum wage. Kids, they never listen to you when you give advice, do they?

Son #1 Jeremiah has slipped a few times following his Narcotics Anonymous program last year but he’s back once more in the basement where we set up an apartment and keep a surveillance camera so we can help him maintain his sobriety. With the Covid Lockdown Linda and I figure this is for his own good in more ways than one. Lately Jerry never leaves the room and no one visits. He doesn’t have much to say at meals with us, but then, he never really did before.

Son # 2 left that religious commune he joined down in Santa Cruz. Brian refused to talk to me after my little meltdown with the ‘guru’ in charge that time we drove down there to see him and the blankety blank geek wouldn’t let us past the guard gate. Apparently, judging by his blogsite, Brian’s a Qanon believer now. I guess you have to believe in something. Nobody said raising kids would be easy, but good god almighty, these boys could try a saint’s patience. Linda says it’s just a phase but that’s what she said about the All Seeing Commune of the Holy Waters too. That worked out swell, didn’t it? Oh, I know, I should be glad Brian found conspiracy theories and not drugs, right?

Me, I’m doing okay. We didn’t travel much this year on account of Covid and it looks like we won’t again this year. Linda is afraid of contaminated hotel rooms and nothing I can say will convince her otherwise. Maybe if she agreed to get her vaccinations, she’d feel more at ease. She says she doesn’t want to infect Jeremiah bringing back the virus from some Motel 6. I say whoa, what about me? But she knows I’m only kidding. I took that horse dewormer so I’m pretty much protected. Jerry, well, the last thing we want Jerry to see is another syringe.

So … hope all you out there are doing as well as us Daddles! Merry Ho Ho!
Love, Linda, Jerry and Skeeter

We don’t really have a Senior Center on the South End.  The Diner is sort of a substitute, but you need to at least buy a cup of coffee before you park in a booth or belly up to the counter for the daily gossip specials.  The vintage car guyz, the Flatheads, fill the joint Wednesday morning.  Tuesdays the Bible study crowd rolls in and most of the regulars roll out.  It’s not that they’re religious averse, but like Freddy the Freeloader sez, Sunday’s plenty.  Freddy gets his disability checks first of every month.  He’s a busted up stump jumper chain choker from the days when logging was man’s work all right but good luck living to be an old man.  If he had his druthers, the Diner would be church a-plenty.

The AA used to congregate on Fridays, but Brenda, the Diner’s owner since 1987, finally asked them to find another meeting place.  She was losing money on their endless coffee refills and the parking lot out front looked like Pittsburg in Carnegie’s day, the smoke from their unfiltered Camels hanging heavy on air inversions.  Plus, she and Big Larry, the grillman, had quit drinking years ago and the new AA members’ determined but usually hopeless drought between benders or DUI’s depressed them mightily.  Half of them ended up in Bible study anyway so AA didn’t complain very vocally, just moved it on up to the toxic mold blue Camano Center the County rents cheap and never cleans up.

Thursdays now the Zumba crowd pulls in after an hour of aerobics at the nearby South Grange, mostly post-Mom women desperately fighting the midriff bulges and Michelin Man thighs.  After a morning workout they replaced the calories lost with Brenda’s Blue Plate Specials, burger baskets with fries and slaw and fountain Coke they could get refills on for free, sort of a zero sum gain.  But without the guilt.  They earned every calorie!

We been thinking about maybe fundraising for a Senile Center.  Lot of work.  Lot of money.  Something ever happened to the Diner, maybe we’d motivate.  Meanwhile, the coffee’s cheap and the gossip’s free.  You ask me, we got the best of both worlds.  Without the Book of Revelations or the 12 step program.