The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

As much as I try, I can’t keep up with demographic distinctions like Millenial, Gen X or … hellfire, I can’t even remember the names of these categories. Apparently I’m a Boomer, one of those post-war babies spawned by a relief that the Great War was over and returning soldiers and sailors were happy to settle down in the newly built suburbs and raise a family. You know, a nuclear family, not really a reference to the atomic bomb although I’m not real sure.

We’re all old now, us Boomers, most of the WW2 folks have gone to their graves, buried with I LIKE IKE buttons, probably disappointed with us kids, selfish, spoiled brats who thought drugs were the answer, work was for suckers and the future was a cash machine. Some of us invented the internet, smartphones and social media — we thought it would make the world a better place and us a helluva lot richer. One out of two, I guess.

What am I spozed to tell the kids we’re leaving broken promises to? Rusting bridges, crumbling freeways, huge debts, lost wars, high health care costs, rampant homelessness, Covid crazies, tax breaks for the rich, a planet going to hell in a golf cart … that it’s not my fault? No mea culpa? Okay, Boomer, thanks for a few trillion to pay back.

Gotta say, I don’t have kids so I don’t have to look them in the eye and say What, me guilty? Sure tell the next generations we left them all the tools they need. Facebook, Instagram, Fox News, plenty of information combined with the world wide web, go forth and prosper. Pay off our planetary mortgage, figure out what to do with the homeless and the refugees, save the planet we used to power our jet skis and our big fin Cadillacs. We’ll leave you old Elvis records, fentanyl, arsenals of automatic weapons, no forwarding addresses and a hearty Good Luck! Adversity builds character, ask our Depression Era parents. No need to thank us. No need at all….

Harry works down at the O-Zi-Ya Body Shop. He’s an artist with bondo, makes a ‘total’ look brand new after pulling the dents and replacing crushed quarter panels, has a real nice touch with an airless in the spray booth. Back about 4 years ago, Harry was a ‘he’. Six foot four, muscular in a lithe sort of way, moved car parts around like baskets of daisies. I didn’t know him real well, I guess, mostly because my beater cars never got treated to the Body Shop make-over. Dents, scratches, bullet holes —- I’m not spending money for pigs’ lipstick.

So imagine my surprise when Harry walks up my drive during our annual Mother’s Day Studio Tour … in high heels, a tasteful above-the-knee pleated skirt, grey blouse and a matching handbag. “How you doing, man?” I ask nonchalantly and Harry explains, no doubt for the 1000th time, he’s no longer a man. Course, judging by the 5 o’clock shadow of a beard, he’s not quite a woman either. Which, he tells me earnestly, will take the hormone treatments some time to kick in.

Even on the live-and-let-live South End, this was, well , this was … different. And we’re accustomed to different. Harry toured the studio and we chatted it up and when he left I gave him a manly sort of hug and said, “Good luck, man,” and immediately corrected myself. Harry gave me a wink and a laugh and sallied forth down the drive.

Harry quit the Body Shop — not because the boyz couldn’t deal with The Change — they still speak fondly of him. Her. You know what I mean. She wanted a new life to go with the new her.

A couple of years ago I ran into Harry. Harriet now. She was installing fountains. Hauled the rocks, dug the ponds, wired the pumps, plumbed the waterfalls. “I’m an artist, Skeeter” she declared. She was welding sculptural components, creating light shows, running her own business. “Life’s good, then?” I asked.

She broke into a radiant smile, one I never saw at the Body Shop. Leaning down to whisper in my ear, she fairly bubbled, “It’s a joy my boy, it’s a joy!” All I can say is the path to happiness is a whole lot harder for some, even on the salty South End, but it isn’t impossible.

I hear folks say all the time how the country no longer makes anything, everything’s outsourced, manufactured in China, then imported. Course, they’re running up to Wal-Mart or ordering on Amazon for all this cheap junk, save them a few bucks, half of it going back into gasoline on their SUV. Here on the self-sufficient South End, we still make stuff. Okay, mostly because we couldn’t afford to buy that stuff new. But partly because there’s still a vestige of pioneer pride. You make something yourself, you maybe understand how much work goes into it, you maybe understand the real worth of it, you maybe become a part of it and it becomes a part of you.

We got about 2 million artists down here who paint and sculpt and carve and you name it. They make stuff. That’s what art is. Creation. If they could sell it, they’d be ‘job creators’. Always that damn ‘if’. I admit, half of artistic inspiration is job avoidance, or, in my case, about 100% is. Workaphobia, almost a crippling malady. I’ve had friends, who fancy themselves psychotherapists, suggest that if I spent half as much time employed as I do avoiding work, I’d be rich. Course I explain that then I’d have to do taxes or hire an accountant, set up wills, keep records. I’m just a little too busy for that kind of complexity.

The thing is, see, if you do your own car repair, fix your own leaky pipes, dig your own garden, catch your own food, prune your own fruit trees, cook your dinners, play your own musical instrument, sing your own songs —- you don’t have time to work some silly crappy job. No way. You’d fall behind, the chores would gang up, the shack would rot, the whole she-bang would come undone, entropy would rule, chaos would ensue. Down here, you do not have the luxury of a job! What you got, as consolation, is making your own life yours. Not buying it on credit, piece by piece, from a factory filled with people paid next to nothing in a country that makes stuff for all of us who don’t have time to do it ourselves.

James T. Kirk has left the planet. The captain is 90 years old, a tad overweight, but otherwise in great spirits, having actually loosed the bonds of earth, going where no old guy has gone before.

I can’t blame him for leaving. Lately I’ve been fantasizing about living on some other planet. Maybe one that believes in Spockian logic. One that doesn’t think it’s okay for 8 or 10 of its inhabitants to own most of the wealth. One that actually believes in the kind of democracy where my vote isn’t equal to a corporation’s, but is equal to everyone else’s. A planet that spends its money and intelligence on curing diseases instead of waging wars. One that lives in harmony with nature rather than ruin the atmosphere and the ocean and ravages the land. Maybe one that hasn’t advanced to the internet or social media or smart phones and computers even if it means a more primitive existence. Primitive is looking pretty good to me these days. And definitely a planet that doesn’t elect a baboon like Donald J. Trump as its leader. Really, is that too much to ask?

I know, that place doesn’t exist. So best next bet, grab a rocket ship and hurtle myself away from this doomed orb, up up and away from the pandemic mandate battles and the Koch brothers and the religious kooks and the climate change deniers and the Taliban and the great state of Texas, as far away as I can for as long as I can. Like Elton said: I think it’s gonna be a long, long time
‘Til touchdown brings me ’round again to find
I’m not the man they think I am at home
Oh, no, no, no
I’m a rocket man
Rocket man, burning out his fuse up here alone

All I can say is Godspeed, Captain Kirk, godspeed! Beam me up too!

Up behind us and through our woods there’s a road that snakes into the interior, got a few houses back there, even some folks who live there full time. Marge was one of those. She moved here when the clearcut ruined her own woods down by Lake Stevens. Course, about a year later, two or three of her neighbors cleared their 2 and a half acres and she felt like there was really nowhere to hide anymore.

She asked me to come up one day. Her husband was there in the livingroom with a whisky glass and the TV tuned to a game show. It was about 10 in the morning and he was drunk as a purple skunk and friendly as most alcoholics, meaning he wouldn’t say hello or shake hands. Marge made muted apologies, said he was a boat skipper, gone a lot of the time. From what I could see he was gone most of the time, even when he was in the room.

Marge shot herself a few years later, I can pretty much guess why, sad deal, sad woman. Her husband offered the place to his no-account kin, some punk pedophile the sheriff warned us neighbors about. The kid ran around with a crossbow, putting arrows into the neighbors’ houses, killing deer and leaving them to rot. He had parties the neighbors complained about, but he told them to jam it, he’d do what he wanted. The cops weren’t much help, pretty typical, so for four or five years we had this drug addict Chester the Molester for a roommate on the South End.

A few years ago Marge’s husband stopped by my shack during our annual Ma Day Studio Art Tour. Said he was moving, just wanted to say so long. “I haven’t been much of a neighbor,” he said sheepishly, “but I’ve quit drinking and I’m starting over. Wanted to apologize and say goodbye.”

A better man might’ve accepted that hand and that apology. But … I’m not that man. I leaned in on him and said, “I’m sorry too, Charlie, but it’ll be a better place with your sorry ass gone and your evil kin too. Adios, man. Move a long ways away, be all right with me.”

I believe in second chances, I really do. But I’m not one who believes an apology necessarily makes things right. I know he didn’t hold the gun to Marge’s head. I know he didn’t kill her, she killed herself. But I’ll be damned if I’d shake his hand and say good luck. I said instead, good riddance. Like I mentioned before, a better man …. that’s not me.

Joe Camel, oops, I mean, Joe Facebook, has announced recently that the app they were developing for Instagram for Kids, suddenly under fire by critics accusing them of child brainwashing, wasn’t really meant for kids, it was meant for teens. Teens, to Mark Zuckerberg, are apparently adults. Mark Zuckerberg is the Purdue Pharma of the social media world, the man whose company knowingly addicts its clients in order to monetize their dependency. Facebook is the digital Oxycontin, advertising as a benign entity but in reality a purveyor of hate, bigotry, violence, conspiracy theories, bullying and disinformation. He knows the nastier the feeds, the more the revenue. Simple as that. Give them more Oxy and they can’t help but come back for more. Sweet deal if you have no ethics.

They know what they’re doing, known it for a long time. Trouble is, they’re addicted too. To profits. At any cost. Are they evil people, the folks who run Facebook? Hell yes, they’re evil people. Were the tobacco folks evil people? Damn right they were, simple salesmen of death, fully knowledgeable about the cancer rates and they knew how to jack up the nicotine in more ways than one. Evil, definitely, or evil has no meaning. Was Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers evil? C’mon, they pushed the sales, they knew the addiction rates and the death count. Evil? What do you call it when hundreds of thousands of lives were sacrificed for their bottom line?

And what do we call it when profits trump ethics? Was Facebook the only one running Russian bots, jumping conspiracy theories to the top of their feeds, playing off hate and bigotry? No, they weren’t. And are the good people who feast on this clickbait, are they just poor innocent victims? No sir, they’re culpable too. Facebook understands Pavlovian conditioning. Our society is made up of bored folks with nothing better to do than check their feeds, see if their classmates think they’re fat or ugly, click on vitriol and disinformation, spend their lives pumping crap into their brains. They follow the blood, the venom, the gossip, the bigotry and all the rest while they’re connecting with their grandkids, just harmless diversions. Meanwhile, the politics turn toxic, the democracy teeters on failure and Zuckerberg is contemplating hooking the kids. Just the teens, not the real little tykes, not yet anyway. You tell me if this is evil….

Sometime back I donated stained glass to the new Island County Administration Building, a 7 foot tall by 21 foot long window facing the highway. The editor of the Crab Cracker sent me a link to the Facebook threads from concerned citizens with a note: Don’t know whether this will make you laugh or cry. Or both. I’m not a subscriber to any social media and after reading a couple dozen comments from my fellow islanders, I remembered why.

The first critic demanded to know what my window cost us taxpayers and who authorized it and what the hell anyway? Damn government! Damn county! The usual, followed by a few more of the same angry tirades before someone mentioned they thought maybe it was a donation by a local artist. The first writer responded with outrage over what upkeep and maintenance would cost. Are county employees going to do that on the taxpayer dime? A few folks mentioned the artist in question had donated a few other artworks to the area, one even said he was a pretty generous fellow, but mostly the subsequent threads were pissed off screeds. No good deed goes unpunished, not in these partisan times. There’s an anger seeping over the land that corrodes any potential for approval or appreciation. That, or the neighbors just don’t care for my idea of art, free or not.

Back when we built the Visitor Center I became the de-facto contractor when all I hoped to do was donate the 15 foot by 12 foot stained glass front. I got hate letters, the glass was shot with small caliber bullets, the building itself was the target for repeated assaults by bottles thrown from vehicles by irate taxpayers, some who, in their rage, stopped by to give me a piece of their mind. “Who’s paying for this?” they wanted to know. “Are my taxes paying for this??”
Invariably I would put down the hammer and reply cheerfully, “It’s your lucky day. Not a dime out of your pocket, pal, all donations, all volunteer labor.” To which, almost without fail, they would stomp back to their vehicle, turn and say with no little bitterness, “I still don’t like it!!”

I’m betting they still don’t.

Well, six months and a few audits later, the votes in Arizona’s most populous county were counted again, third time, this last by Republican yahoos and backers who were absolutely certain they’d find the fraud that gave Sleepy Joe the election. Not only didn’t they find evidence for that, they actually found more votes for Joe and a few less for the man who told us days before the results were released, this would show absolutely that he won Arizona.

Some folks would be humiliated by this and most folks would be embarrassed. But not the True Believers. Now they’re telling us the forensic audit was run by amateurs and hacks and they would need to get some auditors who were professional vote counters and voting machine analysts. Then we’d get the proof they know is out there, that their man won fair and square. Fourth time is a charm in their playbook.

Trump and his minions hired Cyber Ninja to get to the bottom of this fraudulent election, an outfit with no experience in the voting game, whose CEO announced prior to the investigation that the election was definitely rigged. God only knows he tried. So what if the team of investigators never realized, in their final report, that there actually was a paper trail when they suggested Arizona create one to prevent future irregularities, what we out here in the mail-in state of Washington would call Egg on Yer Face.

Course now we have other states, from Wisconsin to Texas, scrambling to help find those missing votes for the President-in-Exile. What we here on the South End call Slow Learners. You can lead a horse to water, but you sure can’t make him think….