The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Some of us layabouts at the Poker Parlor were trying to think up something special for an upcoming 4th of July celebration.  We figured we got so many Vets down this way the Diner might as well declare itself a VFW South End Auxilliary.  And since most of them are vintage car guyz too, they could hold their own annual Independence Day Parade from Camano Head to the Elger Bay Store.  I, of course, wanted to just use these militiamen as an excuse to secede from the Island, but cooler heads prevailed.  As usual.

Two Toke Tom served in Viet Nam and now is pretty much anti- every war.  Jimmy Z, who’s old enough to be Tom’s old man, fought the Japanese in WW2.  Tom thinks Jimmy’s still fighting em and maybe so, but I notice Jimmy driving a Toyota pickup now even though he swore for 60 years he’d never buy a ‘Jap Car’.  Baghdad Bill fought in the second Iraq War and Big Larry just got back two years ago from Afghanistan.  Jerry spent a year in Korea and frostbit a couple of fingers he wishes he had back, but he still can play a mean guitar.  We even got Crazy Eddie who ‘liberated’ Grenada.  We’re missing Somalia and Panama and Bosnia, but with all the newcomers rolling in, we may cover those too eventually.

Sometimes the boyz argue among themselves about those wars and sacrifice and what patriotism really means at the Friday night poker game we’ve been running since 1986 down at the Marina and Bait Shop.  Two dollar limit on bets, no limit on alcohol.  The pots don’t do much damage, but single nettle Daddle Distillery moonshine sometimes does.  I sit in with these war-hardened patriots most Fridays and serve as their patsy and their sometime referee, the one who never served even in peacetime.  Or what Two Toke calls a draft dodging, student deferred, flag burning, Summer of Love hippie protester.  He takes great joy in telling me I would’ve loved the smell of napalm in the morning over there on the Delta.  Jimmy Z chimes in how his platoon could’ve won Viet Nam single-handed although Jimmy never once has told us one iota the hell that must have been Iwo Jima.  But he’s the one who puts a liver spotted hand on Bill’s arm whenever Bill gets overwhelmed by memories of buddies lost in the HumVee he was driving when it was blown off the road to the airport in Baghdad.

We’ve fought too many wars, I think, before realizing I’ve said it out loud.  I see by their pinched lips and averted eyes I won’t get an argument tonight.  Patriotism comes in all uniforms, even no uniform at all.  Big Larry finally breaks the swelling silence, pushes a handful of quarters into the pot and says, real quiet, “I’m willing to spend a couple bucks, Skeeter, to see if you got more than bluff in this hand.”  Grateful to change the subject, I say, “Name of the game, Big.  Read em and weep.”

Hits: 130

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/audio-throwing-the-book-at-myself2.mp3[/podcast]audio — throwing the book at myself

Hits: 34

Folks ask me all the time – well meaning folks mostly – why in Blue Tarnation would a right brain sided yahoo who makes his so-called living on the fringes of the art world sit down and write himself a blog.  Blogs, they reason, are the direct polar opposite of the visual arts.  You could cut away the entire left hemisphere of my frontal lobes  –if you had a magnifying glass big enuff to find it — and I probably wouldn’t miss a banjo beat.  Van Gogh mighta been trying something similar with his ear surgeries, see if it might equalize the polarity.

People nowadays believe in specialization.  Find your niche and stay put.  Brain surgery, okay, don’t try chainsaw sculpture too.  Hard on the scalpel hand.  Maybe it’s cause I never was much good at anything in particular.  Couldn’t find a niche …. Or a crack or a crevice in the world that seemed like something I wanted to spend my whole life on, give my whole self to, dedicate all my energy for.  Probably just attention deficit before we gave it a name and diagnosis.

This blog writing – it was something to fiddle with.  Explore it a little, see where it led.  Life, it seems to me, now that half of it’s in the rear view mirror, objects appearing closer, life should be an exploration more than an explanation.  Writing, I suppose, to most folks, is different than painting an abstract, or sculpting a nude, or cutting glass to pieces and gluing the scraps back together.  It’s different than building a house.  Or making music.  Or becoming a physicist.

Or so they think.  And, they think this way because instead of seeing the universe as a whole, they see it as its pieces.  They see their life the same way.  Compartmentalized.  Fragmented.  Broken up like my glass art ….. only they don’t know how to take the pieces and make them cohesive again.

We live our lives, not so much in quiet desperation as quiet isolation.  We’ve lost the sum of our parts.

Folks tell me way too often, oh, they could never be an artist.  They think artists are BORN that way.  They think Mozart and Picasso.  They think if genius doesn’t come pouring out by age four,  the fountain’s probably dry.  No point trying.  Can’t do it.  Not an artistic bone in their body.

The world, I think, is a grand experiment.  Meaning, failures are okay.  What’s not okay is not even trying.  Not learning.  Not exploring.  Not imagining.  I got some real bad news for the artistically invertebrate …………….. we’re all artists.  We’re all born with an empty canvas and our life is what we’re all painting.  The only art that matters one iota …. is creating ourselves.

So, I’m doing some writing and I’m playing banjo in a fiddle band and I’m building my house and I’m struggling along in this vastly inexplicable world the best I can, trying not to bore myself more than necessary.  I’ll no doubt prove  I sure wasn’t born a Mark Twain, but I didn’t let it stop me.

The Skeeter Daddle Diaries are really about the arc of a life on Camano’s backwash South End.   I came out here to lick some wounds and hide from the world.  Turned out, I learned most everything I know down here.  But mostly I learned that the fun of life is the adventure of learning.  If you’re not afraid to look the fool sometimes, everything’s possible.  This fool, you better believe, got more than a few laughs from watching himself trying to figure things out……

Hits: 34

Hits: 29

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/audio-version-bygone-building-days.mp3[/podcast]audio version —bygone building days

Hits: 36

I know there’s still a few of you builders out there whose knees haven’t given out completely, whose backs are bent but not quite broken, whose minds are still … well, let’s not go there. You boyz have seen some changes since the heydays before Growth Management, permit delays and draconian building codes. And I’m not just talking about profit margins.

Some of you old growths might remember when Bruce Kennedy was the building inspector. Golden days, that’s for sure. Some of us — and I won’t embarrass you – might remember his dad, old ChucK Kennedy, when he was inspector. I’m not sure you even needed a permit back then. Bruce is gone now — hiding out in Lewiston/Clarkston — and his old man’s there too. I guess they aren’t coming back so I’m going to tell you a story — and if they do come back, you didn’t hear it from me.

Bruce was out one weekend helping a buddy of ours build an illegal cesspool, what we called a Costa Rica septic system, three 55 gallon barrels lined up and connected with high tech, highly engineered, not quite fully approved PVC pipe. Bruce was up on the backhoe —- it was his day off and he was nervous about getting caught by somebody from County, you know, losing his job, his career, his pension, his whole future. I got wind of this and so I had my brother, who was visiting at the time, stick a clipboard in his hand, walk up to Mr. Kennedy on his backhoe and identify himself as a state health department inspector. He orders Bruce to shut off that machine and I mean Right Now, Mister! and let’s have a look at those health department permits If You Don’t Mind.

Now I know it sounds mean. I know it may look cruel. But hey, those opportunities for practical jokes don’t come everyday. Course when I saw Bruce slump over the steering wheel, I thought sure he’d had a heart attack and I ran out of my hiding spot and said enough’s maybe enough. When he saw me it was like a jolt off a defibrillator. He started breathing again. Swearing revenge, of course.

Shortly after that Bruce quit the county. He said it was all those rules and regs, those codes, all that rigamarole. But deep down I suspect it was the guilt of being a renegade fly-by-night septic installer. Oh, I suppose some of you think I should share the blame. But hell fire, if we all quit our jobs over side-skirting county regulations, who’d be left to build the houses??

Bruce is happily retired now, probably still bitching about Island County Building Department Management. And we’re all left learning the new rules, the new ropes, even with our Tea Party Commissioner who builds her own palace without permits. Okay, we’re bitching too…. But I hope occasionally we all think back aways and maybe recall fondly the era when our building inspectors not only looked the other way, but actually ran the backhoe for us old renegades. Knowing Bruce, you can bet it was one damn nice septic system.

Hits: 91

audio —- metal detectors and geiger counters

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/audio-metal-detectors-and-geiger-counters.mp3[/podcast]

Hits: 25

The Commissioners up at the Port of Mabana were holding their semi-annual meeting and high stakes poker game the other night when Melvin, the self-named Porta-Potty President, introduced into the minutes the ticklish subject of tsunami debris. “The entire west side of the South End is going to be Ground Zero for all manner of invasive species and radioactive garbage and foreign junk,” he warned ominiously. “And it’s the Port’s job to anticipate this.”

Willy, the Port’s #2 man, raised $5 and his Rolling Rock, looked around the table with his best poker face — the one that broadcast to everyone he was bluffing on a loser hand — and said maybe they could get some grant money for beach clean-up, whereupon Rick, real estate agent of the year in 2011 for Windy Rear Realty’s worst sales year, opened his cards to look  a pair of jacks straight in the eyes and asked, “Who’s going to give us this money, Willy? The Feds are broke, the state’s selling its liquor stores, the county has us cleaning up its parks? And in a minute, you’re going to be broke too. I’ll see your 5 and raise you 10.”

Melvin groaned but his two pair held him in and he reluctantly pushed 15 bucks into the pot for a look at Rick’s hand, figuring both boys were bluffing. “Be a good way to promote the Port,” he motioned, tinkling the ice in his scotch. “The Port,” Willy grumbled, tossing his cards with no little disgust, “is nothing but old pilings, Mel.”

“Half of Japan is on the way headed right at us,” Melvin repeated as he raked in the pot while Rick shook his head woefully, ready to call it a night and wrap up the meeting before his losses became personal. He hadn’t sold a property in two months. And that one looked like it would flip any day. “Stop your worrying,” he muttered. “The beach will look like a Goodwill for awhile, only cheaper. Be a beachcomber’s paradise. The only downside is sales at the Last Chance Thrift will plummet for awhile. Not our problem.”

Willy brightened a bit and gestured with his beer bottle. “How about this: we hide a blown glass ball or two down by the Port, advertise the hell out of it, and they’ll clean up that beach like it was a resort hotel in Waikiki.” He killed the Rolling Rock in a grand gulp and moved to adjourn. Melvin seconded and Rick pushed away from the table. Outside in the rainy driveway, starting up his battered Toyota Camry, he could almost hear the waves churning housewares and broken furniture, appliances and broken boats. Mostly he wished he hadn’t bluffed on that last hand.

Hits: 89

Hits: 20

audio — my brother-in-law’s keeper[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/audio-my-brother-in-laws-keeper.mp3[/podcast]

Hits: 24