The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Big Walter was looking for a high five down at the Pilot Lounge a couple of nights ago after showing the Kentucky congressman’s photo of his entire family assembled happily in front of their Christmas tree with semi-automatic weapons in every hand. ‘Nothing says Happy Holidays like a warm gun,’ Walter was crowing. Under the photo was a P.S. to Santa to please send ammo. Ho ho ho.

Two Toke shook his head sadly. ‘I don’t know, Walter, but doesn’t it seem like bad taste to post something like this right after that kid in Michigan shot up his school? Sort of tone deaf, isn’t it?’ Big Walter, not exactly attuned to nuance of any variety, snorted loudly. ‘No, Tom, it sends a message to you snowflakes that we’re not cowering to all of you who want to take our guns away.’

Jerry put his beer down and applauded that sentiment, another yule log on Walter’s fire. ‘Damn right,’ he practically shouted. The Lounge quickly divided on party lines as usual, the Bud Lite crowd vs. the craft beer boys. Well, okay, not exactly. Jerry was quaffing his third South End IPA and Two Toke and I were drinking Rainiers. Actually, party lines drawn at the Lounge were fairly elastic, depending on the topic du jour. On abortion, the lines were agnostics vs. the Chapel in the Ravine camp although I have friends who are fairly progressive but want more restrictions on abortion rights. Guns, sometimes the lines were hunter vs. peacenik but other times they blurred. Fairlane Fred fought in Viet Nam, knew guns a little more firsthand than he’d ever dreamed, voted Republican but wanted a ban on semi-automatics. You never know. And probably shouldn’t try to assume. You know, unless you’ve been drinking….

‘I ought to make my own Christmas card, ‘ Walter said and Tom smirked, ‘What, Peace on Earth?’ ‘Piece, like as in check out my piece? I like it, Tom, I like that a lot. Piece on Earth. That’s great. Thanks, Buddy.’

And so it went, another joyous evening of holiday spirits down at the Pilot Lounge. Like we always say most meet-ups, we can always agree to disagree. Hopefully without firearms. Feliz Navidad!

Half the South End is For Sale. Three quarters of the neighborhood have real estate signs out by the driveway, everything from WindyRear Realty to Reflux Realty. They used to hold open houses on the weekend, but after 3 or 4 years, I guess even the optimism of a realtor starts to look like a horny snake courting a garden hose. Or vice versa.

Some of the homeowners have given up too, bought haciendas in Arizona or trailer court lots in Nevada. They come motoring back in their 40 foot mobile homes when the asphalt starts to melt down there and the gila monsters stay under the rocks all day. I guess they’re the optimists, folks who figure the housing bubble will eventually swell up again and they’ll get the million dollars they thought the place was inflated to back in the carefree days before October 2008 when the betting stopped and the banks had to show their cards. House of cards, it turned out, one very bad bet.

We’ve gone through the Boom and Bust cycles on the South End many times since I lost a wheel on the Conestoga and decided to stay put. Folks find out the neighbor sold for twice what anybody dreamed somebody would pay and next thing you know, everybody figures they can sell now and retire like a dot.com executive. Signs sprout up and proliferate like nettles in chicken manure, eventually they DO sell or the sellers give up and we return to normal. Although … normal may just be more of those selling binges than living our lives, hard to say.

The realtors do fine most of the time. Commission coming in, commission going out. Rita, down at WindyRear’s North End office, tells them when they’re ready to get rich, come on back, she’ll sell their dream house for 50% more than they paid. There’s ALWAYS another house — the real dream is making money.

Personally — and nothing against the wisdom of Rita the Realtor — I don’t care how much my bank account would swell, I wouldn’t want to end up in a trailer park in Nevada. I don’t care how good the air conditioning is.

So the 15 year old Michigan kid who shot his fellow classmates right after a counseling meeting his parents had with the school had gone a few days earlier with those same folks to buy a semi-automatic pistol. At the meeting the school mentioned their concern that little Ethan might be contemplating mayhem. The parents apparently never really felt that the gun purchase might be relevant to this discussion because as soon as the meeting ended, their kid took his backpack into the toilet and emerged minutes later locked and loaded.

Now, I’m sure you’ll agree with me that every troubled 15 year old kid is entitled to own a semi-automatic weapon. But … sadly, not all of us have the kind of parents who would help us purchase one. My folks probably would have said no. Actually, they would have said ‘hell no, what’s the matter with you?’ Little Ethan’s parents probably were pleased as punch their delinquent kid was showing some spunk, c’mon, let’s get right in the car and drive to the nearest gun shop and we’ll buy you an early Christmas present, son. Maybe for your birthday we’ll get you a bazooka. You know, if you’re good.

What better way to say Merry Christmas than a gun? I got a capgun when I was six, a BB gun when I was ten … but that was then, this is now, time to upgrade to something a tad more lethal. The 17 year old kid whose parents got him an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle took it on himself to play vigilante up in Kenosha, Wisconsin, go defend the city against those bad Black Lives Matter folks who were protesting racial discrimination and ended up shooting a couple of them in what he called self-defense. Got off scot free too. Nice message for the kids of America, the white kids, anyway.

I’m not really anti-gun. I am anti-stupid. The folks who set up a Fund Me site for the killer at Kenosha, well, somehow making a hero of him sends shivers down my spine. Second amendment or no second amendment, you don’t have the right to kill folks you don’t like, I don’t care how many hours of video mayhem you watch.

There’s a truism among us park rangers: a neglected park invites vandalism. I’ve been taking care of the only county park on the South End for about 15 years. It’s not much, five acres, couple of picnic tables, BBQ grill, trails, just a small place of respite from the woes of the world. I mow, plant flowers and shrubs and trees, clear trail, pick up litter, stock the 60’s phone booth Little Library, add sculpture and art where I can, all to help the county for nada, another Friends of Camano Island Parks volunteer.

For the past five years or more the chain link fence around the parking lot perimeter has been smashed, knocked down completely in places and stood sagging so that it looked like the dental work of a bad prizefighter. This year the county finally got around to replacing the sections that were bad. A little late, but better than nothing. For the past couple of years I’ve asked the county to regravel the parking lot which is, after any rain and always throughout the fall and winter and spring, a mudhole with deep craters. I’ve been told this is Top Priority for the county parks. I hate to think what qualifies as Low Priority.

I could write an entire humor column on the excuses I’ve been given why our Top Priority mudhole never gets graded and graveled. Broken tractor, busted pickup truck, leg problems of the park guy, misjudged gravel estimate (twice), budget shortfall, backlogged blackberry cleanup, forced sick leave if not taken in this fiscal year, you name it, I’ve heard it.

The place with its tarpit parking lot looks like hell, a great invitation for vandals and yeah, we’ve got plenty of vandals. Strewn garbage, broken library windows, burned books, stolen grill, stolen art, new fence smashing, tossed condoms, plants dug up, paintball splatter on the trees. Do I blame the county for all that? You bet I do. The volunteers on these parks, working years for nothing, donating gas and mowers and landscaping, we deserve better than a shrug of the shoulders or a litany of lame excuses from the county. Am I pissed off? You’re damn right I’m pissed off.

But …to be fair, I’ve forever been the one who rejoiced in living far from the reach of Rome. The County of Island has always been a moat away, a Saratoga Passage away or worst case, a long slog by road up through Stanwoodopolis, through Snohomish County, Skagit County, Fidalgo Island then across the Deception Pass bridge and down to Oak Harbor on Whidbey Island. From my little park, about most of a day round trip. So if the bureaucracy of the county seems to have forgotten about us, well, maybe they’ll understand if I skip my property taxes this year. You know, my truck isn’t running well, my foot has been hurting me lately, I’ve got my own blackberry cleanup, I’m saving for a tractor, I misjudged the tax payment, my personal budget is a little thin this fiscal year, I need to take sick leave or at least a few mental health days, don’t forget Covid but hey, that property tax is Priority One for me, trust me on that. Oh, and thanks for your patience!

When I was the ripe old age of 20, I decided to get a vasectomy. The world sure didn’t need any more Skeeters, I decided, and furthermore, I knew I wouldn’t be much of a dad. Maybe too selfish, maybe knew I’d be broke and out of work, maybe just wasn’t in my life’s job description. Looking back 50 years later, I don’t have any regrets whatsoever even though I suspect I might have been an okay father but hey, the world has plenty of okay fathers and way plenty kids without me adding to the glut. Deciding to be childless was one thing, finding a doc who would perform the vasectomy on a 20 year old was a lot more daunting. The first few I went to quizzed me about my decision, told me they wouldn’t perform it, figured I might change my mind down the road. I assured them I wouldn’t be changing my mind. They assured me they wouldn’t have any part of my plans.

I will say, at least I didn’t have picketers outside the clinics and doctors’ offices, shouting at me, screaming Bible verses, telling me I would go to hell if I prevented a life from coming into this world. But what I took away from all this was that it was my body all right, but there were those who thought maybe it wasn’t. They knew better than me and they had the scalpel hand. They had the law on their side. They had the Power and I had, well, I had pretty much nothing. Way of the world, I guess.

I could have used birth control the rest of my life. Could have abstained. Could have been a priest. There would still be those self-righteous folks who would object to the pill, to the day-after drug, to condoms, to … well, you name it, they would pass a law if they could. And they do. They prevent Planned Parent clinics from operating in a lot of states, they ban the morning after pill, they want government out of everything BUT your sexuality. And today they’re arguing at the Supreme Court that abortions be made illegal, essentially. They’ve decided when life begins and they have the Bible on their side. If you don’t believe in the Bible, if you think life begins at birth, if you don’t happen to believe that abortion is baby killing, well, get ready, things are about to change. And not to your liking.

Nobody, and I mean pretty much nobody, is pro-abortion. Abortion is a hard damn decision and I wouldn’t want to be in the position to have to make it. But …plenty of women, girls really, find themselves deciding if a child is the right choice. The Court is going to help them with that now. For sure some will do okay raising an unwanted kid, some by themselves, some just a kid themselves, some struggling to be a mother and still find a job. But a lot of women are going to discover their body isn’t theirs, their decision isn’t theirs, and their future was determined by five or six people in black robes. Way of the world, maybe, but that doesn’t make it right.

These pesky viruses, they just keep mutating like zombies digging back up out of their hastily filled graves. This latest one, according to frantic news accounts from every network, newspaper, media platform and gossip, appears to be mutated like nothing before, some 60 mutations on its little self. God only knows what it’s capable of, what it might do, who it might infect, where it will show its spiky face next.

And just when you thought you were safe. Two inoculations and a booster plus masks still worn and public avoidance still in effect, what, me worry? Course, back in Wisconsin where I just spent a couple of weeks, they stopped worrying long ago, mostly anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists. Covid? Naw, they don’t believe it’s real. So what if their hospitals are filling up again, facts don’t scare them. I rarely saw a mask on anybody in the grocery stores, other than myself. So you can bet the Omicron variation won’t convince them any more than the Delta that vaccines might help. They don’t need your damn help!! And, you know what, I’m not offering to help. Like how? Tell them about Charlie Darwin? Isn’t this the whole point about evolution? You got a brain that feeds on Qanon and Breitbart, well, it’s going to atrophy. Simple as that. Eat a banana and piss up a rope.

Meanwhile, back here on the ground we got scientists working around the clock, monitoring cases, checking out severity, transmission speed, DNA sequencing, all that mumbo jumbo the folks who don’t believe in Covid think is bogus. And who knows, maybe this new variant will be the one that dominates and is less deadly, just a seasonal flu down the road. More Darwin, more evolution when it comes to these replicating bugs. Give me science as a weapon to fight this, maybe stop with the hair-on-fire news media reports and good luck to the folks who think three quarters of a million dead Americans is nothing worse than a cold. Duh.

We live on what the tourism folks like to advertise as the Island You Can Drive To. It’s sort of true, unless you come at rush hour or a busy summer weekend, then it’s more like The Island You Can Crawl To, not quite as appealing but never the less, slightly more accurate.

I read in last week’s Stanwoodopolis Gazette that the city planners were going to propose multiple plans for a bypass around the gridlocked megalopolis, most imagining a beltline out through the farm fields to the north before looping back to the main highway at the edge of town just before the Memorial Bridge leading to the island. Farmers are already upset, downtown businesses are peeved, the City Council doesn’t need another civil war after the deadlock over if what where and how to site a new City Hall, the city administrator just quit and, well, everything’s pretty much normal in our fair city.

Not being a registered voter in the town, I suppose I’m not really welcome to offer my outsider suggestions. Sure, I’ve driven that gauntlet through the sewer lagoons for 44 years, but it doesn’t make the local yokels Velkommen sign any more welcoming now than it did when I first arrived with long hair and no money, no job and no doubt a bad attitude. Times change, I’ll grant you, but some things don’t. The downtown businesses are still as friendly as ever, meaning they want our bizness but not our presence. Shop, but hurry on home now. Here’s your hat, what’s my hurry?

So okay, here’s my two cents, a long time suffering outsider who tried the SHOP LOCAL slogan and never thought reciprocity was part of the deal. Build the Tunnel! Bertha’s done digging Seattle’s, haul it north, set it up by the new high school and dig til you reach the bridge. Now there’s a bypass. Out of sight, out of mind. Stanwoodopolis gets the peace and quiet it has always wanted and we islanders get to bypass the town that never really wanted us in the first place. If the city puts up a Velkommen sign at the island end of town finally, well, I’m saying it’s too damn late. Dig the bypass!

Today we’re going to my wife’s father’s funeral. She’s been out here in Wisconsin three weeks while he died a lingering and painful demise, probably memories she’ll never erase but hopefully not permanently scarring. I arrived here in Oshkosh a week ago after flying into Madison to visit my 98 year old dad in the assisted living place we put him six months ago, only to walk into his apartment to find him flat out on the floor half dressed, moaning from where he’d fallen. Welcome back!

I’m not accustomed to Death or Dying. Although … I suppose nobody is. Wars maybe. Pandemic hotspots, possibly. Having worked in a hospital as an orderly for ten years, I witnessed plenty of horrors but those were strangers, brief brushes with fellow earthlings leaving their mortal coil, just part of the job, nothing personal, no need to turn it into a philosophic inquiry.

This is different. It feels as if we’re all dying. Which, of course, we are. If we care to view it that way. People like to say — and even believe — a funeral is a kind of Closure. I’ve never understood that word ‘closure’. A door closing behind us, shutting out the past? Turn off the lights, lock the door and leave the Do Not Disturb sign on the knob?

We’re going to the cemetery where Karen’s mom was buried years ago on a similarly cold bleak and windy November day in Wisconsin, the sky the color of Lake Winnebago, spitting snow over an open grave, soon to be filled back in, grass growing again in spring, all of us back where we came from, back to the business of living.

I’m no longer a philosophic enquirer. Explanations are the faux news of my existence. For those who ask no questions, there are no mysteries, no need for answers. Life, I think, is more like a music, not a riddle. The dead dance with us, the living. They’re never really gone and the door we thought we closed was never really soundproofed.

Steve Forbert sang this back in my youth:
“Here’s to all the shitty jobs that I despise
Here’s to two-bit guarantees and other lies”
I guess I took Steve pretty much to heart in my wayward youth. Worked in a dog pound for awhile, taught school a bit, drove trucks and buses here and there, stripped furniture until the fumes got to me, cleaned Coca-cola bottlers and loaded their trucks, managed a University dining hall, spent one night in the local cannery shoveling corn husks out to a conveyor belt, tried my hand at carpentry, ended up on the graveyard shift weekends at the Everett hospital as an orderly. My favorite days were the ones when I threw down the shovel and quit. My least favorite were the ones spent looking for the next shitty job.

My folks thought I was mostly a slackard and a bum. Quitting was for Losers might have been the crocheted sampler on their kitchen wall, but fortunately for me, I’ve never been looking for parental or peer group approval. In 1992, I had had a dose of bad jobs, bad bosses, low pay and all the rest. We had decided the old shack we had lived in the past 17 years wasn’t going to outlive us and the mizzus was lobbying for us to hire a builder, get a mortgage and move into the modern world. I, of course, was terrified of a mortgage, a ball and shackle on my current job, the one I planned to quit as soon as possible, meaning, right now. So … I begged her, pleaded my case, swore I would build the house myself and even, so help me god, get permits and build it by code, a novelty for us after multiple illegal additions and buildings. No doubt in a moment of weakness, or plain pity, she relented and agreed I would quit my graveyard shift job, build the house and when it was done, make my avocational glass business a real occupation. And if it wasn’t ….? Well, that was the dagger.

The house took me two solid years, almost to the day. Hardest work I’d ever done. Happiest job I ever had. I worked 7 days a week, long days, lots of overtime, plenty of stress. You try building a house by yourself, learning plumbing the night before, electric from a book, most every step a new education. But day by day, nail by nail, the house rose out of the ground, a satisfaction that’s hard to describe.

And then the day came when it was finished. Time to make a living doing art or else it was back to the mine. I always thought artists should have a day job, if for no other reason they wouldn’t be forced to compromise their art for money. But … the opposite might be more true. Necessity might be the mother of creativity as well as invention. If you want to be an artist, nothing focuses the mind like the fear of those crummy jobs throughout the years and more to come. Poverty is okay. But it’s far better to be working for yourself and even better if that work is what you love. Quitting, sometimes, is the best strategy.

I was at the opening of new works by one of our local oil painters at the South End Fine Art Gallery and Expresso Shoppe. As always it’s a guaranteed large crowd, mostly us artists and a few of our friends and occasionally a patron or two. Regina, the gallery owner and latte barista, always provides liberal winepours and enough hors d’oeuvres to hold back rickets among the starving artists another week or so.

I was admiring a fine piece titled, tantalizingly enough, “Sailboat at Sunset #56”, one of a series I’m guessing of at least 56 or more, when a couple jostled me out of the way for a better view. I didn’t really mind moving on, after all, there were plenty more similar offerings, but the gentleman of the pair had caused me to spill my merlot onto the sleeve of my last presentable Goodwill shirt, then gave me a cursory ‘scuse me,’ that sounded vaguely like ‘sue me’ before steering his companion and her jangling earrings into the appropriate viewing angle. A moment later they were discussing perspective and complimentary colorations, the expressively bold brushstrokes of the sails, the minimalist way the artist had captured the shimmer of the sea, and of course, the price, anything BUT minimalist.

“I may not know art,” my jostler said, sipping daintily on a white wine from his plastic glass, “but I know what I like.” He was quite pleased at this knowledge, no doubt gained with considerable effort. His companion wagged an earlobe with a windchime banging to life, evidently in total agreement with both of us on this aesthetic declaration.

I guess I was still miffed about the impromptu dye job on my best shirt, or maybe it’s just a character flaw deeper than any fabric stain, but I smiled winningly and said out of the cerulean blue, “I don’t know much about biochemistry, but I sure know a good clone when I see one.” This caused some raised eyebrows, a rolling of the eyes and the beginning of distant alarm bells that would soon drown out the jangling jewelry. For good measure I added, “I don’t know much about history either, but hey, I love a good war. I know what I like.”

So okay, I cost Regina a commission and I should feel bad about that. Probably cost the artist a sale and I should feel worse about that, but I don’t. I do happen to know something about art, and I know what I don’t like. I guess it’s okay to buy what you do; I just don’t think we should be proud of our ignorance. Then again, what the hell do I know?