The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

This morning I read about a guy who is planning to dive 25,000 feet from a plane. Without a parachute. He plans to land in a net held up 20 stories high by two cranes. He’s tested this with dummies. One dummy shot right through the webbing of the net, but I hear it’s okay. Still a dummy, though.

I’m always puzzled by people like this. Not one ounce of me has that urge for thrill seeking, death defying acts. I don’t picture myself conquering Mt. Everest without oxygen, I don’t want to bungee jump off bridges into deep gorges, I don’t imagine myself in a Formula One racecar hitting 220 miles per hour going into the turns. If you look up the word Cautious in the dictionary, you probably will find my mug shot hiding behind a tree. It’s not as if I haven’t taken my share of risks, but I don’t go looking for them. Sometimes they’re unavoidable. Sometimes they’re the result of stupid mistakes. Mistakes I wouldn’t want to make twice.

Harry, a buddy of mine, offered to pay my fare for a skydiving jump back when I first got to Seattle. He’d taken a jump out in Issaquah a couple months before and he was totally hooked so now he was looking for converts to his new adrenaline fueled addiction. No thanks, I said. He could hardly believe his ears. He repeated his offer, thinking maybe I was hard of hearing. “It’s a Total Rush!” he kept saying. “I’ll pay for your first dive. After that, you’ll be hooked too. It’s amazing. Amazing!”

I thanked him again and declined his offer. “What??? Are you afraid??”
“Afraid?”I said, “Afraid?? Jump out of an airplane and hope whoever stuffed my parachute did it right? Yeah, that would scare me. I don’t even like roller coasters, but I’m sure as hell not jumping out of an airplane with no margin of error.”

Harry laughed at me and explained about the backup chute. Called me a coward. Ridiculed my fear. “We’ll go this weekend,” he cried, I guess figuring I’d rather be frightened than forever tagged as a Coward. “Won’t cost you one dime and you’ll thank me later.”

Harry and I rafted a river once together, but we never jumped out of an airplane, no doubt the thrill of a lifetime. Harry’s a quadriplegic now after getting hit by a truck riding along a highway. He was always an aggressive bike rider, like everything else he did. He’d probably tell you it was a small price to pay, that life isn’t worth living without taking risks. I’d answer that it was plenty risky enough already.

And by the way, that skydiver landed in the net okay. The paper said his wife and family were watching from nearby. A hot air balloon in Texas hit a power line and all 16 passengers were killed. Today I’m thinking of just staying home. Why take unnecessary chances?

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Week after week, month after month, I’ve watched the little Scandihoovian burg on the other side of the bridge to the island, grow smaller and smaller down on the sewage flats of the floodplain. The bookstore just closed after three decades, a couple of taverns that were there when I came here are shuttered and up for sale, the empty storefronts are mounting up. Down at the Viking Village even the Dollar Store went under and you know and I know, when the Dollar Stores go belly up, we got troubles, capital T, right here in River City. And they don’t rhyme with pool. The Viking Village megaplex still sports the ever popular Uff-Da Shoppe with its witty collection of coffee mug Norwegian jokes, plus the barber shop and the laundromat and the Duck Inn café. Anchoring the other side of the dead Dollar store is the headquarters of the GOP. To say the place is as bustling as a morgue is optimistic hyperbole.

The Fresh Alternative Medicine Dispensary, the medical marijuana retail shop next to the police station, is the latest in a string of businesses dead on arrival now that the City Council voted to rescind its permits. State law now requires pot permits for both recreational and medical. We want those taxes on medical we didn’t get previously and the legislature finally figured out that the best way to do that was combine the two and tax it all. Duh. Pot outlets opened up on the island, in nearby Conway, up in Mt. Vernon, over in Arlington, down in sleepy little Silvana. Prohibition, needless to say, is over.

Well, not quite, not in Stanwoodopolis, not with the City Council that can’t in good conscience, so they plead, sanction recreational drugs in their fair city. They have to protect the kids. As if the kids aren’t buying everything from beer to heroin from their friends and the pushers who ply the parking lots and parks. The mayor estimates that hundreds of thousands of dollars of tax revenue are going to be lost to all those surrounding areas that accepted the will of the voter to legalize marijuana. Arlington makes $400,000 a year already.

Take a little stroll down the streets of town with me. Cupcake shop, check, antique store, check many times, pizza delivery shop, check, boutique consignment shop, check, bar and grill,, check twice, Chinese restaurant, yup, co-op art gallery, check. Empty storefronts, plenty of those…. Ghost towns start this way and with the coming flood insurance increases, their best hope is to breach the sewer lagoon and bring in gondolas with singing Norwegians to ply the canals of the sunken city. Some towns get exactly what they deserve. Uff Duh!

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Some of you fair readers out there might not know it, but in actuality, I’m a biznessman. One of the few here on the corporate-challenged South End. Admittedly it’s a small bizness. And okay, full disclosure here, I’m not real high on the Job Creator list, although, I have hired half a dozen folks over the years, not enough to bring the economy to full roar, but hey, how many have you hired? If it’s more than half a dozen, don’t write to me. You either, Donald, I don’t care if you are running for President.

As a bizness, a legal entity known to the state of Washington and the IRS as Revisionary Glassworks – okay, it’s a hippie dippie name, but how was I to know back in 1980 I would become the economic engine I am today – I am required to do most of the things Boeing or Microsoft do to operate a company. No, not outsource my work to China, I mean I have to fill out L&I forms, proof of insurance, get contractor’s licenses, pay quarterly taxes (which I always forget to do, which reminds me, damn, I forgot this last one too) and file Intent to Pay Prevailing Wages, this last I’m trying hopelessly to do online. The Big Boyz hire people to manage this stuff. I tried to talk the mizzus into doing this tedious crap but she’s a little busy working full time and doing our household finances. So I’m stuck with most of it. Good thing I’m not real busy myself working.

My handlers at the WA Arts Commission put out a little booklet they call the Handbook for Artists. It’s 60 pages of hoops us artists have to jump through before they pay us a dime for any public art projects we have won commissions to do. Little things like structural engineering stamps, conservator evaluations, proof of insurance, business license, blah blah blah for page after page, plus this brand new one: Intent to Pay Prevailing Wage. I recently got a contract, signed it, sent it in with most of the above and said Yes, I will pay prevailing wage. I got back a message Not so Fast, Charlie! You got to send us a form.

Nice to let us know. Next Handbook will probably add a few pages to explain where to get such a form. Turns out L&I handles that little detail. So I go online to fill out their form and pay their fee (which, call me anti-government if you have to but don’t bet heavily on it) is really the basis for this, I think. Well, it takes money to make money, me and Donald always say, so I hunkered down over my computer and started to fill out the damn form.

I’m going to spare you the ugly descriptions of this torture. You don’t need to visualize waterboarding or online form fill-outs. I even apologize for inflicting this minimum amount on you. But after an hour I had to stop. When I went back later, the site was gone. Or so my computer told me. I tried alternative places. Same message. Half an hour later I got in. Same site, so you tell me. Alice in Wonderland would have a field day in bureaucratic mazes. I spent two more hours filling out a one page form only to get stalled trying to print it. Fast forward an hour. I’m on a different form, online alternative version I guess of the other one, and it asks, about question #3 who my funding agency is so I put down the WA Arts Commission. It says it has no record of this. How could it? I’m putting it down now. But … you can’t go to question #4 if you can’t get #3 done. And I can’t get paid if I can’t get to question # 378,934 and hit Send.

Okay. Catch 22. Somewhere in a perfect world where the sun shines all day long and the moon is full every night, we could forego this red tape. No, wait. That place exists!! I have had projects in Florida and Alaska and Oregon and Utah. They don’t give me a 60 page Handout. They don’t require 35 hoops to jump through. They don’t need an Intent to Pay Prevailing Wages, as if I would know what the guy I hire should be paid to hold a panel in place while I screw the moldings on, some union scale for Panel Holder On-ers. And okay, yeah, I’m frustrated, I’m more than a little pissed off, I’m 66 years old and still trying not to be forced into involuntary retirement. But I tell ya, I’m starting to see what the small business folks are screaming about. I feel their pain. I definitely do. And no, I’m still not gonna vote for Donald. Pain is one thing, torture is another.

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When I was just out of college — we’re talking the early ‘70’s here — I wanted to join a commune and be a hippie. I know, a little late for the show, but better late than never, I figured. And anyway, I didn’t want to work so that narrowed my options down to very few. Bum, artist or hippie — or, in my case, all of the above. So a few of us went up to an abandoned farm in Northern Wisconsin and set up shop in an old Polish farmhouse, no indoor plumbing, a couple of electric outlets, a handpump out in the yard and a falling down outhouse.

Rick and I were the two males in the encampment so we he-men took it on ourselves to construct a state of the art outhouse. We found some lumber in the barn — which we learned later, much to our embarrassment, belonged to Ernie, the son-in-law of Felix, the farmer across the road — and armed with hammer and hand saw, we set to work. Now maybe you know how to go about outhouse construction, but Rick and me didn’t have Clue One. We were like Cro-Magnons who’d heard rumor of wheels but had never seen one in action. We knew you needed walls, roof would be good, a seat with one or two holes and of course one in the ground. That last one we figured out okay, but the rest, they were real headscratchers.

Somewhere on the 2nd or 3rd day we’d nailed together some boards, hoping, I guess, inspiration would carry the day. Eddie, our other next door neighbor, who’d probably been laughing himself sick watching from across the field, finally took mercy on us wanna-be hippies and brought over his extension cord, a skilsaw and his cousin Tony who lived in Chicago but had the house down the dirt road we all lived on. Rick and I managed to do just enough to make nuisances of ourselves while Eddie and Tony slapped up our new shithouse in no time flat.

We all sat around afterwards, all us men, drinking cheap beer, warming ourselves in manly companionship and camaraderie, pleased as punch like all masculine carpenters at our ability to erect cathedrals and skyscrapers with our own two hands. So okay, civilization rests on shaky assumptions. Nevertheless, you’d have been pleased too to have an outhouse, not the woods.

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Even on the politically scarred landscape of the South End where scorched earth campaigns are now considered, not just normal, but mandatory, I would be remiss if I didn’t, at least in passing, make mention of this week’s GOP convention. In full disclosure I am not a Republican, have never been a Republican and even if the Republican Party survives this humiliating year they’ve saddled themselves with, I will not become a Republican. Maybe if I lived in fear of neighbors with different sexual preferences or watched through binoculars the hordes of Hispanic lawncare providers poring into our suburbs or worried that the kid down the block had pledged allegiance to ISIS, maybe I would reconsider. But by then I would be drooling in my wheelchair in front of Fox News down at the Mabana Home for the Hopelessly Insane, pounding my liver-spotted fist in cadence with the hate-spewed chanting LOCK HER UP.

My old man is a dyed in the wool Republican who thinks Fox is a news channel, not an opinion factory for the rabid right wing. And even he sits in disbelief that his party is nominating, no, HAS nominated this billionaire braggart who admits the evangelicals supporting him probably shouldn’t have, who supports LGBT rights when the party platform is vehemently stuck in the Eisenhower closet, who still wants to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, who wants to run from the globalization Republicans and the Chamber of Commerce have supported for decades, who plans to renegotiate trade agreements unilaterally, who … oh, why go on? Donald J. Trump is no more a Republican than Obama is a Muslim. Although … there will always be doubters.

Democracy is a more fragile political system than most of us think. I walk down the aisles of the grocery store now and I realize half of the folks pushing carts are really very angry. We all live on an island here in paradise, we’re mostly white and privileged, mostly retired and well off, we all count ourselves Americans and Americans, last time I looked, are the 1% of the world and we’re pretty much the 1% of America or at least 2 or 3%. What, I want to ask my fellow grocery cart pushers, are you so pissed off about? Hillary Clinton? Mexican rapists? Black Lives Matter? Teachers Unions? Terrorists? Benghazi?

Well, yes, I guess, judging from Trump’s acceptance speech. America, we’re told, is going down the rabbit hole. Economically, militarily, politically, all is lost. And only one man, one man alone, can save us. A white man. A rich man. A man who cannot be bought but who bought others. A man who sees this country as a lost dream in need of a strongman. If he’s right, if most of us share that dark vision, we may get the leader we deserve. And I’m going to need to find another grocery store to shop in.

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