The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I was chatting it up with a couple of fellow artists down at the South End Galleria this week, comparing notes on aesthetic strategies, bizness practices, encounters with philistines and other assorted moral hazards of the art trade. The sculptor among us avowed how he chose to eschew my public art avenue and regaled us with tales of clients and looky loos, folks who might suggest that rather than pay full price they could check Ebay or Etsy for fabulous deals, as if that original stone carving might be had from WalMart for hefty discounts.

We artists love displaying our wounds and scars from the Culture Wars. I mentioned how I lacked bizness acumen and so public art took me out of those sorts of encounters … to which our gallery owner mentioned being a finalist three times for public art commissions only to lose. ‘No prizes for runner-up,’ I said. ‘No Miss Congeniality either.’ Afterwards I started adding up my own losses over the years, something around a dozen. You get a small stipend for a design, maquettes, plane fare, motel, car rental, etc., usually less than what you spend and zero for your work. It’s a tough racket and after a couple of second place finishes, plenty of artists quit throwing their hats in the ring. Me, I got plenty of hats.

My first loss, a fire station entry against a famous Seattle glass artist with a buddy on the jury who gave him helpful hints at our site visit, left me feeling like the game was rigged. But instead of quitting I took my 4 foot by 3 foot glass model, cut a hole in my shop wall and installed it in front of my work table, a wound I could salt every damn day, a reminder that I needed to up my game.

What I’ve learned over a few decades of competition is that it isn’t always fair, it is sometimes rigged, the juries are occasionally a sham, an opponent may actually be better than you and lose … or vice versa. Art in the public arena is a bloodsport. I try to accept the losses and thank my lucky stars for the commissions I win. Mostly I’m glad I stuck it out. And best of all, nobody’s going on Ebay and finding a cheap substitute. Yet.

I was in the South End Trader Jimbo’s the other day looking for those hard-to-get-down-here items in their Land O’Yuppie aisles. Somehow I got waylaid by the organic pine nuts. Organic? Are we growing pine trees in nitrate infused woods now? Further down the aisle I found gluten free kettle corn trumpeting stuff that never had gluten in the first place. Not only that, they were guaranteed nut-free. The products, not Trader Jimbo. When I turned the corner, drove past the chutneys and the soft cheeses, I discovered Aisle 6, the no preservative, no additive, no GMO, no growth hormone, no antibiotic, no gluten, no soy, no MSG, no transfat, no caged animal row. About middle of the aisle there were three cans in a pyramid. Cave water. 12 ounces for $10.95. I took all three. Just so the row would be immaculate for a moment.

A friend of mine has a futon mattress that contains organic cotton. Softer maybe, like his head. Course I grew up with virgin wool — as if I care what the sheep do at night. These are dangerous times. Who knows what’s in those nettles I’ve been brewing beer with? They don’t come with an organic certification and what with acid rain precipitating out from Chinese pollution, I may be toxifying myself inadvertently. My entire garden may well be a seeping cesspool of multi-syllabic compounds from the prevailing winds of Seattle and Gomorrah or contaminated from the tailings and runoffs of the South End industrial era. Natural? That’s no longer a designation to give anyone peace of mind. No government certification for natural, pal.

They tell me our water has elevated levels of natural arsenic. The neighbors on water systems filtrate for that and other minerals. We’re on our own well. Which means just that, we’re on our own. Forget worrying about contaminated nettles in my homebrew. The water’s got poison in it.

So where do you go to find the purity we so desperately seek? Where do you retreat to escape the toxic leaching of modern society? And where can a yahoo go to avoid the steady drip drip drip of new warnings, new labels, new GMO salmon species, new BMO milk products, new irradiated foods, new afflictions? The South End??? Sorry, we got the bio-hazard tape across the road now. No wonder people are signing up for the Mars mission. Even if it is one way only.

Little Walter, Big Walter’s oldest boy, was sucking on a Marlboro, one boot up on the chrome bumper of Harry’s newly restored ’64 Nova, waving his can of Pabst in the ketone-laced atmosphere of the Tyee Paint and Body Shop. He was addressing the assembled masses on this particular Friday afternoon, the boyz’ favorite day. Not because it signified the end of a work week; after all, most of us layabouts are unemployed, self-employed or just employment challenged. Naw, we just like to remember when Friday was PayDay and Friday night was a night of freedom. Now everyday is a day of freedom and it seems like a form of subtle slavery.

“This country,” Little Walt was saying, “went down the crapper when we started giving people all this free stuff. Socialism, that’s what it’s called, and it killed folks’ incentive to work.” Little Walter has been unemployed for most of his adult life. He’s currently laid off from the hardwood mill over in Arlington and for the past year he’s been living off the unemployment comp he gets plus some loans from his old man. Big Walter isn’t happy about this, but he places the blame squarely on the ‘ruined’ economy. He let the boy live in the spare bedroom of his double-wide and now he has to feed the kid too and fight over what programs they watch on his 50 inch flat screen entertainment center. They both have beefs.

“You talking about that tax break we gave Boeing?” Terry asked. Terry is the kind of guy who, if he knows someone is a hypochondriac, asks them how their health is, what we on the South End call a Pot Stirrer. He doesn’t really take a side, he just wants to light a fire.

“Hell no, I’m not talking about a tax break!! I’m talking about giving these people who don’t work for a living everything they need to keep on not working for a living, that’s what I’m talking about.” He crushed his Pabst can in his right hand and beer foamed out the top and onto Harry’s new paint job. Harry said Hey Man and Walter grabbed his dirty handkerchief and quickly wiped off the suds.

Terry said, “You must be talking about those people on unemployment compensation then. Folks sitting around drinking and not looking for honest work. You mean people like that?”

Well, you can maybe guess where that conversation went. It’s just another day loitering on the South End, debating the issues of our time, nothing much better to do than drink beer and chit chat with the neighbors. Somewhere else they got wars and refugees, they got terrorists and beheadings. People starve, people are killed, people live hand to mouth. I don’t know much, but I know this. Things here aren’t too bad, they aren’t really bad at all. You ask me, and I know you’d hate to, it seems like complaining is damn close to a sin.

Nobody seems to like growing old. Can’t blame em, I guess when you factor in the aches and pains, the wrinkles and hair loss, the diminished mobility. Well, almost nobody, cause I don’t mind. Sure, I got the same ailments, but hellfire, you ought to pay SOME price for all this accumulated wisdom, for some peace of mind, for a more stable financial grip on this hard world.

My brother’s father-in-law, a dairy farmer in Northern Wisconsin who knew a few things about Hard Living, told him at a ripe young age to quit worrying about money. Money, he said, takes care of itself. You’d be better off to tackle the rest. Love, marriage, family, career, happiness. My brother, being young, didn’t believe him until he too was older and wiser.

We used to value maturity. We used to respect the accumulated wisdom of all those years of living. We used to pay homage to our elders. Now that I’m an elder, I sure wish we still did. But we don’t. We value youth, energy, good looks, clean skin, svelte bodies, shimmering hair. We’re a bit superficial. Okay, we’re TOTALLY skin deep. We’d sell our souls to be beautiful, to be athletic, to be rich. If I was the devil, boy oh boy, I’d be banking more souls than I’d have rooms to rent in Hell. I’d be building infrared suburbs, you bet. Plenty of beauty parlors, fitness centers, spas, sports injury treatment facilities, so many mirrors a 60 watt bulb would heat the place up to full sizzle.

You reach my advanced age, you ought to pat yourself on the back. You probably figured most things out. You must’ve learned plenty from all those mistakes. You should’ve learned to live in your own skin. When kids ask who your heroes are, tell them YOU are. It’s not egotistical. It should be the truth.

The truth is, we got this far. Meaning, we had a hearty dose of living, our fair share…. We learned a thing or three. We witnessed the world. We even changed it a bit, don’t underestimate yourself. Pass some of it on to the young’uns. They might listen. More than you think. Just don’t wish you were them, young and starting out fresh. Why go through that twice?

I was in a courthouse recently, one built one hundred years ago. Marble stairs, oak banisters, historical murals, mosaics, paintings, stained glass windows, monumental columns… a temple, really, to the abstract notion of justice and laws. We used to erect our public edifices with more than concrete and mortar —- we built them with the idea that they represented our values, our hopes and our optimism for a grandiose future. Great societies do this. Their architecture and their art reflect this confidence in what they believe, in what they accomplished, in what they still hope to achieve and pass down to the next generations.

Nowadays I see libraries in dead storefronts, I see city halls in re-imagined office buildings, I see schools that are half trailers. Maybe this is fiscal frugality writ large. But I worry this is nothing more than a shrinking vision of the future, a hardening of societal pessimism or worse, a loss of hope that the path ahead leads to better times.

I put art in public buildings, a latter day Leonardo in an era where grand statements are looked at with suspicion or outright disdain. At a recent public discussion on our plans for a new fire station headquarters, the fire commissioners were concerned the building might look to the the taxpayers a bit, oh, too opulent. Better to cut out any amenities, any architectural flourishes and certainly any art. Wouldn’t want to incur the wrath of an overburdened citizenry.

God forbid! Better to play it safe, shrink down the vision, quash the aesthetic, go bare bones. Forget any archaic notion of the inspirational, abandon all pretense of grandeur, huddle in the 60 watt darkness of a wasting vision. The empty Wal-Marts can be our schools, abandoned Safeways can be outfitted as City Halls and the rest, well, like our sheriff’s station, drag in a pre-fab box. The taxpayer is supreme and they need the savings for Lotto and the flag they fly out in the lawn rain or shine, puerile patriots to the outdated fiction of a now plasticized Rome.

Wanda and Ed Zurik own 20 acres past the Diner, mostly cleared land in the South End’s remote interior. Ed grew alfalfa and grass for his six head of cattle, but a few years back he came out to find a perfect circle burnt into his field, what he later learned was a ‘crop circle’, one of those mysterious geometries created with no trail in and no trail out. One of Ed and Wanda’s cows was missing as well. Ed and Wanda contacted the AREA 51 organization who sent an investigator up from their Arizona headquarters to verify that the circle had all the hallmarks of a UFO landing. (The cow was found a day later back in the nettles where it had gotten through an opening in Ed’s barb wire fence.)

The Camano Head, it turns out, is one leg of a Bermuda Triangle of reported sightings of UFO’s, the other legs being Mt. Rainier and the Bangor Naval Base. Ed and Wanda began to devote time and money to the AREA 51 folks, at least until Wanda was abducted one night by aliens while Ed slept the sleep of the innocent. He awoke to find her missing from their bed and found her traumatized out by the barn, barely coherent, telling him in a terrified voice how she had been ‘taken’ in a blinding pulsing light, to god only knew where, and probed and poked by unseen beings. It was, she told Ed and later the AREA 51 team, horrible. She showed them marks on her arms and legs made by syringes that took fluids from her body and shot unknown fluids back in. She was certain they were experimenting on her. Worse, she was certain they would return.

Those of us who inhabit this Triangle know it to be a strange place, all right. Maybe not an ‘entry point’ for extraterrestrial intruders, but some kind of magnetic disturbance that pulls the weird and the deranged from their ordinary lives. Ed was a former insurance salesman who decided one winter day to become a farmer, closed his office that same afternoon, sold his suburban ranch house a week later and moved here where the ‘emanations’ seemed strongest. Maybe we all felt that same pull, who knows?

When the farming proved too hard and the cows not too profitable, the Zuriks did what a lot of us do down here. We kept on digging the hole. Ed took up drinking as a second job and of course his first job suffered. Occasionally Wanda calls in a missing human report on Ed to the sheriff’s department those nights he doesn’t show up before dark, but the deputies know to check with us down at the Pilot Lounge. “You aliens got Ed Zurik?” Carl will holler to us layabouts and, more likely than not, if we don’t, we soon will.

Slim Jim was a little wound up at the Pilot House’s happy hour. Course, it was two hours PAST the happy one and Jim was paying full price for 16 oz.’s of bitterness and I don’t mean IPA’s. “I’m pulling Little Jimmy out of the Scouts,” he was hollering to Two Toke Tom, Guitar Bob and me at the adjoining table. “Before you know it, they’ll have Sodomy as a merit badge. I mean, Jeez, where does this end? I tell you what, I’ve had it up to here.”

Up to here evidently was his pie hole where he was now pouring down his 4th pint. Guitar Bob’s kid Billy was a member of the South End Troop 17 sponsored by the Little Chapel in the Ravine. The Little Chapel had considered pulling out after the Scouts decided the time had come to accept gays, but the deacons couldn’t reach a decision without tearing the membership apart.

“You gonna let Billy stay in?” Jim asked Bob. “You aren’t worried he’ll end up some limp wrist with all the perverts we got these days. What kind of father …?”

Bob held up a hand in a stop sign. “Settle down, Jim. It isn’t the end of manhood as we know it. It’s the same troop. You know all these kids. And Phil’s a good scoutmaster. What the hell are you cranking yourself up for?”

“Holy crap, Bob,” Jim spluttered, half rising from his seat. “These are our kids’ lives, ya know? We didn’t send them to Boy Scouts to earn Fairy Badges, we expected them to learn how to use knives and hatchets. The way we did, remember?”

“Billy just got his computer merit badge, Jim. I don’t care if he learns how to chop wood in the 21st century. We’re not Cro Magnons. No offense, Skeeter,” he grinned, looking my way.

“Me like fire. Me cut wood,” I grunted. So did Jim. “Maybe that’s what’s wrong with the damn Scouts. They don’t care about teaching Manhood. They’re all a bunch of pansies, you ask me.”

“We didn’t,” Two Toke said.

“Look who’s talking,” Jim grumbled, “a guy who never had a kid, probably couldn’t if he wanted to.”

Tom, instead of taking offense, just laughed. “If I’d known I could get sex-ed in Boy Scouts, I’d’ve joined. But isn’t that what you’re worried about?”

Jim snorted in disgust, swilled down his half full glass and got up to leave. On his way to the door he turned back to us. “You three faggots are exactly what’s wrong with this country.”

Two Toke shook his head sadly, but Guitar Bob laughed. “Love you, man,” he said for all the bar to hear before throwing him a kiss. Love on the South End comes in many disguises….

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.