The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

So you survived the Plague Year, maybe didn’t know a single person who died of Covid, not that you thought it was hoax, just lucky, you guess. Now the quarantines are over, the restaurants and bars are re-opening, the mask mandates are voluntary, the world has returned – nearly – to its pre-pandemic state. Why, you ask yourself, do you still dread the grocery store, the trip to town, all those things you once too for granted? Maybe you still wear a mask. Still avoid crowds. Still refuse to fly on an airplane or board a bus. Still send regrets to the few party invites starting to pour in.

The answer, my friend, is you’re suffering from Post Traumatic Covid Disorder, PTCD. And you’re not alone, believe me. Do you find yourself growing irrationally angry when you pass people in the aisle who no longer mask up? Of course you could take off the plague mask too now … but you don’t. PTCD, pal. When friends invite you to their party now that restrictions are lifted, do you fabricate an elaborate excuse? Post plague partum, bet on it! You’re a survivor and you tell yourself you want to stay a survivor. Who knows what viral variant varmint is mutating even now in the regions where the Covid-deniers are seeing spikes in contagion.

The best vaccines offer you 94% immunological protection, so the pharmacology reps say, but you know that means you’re 6% open to disaster. And the new Delta variant is now over 50% of the new cases in America, a more virulent and spreadable mutation and probably growing worse every day. You dream about the next generation of viruses, you wake up with a mounting dread, you read about it in the paper, watch it on the news, you live with it day and night. Post –pandemic? You don’t think so, no way! Post-traumatic, absolutely.

And those people who deny that over 600,000 Americans died of the disease, that bring your blood to a boil? They don’t believe 4 million people are dead around the globe, don’t believe the vaccines work or that they’re a government plot to enslave you, don’t think any of this was more than an elaborate hoax to embarrass the former President before the election, that work you up to a rage? Yup, post traumatic covid disorder. Here’s my advice, take two vaccinations and call me in the morning. And no, it won’t really help….PTCD may not be curable.

When I first moved to the South End, I decided that since I lived in the Appalachia of the island, I should probably make moonshine and learn to play the banjo. The moonshine turned into beer making back when craft beers and brew pubs were just getting started. The banjo playing, well, I had a 5 string I’d traded a gun for, nothing special, but something to get me started. First year I was here I found a nicer model in a second hand store in Stanwoodopolis, cost me 200 bucks, which, at the time, was a small fortune. I was torturing my dog Gonzo with both of those banjos when I came across a very nice banjo up on consignment in a Mt. Vernon music store, a Japanese knock-off of a Gibson Mastertone, the gold standard at the time for serious banjo whackers. They wanted $350. I drove to a music store that sold Mastertones for $1500 and played some to see if the knock-off played and sounded as good. It did.

My wife at the time told me if I bought that 3rd banjo she would divorce me. I emptied my change jar full of quarters and dimes, etc. and came up just shy of that 350 dollars. It seemed like a good trade at the time, and it still does. I have that banjo and my ex has moved through an equal number of husbands as I did banjos. A buddy of mine who wanted to learn to play bluegrass a few years later asked me what kind of banjo he should buy and I mentioned how a pre-war Gibson Mastertone was the iconic instrument, the Holy Grail of banjos sought after by everyone from Earl Scruggs to Bela Fleck to Steve Martin. ‘You won’t find one,’ I mentioned, ‘so aim your sights a little lower. My knock-off is a perfectly fine banjo.’

Well, some people have more luck than me, I guess, because a month later my buddy was chattering it up with his hairdresser about wanting to learn to play the banjo and his hairdresser said her daddy used to play and she thought maybe that banjo was up in her attic and of course the next haircut she’s brought in a 1927 pre-war Gibson Mastertone in immaculate condition and I thought maybe there is a God after all but he probably is pissed at me for screwing up my first marriage but okay, I was glad for and envious of my buddy’s great good fortune. The Eleventh Commandment: do not covet thy friend’s banjo!

Jump ahead with me 35 plus years. My friend never learned to play that prized banjo but he promised me he would leave it for me in his will. Fat good that would do me. We’d both be in the nursing home, lucky if we could play jawharp. But … a few weeks ago he had a brush with death, still on IV’s for sepsis from some weird infection, and no doubt slightly delirious, told me to go pick up that banjo now before he came back to his senses. Near-death experiences do that to people, I guess.

Yesterday I brought that 95 year old banjo back to my Appalachian shack, strung it up, tuned it and … holy Foggy Mountain Breakdown, Batman, the sound that banged off my 100 year old house’s walls was loud enough to knock pictures off and break stained glass windows. The thing was a cannon, a high decibel monster capable of untold mayhem in the hands of an untutored amateur. Luckily, I think I know what I’m doing. Paddle faster if you hear that banjo, is my best advice.

Jihad Jimmy, last time any of us South End yahoos talked to him, was holding court at the Thursday AA meeting a month ago. Jimmy had kicked his drinking problem but now he had a religion problem, maybe not to him, but for the rest of the assembled abstainers, for sure. Jimmy had grabbed the first lifesaver that floated by when he was hopelessly adrift in a gin-filled sea and I suppose it could’ve been music or woodworking or yoga …. But no, Jimmy found four nicely dressed folks at his door one inebriated afternoon who asked if he’d care to discuss Scripture.

Good timing! Brenda, his long suffering wife and breadwinner the past two years, had left him the day before and in his drunken despair, Jimmy had sense enough to reach out for proferred help. Always nice to find a Sign or an Omen when you’re free-falling over the cliff of your imagination and believe me, Jimmy was expecting the Bottom.

Addiction, whether it’s alcohol or Heaven, makes True Believers of us. I’m not saying they’re equal, especially when you see Jimmy clean himself up, dust himself off and return to the world of the living. Course now J.J. is talking Rapture. Revelations. End Times. Sign of the Beast. He finds Signs everywhere now. He’s a prophet, although he never claims it. He just Sees what’s obvious, just wants to share it with us Lost Souls.

Just for once, I’d like a religion that loves THIS world. That doesn’t think the Next World is gonna be better. Maybe Jimmy’s going door-to-door with 3 other Jimmy’s, knocking on broken hearts, broken dreams, broken hopes. Maybe they’re saving lives, hell if I know….

Brenda’s doing some clerical work for Windy Rear Realty. It’s okay, she says. Twenty hours a week, not too stressful. She told me he’d stopped by her house a week ago. Wanted her to leave with him and start over. He’d changed, he said. He was sorry. He asked forgiveness before it was too late. “Too late?” she asked. “Too late for what?” “The Rapture,” he told her. “You’ll be left behind.”

Left behind?? “Jimmy,” she says to him, “that sounds exactly like heaven to me.”

The South End String Band didn’t start out planning to be a band — they were mostly a back porch drinking society with music as a viable excuse to offer their wives for staying out til after midnight. What most of them didn’t know was how grateful the mizzus was to have a peaceful evening to herself. Well, at least until Shelly joined the band.

For years the boys hauled out their guitars and banjos, pulled their fiddles off the wall and strung up all those mandolin strings, met up down at the South End Grange Hall where Tommy the fiddler was Master. In the beginning they were all much more proficient on the jug than on their own instruments, but as often happens with practice, they got better. And as they got more proficient, they drank a little less and began to talk playing in public. When the South End Historical Society asked them to perform for their annual salmon bake fundraiser, they jumped on the opportunity. “Can’t pay you anything,” Edith Wonkszeski told the boys, “but we’ll feed you. And the beers are on us.” That sounded more than fair, Tommy told her and warned her to stock up on those beers, you might lose money on this band.

And so the newly named South End String Band went public. If they liked drinking and strumming, they loved live performances for an appreciative audience twice as much as both put together. Trouble was, they soon found out, none of the boys could sing outside a shower worth a hoot or a holler. Billy on the banjo tried, but he sort of talked his way through, not really sang. And then Shelly came up to them after a gig at the Mabana Sunset Villa Nursing Home and said, “You ought to give me a listen.”
Which they did. She came to the next practice wearing a low cut cowgirl dress and even if she’d sung out of tune, the boys knew she’d be their new vocalist. It didn’t hurt either she could outdrink every manjack of them.

The South End String Band still performs, but after a couple of divorces, the personnel have shifted frequently. Shelly fronts the band now and she’s pretty much the last remaining original member. You can always find a banjo picker in the backwash here, but not another Shelly. The Band practices at her cabin these days and when the night winds down past midnight, Shelly shows the boys the door and always says, “Jug’s empty, boys, time to face the music.” It would be funnier if it wasn’t so godawful true.

51 % of my fellow citizens who are declining the immunization for Covid believe the vaccine contains microchip tracking devices. I can only presume that you cautious neighbors avoid cellphones, credit and debit cards, Google, Facebook, grocery stores that require ID cards and probably you have refused to pay the IRS and will not, no way, accept Social Security payments lest the government or child eaters will follow that money to your lair. Tracking devices in the vaccine? Hey, buddy, it’s a little late to worry about anonymity now. The government and the corporations got everything they need, courtesy of yourself, to hunt you down like a rabid dog. Better to take your chances on the Covid killing you.

Satellites are whizzing overhead 24/7 with cameras so powerful they could read the number on your mailbox. Hopefully, you’ve moved and left no forwarding address and certainly haven’t stuck a mailbox at the end of your dead end driveway. If not … well, hopefully you’ve stockpiled a virtual armory of weapons for when the Bad Guys come for you and your family. And I’m sure you know, or at least are convinced, they are coming for you.

So yeah, refuse to take a vaccination, pardner, I get it. Why give them one more tool in their surveillance arsenal when they only have a dozen others to monitor you night and day, week after week, cradle to the grave? Your new TV can do the same thing. I bet that gizmo you bought awhile back, the one you can talk to and ask questions of or play music for you, it’s not only tracking you, it’s listening and it’s sending data back to … you guessed it … Big Brother. You haven’t noticed every time you ask Google a question, a nano second later you get a pop-up ad for some related product? C’mon, you’ve noticed. Did you quit searching with Google? Did you disable Alexa? No?

Buddy, you mean to tell me you won’t take a Covid shot but you’ve got the tracking device on you right now? That smart phone, the one you carry with you at all times, I guess you can see what I’m driving at, it’s a helluva lot smarter than you, pal. That camera built into your computer, did you realize it can be turned on by … well, you know who.

Take your chances with Covid, that’s my best advice for you now. You get it, hey, maybe that’s the easy way out of this brave new world. Course, if you live past the respirator days, then they got your medical records. It just doesn’t seem like there’s any winning, does it? Wish I could help but helping you might lead them to me. Can’t be too careful these days.

A new Gallup poll found that Americans who actually have confidence in science fell from 70% in 1975 to 64% today. In other words, over a third of us don’t really buy into that science crap. Republicans used to believe the earth rotated around the sun, something on the order of 72% of them, but in this Age of Enlightenment we live in now, the era that finds conspiracies in everything from presidential elections to microwave implants in their toilet paper, the Grand Old Party folks who believe in rationality dropped below half to 45%. What, you’re surprised?

Maybe you don’t believe Q exists, that Qanon is just a bunch of crackpots who eat magic mushrooms on their breakfast toast, that evolution is real and that the universe operates on the laws of physics. Most Republicans don’t and more than 1/3rd of all of us don’t. So okay, you probably got bored in class when quantum physics sailed over your head and calculus just made your head hurt. Egghead stuff, no doubt just weirdo formulas and hard to understand folderol. Easier to wrap your mind around Bigfoot and watch documentaries about aliens building the pyramids, right? And forget about the Big Bang theory of the universe when you can just watch Big Bang the sitcom.

The way things are trending we’ll be having the Monkey Trials again before very long and the Catholic Church can bring back the Inquisition for the apostates who refuse to believe the earth is the absolute center of the cosmos. 40% of Republicans already have declared they will not, no way, put a vaccine in their arm or the arms of their kids. Some think the Covid is a hoax, that 600,000 deaths are really from underlying conditions, that the vaccine contains micro –transmitters so the government or Bill Gates can track them 24/7, that old Doc Fauci is really the devil incarnate. If you can believe Democrats are kidnapping children, storing them in a D.C. pizza parlor for their sexual and gastronomical appetites, well, it’s pretty hard to imagine what is beyond their imagination.

I suppose if the modern world is moving so fast into a strange future, the folks who feel most threatened by the coming changes might hang on to magical thinking. If they think their white privilege is under assault, well, why not turn the channel back to Ozzie and Harriet, spend half the day scrolling Facebook for posts with similar fears and keep on listening to the talking heads on cable who monetize paranoia and dread? Gravity? Just bunk. Evolution? Don’t make me laugh! Climate change? Who ya kidding?? E=mc squared? Huh??? Take two supplements and call me in the morning. You’re gonna be just fine.

Me and my neighbors gear up for crabbing season the way my old ones in Wisconsin did for deer hunting season. Well, we don’t put out salt licks and no, we don’t jump in a boat to ‘shine’ our prey with headlights, but we do start talking about the hunt and we do gather up all the regalia and make sure the lines are good, the bait is ready and the boat motors start. In my case I check to see if my oars are rotted or the oarlocks rusted. Crab fever is an annual pandemic around here. Covids come and go, but crab fever, it’s like the common cold, it comes every year.

The past couple of seasons we’ve had trouble with poaching. You can expect some of that, maybe a kid just checking your traps, seeing if he could catch an easy dinner, or guys like Poacher Paul who poach deer and crab both, no license necessary. But I’m not talking about the casual poacher here, I’m talking about organized crime. Up and down the Camano coast the crabpots are hauled up and the crabs stolen. Just out front of me, we’re talking hundreds of crabs every day or night, and if you add in the rest of the island, think thousands. Multiply that by over ten bucks a pound, and no, we’re not figuring this guy or these guys are eating all these crustaceans themselves, we’re looking at tens of thousands of dollars, probably more like six figures every season. This is grand theft crab! This is a major felony.

But … no one in fish and game seems to be too interested in catching our poacher. One of the neighbors called in the boat license of a suspect rifling his pots to the Washington Fish and Wildlife folks only to be told they would need to see the theft themselves. Nevertheless, the nice man on the phone said they would send an agent down to the Everett boat launch and see if the suspect put out there. Oh, right, like he might just have his own dock or he might be launching just about anywhere in Puget Sound? Couldn’t go to the trouble to look up the owner of said boat, maybe wait in his driveway, see what was in those multiple coolers? Nah, that would be police work. That would be, I guess, work.

So we crab hunters are left to fend for ourselves, looks like. A buddy suggested a vigil on the bluff with binoculars and a deer rifle, maybe add a little vigilantism to this year’s crab season. But I reminded him of the guy a few years back who watched from his bluff a guy pull his pots out in the bay, pulled out his 30-30 Winchester and shot a few times in the general vicinity, which, you might have guessed, sent the miscreant fleeing. Course half an hour later the doorbell rang and there was the game warden, plenty pissed at being targeted checking our shooter’s pots for regulation violations.

Just goes to show, it’s hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys. I’m trying to decide which one I am this season.

The times we live in, this fresh start to the 21st Century, seems, at first glance, to be a cauldron of craziness generated by the internet and the tribalism of every media out there. From politics to pandemic, there’s no shortage of whackiness. Science and logic, who needs em? We got superstition and magic to cure the anxiety and dread of this era. Sometimes it seems as if we’d barely left the caves of the Dark ages, just clung to whatever amulets and spells that gave us comfort against the marauding mastodons or the horror of Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The pundits and the talking heads lament the internet, social media, cable TV, consolidated radio and the cynicism of our politicians. Bullshit passes for alternative facts and insanity gets you elected. Oh me, oh my, what’s gonna come of me boys, what’s gonna come of me?

We like to think we live in an Enlightened Age, one where reason and logic reveal the Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth. The internet ruined that, we think. Social media made a mockery of that, some say. I say the internet and social media probably just pulled back the curtains on all those folks who have always believed more in superstition than science, more who think they might win the lottery despite the statistical odds or that supplements will cure what ails them, more who take comfort in unprovable beliefs than facts that make them squirm, more that find faith in the unknowable more compelling than the angst of the knowable.

The Dark Age denizens never really left, they just didn’t have an internet to give them a microphone. We just under-estimated their numbers. And we over-estimated our own. Age of Enlightenment? Don’t kid yourself.

A friend asked me recently if I was rich. Maybe you get asked that a lot, but trust me, I don’t get inquiries like this too often. Kind of caught me by surprise. My family never talked finances, didn’t announce their bank account balances, really didn’t tell us kids much of anything about how they were doing. And if they never told the family, you better believe it was unwritten gospel they didn’t talk about it in public, with friends or relatives, with anybody. Ever.

So I was caught off balance, checking account and equilibrium both, to be asked point blank if I was rich. You could imagine that the answer, assuming you deigned to reply, would depend on the person asking. If my pal Bill Gates asked me, I’d say, ‘gee, Bill, I’m bumping along, but no, my hedge fund isn’t one of the top 50 or anything, not really even in the top … actually, I don’t even have a hedge fund right now, sort of embarrassed to tell you.’ If one of my pals trying to make ends meet during the Covid shutdown asked, well, I might say ‘Don’t even think of asking me for a loan, you slacker!’ Wealth, you see, is fairly relative.

You ask most folks if they’re rich and they’re going to tell you no. But … if we considered that we’re in America and we’re on the South End to boot, hellfire, by nearly any standards you pick, we’re the 1% of the world. We’re rich. You don’t think so, take a trip to Cambodia, Mexico, Costa Rica, just about any third world country and then tell me you’re not wealthy. You are. Period. Don’t argue with me, I won’t have ears for it.

But my friend wasn’t interested in philosophic fiscal discussion, just wanted to know if I was rich. Asking an artist that question is akin to wondering if I might be vacationing this year with Bezos on his moon rocket, mostly a flight of fancy. I said yes I am, rich. And honestly, I consider myself rich, I really do. We have our house paid for, the one we built ourselves without a loan, without a 30 year mortgage. We pay cash for everything we have, car, truck, you name it. We live in paradise, we live modestly but we want for nothing. We still work, but not because we need the cash but because we like what we do. Even without that money, we feel enriched by working. And we have each other. We lived in a dilapidated shack for 13 years together, scraping by, tending our gardens, learning our trades. We’re growing old together. And that’s just fine too. Are we rich? You’d have to be nuts to ask….

I’ve always wondered why folks climb the Himalayan or hike solo across Antarctica or want to be the first ones into space. Jeff Bezos is headed up and now Richard Branson plans to beat him to the punch. “Asked about what his kids and wife thought of his attempt to be the first tourist in space and how his family reacted to the news that he would be on the flight, Branson said his children are adventurous, but it’s clear they get that quality from him.
‘As a family, our motto is, ‘The brave men don’t live forever but the cautious do not live at all.’ And so, as a family, we love to say ‘Yes.’ My wife is the sort of person who would be terrified on a Virgin Atlantic airplane. She’s the last person who would want to do something like this. But she’s known me since I tried to balloon across the Atlantic or the Pacific or around the world, and she still seems to love us.’”

I guess what the Great Adventurer is saying is that his wife doesn’t really live at all. Bezos wife took half his billions and said adios. I suspect she’s living pretty high on the hog, at least by most folks’ standards, maybe not Branson’s. Evidently there are folks who need the adrenaline rush of near death to help them feel alive. Trust me, I’m not one of those people. I’ve taken a few chances in my 71 years that might have ended badly, might actually have killed me, but they didn’t make me feel alive, mostly made me glad I was. When I hear people of my generation say they never thought they would live past 30, I want to laugh out loud. It wasn’t that we thought our lifestyles were so dangerous, it was more that we just couldn’t imagine the future.

Or that the future seemed so banal and boring we refused to contemplate the house in the suburbs, the less than romantic marriage, the squabbling kids and the career that seemed so much smaller than the dreams of our youth. Me, I figured on living to a ripe old age. Given enough time, there would be plenty of room for course corrections. Getting crippled in a fall into a crevasse on Mt. Rainier wasn’t part of the Plan. If you want thrills and chills, try walking the tightrope of unemployment without a safety net, try making a living being an artist. It’s enough danger for me and chances are it won’t kill you. Make you crazy, maybe, but it won’t kill you. And I’m pretty sure if you take life with a degree of caution, you’ll be just fine too.