The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

We have a little rental house next door we lease out via Airbnb. Usually folks stay a few days, but sometimes they rent it for a week or more, even a month or two. Because it’s an old 1940’s cottage, the mice have their secret highways in and out if we’re not there to put out traps so when Karen got a text two days ago from our current guests who’ve been up there three weeks that they’d seen mice in the place, she groaned and told me the news. Since I have been catching mice in the shack the past week, I can’t say I was surprised.

I know she didn’t want to tell them to get out the mousetraps we keep up there in the closet, but really, what are their options? Move out and look for a motel? Chances are they’ve been around the little vermin and probably know the drill. If not, welcome to the country. And just so you know I’m not totally a hard-hearted SOB, I can tell you that once I used to catch mice with one of those Have-A-Heart traps, the kind that has a spring-loaded wheel that, triggered by a small peck on the bait, slings the little guy into an adjoining holding cell where he waits until I take him across the road or back in the woods and place him on parole, not even a leg bracelet to monitor his whereabouts, which, you can bet, are a bee-line back to the shack. That bit of squeamish liberal guilt ended when the mice started getting caught in the cage’s wheel and mangled like roadkill.

So I tried the bucket of water trick with the string across the top and a dangling piece of cheese. It works, by the way, but imagine the poor mouse swimming for who knows how long until exhaustion gives way to drowning. Trust me, it interrupts a good night’s sleep. And sure, there’s D-Con, some poison that thins their blood until they hemorrhage. Nothing too humane there. I even, and I know I will pay a visit to Hell for this, bought one of those sticky pads thinking that the little guys would get stuck on it and I’d be able to take them back in the woods and set the free. If you’ve never done this, DON’T!! These should be banned by the animal Geneva Convention as nothing less than a torture device. You cannot remove the mouse without tearing his little legs off. It was ghastly and I will pay dearly. And should.

So a mousetrap, horrible as it is, seems like the quickest most humane dispatch of the little mammals I can think of. But like Karen fears, what will the guests think? Nobody really wants the cute buggers in the house with them, but maybe killing the bastards is a bridge too far. Today we got a text that James had caught two of them in the traps. He said he was a city boy, Boston, and was no stranger to these kinds of intruders. Which was a relief to her. ‘What should I say back?’ she asked me, still a bit worried about our guests’ reaction to the invasion of mice. ‘Tell em I can give them recipes if they want.’

I suspect she didn’t send that message.

The little park I caretake needs mowing once a week plus a little trail maintenance. Once in awhile I plant some flowers and shrubs which occasionally survive. The phone booth library gets vandalized regularly but lately we seem to be doing okay, books aren’t being burned and the windows haven’t been smashed since the last time when I replaced them with stained glass. I know, it’s only a matter of time.

You work as a park ranger, you grow a bit cynical, trust me. Dog walkers put their dog’s droppings in a plastic bag then deposit the plastic bag along the trail. I suspect they’re either dumber than the stuff in the bag or they just haven’t got the heart to take the bag home. Either way, I’m going with Option #1. This past year I have a gentleman who courts his girlfriend in the backseat of his car. He has the courtesy of using a condom which I know because he slings the condom out into the parking lot along with the wrapper it came with. Dog shit is one thing, semen in a rubber bag is quite another. For you delicate readers, I apologize, but remember, someone has to clean this stuff up and that someone is more than a little irritated.

I suppose I could install a surveillance camera and get this fornicator’s car license number, maybe track him down, haul all his used condoms back to him, probably have a nasty confrontation, plenty of cursing and shouting, possibly even something physical. Or I could go to the local sheriff station, the nice new one we built, and ask the deputies to be on the lookout for our Romeo sparking in the park. But … I was young once myself and short of money for motel trysts. I don’t want to ruin this guy’s evening with a cop tapping on his car window with a heavy flashlight, I just want him to dispose of his trash without resorting to continual littering. Geez, is that a lot to ask?

I’m thinking of trying this: put up a billboard size sign that reads HEY LOVERBOY!! DON’T THROW YOUR USED CONDOMS ON THE GROUND WHEN YOU’RE DONE! TAKE THEM WITH YOU. OR ELSE! The Park Ranger

I know. It probably won’t work. If it doesn’t then we go to Plan B. HEY LOVERBOY’S GIRLFRIEND, ASK MR. WONDERFUL TO STOP LITTERING WITH HIS FILTHY CONDOMS WHEN YOU’RE DONE!! THIS IS APPARENTLY YOUR BEDROOM SO KEEP IT CLEAN! Mom.

Who knows, it might work….

Just when you were starting to relax after a year’s paranoia about mutant viruses unleased on us, we get the sunny news that scientists are combining the genes of monkeys and humans. To develop organs for transplanting, we’re told. The same geneticists had tried splicing human cells to pigs and sheep, but none of the resulting embryos had lived longer than 19 days so naturally they turned to our ape cousins, hoping for better results. Gotta love these guyz, never say die. And never worry about unintended consequences either.

Now this might be good news for the chimps (although I sort of doubt it), but all I need these days is a breeding program for half monkey, half humans. I don’t really need any more Proud Boys running around storming the Capitol and trying to kidnap state governors they don’t like. And don’t get me started on that pig/human experiment. I’m trying to put partisan politics behind me for a few years.

I don’t really have anything against my ape cousins, but c’mon, the last thing we need is another minority to discriminate against. Chimera Lives Matter signs on front lawns, not what we want to see. And you know damn well there’ll be some pushback over this, whether or not these hybrids are immigrants or not, whether they can be citizens, can they vote, do we have to pay them minimum wage to pick our tomatoes and work for Amazon. The door is wide open for controversies we’ve scarcely considered.

But of course that won’t stop the mad scientists. No matter if they muddy up the gene pool with tadpoles bearing human heads. I mean, who wouldn’t pass up the chance to win a Nobel Prize with a chimpanzee that could play piano and star on the next generation of Kardashian shows? Give us all a 3-D printer and let us play God for awhile. I sure got some swell ideas of human evolution once I get my hands on a CRISPR gene editing machine that will fit in my shack. Course I don’t have any more monkeys back in the woods, but there are plenty of deer and coyotes. Sure, I’ll make some mistakes, but hey, isn’t that the fun of being a geneticist in the 21st Century. Lately, most of us would think anything would be an improvement after the last couple of elections.

I stumbled into a lumberyard the other day and noticed a sign by the 2×4’s that read $7. Last time I looked a 2×4 cost 2 bucks and some change. The sticker shock made me check the price of plywood just to see if maybe some new employee with glasses fogged by his Covid mask hadn’t screwed up the price inadvertently, but nope, the ½ inch plywood was 3 and a half times what it was last sheet I bought not too long back.

Ditto the 2×6’s and the treated lumber and the cedar decking. All I can figure is either Covid killed a helluva lot of trees, driving the prices sky high or it killed the loggers who refused to wear masks. Whatever, this is another dark side of the pandemic, no doubt another conspiracy by the damn Democrats to raise the cost of a home and ruin the American Dream for the average citizen.

My old roommate from our Slacker Years when we were content with poverty, living the Dream down at the South End, came up recently for a visit. I had the shack then and a mortgage of $24,000 with a monthly payment of $180. Easy living! If you didn’t mind shack life. And we certainly didn’t. Known to the local lumberyard as the Piranha Brothers, we built two additions to that shack, one a backroom I used as a stained glass shop and the other, a kitchen addition, room for a sink and cabinets plus a 1920’s electric stove and a 6 foot by 3 foot clear cedar slab for a table, probably worth a bitcoin or three in today’s speculative lumber market.

We built with 2×4’s and 2×6’s, probably spent a couple hundred bucks to frame both, same with the plywood siding, go Martha Stewart with tarpaper then nail on the cedar shakes scrounged from various sources and voila, you got yourself some elbow room, mister, maybe not Architectural Digest, but nice for the price.

Now, of course, I’m considering taking them apart. Gotta be worth more as vintage 2×4’s than a tax appraiser’s assessment of a deteriorating hundred year old hovel. I’ll even pull the rusty nails, only cost slightly more than what the lumberyard wants for inferior wood. And … environmentally correct to recycle. Yep, sounds like a win win to this old Piranha Brother.

We got a token Republican in the Wednesday night Mabana Poker Club. Billy Bluff, we call him, mostly because he’s a piss poor bluffer. When he’s got a good hand he makes idle small talk. When he’s got a winning hand, he talks politics. Billy might as well send up an LED signboard announcing he drew a straight flush. But in case we missed the Signs, he bets low, hoping to keep the pot filling up until he can bet the maximum at the end, suckering the rest of us into staying with him.

He’s actually one of the new breed of GOP, meaning he hates the government and wants to stop funding about everything but the military and corporate subsidies. Taxes are too high, unions are ruining profits and killing jobs, drugs are legal, men are marrying men, Obama isn’t a real citizen, all the usual rants with a few more raves completely from Right Field. We don’t mind so long as Billy uses politics to telegraph his hand. Politics are expensive for Billy, but the thinks he’s just unlucky. That, or maybe he suspects we cheat, the cards are marked or the games are rigged. I guess in a way they are.

The night Billy drew 4 kings in 5 card stud on the first deal, I had 2 pair before the next deal. Billy got going on Secession. Bad sign before we drew a card. “Secession,” he declared, betting the usual fifty cents, see who’d stick, probably all of us. I tossed my half buck in and instead of raising, asked, “The South End, you mean?” Everyone ante’d up.

“You think everything’s about the South End, Skeeter. I’m talkin about Washington state dropping out.” He didn’t ask for a single card from Flat-top Fred who was dealing. Fred shook his head sadly. Real bad sign. Still, you never know, he might be bluffing. I took three cards, Pete took three, Ralph and Walter both took two. Fred dealt himself one. Billy tossed a buck into the pot non-chalantly. “State’s rights, I’m talkin here,” he said, a little too loud, meaning he had a helluva hand. “The government becomes oppressive, we got the right to leave, that’s what I’m sayin.”

Pete dumped in his cards right then and there. “You could always go to Canada, Bill,” Walter said, tossing a dollar. I looked at my new cards, 3 queens over my 2 jacks, full house. Maybe as good or better than Billy’s. Ralph stuck and Flat-top, sitting on a fat flush, raised. Ralph cursed and folded without even waiting for the bid to get back to him. My full house looked good, maybe too good, maybe not enough. “We already fought the Civil War, Bill,” I said. “You want slavery back or just lower the minimum wage?” I tossed my money in without raising, not real confident now.

Billy chuckled and raised us 5, the maximum bid we’d agreed to years ago. “I want my goddamn country back, Skeeter, even if we have to start over.” Flat-top groaned. “You could go to Quebec, Bill. They want to secede. You’d be in good company if you learn a little French.” He tossed a five in and raised a five. Ten to me. Those queens over jacks were looking weaker and weaker. But it was a full house. And now I was worried about Fred’s hand. “I don’t think they’d let him in, Fred. I got turned back the last try.” I was talking about my little incident with the border guards a couple weeks earlier. I pushed ten bucks into the growing pile, knowing Billy was going to raise us again. Maybe Fred too.
“Course they didn’t want to let YOU in, Skeeter. But I’m not going up to some country that’s more of a welfare state than we are. Get a grip. And get another five bucks out if you want to see this hand.” Fred took another look at his cards. A hard look. His confidence was waning fast as mine. “I hear Quebec is nice in the winter,” he mumbled and called with another five to the pot. I hated to, but I had to see his hand, so my five went in too. “Let’s see what you got, boys, cause I got a full house, queens over jacks.” Fred flipped a flush disgustedly into the chips and swore before taking a long slow miserable swig off his beer.

Billy laid one king, then another and then the third. He smirked, showed an ace, waited a long while, then dropped the fourth king. “All I know, children,” he said, “is the rich get richer. Clean livin’s what does it.” He pulled the pot into himself with great satisfaction. The world can sure be cruel when everyone’s lucky. If I’d had a lick of sense, I would’ve seceded a long time earlier.

Walter walked into the South End Diner last Friday morning carrying his Winchester 30-30 under his arm, a rifle meant primarily for hunting deer. He’s a card carrying NRA member and he takes his membership as seriously as a truck driving Teamster or an artist in the Camano Arts Association. Walter thinks the government wants to take his arsenal away from him and apparently, to protect his right to bear arms, he intends to bear them in the Diner.

Anita rolls her eyes from behind the cash register when he walks in with his unintentionally comic John Wayne swagger. “Whatcha got there, Pilgrim?” she asks. As owner of the café, she’s basically the sheriff, judge and jury in this one horse town. She makes the laws here and Walter, well … Walter’s not sure if the 2nd Amendment actually applies in the Diner with Anita at the City Limits, but by God, he intends to make a point and the Constitution should back him up and all the other Gun Toters in America and Anita, well, Anita can just shove it, he figures.

Like usual, Walter figures wrong. Anita holds a hand up like a traffic cop stopping cars. “We already killed the meat, Walter. Bacon, burgers, chicken, they’re dead. You want to be sure, order em well done. But … you aren’t hauling that gun in my restaurant, I don’t care if it’s loaded, empty or stuck up your keester, no way, no how. Comprende?”

Walter starts into quoting the Amendment but Anita’s out from behind the counter before he can hit the ‘right to’ and she’s got him by a twist of hair, turning him like a rusty screw toward the door and he’s yowling in pain so much she lets go. “Dammit, Walt, you give me indigestion, you really do. Give me the rifle and you can have it when you’ve finished your breakfast. But I can’t have the Wild West here with families and tourists. Take your protest to Stanwoodopolis, if you need to demonstrate. I got a business to run, probably into the ground, but I sure don’t need your help.”

In the end Walter’s politics took 2nd fiddle to eggs and bacon and his usual chicken fried steak. And Walter never brought his Winchester in the Diner again. But I don’t know about the Starbucks in town. Altho …there’s probably some enterprising entrepreneur who’s opened up a Barista Balllistic just to cater to the Walters of the world.

My pal Joey who’s been laid off now, oh, about 15 years ever since the recession hit back in Ought Eight, has turned from cynical to bitter. Used to be he hated his employer for poor wages and lousy benefits, now he hates the government for no wages, no benefits and no jobs, not even ones he hates. He spends a lot of his day e-mailing buddies, myself unfortunately included, screeds against the President and Congress (mostly the Democratic side, what he calls socialists and traitors and worse) rather than look for work.

I always wonder why he doesn’t spend his bile on Wall Street and the banks who sent the economy on a wild ride of greed, which finally plummeted to terra firma, crashed and burned and pulled the economy into the smoldering crater with them, but I guess you got to blame somebody.

“Joey,” I say. “Now that you’re a dyed-in-the-wool Republican, how come you don’t become a Job Creator? Be the capitalist you dreamed of being? Start a bizness?” Joey looks at me with pity and shakes his head in disgust. “You and this damn government, Skeeter. You’ve set up regulations and roadblocks. Too many taxes. How’s a Little Guy like me gonna get off the ground? It’s like running a race carrying a 50 pound concrete block. Guaranteed to fail.”

“Too small to succeed, that it?” I can’t help saying. “They all started out small, Joey.”

Joey’s exhausted a long stretch of unemployment compensation. He’s pulling 401-K retirement money too early to live on and that ticks him off, all those penalties. Michelle, his wife, works part time at Jolene’s Beauty Salon, but even with tips, she’s barely clearing minimum wage. Course, Joey’s against raising minimum wage because if he ever did start being a Job Creator, that 50 pound block holding him back would be 60 pounds.

Joey’s never going to work again everybody but Joey knows. He’s retired at 55, another casualty of the Recession, and for his remaining years he can aim his wrath at the illegal immigrants who take the jobs he might have wanted, at the government which ended his unemployment compensation with only two extensions, at the IRS for taxing his 401-K withdrawals, at his old employer for sending jobs overseas, at the people on welfare who’d rather take a handout than look for work, at the women who’ve joined the labor market….

The American Dream withered on the vine for Joey and his fellow victims. He doesn’t have Clue One why it all went wrong, but he’s angry and he’s scared. I don’t know how many Joeys are out there, but too many, that’s for sure. The party’s over for them. Now all they got is the Trump Party and that one doesn’t look like much fun, not for Joey and certainly not for the rest of us. Even on the South End, anger is contagious.

Back when I first came to Seattle and Gomorrah, I had a buddy who lived in a dive apartment that was going to be sold and remodeled. They were tossing the old 1940’s era refrigerators the junkies and alcoholics had used for decades and my pal asked me if I wanted to go in with him on the capitalist venture of hauling, cleaning and selling these vintage frigidaires for fun and profit. Not being employed and in full possession of a half ton Chevy pickup, I said sure. And by that afternoon we owned 60 reefers of various stages of mold and decomposition.

I had access to a garage none of my six roommates used, so we stored them there after a couple days lugging them down 2 or 3 flights of stairs near downtown, then hauling them up to the university district where I rented a room in a house full of students. Each one got cleaned, disinfected and plugged in to see if it still worked. They all did. Tough units, those old Kelvinators and Frigidaires. Not particularly efficient, but they’d run until the next century if you asked them to. All we asked them to was run for the 30 days we offered as a ‘quality assurance guarantee’. If we’d been savvier biznessmen, we would’ve offered a 2 year service plan like Sears. Course, Sears is in about the same shape today as some of those refrigerators were back then.

Our ‘advertising’ campaign was simple in those pre-Craigslist times — we put flyers on telephone poles.
$30 30 DAY GUARANTEE FREE DELIVERY CALL THIS #
The Freon filled appliances sold like hotcakes, mostly to little bistros and coffee shops and student renters and our friends. I kept one for my room after my roommates started stealing my beer and food. Then I locked my room. I guess they were young communists, share and share alike, mine is theirs. They weren’t bad people, but I learned why communism doesn’t work unless the others do and you don’t.

By the end of a month we’d sold every last unit. We made about $800 dollars each, more than I made the entire previous year, maybe two. My buddy said maybe we should’ve grabbed the stoves too, but by then it was too late and our experimental entrepreneurism came to an abrupt end when demand outstripped product. Probably lucky for both us Appliance Kings.

My old man is turning 98 this month and we’re moving him from his house to an independent living apartment. Okay, I know, not much of a birthday present but here I am, back in Wisconsin to help my brother haul furniture and pack dishes, sell a car and sort through a lifetime of accumulation. We had hoped to call a thrift store and have them pick up what wouldn’t fit in his new apartment but Covid killed that plan.

Plan B is to box a few decades and deliver who knows how many years to Goodwill or St. Vinnie’s. Assuming they’ll even take donations during these plague times. If not, we’ll haul it to the nearest landfill.

If you’ve never sorted through the lives of your parents, you maybe can’t imagine the endless possibilities of nostalgia, sorrows, regrets and memories laying in wait among the claptrap and the photographs, the letters and the bad art. None of us three boys want much of anything the folks accrued over nearly a century. Which says more about what children of the Great Depression spent money on than it does the difference in theirs and their kids’ tastes.

Our folks weren’t collectors of art or antiques or even their own parents’ stuff. They bought cheap or not at all, making it easy to discard at this juncture. But … the family photographs, old albums of aunts and uncles, great grandparents and family vacations, who takes those? Our little brother, the only one of us with kids, doesn’t want them. I’ll take a few but when I bite the big bullet, they’ll go to the burn pile and another family history ends up the way most do, letters lost, names forgotten, memories fading like the photo chemicals in the albums, sad but true for most of us. This trip will be a lesson in accepting that we’re not famous people, we better just live our lives and be thankful for that.

There’s nothing like reading about the future in the morning paper to wake you right up to Full Alert. This morning, buried among the scintillating stories of the Prince of England’s funeral and more mass murders, was the article about the company here in Washington state that was deploying its mobile lasers to prowl the agricultural fields at speeds up to 5 mph zapping weeds. I know what you’re thinking, probably those Jews in outer space that start forest fires in California, but let’s leave that for the Qanon folks to chew on when they get tired of wondering how the Donald never quite managed to penetrate the Deep State and the assault on the Capitol ended with him retreating to a mansion in Mar-a-Lago.

Part of the article concerned the plight of the poor strawberry pickers and the field workers whose low paying jobs might disappear when Artificial Intelligence Machines could pick apples or harvest cucumbers. Hello? I guess the writer thought maybe we should go back to the happy days of slavery and resume picking cotton by hand. The laser weeders would eliminate the need for pesticides, but hey, maybe that would cut down on oncology doctors. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not excited about a future of drones taking away good paying factory jobs or self-driving vehicles eliminating taxi drivers and Uber folks.

Now I know lasers don’t kill, people kill. And I suspect drones will be given all the protection the NRA can muster for their 2nd amendment rights to keep and bear arms. And if one of the weeding machines runs amok, well, that’s the price we pay for freedom. Just another unfortunate incident of malfunctioning technology, frequent but nothing that should be considered grave enough to ban automatic lasers in our suburbs when dandelions are taking over the fescue.

I was on the campus of the Univ. of Wisconsin in Madison, my old alma mater, down near the cafeteria I used to work at for 3 years, watching these little R2-D2’s at the intersection waiting for the students who had called in their pizza orders to come and pick them up. Pizza delivery folks must be weeping. But at least the boxy white drones weren’t armed with lasers. No tip, buddy? Try a small burst from the rear laser then, maybe you’ll remember next time. And have a nice day, kid.

My suggestion? Carry gratuities at all times. You don’t want to piss off a laser armed drone when they all start to ‘carry’.