The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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’.

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.