The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The world is a mysterious place to most of us. Last week some astronomists holed up in Antarctica for three years with a small telescope pointed in one spot discovered a gravitational wave generated by the Big Bang 380,000 years after the explosion. They’ll win a Nobel Prize in physics for this, most definitely. Sure makes the universe easier for me to understand …. unless I start thinking about how it proves the potential for multi-verses with entirely different physics, then my head starts to expand, my eyeballs hurt and I get worried there’s going to be a Big Pop soon above my shoulders.

Tarot Tracy works on a different astral plane. She opened what I guess you’d call a ‘storefront service’ in the old Bucklin gas station just down the road here. It’s been a residence off and on for years, mostly off, but Tarot Tracy bought it, fixed it up with a ‘consulting room’ out front and living quarters in back, hung a shingle with the High Priestess card off the porch and opened up for business. Figuring that curiosity doesn’t kill a cat with 9 lives necessarily, I hoofed it down last week for a ‘reading’.

“Tarot or astrological chart or I-Ching,” Tracy queried. “Which is more accurate?” I asked with some smarm. “Depends on you,” she replied with a Cheshire smile. So I threw the yarrow sticks and Tracy interpreted after asking what the nature of my inquiry was. Half an hour later she’d determined my future. Not precisely, exactly. Just sort of suggestions, open to my own interpretation. I paid her an exact fee, however, that was not open to much interpretation.

I have a prediction of my own: Tarot Tracy will be branching out soon — and I don’t mean franchising. Like a lot of us down here, she’ll need to supplement the income from her dream profession. Right now it’s an expansionary universe, but I foresee a time when gravity pulls Tracy back toward South End reality …. like the rest of us trying desperately to avoid our private Big Bang.

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I got a junkie neighbor up behind me.  I know what you’re thinking:  I got lots of neighbors with trash accumulating faster than that mudslide up at Oso.  I don’t mean a junk collector.  I mean a junkie.  Addict.  Needles.  Heroin.  He tried committing himself to a rehab joint, but … well, our society doesn’t have the money to run many of those these days.  Too busy, I guess, giving tax breaks to the hedge fund managers and the corporations to find a few pennies for programs a little closer to the ground here.  He could get on a waiting list, go to the back of the line, continue shooting up until he could receive treatment.

So that’s what he did.  Course, he also makes a habit of criminal behavior other than drug abuse.  For one, he’s a thief.  Down the road a nursery was missing a lot of plants and our boy, let’s call him Junkie Jim but it’s not his real name, Junkie Jim was seen carting a truckload of plants down the road back to his property where he did a Martha Stewart landscaping job.  Now, I appreciate the urge to tidy up the place.  Join the suburb.  Maybe have us neighbors in for tea and crumpets.  Join the Welcome Wagon for some meet and greet.  But … he probably shouldn’t have stolen the shrubbery and the ornamentals.

The deputies came after they were tipped off by the old timer who’d seen Jim transporting his booty home.  They questioned him and Jim, being a laid back sort of stoner dude, said, yeah, he stole the plants.  Confession, case closed, fine example of police work and citizen involvement, almost a model for the rest of the nation.  Maybe the court would be lenient since he was cooperative.

Except for one small thing.  The cops never charged him, the case never went to the prosecutor’s office and the court never convened.  Junkie Jim has the purloined plants budding out nicely this spring and everybody but the nursery seems happy about this.  Well, maybe not me.  I know an open and shut case when I see one, but I hate the open and shut mouth on this one.  What the hey??  I was just at an event where the Sheriff spoke ad infinitum on the need for more money for deputies, more taxes for his department, more more more.  What sheriff in what county in what country doesn’t sing the same song?????  But I got a question and I bet you know what it is.  Why would I give the cops one more dime when they won’t arrest a thief they took the time to come and question and who confesses on the spot?  Give me a toy badge and let me play deputy for a year.  I’ll give the taxpayer the same quality crimefighting and it won’t cost you one penny.

I know it’s the South End, but it worries me when the police catch a thief and figure why spend money prosecuting.  Just a bunch of plants to them, I guess.  Me and the neighbors are chaining down our rhodies.  And we won’t be bothering to call 911 in the future.  Why waste their time or our time?

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I go into Stanwood and Gomorrah occasionally for supplies I’m not willing to pay the island surcharge on. Hardware, groceries, gas. Necessities. I must not have been paying attention, I guess, cause a lot of biznesses down on the flood plain closed down awhile back. Looked about as prosperous as an Oklahoma dust bowl implement dealer specializing in irrigation systems. Half the storefronts looked dark or boarded up.

The other day I drove through the East Side and on through the DMZ and over to the West End. Only to discover my old Stanwood is gone. In its place was an Antique Mall. Store after store of vintage stuff I got too much of at home. It looked like Snohomish on the Skids. I’m not on the Economic Development Council, but nevertheless, I found this alarming. Better than a ghost town, I suppose, but there’s something parasitic about antique stores in decaying villages — they suck the nutrients out of their host without giving much back.

Now, honestly, I like antique stores okay. I just don’t want the whole damn town to be one. Somehow it doesn’t make for a vibrant city, all this old junk for sale everywhere you look. If there’s a symptom for the Final Days, one that portends the death throes of Small Town America, it’s a street cluttered curb to railroad track, gutter to dike with goofy little businesses shoe-horned into old houses and soon to be replaced by another second hand shop or Junque Parlor. A healthy town needs a good mix of merchants. Stanwoodopolis seems to have a penchant for failed taverns, ruined restaurants, rotating beauty salons, closing barbershops and shuttered clothing stores. The void is being filled by hypno-aromacists, paint ball franchises, toenail painters, Chinese chiropracters, storefront religions, struggling cookie mills, gift boutiques, satellite real estate offices and smoke shops. And now we got this tsunami of antique stores….

Maybe this is the death rattle of all backwash towns, no longer viable, just quaint little burgs tourists pass by on their way to the La Conners or the Anacorteses, nothing there but gas and groceries, let’s move along folks, nothing to see here …. Just another casualty on the American Interstate System when the road bypasses your cute village, no need to exit. 7 miles too far.

When I need another vintage piece to bring the livingroom roaring to life, well, I don’t have far to go. If I need anything else, besides gas and grocery, I’ll have to drive a lot further. Nothing much new there near as I can tell

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