The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Some people are born to be businessmen. They know how to promote themselves, they understand negotiation, they embody what Donald Trump calls the Art of the Deal. I wish I had a couple of strands of those genes in my DNA. My kin, my ancestors, my genepool — all I can say is they climbed down out of the trees, but they never figured out they could sell the timber or develop the real estate. Plus we never remembered how to climb back up so now folks want to sell US the damn trees.

I actually have a business. I know, hard to believe. My right-leaning Republican relatives and in-laws shake their heads sadly to think I’m the only one in the two families who represents their bedrock GOP values of entrepreneurial get-up-and-go, job creation, small business struggles, all those virtues they hold dear. I sell goods. I buy materials, fashion them into art and then I have to sell the product. American? Well, it sticks in their throats, but yeah, as apple pie. Mom and country. Bootstrap success story. You might suppose, after 35 years, I’d be pretty good at it. I just made a stained glass entryway window for some new arrivals on the South End. Even though I’m cheaper than any glass shop in the Pacific Northwest … and even though my stuff is original artwork … I ended up giving them a discount. And they’re rich. You tell me what’s wrong with that picture.

I bought a new truck a few years ago when my old one almost caused me to miss a huge commission for a public art project down in Portland. You think I negotiated a lower price or argued for some ‘extras’? If you thought that, you don’t know me. All I asked my salesman was sell me the damn truck sitting out there in the lot, the one without any bells or whistles, and don’t screw around, I want to leave here ASAP, I don’t want to play the game, I don’t want the sales manager showing me an invoice proving you aren’t making any money on the deal, I don’t want to hear that bullshit. Yes, I’ll pay full price. No, I don’t want to take it for a test drive. Yes, I’m a complete idiot.

But …. I’m an idiot who would rather pay the full monte than get down in the pit and wrassle for a few dollars. I’m not going to lie and say money is beneath me. I’m frugal to a fault. I’m my Depression-era parents’ kid. I shop mostly at Goodwills, I buy Chinese, I’m so stingey I squeak. Money comes hard and it leaves hard too.

Sales is a tough job, at least for the likes of me. Buyer beware? I don’t think so. For me, it’s seller beware.

I got a friend who was kicked out of Catholic Seminary many years back for admitting he was gay. I guess if he had been a pedophile too, he could’ve been a priest. Even a gay pederast known to his parishioners would’ve been okay, although the bishop or cardinal or the Pope might want to move him along to other parishes that didn’t know his history. Like they say, it takes a lot of faith to be religious.

My buddy lost his faith. He couldn’t quite square up a church that professed love for his fellow man in the abstract but not in the particular. All I can say — as an outsider and even an infidel — they lost a good man, a thoughtful man and a man with a very big heart.

Religion is a topic best left alone, I’ve learned the hard way. For awhile the South End Diner had the Bible study group descend on two of their too few tables. They only ordered coffee, no breakfast, and drank refill after refill without leaving much of a tip or a thank you either. Anita, the owner back then, watched her business going downhill, mostly when her other regulars got sick of the debates over Leviticus. She finally asked them to go somewhere else, they were curdling the eggs.

“And besides,” she told them, “morality shouldn’t be as hardboiled as you gentlemen make it.”

Live and let live, but nevertheless she wanted them to live somewhere else half the damn mornings of the week. Jezebel, they called her. But not to her face, of course. Anita was much loved down here and known by all as tough but fair. “Take it back to the church,” she told them, “and if I want to join, I will.”

We actually got a little church on the South End, the Little White Chapel in the Ravine, a non-denominational congregation that ministers to quite a few of us sinners. Comfort and fellowship come in many forms and myriad faiths. Debating which one is the correct one, well, I leave that to the righteous. Me, I just try to do as little harm as I can and stay out of their way. Figuring out the universe, trust me, that’s not in my pay grade.

The Crab Cracker asked if I could maybe whip up an April Fool’s sketch again this year. You know, something in the line of the new Amazon Distribution Center down just south of the South End Diner or maybe Two Toke Tom’s Cannabis Emporium Grand Opening’s free edibles. Course, we already did something on this order. The editors got angry calls from some of their readers who had driven clear down to our remote regions here only to find … well, an empty storefront half lost to encroaching blackberry vines. Half of em ran out of gas before they could find their way back to the Colton Harris-Moore Memorial Bridge. I seriously doubt they’ll be back to this sunny end of the island, I don’t care how many of those glass balls we hide down here in the backwash we’re sprucing up for our Annual Spring Nettle Festival.

Folks apparently believe what they read. When the Cracker ran the issue on the new Alpaca Hunting season regulations, holy moly, you might suppose it would be fairly obvious only a Fiend of the Worst Sort (or the figment of a very sick writer’s imagination) could think he could purchase a license down at Elger Bay Store, dress up in llama camouflage and crawl on his beer belly across blackberry razor wire to sneak up on these poor cute defenseless little critters, I don’t care HOW good they taste on the grill.

The Cracker could photoshop Big Foot behind the plaza, Colton in a Cessna over Mabana, Donald Trump quaffing a pint of nettlle IPA at the Tyee Brewery, the South End String Band playing Benaroya — and folks would just naturally believe their eyes. Not simply because the Cracker is a bastion of journalistic professionalism with all their sources checked and double checked, but we’ve just become folks who either believe everything or believe nothing.

On the internet April Fool is everyday. The political e-mails and pundits’ blogs that spread faster than Covid variants are more and more outrageous, most of them outright lies if anyone bothered to fact-check. You either buy it hook line and stinker before calling the editor to complain or you walk away shaking your fist vowing never to believe ANY of this stuff.

So in all honesty I just can’t be a party anymore to the Crab Cracker’s misguided (even if humorously intended) attempt at public deception this last issue before their sale to the Stanwood/Camano News. And when the new owners vow complete journalistic integrity, I hope you know Skeeter’s going to be 100% honest in his reporting. And it won’t have one iota to do with my new raise from these really great new editors. You have my word. As any who know me can attest, my word is my bond. And I’m not talking bail.

So okay, I got my 2nd dose of Covid Kevlar last week, a Pfizer vaccine probably chock full of micro-transmitters Bill Gates snuck in there to track my every move, information he could have just asked me to give him, not too much variation. I’m now bulletproof, at least for infection from the coronavirus, maybe not for autism, future cancers, 3rd limbs trying to grow and possible susceptibility to Qanon conspiracy theories. My voluntary Lockdown is over!! I even think my sense of humor is coming back … or at least mutating.

It’s been a little more than a year since Pandemic Paranoia swept most of the world and maybe half of this country of contrarians, disbelievers, Trumpists and other kooks and ninnies. When I mentioned to a neighbor, one who’d actually contracted Covid, that over half a million of us had died in this Land of the Free Thinkers, he told me no, they died all right, but probably from underlying causes. If you want to debate this kind of logic, be my guest, but me, not so much. I’m vaccinated — did I mention? — and folks who think Covid or E-bola or polio or wasting brain disease are phony, well, skip the vaccine and take their chances. I’m on their side now — a few less of these maskless conspiracy theorists is okay by me now that I’m officially immune.

Oh sure, the virus will probably mutate and we’ll need booster shots for the Variants. But eventually the variant viruses would whittle down the non-believers. I’d call it Darwinism … but that’s just going to invite more hostility and resistance toward us folks who wore masks and got vaccinated and lockdowned during the Plague of 2020. Let’s call it instead an Upward Intelligence Trend, the smart survive. Maybe it was an underlying condition too.

I was minding my own business in the Pilot House Lounge and Bar — or at least tending to my beer and scribbling away in a notebook I always carry — when a guy I didn’t know parked at the table next to me with a cup of coffee. Army fatigue jacket, butch crewcut, aviator sunglasses hanging from a strap. Probably ex-CIA or retired corrections officer. He had his back to the ballgame on the bigscreen TV over the bar, apparently more interested in my antics. I tried to avoid eye contact, watched a bunt down the first base line, but he didn’t need a cue.

“Whatcha think of that drilling ban in the Arctic?” he finally asked. I looked up from my great American novel, took a slow sip of suds and studied him for motives. He didn’t offer anything obvious. Just a guy in a bar, a student of politics, no doubt.

“Okay with me,” I said non-committedly. And waited. “You rather have nuclear?” he countered. His coffee sat untouched. I sighed. Here we go …. “Okay with me,” I said again. Cap’n. Klink nodded.

“How about those Muslim terrorists, you okay with that?” I put my pen down. Slid my notebook to the edge of the table. Took a slow sip of beer whose taste seemed metallic now. Why me, Lord, why me? We were alone except for Jerry wiping down the bar that didn’t need wiping. The batter took a called strike. I looked at my inquisitor, some bridge troll out for a holiday.

“We don’t get too many down my way on the South End,” I finally said. “So you aren’t bothered?” he sneered.

“Oh, I’m bothered,” I said, feeling the blood rising. “I’m bothered right now.” He finally sipped his coffee and smiled. Now he was getting there. Strike two to the batter on the TV. I smiled back, hoping to cut off his air supply. It did — he dropped the phony grin. “Whatcha think of us white males turned into second class citizens?” he fairly snarled. I laughed out loud this time. Jerry looked up. Behind him a baseball landed in the outfield stands. I left my beer half finished and stood up to go.

“Try not to be a victim, friend. Especially if you’re white and male. Doesn’t leave much for those terrorists to take from you.” Jerry waved so long and gave me a quizzical arched eyebrow. The pitcher put a baseball in the manager’s hands and headed for the showers. Me too.

Ever since I got my 2nd Covid shot I seem to have an urge to buy Microsoft stocks. And I don’t usually buy any stocks so this is unsettling. And that purchase of Cortana I made? I don’t even know what Cortana is. Worse yet, I show a receipt for a Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 that I have no recollection of buying. What this can mean is anybody’s guess. On the up side, however, I seem to know, without really trying, most of my friends’ whereabouts at any given time day or night. The ones who haven’t had their inoculations yet don’t show up on my internal GPS, which makes me really suspicious.

In fact suspicion seems to be my main emotion now. I used to trust in my own instincts, trusted facts, trusted my government, trusted the Lord, trusted the warranty on my truck, trusted the advertisers on TV who told me late at night I could get two of the same item if I only paid shipping and handling. Now I wonder how much is that shipping and handling, maybe three times what the item I’m getting two of costs. And those drug ads during the evening news? I wonder now if they really cure what ails me or if all those side effects that take half the commercial to list are going to require additional pharmaceutical purchases, probably manufactured by the same company the way Purdue Pharma is going to make an antidote for oxycontin. The truth is, I don’t trust my advertisers any longer and if I can’t trust American business, who do I turn to, the Chinese? Geez, didn’t they infect us with Chinavirus?

I wake up now worrying about those poor kids in the pizza parlor basement being abused by Democratic cannibals. Yesterday I was afraid to go near the windows where lasers from outer space could place me in their gunsights, incinerating me and my banjo in a nano-second. Today I heard another mass murder was staged to make it look like violence was rampant in my country. A few days ago Asian American women pretended to be killed by another phony psychopath. It never seems to stop. When I go to the grocery store I can’t help wondering who are human and who are Lizard People. My god, maybe, just maybe, they’re ALL Lizard People. With guns!!!

What I’m wondering now is if that Covid vaccine is making me a Lizard Boy. I’m afraid to look in the mirror to check if my tongue is forked, my skin is scaly, my eyes have vertical slits. Something strange is happening, I know that much. For awhile I thought Trump would fix this, save the country, make it great again … now it looks like he wasn’t the savior after all. Now that I’ve joined Qanon, I’m already thinking of quitting but I hate to turn tail and run. Although … I do seem to be growing a tail.

Most of us artists are too sensitive for this world. We’re delicate flowers, blooming nocturnally, our precious scent wafting on the tidal emanations of the moon and lost before dawn. By day we’re ambivalent about our talents. We torture ourselves with questions of skill and worse, of imagination, wondering if we made a mistake pursuing a trade whose rewards are certainly not monetary in a society that judges us by our profit and loss. In daylight we dance with our demons. By nightfall we listen to bacchanalian howls echoing from ravines back in our suspect imaginations.

We are our worst critics. We are our biggest admirers. The push and pull could drive an ordinary person crazy. It certainly does us. Caught between that spark of creativity and the dark shadow it costs, we are trapped between the jitterbug and the dirge, yo-yos to our own ambivalence, see-sawing away until paralysis or delirium gets a grip on our inner child, the spoiled brat who craves attention but wilts under criticism.

And god help us if we find ourselves suddenly ‘marketable’. Try a new style, a variation, an experimental approach, but the buying public may only want that last painting, the hit song, the first novel. The pressure will be to replicate, to plagiarize ourselves, to stay with the tried and true and tired. The saleable. Even the Masters sold out. Dali signing thousands of prints, Picasso scribbling iconic doodles, the spark slowly dying while the money rolls in. It’s a trap, a curse, a blessing, a living. A starving artist, and you can quote me, is a far better artist than a famous ones in their old age, nine times out of ten. The trouble is, eight of them will just give up.

What I tell the kids I sometimes inflict my wisdom on is this: get a part-time job to pay the rent, don’t buy a new car, live frugally, do NOT go into debt. And above all else, keep making art whether it sells or not. And if it sells, keep pushing your limit. Keep experimenting. And whatever you do, don’t amputate ears or other body parts. It’s only art, not life and death. Or you can do what I do and tell yourself every damn day, it beats working for a living….

Little Jimmy was on his second or maybe his third last beer of the night down at the Covid-spaced Pilot Lounge the night he’d gotten his 2nd inoculation so naturally he was celebrating. Maybe a little too hard. Jerry’s grandson had just been accepted into a prestigious private college, a fact that he announced with a toast ‘to the kids’, at which point Jimmy’s ebullient mood did a 180.

‘My kids,’ he said solemnly, ‘are still paying off student loans. Joe’s got a job at Amazon, a mortgage that weighs a ton and just barely hangs on. Ronnie’s out of rehab, totally broke. He just gave up, all I can see. Wasn’t it supposed to be our kids would do better than us? What the hell happened to this country?’

Well, you want to kill a buzz, this is one way to go about it. Two Toke, kidless and not exactly the Poster Child for the American Dream, declared ‘noboy promised us a rose garden, Jim.’

Little Jimmy gave that pearl of wisdom a fat snort of derision. ‘I wanted more for my kids. I expected more. That’s what America was all about, a ladder up to the next rung. Or a rung on the next …. Hell, you know what I mean.’

‘A bigger slice of the pie,’ TT said, not exactly trying to help. ‘Bigger house in the suburbs, trips to Greek islands …’

‘Better vintage wine,’ Jerry tossed in. ‘Two chickens in every pot!’ Harry chimed. ‘Two pots for every chicken!!’ Did I say that?

‘Don’t you guys get it?’ Jimmy moaned with emotion. ‘It’s a downhill slide now. And you think that’s okay?

‘Make America great again?’ Jerry asked, risking a quick end to the night, and sure enough, Jimmy gulped his last last beer and declared it was time to go home. Jerry lives in a 4000 square foot McMansion on the bluffs overlooking views of Mt. Rainier, the Olympics, Whidbey Island and the Saratoga Straits. He retired at 45, a dot.com millionaire, been bored ever since. The rest of us layabouts basically retired early too … but without stock options or 401-K’s or pensions.

TT watched Little Jimmy put on his coat forlornly, muttering ‘night, guys’ and head for the door. ‘Too bad I don’t have kids,’ Tom said, finishing his own drink and standing up to leave too. ‘I guarantee they’d be a rung up on me. But I doubt they’d be happier.’

Downward mobility on the South End never was much of a cause for concern, I guess.

The South End, for more than a few of us xenophobes, has always offered an escape from our past. A chance to bury the dead and make a clean start here on the far reaches of reality. For some of us it was a place to return to, lay low awhile and hope the past had a short memory.

Ruby Reed belonged in the latter category. She was born here over one hundred years ago, went to school in the Mabana schoolhouse, even lived in our old shack with her mom and sister and brother. Not many neighbors back around 1915. Not much work either. Not much to keep a young person with dreams of the city life. Not much, really, too different than today, just more so.

Ruby left the bucolic and boring South End to become a burlesque dancer. We have a full size theater marquee of her we dug out of the shack walls in one of our many remodeling jags. Black leather bra with an X across the sweet spots, black leather bottom with laces on the sides revealing plenty of thigh. Not much else other than a come hither smile. She worked the strip tease circuit from Seattle and Gomorrah to Spokane, Portland to Frisko, married a vaudevillian with the lewd stage moniker Harry Reed. We’ve got newspaper ads of Ruby and Harry at the Temples of Sin. What a time they must have had! What a wild ride! You want to leave the banality of the South End, there you go.

In the mid 40’s she and Harry were sleeping in a hotel in downtown San Francisco when an intruder burst in, hogtied Harry and raped Ruby in front of him. Maybe unpaid gambling debts, maybe promises unkept, who will ever know? Shortly after this incident was reported in the Bay area papers, she and Harry came back to the safety of the South End. They built the house next to our shack which her sister now owned, raised chickens and ducks and geese, stayed home. Ruby taught dance classes in Stanwoodopolis, lord only knows what Harry did.

They didn’t last long. Not here, not their marriage. Way of the world, I guess. We bought their house, the one they built next to ours. We’re now the keepers of their history, we’re their caretakers. I wish we knew more about these two, but like most history, theirs is lost to rot and rust and ruin. Same as ours someday. Same as most of us on the remote South End. Probably for the best. Probably what we wanted in the first place.

Back when I first got off the Mayflower south of Utsalady, I hitched my fortune to an unlikely looking piece of bottomland which had a shack, a large shed (or small barn depending on your agricultural perspective), a chicken coop, doghouse and a pen for some rabbits. Better than raw land, I figured. But not by much ….

Those early years I mostly hunkered down and tried to stay warm. Some folks would just look at this and shake their heads. Can’t say I blame them, but looking back now 44 years, I’m glad I bit it off. Occasionally I’d get friends coming up to see the estate. We were all pretty much layabouts from our days driving school buses in the Big City, not big dreamers, just slackers getting high on getting by, or so the song goes…. We were an aimless bunch, lacking in ambition and drive, plenty short on cash, but optimistic the future would play out all right for us. Why? I couldn’t say, just that a good positive attitude might, in the end, carry the day. I guess we drank the Kool-Aid —- or if we hadn’t, we were more than willing.

Some of those weekends, come nightfall, we’d load up the VW bus and motor into town, figuring to catch some Stanwoodopolis night life. Rudy the Banjo King played every Saturday night at the Hotel, but once was plenty and so we went to the other side of town to see what the Sportsman and the Sundance and the East Side had to offer a half dozen of us thirsty revelers. First tavern up, the Sportsman, we ordered schooners of tap beer. A minute later every barstool was empty and we were alone with the scowling bartender. Couple of beers, some pool, we moved next door. Our absentee barstool pals were all there, waiting, I guess, for us to bring the party.

We bellied up to the bar, ordered pitchers and watched our fellow revelers finish their beers and head for the door, about half a dozen fellas exiting. Was it something we said? The bartender took our money, but offered no clues. An hour later we were at the East Side, little shotgun of a place, shuffle board half its width. The locals kindly gave us their stools, tipped their hats and left. Once again.

Some places the drinking establishments are lively, a democratic conviviality. Alcohol has its negatives, but for loosening up inhibitions, it’s tried and true. I’ve lived here now 44 years. I’ve been to every drinking establishment that’s come and gone, lived and died. The mizzus says you can’t judge a town by its saloons … and she’s a historian … but I say you can. I could live here longer than Methuselah on scotch and soda and I tell you what, it’s way more fun to drink alone. Which is what we got in spades down here on the South End.