The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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I guess we’ve all seen these folks at the freeway entry ramps with their mournful mendicant faces and their homemade signs that say they’re looking for work or money or food or a kind word and can you help, God Bless! They stand like stoic poster children for the poor, the homeless, the forgotten losers in the economic gears of a capitalist machine. They don’t seem to be on drugs or carry a bottle in a paper bag. They seem like us — okay, like me — just a bit down on their luck.

Myself, I’m a sucker for a panhandler on the sidewalk. I’ll empty my pockets even if I KNOW it’s going toward the purchase of the next bottle of Mad Dog 20/20. Maybe it’s the suspicion that there, but for the grace of God, go I …. Some wrong turns, a round of bad luck, an accident, a disease, you name it, that guy with the glazed eyes, the bad breath, the shabby clothes — he could be me. On my dark days, I think maybe he IS.

But the folks on the freeway ramp, looking like the one at exit 205 or 216 or, well, all of them, I have this uneasy suspicion they all work for an outfit run by some smooth operator registered with the State of Washington as Legitimate Beggars, Inc. or BumsRus, LLC or just Freeway Freeloaders.com. The signs are hand scrawled but they seem remarkably uniform like they were copied from a foreman’s template or made down at the home office.

Maybe it’s that I’m enclosed in a steel and glass vehicle, window up, eye contact minimal, that makes me more critical than I am with the guy on the street asking for spare change. They certainly don’t look like they’re flush with income. They never look anything but gaunt and underfed. They seem Totally Authentic and yet … I never roll down the window, I never dig for loose change or a spare buck, I never quite see myself working that intersection.

Course, when they’re finally standing by Elger Bay Store, hands out, signs lettered in the same printed childish script, maybe they’ll melt my heart. Then again, we got plenty of needy down here now. They just don’t stand all day at the closest busy intersection. Maybe why they’re still needy…. They just need a little organizing and we got plenty of artists who could help me with those signs.

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We take so much for granted, us Moderns. Oh, I don’t mean you, of course. Me, maybe. But the truth is we live in a predictable world, electricity always on, water in the taps, thermostat at our fingertips. Get our food when we’re hungry, get our entertainment at the touch of a button or a mouse. Life’s easy for us Americans. Complacency is our middle name.

So why is it we whine so much?? Are we spoiled brats in the Garden of Eden, always wanting more, never satisfied with what we have? Have we become soft and lazy sitting at our computers, goofing with our ‘devices’? Two Toke Tom thinks it’s something else the night we’re parked on his rickety porch waiting for the full moon to rise out across Port Susan about where Mt. Pilchuck has turned the last of its snow golden as if God Herself had poured butterscotch topping on its ice cream peak.

“You and me, Skeeter, we’re the last of our kind.” Tom had been living up to his nick name while I’d been working on a beer or three. “We’re outliers.”

“Outlaws, you mean?” I asked, not sure what he was driving at.

“We’re outside looking in. We want heat, we cut wood. We want water, it comes from our well. Food’s out in the garden, down at the beach. We’d rather build something than buy something. You built a house and I did too. You build boats, I build furniture.”

“What’s your point, Tom?” I cut in, knowing he could go on past midnight with this. We’d done it many a moon, full or not.

“I mean, we live in the world.” When he didn’t elaborate, I said, “We all live in the world,” but he shook his head. “Naw, not the natural world. They live in offices, they live in fluorescent light, they live inside their entertainment center, they think nature is the weeds out by their sidewalk. They’ve gotten themselves stranded, man, and they don’t get what they’re missing anymore. They got their social media bullshit and that’s their reality, talking to people they don’t know or can’t see or who the hell cares? It’s all two dimensional. It’s all disconnected from this.” He swept his arm out into some galaxy he was apparently Seeing. “People have lost touch, that’s what I’m saying. They’d rather live in the Digital World. Pretty soon they’ll have little automatons living with them. Bots, man, doing their bidding. And when the robots decide to take over, people won’t even notice. Because they’ll be robots too, man.”

“Cut back on the weed, Tom,” I said, popping my next beer. “We got our own issues.”

Fortunately the moon began to show over by Three Finger Jack, just a glow at first, then quicker than you might think, a fat pumpkin of a moon orbiting the globe while we sat lost in our own thoughts on a porch on an island where the world kept spinning whether we noticed or not.

“Just like in the movies,” I said.

“Pretty as a hologram,” Tom cracked back.

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I was a kid in Georgia during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I wasn’t real sure how far we were from Havana, but some of the neighbors were real sure the commies were going to nuke the bejabbers out of our locale so they put concrete block fallout shelters in their basements. Malcom, the father of my friend Anita, kept his hunting rifle by the door and told me, when he gave me the tour of this subterranean future home, how he would have to shoot me and my family when we came begging to get in when the bombs began to fall.

At school we did the nuclear drill, the one where we got under our desk. Don’t look at the blast, we were instructed, you’ll be blinded. I’m not sure if my desk was sufficient to stop radiation, but hey, any port in a storm. Now that I’m an old geezer and managed to live through decades without having ICBM’s landing in the neighborhood, it’s a little like deja vu to have all this talk of Korean missiles landing in our backyard. I’m expecting half the neighbors to start digging their fallout shelters any day. The news, gotta love those folks, like to keep the drumbeat going.

Me, I’m too old to excavate for our shelter. The neighbors probably think they should keep a hunting rifle next to their door to keep me and the mizzus out when the nukes rain down, but I plan to reassure them. We have an old school desk next to our front door, usually for sitting on when we put our shoes on to go outside. I figure if it was good enough in 1962, it’s good enough now. We just have to remember to keep our eyes shut when the mushroom cloud shows up down the road….

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A lot of you readers out there maybe didn’t know you were part of a national conspiracy of radicals bent on violence and the destruction of the American Way, did you? I sure didn’t. Here I was, minding my own bizness, trying not to get wound up by every tweet my Commander-in-Chief sends out, a little troubled by that riot in Virginia maybe over taking down that statue of Gen. Bobby E. Lee, but c’mon, what with the Korea nuke scare and the end of civilization as we know it, what’s a small re-enactment of the Civil War?

Some Nazi nutcase runs down a few folks, well, who’s going to defend him, right? The authorities caught him quick enough, the courts will handle the rest. Call it domestic terrorism, call it murder one, call it a sad day in the USA, but nobody in their right mind would cut this guy slack. He is, after all, a Nazi and nobody likes Nazis except maybe other Nazis.

But now I’m learning that those liberals, meaning you and me, don’t kid yerself, are just as bad. Extreme violence, inciting mayhem, protesting methinks a bit too much. Alt-Left. Dangerous, radical, menacing and un-American. Folks who want those statues of the brave white men who fought so valiantly to keep slavery alive in their cotton picking states taken down along with the Confederate flag flying over state capitols and county courthouses. Just as bad as the Aryan Nation crowd. Just as dangerous as the white supremacists. You didn’t know that? Well, ignorance is no excuse. Not these days….

Now, I’m like you probably, sort of confused. But before we run out and lobby for a Hug-A-Fascist Day, let’s just try to calm down, get our priorities straight and, if possible, join the Mainstream. Try some daytime TV or binge on Netflix. If you think you’re part of the solution, wake up, you’re really part of the problem. Sorry to hafta tell ya.

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For months now the lamestream news, desperate for something to report other than the President’s latest tweetstorms, has been hyping the lunar eclipse. “Life changing,” some of the folks interviewed claimed, one guy having gone to 8 or 9 around the globe. I guess his life needs changing the way my truck’s oil needs changing. Regularly and often.

Down in Oregon where the total eclipse will be visible along a track stretching from this coast to the Atlantic ocean, traffic is already starting to back up out in the rural areas where folks have reserved every motel, airbnb and cabin available. Needless to say, the laws of supply and demand are in full force. Hotel rooms run into the thousands of dollars, camping spaces go for hundreds. Good luck finding a porta potty, the rumor is there are none to be found at this late date if you were contemplating renting your backyard to a few dozen sungazers. Gas prices are shooting up and now the stations report they’re completely out of fuel. Life changing? I’m starting to see the truth in that observation.

Up here we’ll get 90% of the eclipse. I was going to offer up our airbnb rental at 90% of the going rate down in Nowhere, Oregon, but I was a little late getting a jump on the capitalist action. You snooze, you lose. I could feel sorry for myself, you know, knowing my life will not change with this astronomical event of the decade, but I plan to be out in the eelgrass Monday morning chasing Dungeness crab around. I’m hoping when the daylight suddenly goes very dim on these primitive creatures, they’ll freak and come out of their hidey holes. Me, a modern boy fully versed in the laws of nature and the orbits of the moon, will be waiting for them. I know in these post-modern Trumpian times, knowledge can be a useless weapon sometimes, but the Day of the Eclipse, I’m figuring the Light’s going to come back. Call me an optimist.

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