The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

South End society runs the gamut these days from Dot.com millionaires to meth-heads. You live down here in the tonier backwashes, you acquire a necessary degree of egalitarianism. That, or you move into the Gated Communities, rig up elaborate security systems and hope the unwashed masses don’t mistake the moat around your castle as a fancy hot tub.

One of our neighbors who went by the moniker of ‘Dawg’ married a woman south of me and immediately added 4 stepkids to his care. His ex was living over the mountains with two of his other kids and so, in the spirit of misguided parenthood, Dawg and his old lady hired an attorney to regain custody of those poor deprived children being raised by a single mom who’d taken up with an ex-con and worse, one on drugs. Dawg and his mizzus were also on drugs, drank heavily, but they had decided their parental skills would serve the children best.

And so they finally convinced a judge and child services to return the two teenagers to the stability and warmth of a South End home, to be raised by paragons of virtue and join the family circle. A year later Dawg and the mizzus split the sheets after she’d shacked up with an alcoholic loser on the north end and left him with 4 juvenile delinquent stepkids and his own 2 genetic ones. In the spirit of sacrifice and after considerable deliberation with myself and Jack Daniels, Dawg moved out too.

Lest you think Dawg was heartless, it should be stated he came down once a week to fill the fridge and ‘check on things’. “I just can’t be here all the damn time,” he told me. “And anyway, those kids of hers (meaning the mizzus’) hate my guts.”

The neighbors grew concerned when the parties lasted deep into the night, cars honked horns and tore out at 2 AM and numerous fights were continually breaking out. Chickens, dogs, cats, meth dealers and other animals came and went in the house whose doors were wide open day and night. The floors were urine and feces stained and the place reeked like a Texas porta-potty in August. Dawg told me his daughter — the one he’d ‘rescued’ from an abusive life — was now pregnant. She was 15, maybe 16. When she came, she was a bright and inquisitive kid. Now she could look forward to teenage motherhood.

There’s plenty of guilt to go around and I have some myself for not going to the police or child protection services or even calling some church. My mother used to tell us kids, “It takes all kinds to make a world.” And when we got to be smartass teenagers, we’d reply, “Right, Mom, that’s why it’s all screwed up.”

Dawg got fired awhile back from his job of 25 years. He ended up marrying his ex, the very same woman whose kids he took and ruined. It only lasted a year or so, then she hooked up with a biker from Seattle. I ran into him the other day. Same old Dawg. Like he always said when he lived down here: No brains, no headaches. Dawg hasn’t got either.

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Three weeks to go, Lord, three long weeks until the incessant ads stop, the mudslinging ends, the election signs come down and we all resume our regular broadcasting. With any luck we’ll put the Trump Show into reruns and wait for the Fox News winter line-up featuring the evening variety program Dancing with Donald. Whatever the outcome of this interminable election, the man won’t be going away, not for a long long time. He’s basically a herpes virus, lurking in your spinal column, just waiting for the right opportunity. Cue the music: ‘you’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you.’ Actually, the song IS about him.

Me, I’m ready for a break from Mr. T. Four years has worn me down. If Covid takes away taste and smell, Mighty Mouth has destroyed my sense of humor. My funny bone has atrophied and I may have forgotten how to laugh, permanently if this guy gets another term of office. In the middle of a pandemic, with protests going on for months and riots breaking out continually, with kids locked up at home with parents who can’t afford child care, with the economy in smoking ruins for the poor, maybe it’s time for someone who wants to unite the country in common cause, not poke a stick in half the nation’s eyes. A little optimism instead of incessant pessimism might be a welcome relief. I know I’m sick and tired of the constant vitriol, the finger pointing, the shaming and the blaming. How about a plan of action? How about tackling some problems? How about helping those who need help? How about confronting this Covid outbreak with something more substantial than rah rah, hurray for me, what a job I’ve done, look at how I saved probably 2 million lives? Send this Cat 5 hurricane back to Mar a Lago where they know how to handle disasters. Board up, hunker down and hope the damage is manageable when the storm subsides. Then go to work rebuilding what was torn down.

Maybe you watched the ‘town meeting’ last week, the one he arranged with NBC after refusing to debate Biden virtually after he’d contracted Covid. If so, you got the full monty, the angry guy, the leader who retweets conspiracies theories and then denies knowing anything about them, just sending them out to his twitter followers and they can decide for themselves. The moderator said, c’mon, Mr. T, you’re the President, not somebody’s crazy uncle. How wrong she was. He’s everyone’s crazy uncle.

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I was talking with my neighbor today. He drives milk truck. Home delivery. Glass bottles. Old school. It’s like having a time warp drifting around in the back yard. I’m expecting the Iceman soon on the other side of me. Big tongs dropping blocks in my 1910 icebox that sits on the porch for decoration now, you know, the present, before the century turned back. Why not? Might be time to save on the electric bill running that old Frigidaire we got back in the future.

The milkman was telling me how he’d gone to Minnesota to go ice fishing. 20 below zero. Couple feet of snow. Half a mile out on some lake near the Arctic Circle above Minneapolis. Heaven on earth. I asked what YOU would: why? He’s a dedicated fisherman and he just wanted to experience it, he said. Part of his Bucket List. I was afraid to ask what else was on that list.

I went ice fishing once. 1966. Northern Wisconsin. 10 below. Nice wind freshening up the crusty snow. My brother and I trekked out like deranged Zhivagos across a frozen desolate God-abandoned expanse, lugging an ice auger, some ice fishing ‘jigs’ and a little bait. We drilled a 2 foot hole through the ice, slapping ourselves to keep warm, then set the jigs to pop up when some sluggish fish floated by in a state of half-hibernation and got a sudden appetite. We stood there, two primitive people hunting food. The wind swept snow around our feet and the water in our fishing hole began to close up with slush. We didn’t talk much. The jig didn’t move. Time itself was freezing up.

I looked at my brother. He looked miserable. He looked at me. I know what I looked like. Without a word, we pulled our lines up, packed up the jigs not very carefully, grabbed the auger, our pride, our fishing fantasies and trudged back to shore, half frozen. Let’s just say — Ice Fishing would never have to be on our Bucket List later in life.

I asked my milkman how HE liked it. “Just wanted to experience it,” he said. “And Minnesota too, in the winter. I’ve heard about it. “ “You catch anything?” I asked. “Naw, just a small walleye. Twice, I think, same fish.” “Probably the one we didn’t catch,” I mumbled.

The rest of you anglers, give that poor walleye time to grow before you trek across the tundras in search of Antarctic fish trophies. They grow slow under the ice.

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Welcome to the future, everybody, a virtual world where we all live on a computer and communicate by email or cellphone or just about anything other than physical encounters. Some of my friends (who apparently never met me) ask if I’d like to join them in zoom meetings. Last time I checked, my computer didn’t come with a built-in camera, meaning, Amazon and Google don’t get to spy on me. I even turned off the microphone after the mizzus and I had a conversation about a possible trip to the southwest and she instantly got a pop-up ad for motels in Phoenix. Just a coincidence? Or paranoia running rampant in the time of Covid? You tell me.

I just won’t be telling my eavesdroppers….

But because I am still a ‘working’ artist, meaning I haven’t made my semi-retirement a full time position just yet, I have a public art project that demands that I attend zoom meetings. Reluctantly I bought the cheapest camera made by child labor in some third world hellhole and spent a day trying to figure how to use it. Needless to say when the meeting started, nobody could see my handsome visage, fine by me, all they got was a disembodied voice without the Boris Karloff in a weird shade of pink only I could see on my own screen.

Since this was the first of a few more such meetings, I purchased a mid-priced spy camera that seemed to auto-focus and gave me a more human skin coloration than the previous piece of junk. The next zoom meeting I could see them and they could see me. Trouble was, if they could see me, they couldn’t hear me. If they could hear me, they couldn’t see me. We opted for the disembodied voice once more. Lucky them, I said.

Now I love technology as much as the next Luddite South Ender. Give me a new gizmo and let me spend hours figuring out what I’m doing wrong, what better way to spend a day or three? I have the next zoomer meeting coming up next week and I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong that sound and sight aren’t synched. So I’ve decided to go without the visual. Course, I’m pitching designs for an art project, kind of falls into that visual category.

No doubt we’ll sort this all out. Probably after I lose the project. But for my pals who want to engage me in a zoom meeting, hey, call me on the phone. Landline only. Last thing I need is some cellphone I can’t figure out either…..

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Most folks think homeless people live in the Big City. Seattle and Gomorrah. Portland. Stanwoodopolis. But that’s not true. There’s homeless people living everywhere — even the South End. If you’re the type of cautious soul who’d never pick up a hitchhiker, you’d never have met Stinky Steve. Or you’d think, even now, how mean it was to call Steve ‘Stinky’.
For those of us who DO pick up folks with their thumbs out, we didn’t call him that out of spiteful cruelty. Steve was genuinely, and I mean Full Bore, Head On, Hold Yer Nose, No Kidding, olfactorily displeasing. He had an odor part old B.O., part beer breath, part cigarette smoke and the rest I probably wouldn’t want to guess. I don’t think he minded us rolling a window down even in rain or cold weather. After all, those were his elements.

When I first picked him up, he was living in an abandoned shed a neighbor a couple miles north kindly let him use. He was on his way to work digging soft shell clams on the tideflats near Stanwood, or so he said. Later he lived in a pup tent near me and worked various jobs clearing trail or weed-eating the neighbors’ land for minimum wage. Some even offered him free use of their showers, but Steve wasn’t much for personal hygiene and always politely demurred.

Guitar Bob and me got to know Steve better than most. We used to play the 12 beer blues every Sunday night, and at some point Steve joined our little outdoor guitar duet, singing some ditty to our rambling fingerwork that always sounded oddly familiar. When some kids slashed his tent and strewed his meager belongings, Bob’s neighbors gave him a little trailer to live in … on condition he work around the place and go to Social Services and sign up for disability. Mental disability. They meant well, these Do-Gooders, but the end result of all this was that the State of Washington gave Steve a modest stipend that effectively resulted in Steve’s early retirement from the part time workforce and paid for his malt liquor without him having to work all day to earn it. Steve, predictably enough, had his alcoholism subsidized by the State. And we had a singer more and more off key, schnockered by the time we’d only started to warm up.
I guess the ditches beside the Road of Good Intentions are strewn with folks like Steve. We forget that not all of us want a suburban home, a square meal or even a hot bath. Some of us just want to be left the hell alone, to live our life a different way altogether, without sympathy, without a handout, without a whole lot of socio-psycho hand wringing. I’m not saying you should pick them up hitchhiking into town for their cigarettes and beer. I’m just saying they’re here, they’re not that crazy and they’re okay decent people. There’s no law that says they have to bathe.

Well, long story way too short, the good-hearted neighbors signed him up for computer training in Spokane, detox, three square meals a day and a life as alien to him as a heroin addict in a nursery school. Guitar Bob and I got a couple of letters, half computer hieroglyphics, half semi-sensible musings on his new life and about 2/3rds sadness expressed with a stiff upper lip. We never saw him again. Shortly after those letters he was diagnosed with colon cancer. Then we heard he died. Bob and I bought a 6 pack each and played our 12 beer blues long into the dark night for Steve, a fallen comrade, another loner on the sad old South End the newcomers won’t have to pass by as he stands in a cold drizzle with his tobacco stained thumb held out for the alms of a ride.

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