The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Some of the boyz down at the Marina got to talking about that Ma Day Studio Art Tour that’s been building steam since before the turn of the century, hauling traffic in for 19 years and now has expanded not just to 3 days instead of the original 2, but 2 weekends instead of 1. Before long, Cap’n Jack worried, it’ll become the Mother’s Day to Father’s Day Art Tour, an entire month of traffic backed up from the South End Diner to the Stanwoodopolis freeway exit, all those art lovers and their U-Hauls for carrying back their purchases to Bellevue, Seattle and beyond. They remember when the Tulip Festival was just a small bulb in the imagination of the growers …. before cars eventually outnumbered the flowers. And it makes em nervous.
It should! The South End Economic Development Council holds secret meetings at ReFlux Realty, scheming to sell properties to art aficionados who, in turn, will become artists themselves in the primordial paint soup of the South End, buy easels and brushes, learn raku, break glass and build stained glass panels, sculpt auto wreckage and ultimately double, triple, who knows, the size of the Tour. It’s a self-replicating Beast. And when they all begin to starve through overpopulation, they’ll still need to pay those mortgages on their dream studios. The only other ‘jobs’ here, of course, are real estate agents. So the vicious circle completes itself. More artists, more art, more wannabees, more starvation, more real estate agents, more sales, prices rise, properties subdivide, underwater mortgages swell …. and so the bubble becomes bigger than the egoes of the artists who planned this Tour back in the 90’s.
Some of the Marina layabouts wanted to stop this in its tracks before there was no turning back. Keep the missuz from going studio to studio Mother’s Day weekend. Course, the Tour was planned from the Get-Go to be their default escape from marital duties. Let Ma go traipsing through the art while they’d watch some ballgames. And now, 19 years later, they’re only starting to realize the true price of their mistake. Too late, guyz!! Way too late now!

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If you’re like me, you’ve just finished doing your taxes. You’ve grumbled, you’ve broken a few pencils, you’ve cursed the IRS for making these forms hard to use without a certified public accountant, you’ve exhausted your deductions and your patience both and now you have to write that check to the Department of Revenue. Ted Cruz campaigns on a platform to eliminate the IRS and you think that sounds about perfect. No taxes, no government, no headache next April 15th. Why not? A couple more beers and Ted’s got your vote.

No taxes for corporations ought to bring prices down to rockbottom, right? You hear every day how American companies have to move overseas or offshore to spare them the 35% tax on businesses. Zero taxes ought to keep them here. Course, 27 of the Fortune 500 don’t pay anything now so it won’t help them much. And we haven’t factored in the gov’t. subsidies and the local tax breaks and all the rest of corporate welfare … or incentives, if you prefer. For every dollar they spend on lobbyists, they average about $1400 in tax breaks. Not bad. Maybe next year you should hire a lobbyist.

Or a CPA… Boeing, that shining example of corporate job creators, got half a billion dollars over the past two years to stick around and make more jobs. Course, it didn’t quite work out that way. Too bad for us Washingtonians, but hey, we didn’t make them promise to keep their word. Kind of in too big a hurry to get the bill passed before they moved to Carolina.

Some of us Job Creators on the South End are considering making that same threat to the Legislature. Move our art studios and marijuana growing operations to Idaho, see what deals we can get to stick around and fuel the island economy. Wouldn’t take a quarter billion per year, maybe a tenth of that would do it. Course, once we get our corporate welfare check, not guaranteeing I’ll be making any more art. And if this blogsite suddenly goes dark, you’ll know the deal went down and my check made early retirement inevitable. Can you blame me any more than Boeing? If nothing else, you can rest assured I’ve created jobs for a virtual army of accountants to manage my affairs.

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Dr. Gonzo

We got a lot of folks on the South End making a living the hard way, meaning, they don’t work. In the pioneer days when I first scratched out a meager existence in these played out nettle farms, people survived on piece work here, odd jobs there, some bartering, some horsetrading, the usual indolent country skills. But the new folks, they do some of that, but mostly, due to some serious drug maintenance problems, they got more pressing issues. You want to maintain a heroin addiction, you probably aren’t going to commute to McDonalds and take a job as fry cook. No, it’s easier if you just steal what the neighbors got.

This is more or less what I left the city to escape. No, not jobs or employment. Neighbors stealing from neighbors. What was really sad back then was how the poor folks stole from the poor folks. Easier, I admit, to slip down the alley and come in a nearby backdoor than to drive up to the white folks’ suburbs even though the pickings would have made it more than worth the effort. Course then you have security alarms and motion sensitive cameras and a police force that patrols those tonier neighborhoods. Me, I had Dr. Gonzo.

Dr. Gonzo was a refugee of the Humane Society, part boxer, part hound of Baskerville, a fearless brute of a dog who had been abused by its previous owner who was, judging by her reaction to men, male. If you happened to be a black male, she ratcheted up her snarls about double the decibels. And if you were a fat male, she was nearly unmanageable. Frighteningly so. But if you were a black and fat male, she wanted to hurt you. She probably wanted to kill you. My assumption is her abuser might have fit that exact description and it might explain why she ended up at the pound. Her tormentor probably realized he wasn’t going to cow her and one of them had to go.

She was well known to my neighborhood. It was also well known my house wasn’t usually locked. Not with Dr. Gonzo inside. You wanted to walk in, maybe see if my TV was worth stealing, have at it and good luck. Men knocked on my door and I’d say, kicking a snarling growling Gonzo back behind me, come on in, why dontcha? “Naw man, let’s talk on the porch here,” they invariably replied. And invariably they would want to know if I’d consider selling Gonzo to them. “Maybe you’d like to get to know her better,” I’d suggest, opening the door a crack to let them see Gonzo trying to get her snapping jaws through and I’d say it doesn’t look as if she likes you, man. “How about you breed her, sell me the pups?” And I’d shake my head sadly, naw man, she’s been spayed.

I didn’t have much trouble in that high crime neighborhood even with the 10 units next door that were nothing but a breeding ground for drugs, gunrunning, sex trafficking and fencing. Still, it seemed, I don’t know, a corrosive atmosphere, a breeding ground for cynicism, a hard place to practice peaceful meditation. For both Gonzo and me. So we packed it in, bought a 1910 shack up here on the South End and made a new start, both of us. She died some years back, broke my heart. But at least she never lived so long she had to see the ghetto boys living next door once again.

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You maybe haven’t heard the news yet — Colton Harris Moore, our very own Barefoot Bandit — started a jailhouse fundraiser for saving his mom who has terminal cancer. He’s concerned he won’t be released from prison in time to see her one last reunion, his dear old mom, the woman who made him what he is today. She always said he was smarter than Einstein and now he’s hit on an ingenious solution to what might seem to us ordinary folks, an unsolvable problem.

He wants to freeze her. Something a lot of us wanted to do a long time ago. But with the fervent hope that the magic of cryogenics would allow her to remain in suspended animation until we figure out how to bring her back to her vivacious self down the road. I hate to sound cynical or mean spirited toward a woman dying of lung cancer, and at the risk of appearing un-Christian, I just think maybe we should let Pam go quietly to her reward in the afterlife. Even if flash frozen humans became a possibility.

I can think of a few more eligible candidates for reanimation after death than Colt’s mom. And trust me, I’m not one of them. Some of us South Enders, more skeptical even than myself, think the Barefoot Burglar is really after the money he might raise. Well, I tried, Mom, but it wasn’t quite enough for 50 years of freezer burn storage, and so I used the donations to go to Harvard to get my degree in aviation technology. Personally, I kind of like that scenario. Not enough to donate money to the fund, but maybe the internet followers of Colton’s daring exploits would throw some coinage his way. Why not? The Kid was the first hero of the internet, a 21st century Jesse James.

If you, like me, aren’t anxious to help out with some spare change, I totally understand. But maybe here on the South End, the Kid’s stomping ground and lair, someone will step forward with at least a Frigidaire they aren’t using. Mine is sort of full.

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I got a lot of cronies down here on the digitally divided South End who do not own a computer much less know how to use one. Granted, some of us misanthropes think we can reach the grave before it matters that we’re hopelessly out of touch with the 21st century. Who needs e-mail when we can call up a friend on his rotary telephone, eh? Now that we got private phones and not the party line we once had, why not enjoy it a few more years?

The mizzus got a computer back when Compaq was still a fresh face, not an old grave. She loves all things technical and so she was pretty much in the forefront of home computer technology. If not for her, no way would I own a computer. I still push lawnmowers, not ride em. I still chop wood, not turn a thermostat. I still got a 3 speed transmission, not an automatic. I waited a long time before hitchhiking on the digital highway, figuring for years I’d just wait til Apple came out with a machine that would talk me through all the introductory stuff.

But my pals without marital tutors, they’re still waiting. Three year olds are more savvy than half of us down here in the 20th Century. Course, that was sort of true back in the 20th Century too so maybe nothing much has changed. But the speed of the advances over the past couple decades is a little frightening, especially for anyone thinking they might wait a little longer then catch up once they buy a machine and figure how to turn it on. Or fix it when it glitches. Or set up programs, e-mail accounts, twitter feeds, all that stuff they’ve heard about but never wanted to learn.

I know I wouldn’t want to be starting out now that far behind. Maybe okay if you have a 3 year old to show you the ropes, but if not, fat chance, good luck. I assume most of these poor geezers will have to wait to buy their first Mac or PC when Netflix announces it will stop sending DVD movies and goes exclusively to streaming. When that day comes, trust me, I’ll be buying stocks in Apple and Dell. The last holdouts will have no choice.

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