The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Not long ago a friend asked me if I thought the rest of the country was pretty much the same, economically, as the South End. Obviously my buddy needs to get out more once this Covid business recedes enough to allow traveling again. What he was really asking was if most folks were fairly well off in America. Now, to be fair, my pal isn’t exactly in the 1%, he’s more likely down in the bottom quarter, no Social Security, no retirement, still working manual labor under the table at 74 and will be until he dies.

Traveling through the Deep South one year with my father and brother on one of our Trips with Dad, the Old Man mused how in his lifetime most of us boats had risen with the economic tide. He and my mom grew up poor in Northern Maine where nearly everyone was in that same boat, not much water underneath. And of course there was the Great Depression, then World War Two, what some historian yahoos call the Good War. Please leave your college degrees at the door when you leave, guyz….

We got a few leaky dinghies on the South End moored next to the yachts, but most folks don’t have a boat to pee in and some not even a pot to bail with. We’re 99% white bread with the few immigrants working on our lawns then leaving by dark. The South End has a few homeless people, but not many. It has a few millionaires, maybe too many. Rents here are high, real estate is hot, retirees are many and working couples few. I’m no sociologist (although I have a degree in sociology) but no way is the South End representative of the America spread over 3000 miles east of us. We’re white, we’re fairly well off, we’re insular and we’re divided about equally by politics.

I told my friend that parts of America are poor and getting poorer, rural but the farms are played out or bought by agri-corporations, urban with ever marginalized ghettos, suburban with the malls dead and abandoned. The South End is a backwash of a lost American Dream on an island with a rising sea level. If my buddy is any indication, ignorance is bliss. For the rest of us, it may just be a tactic.

Yeah yeah yeah, I know the expression, behind every great man is a great woman. I even suspect they mean the Great One’s wife. Personally I don’t know a lot of great men, no offense to the folks I know. But I believe a lot of us down here on the South End, us artists especially, owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the woman beside us. Or the husband, case may be.

We got plenty of layabouts down here. Guys with no ambition, retired fellas at the ripe old age of 30, yo-yo’s who think work is for suckers and by god, they aren’t suckers. Some marriages fall to pieces, others get patched and sewn back together but never really well. A lot of single women down on the South End, easier to go it alone than live with some lazy good-for-nada yahoo who would rather drink with his lazy good-for-nothing pals.

The trouble with being an artist is really not so much lack of imagination but lack of money. Those years working at our art, well, those are years not earning an income. And believe me, there are plenty of partners who might look at their spouse and think, when is he going to give it up, throw in the towel and the paintbrush, pick up a shovel and help with the mortgage and the insurance and the car payments and all the rest. It takes more than love to shoulder the yoke and become the breadwinner while hubby noodles around in his so-called studio. It takes a kind of faith that some just can’t summon. A faith in the relationship, a faith in the art itself, a faith that this guy might just make something of himself eventually and even if he doesn’t, well, she loves the jerk.

I count myself one of the lucky ones. We lived in our shack for 17 years, scraping up mortgage payments and taxes, scrimping on clothes and food, worrying about the future when the shack would begin to cave in on itself. Back in 1990 I quit my two day a week job as orderly at the Everett Hospital with the promise to build a real house, even get permits and such, and in the meantime figure out a strategy to make my glass art pay. Karen had just taken on a full time job as a department head librarian down at the University of Washington, a long two hour commute going and coming back, plenty of time to mull over marital commitments to a so-called wannabe artist with virtually no gameplan for success. For better or worse might have seemed like a bad vow driving through rush hour traffic four hours a day.

There are folks who deceive themselves into thinking that what little success they have in life must be the result of their own perspiration, their perseverance, their skills and their imagination. Captains of their own destiny, they think. But most of them couldn’t be more wrong, these Marlboro Men, these macho American males who value independence over collaboration any day of the workweek. Looking back at my own luck and a happy tenure as a glass artist, I know it wouldn’t have worked out without a partner who did have a little faith, who took the risks and never complained, who made my life possible. A lot of it was luck, some of it was perseverance, but most of it was her. A smart man should be eternally grateful. Smart or not, I am.

So I’m in the airport check-in line and the guy in front of me is giving the TSA an earful about his rights as an American citizen. He’s not wearing a plague mask even though we’ve passed 100 signs telling us travelers they’re required at all times in this facility. By the time he’s bending their ears about being forced by the federal government, the damn government, to drink his pop before going through screening I figure I’ll be here for another half hour while they put him on the floor and do a cavity search in front of the rest of us compliant citizens. I’m praying that he won’t be a fellow passenger on my flight, the one who gets the place turned around so he can be taken into custody back where we flew out of.

Freedom for some folks is just nothing left to complain about. No shoes, no shirt, no service must be practically a call to arms. A friend of mine has a neighbor who drains his septic into the ditch by her house, no doubt another freedom fighter. The guy next door on the other side likes to shoot his automatic assault rifle after midnight, testing the patience of the sleeping neighborhood, maybe see who wants to confront him. The cops don’t care to so why would she? I need to reread that second amendment, see if the right to bear arms means the right to shoot them night or day below my window.

This pandemic has certainly brought out the new Minutemen, folks who think the government has a boot on their necks. Nobody has the right to tell them anything. And watching them storm the Capitol a few short months ago, I got an eyeful of what freedom means to them. More for them, less for me. You wonder why I live at the end of an island at the edge of a continent, it wasn’t to escape the reach of Rome, it was to escape these yahoos. That kind of freedom, trust me, is getting harder to find.

Some days I don’t know why I get up early and read the morning news. I might just as well sleep in and then, prior to that first cup of joe, slam my thumb with a hammer so it will throb the rest of the day, helping me forget the world beyond the pain. But no, I walk down the path from the house to the mailbox, passing the rhododendrons in bloom, the birds calling from the shrubs, the sun filtering through the foliage of exotic trees … only to snatch my newspapers from their plastic coffin and head back up the trail reading snippets of the day’s insanity.

Today, what the meteorologist promised would be a warm and sunny prelude to summer, turned ominous and dark as I read about the number of folks in my America who believe completely in Qanon, about one in five of us. Or, as the article pointed out, more of us than any mainstream religion’s believers. I know I’ll be turning that over in my head all day long, trying to wrap my mind around the notion that 20% of my friends and neighbors believe there is a cabal of Satanists who control the government, media and financial worlds and oh, while they’re at it, run a child sex ring. If ignorance is bliss, heaven awaits you.

And here I was worried about the Covid plague … little guessing that the real menace was the worm that had burrowed into the brains of a sizeable percentage of my fellow countrymen and reduced them to paranoid babblers of cockamamie idiocies no sane person could possibly believe. The Dark Ages are back apparently and spreading a black sheet over the home of the brave, land of the feeble with no vaccine in sight and even if there was one, these folks would refuse to be inoculated by the pederast priests of their new enemy.

Wearing a mask probably won’t help now. The worm spreads on the internet, passed from ‘friend’ to ‘friend’, an invisible pod like the one in Invasion of the Body Snatcher, this one rewiring the circuits of the brains of their victims. Unplug your computer! Turn off your TV! Board the windows andbolt the doors! Do not answer your phone! But by all means, be afraid! It isn’t the pederasts who are coming for you.

Once again us folks down at the South End lag far behind the entrepreneurs in Stanwoodopolis. Why do we invariably read in the paper about those enterprising innovative capitalists who beat us every time to the punch? Is there something in our well water that stunts our imaginations?

This week I read in the Stanwoodopolis Gazette how a couple had bought aging alpacas at pennies on the hoof, then killed them and blended the meat into a savory pet food. We got old horses down here. Donkeys too. Not to mention llamas and alpacas — all of em eating hay and oats without much economic return to their owners. The government will pay you 1000 bucks to take wild horses and some of those folks quick turned around and sold them to meat processors. What a concept: take these tired old animals and grind them into fresh dog food. Geez, when the dogs get old, grind them up too! You got a practically endless food chain and profit margin.

Now, admittedly the folks who originated this meat market marvel fell afoul of the laws governing the humane treatment of animals in their care prior to butchering them. Turned out their animals weren’t really all that old, mostly 1-4 years, kind of kids really, and the owners weren’t feeding them much either, basically starving them. Poor animal husbandry, you ask me, and the vet who accompanied the sheriff thought so too just before they confiscated the herd. Not even a good business plan, starving the little guys instead of fattening them up. Quite a few died of malnourishment afterwards, a damn shame to waste that meat, some might say. Well, the owners …. The rest of us probably felt like they ought to be ground up themselves and fed to the dogs.

All I can say is it gives entrepreneurism a bad name. And just another excuse for us layabouts down here to avoid capitalist enterprises. As usual ….

I’m out in the Dairy State right now, halfway into moving my father from an independent living apartment to the assisted living one at the far wing of the complex he’s been at less than a month. Part of the building is in Lockdown, part in quarantine, so you can imagine the logistics of moving furniture and the rest of his belongings are fairly daunting. So far so good. Last move a month ago we managed to get him into the apartment, then the entire complex shut down, no one out, no one in.

This time we’re crossing fingers and throwing the dice, moving piece meal in case the cell doors slam shut once again and he’s locked into a mostly empty apartment, no visitors, no exit. The place is called Attic Angels, what I now call Attica. Tomorrow, Allah willing, we move the last stuff, bed, kitchen table, chairs and … him. Once we move him we can’t visit on the lockdowned side he’s moving to. I fly home the next day but my brother won’t be able to visit until, hopefully, a few days later when the 14 day quarantine expires.

Strange times. Meanwhile life goes on. Yesterday my brother and I went to the Toyota dealership to pick up a van he’d ordered months ago. Sharks in the kiddie pool, believe me, when you walk inside where the sales personnel wait filing down their teeth. Standing at the main entrance, my mask on and a South End String Band ball cap on my long hair hanging below my collar half a foot, who should I see but a friend we’d just seen two weeks ago. Now you might walk up and surprise him by just being here 2000 miles from home, but me, no sir, I bounced up and greeted him with my best land shark imitation and a ‘What kind of vehicle can we put you in today, sir?’

Well, fun is fun, but finally I dropped the mask and dropped the act. It took him a second to rearrange reality, but we had a good laugh. By the time my brother had title to his new van, my pal’s friend had bought a car too. On our way out I strolled over to their table and said, ‘I trust our sales staff met your expectations.’ Tomorrow I’m going to send him a survey asking him to rate that service. Life, as the philosophers say, goes on ….

There was a study recently — I know, who believes those anymore? — where college students were tested with smart phones on them, with smartphones in their packs and with smartphones left in an adjacent room. Nobody used them, nobody answered calls, nobody googled anything, but in the end the kids with phones on their person scored worse than the ones with phones in their packs. The highest scores were those of the students whose phones were left in the adjoining room. I would’ve loved to know how kids — if there are any left — would score if they had never owned a smarty phone at all. The conclusion the researchers reached was something on the line that smartphones make us dumber. Since I don’t own a smartphone, you can well imagine my pleasure at learning this. Or, if you’re a slave to the device, you’ll say I’m full of shit and the study was faux science.

I got a buddy, Computer Carl, who was the first guy I knew who bought a GPS. He visited us with it proudly mounted on his dash and we all listened — in amazement — to the female voice in perfect enunciation — command us to turn left, proceed point six miles, turn left again, or if we screwed up, recalculate and order new revised instructions. Carl, being a techie, gleefully obeyed her every edict.

Invariably we’d be driving home down the island and the smarty pants GPS lady would tell him to turn left at the corner where we always go straight, no doubt calculating distance, not time, and Carl, who never remembered the route even after two or three dozen visits and one hundred trips, would turn left. No, I’d say each of those 100 times, go straight, but Carl trusted the GPS more than me, a 40 year resident, and — here’s my point — more than HIS own memory. This is what we’d call now, Google Brain. Why trouble yourself learning and memorizing (and possibly using) that stored information if you can just google it up?

Maybe when I have Alzheimers I’ll have a better answer for that. You know, if I can remember where I put my smarty phone….

When I got my Covid vaccination, hoo boy, was I a happy camper, glad I wouldn’t be coming down with the virus, spending a few quality weeks alone with a ventilator tube shoved down my gullet, waiting for a miserable death. A lot of folks around me decided for various reasons not to get the vaccine. Some were afraid of side effects, some believed Trump even though he himself secretly ran out and got himself inoculated, some just believed the whole coronavirus thing was a hoax. Who knows? And after I had mine, who cares? They can roll the dice. Polio? Probably a hoax too, all us little kids rolling up our sleeves for a poke in the arm when really it was all bogus, no doubt a scam perpetrated by the pharmaceutical industrial complex to make another few billion.

Now that we’ve reached about the maximum number of people who will willingly take the vaccine, it’s obvious we aren’t going to reach what the media calls herd immunity. This virus will just rattle around in the population that refuses to take the shot and over time it will mutate and eventually we’ll all be back to Pandemic Year One. Freedom, sometimes it isn’t quite as simple as it sounds. So … what’s a country to do? Well, since we don’t have federal guidelines we just wait to see what the governor or the mayor or whoever wants to weigh in on this stuff finally decides to do. Some just want to call it quits, let everyone go back to partying, let the chips fall where they may. Some are still trying to encourage folks to take their damn medicine. In fact there are incentives being offered for doing just that.

You didn’t feel like helping us end this pandemic, okay, how about we reward you if you get the vaccine? Money, chance at the lottery, free college education, beer, hunting license? There are a dozen inducements, each one varying by state or county or city. But the idea is to bribe the recalcitrant into rolling up their sleeves and helping the rest of us out. Call me cynical but I can’t imagine for a beer some redneck Covid denier is going to let the damn govamint stick a needle filled with god only knows what into his tattoo. Maybe a free hunting license, but I doubt it. Throw in the deer and okay, 50/50.

I suppose all of us suckers that happily took the injection are thinking if only we’d waited, maybe we could have gotten that free money or a car or maybe a vacation in some Covid-free paradise island. Well, there’s always the next pandemic. Lesson learned.

About a month ago I flew back to Wisconsin to help my brother move our father into an independent apartment down at the assisted living complex, what we called the Big House. Our mother had died there a few years back in the nursing units while the Old Man stayed up at the house and visited three times every day. She could never understand why he didn’t move down there with her, but we did. At the end she was hard to live with and when she died our father never mentioned her again. ‘Til death do us part’ must’ve meant something to him.

So we no sooner got him moved from his house to the new apartments when the entire complex went into Lockdown, some staff person having come up positive for Covid, which meant I wouldn’t see the Old Man the rest of my time back there, something we hadn’t anticipated or else we would have waited until the pandemic had settled down to something you could drown in a bathtub. When I left to fly home, he seemed to be acclimating just fine to his new accommodations, but about a week later he took a dive, seemed to lose his focus sounded a hundred years old even though he is 98 and made us wonder if he’d had a small stroke or old age had just caught up to him finally.

Either way we decided the time had come to move into the assisted living quarters, get some nursing help, have his meals delivered, let folks keep a watch on him. I made arrangements to fly out in a few days, a bit sad that we were moving him so soon but hey, it had to happen sooner or later. Just a lot sooner than we dreamed. Yesterday my brother called to say the Big House had gone into total Lockdown again, no visitors, nobody allowed in or out, no sons allowed to move their father to the other side of the building. Everything right now is on hold.

My brother and I aren’t the type who second guess themselves. We made a call and at the time it seemed like the right call. Now, of course, we might have done it different, maybe let him stay in his house another few months, then move him down to the apartments. Course, he might have gone downhill at home and that would be worse with no assisted living to move into if it were in Lockdown.

But … it looks like from out here we’ve put him in a very nice upscale penitentiary. And worse, he’s in solitary confinement. I suppose I’ll be back there before too long. If we can’t move him to the care units, I’ll have to bring him a cake. One with the hacksaw baked inside….

Well, okay, about a third of us in this country have been hacked. Social Security numbers, driver’s license, date of birth, all the necessary ingredients some crimninal in Belarus can sell to identity fraud specialists. I didn’t realize there were 3 or 4 companies that kept credit databases, much less 3 or 4 companies who were wide open to hackers. Silly me.

And here I was worried about Big Brother. The Damn Government, I mean, not Mark Zuckerberg. Turns out all of us are just one big happy data family, smooshed together in some internet Cloud that knows everything important about us. Now we’re sharing that information with hacker hoodlums. Swell. Just swell.

Back in the dark days of the 1970’s I lived with a bunch of freewheeling yahoos in Seattle and Gomorrah who majored in various studies at the University of Washington, but spent most of their time experimenting with drug abuse of various sorts ranging from hash oil production to laughing gas theft. They grew pot and they raised psilocybin mushrooms. They scored opiated hashish and they drank legal whisky. The place we lived in was a veritable criminal operation. ‘Honest, Officer, I only rent a room here.’

On our bulletin board we had a Social Security card pinned up. Ralph Speidel. The kidz had gone down to the local cemetery and searched for a deceased child, then gotten a card in Ralph’s name, they told me when I asked who Ralph Speidel was. ‘Just in case,’ they said. Just in case of what, I asked. ‘You never know,’ they replied. ‘We might need to go underground. Set up a new identity.’

Jeez, I thought at the time, these are drug addled paranoiacs. But they were playing with fire, stealing canisters of nitrous oxide from hospitals, selling various illegal drugs. Nixon was gone by then, the VietNam War was lost and the draft was over. These weren’t SDS roommates or Weathermen, they were college students doing a little research, nothing the FBI would find particularly interesting. Yet.

When I moved out a few months later to my ghetto home and some fresh roommates, I considered taking Ralph’s card with me but I left it on the bulletin board, just glad to be shed of these goofballs finally. Now, of course, in light of current events, I wish I’d snatched it. You just never know when a new identity might come in handy.