The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Capitalism succeeds because it combines two primary drives in the human brain: greed and the urge NOT to work for someone else.  On the South End most of us tried our hands at employment but came up a little short.  Short of a work ethic, short of money, short of tolerance for a Boss.  So we did what most desperate, unemployed people do.  We started our own business.

Any good STARTING YOUR OWN CORPORATION FOR THE COMPLETE IDIOT book will tell you under-capitalization is the main harbinger of Failure in 90% of startups.  Obviously none of us down here bought the book, probably couldn’t afford it.  “It takes money to make money.”  Page 2, Chapter 1.  Folks just figure, I guess, they’ll buy a couple of yaks, breed em, then sell the little yaksters to a clamoring public.  They don’t really factor in the yak feed, the vet bills, the yak barn and the yak fences.  And they NEVER factor in the publicity campaign to create a viral fever for WANTING  or NEEDING a yak.  Maybe many yaks.

The other thing they don’t calculate in is how much work self-employment entails.  Without overtime.  Without benefits.  You’re supposed to trade off working for Cap’n. Bligh in return for slaving 80 hours a week for Mr. Wonderful, yourself.  Course Mr. Wonderful isn’t issuing paychecks at the beginning.  He has yak bills to pay before he pays himself and the debts are growing deeper than yak droppings out in the barnyard.

So it’s little wonder us entrepreneur types, us Job Creators, us Captains of Industry, end up broke, disillusioned and depressed, our dreams shattered, our shacks mortgaged, our divorce rates sky high.

But!  By god, we’re South Enders and South Enders don’t quit!  Well, okay, we gave up on our capitalist fantasies of entrepreneurial riches.  But we stayed true to our vow never to work for the Man again, never to be a cog in the well-greased machinery of some #@*&!!^# company, no sir!  If we have to live poor, so be it.  If we have to live by our wits, even if that’s a SERIOUS disadvantage, okay.  And if anyone out there is looking for a very nice herd of cute yaks, I think we can help you with YOUR dream.

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You live in a remote backwash like we do, you might think life is passing you by.  But even for those of us sitting still, the world keeps spinning.  Live long enough and you’ll have a book or two of stories, I guarantee you.  Even Little Billy.

Little Billy lives in the While-a-While trailer park that Ralph Wissmach set up back in the ‘70’s, not really zoned for it, but that was back when the South End was a little wilder and regulations were flaunted with impunity if not relish.  Ralph owned most of the single wides, hauled them in as rentals, then leased them PLUS added power and water surcharges.  If Ralph hadn’t acquired a ferocious taste for blended whiskies, he might have done okay, but he drank most of his rent money and neglected upkeep in the park.  By the turn of the century the While-a-While was a ghetto, tenants made payments only occasionally and the sheriff steered clear if possible.

Little Billy’s castle was the trailer at the end, leaning partly into the woods, curtains always drawn.  The adjoining trailer was vacant, curtains fluttering tattered out its broken window, allowing Billy even more privacy.  Cats by the dozen came in and out at Billy’s through a pet door he had cut into the fiberglass back door of his abode.  His neighbors saw more of the feline herd roaming the park than they did of Billy.

The Trouble began when the Carter brothers rolled in one windswept monsoonal day late in November, off-loaded their rust-eaten 4×4 trucks, then, over the next week, were joined by their kin and girlfriends until the trailer was wild with metal rock and constant fighting.  Strange cars and grungy people came night and day.  Billy kept an imperious silence through the next couple of months.  Except for the cats the Carter clan would’ve suspected his place abandoned.

Then, one drizzly night after New Years, the Carters decided to amuse themselves by shooting at Billy’s cats with a couple of .22’s.  By the time Billy stepped out on his rickety porch step, three of his felines were dead or bleeding next to the trailer.  Billy stood stock still, just a silhouette in the backlit doorway, and watched silently as Joel Carter, drunk on Jack Daniels, stoned on grass and cranked on meth, lifted his rifle to his lips and pretended to blow the smoke away.  Before he laughed and went back inside.

What went through Joel Carter’s empty head when Billy came knocking, nobody will ever know.  “Wuzzup, asshole?” he muttered to Little Billy who was standing on the porch with a .38 in one hand and a bleeding cat in the other.  When he saw the pistol, he smirked.  “What now, Wyatt?   We gonna shoot it out at the OK??”

Billy, apparently not much for light banter, put a slug in Carter’s kneecap, eliciting a howl that could be heard out to the highway.  He watched the backrooms of the trailer erupt into activity, the entire tribe now gathered and shrieking like deranged Banshees.  Billy held his gun up for silence and got it immediately.  Then he shot a writhing Joel Carter in the other leg, brought the weapon to his lips and in an ironic gesture lost on the assembled trailer trash, blew smoke off the end of the barrel.

In the novel that won’t be written, Billy might have driven off into the night, never to be heard from again.  But this being real life and not Hollywood, the sheriffs arrived 15 minutes later and took Billy away.  He gave no resistance and the only words anyone heard him speak were when they shoved his head down before he was put in the back seat of the cruiser.  “Someone needs to care for those cats.”

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I was up at a farm on the North End recently and a couple of us homesteaders got to swapping chicken stories.  Roosters, mostly.    You think maybe chickens are silly little cacklers scratching up worms and grubs for dinner or they’re benign little birds dropping eggs for your breakfast, you haven’t been properly introduced to the male of the species.

Maybe you’ve heard the expression Cock of the Walk?  That’s these bad boys.  Vicious attackers of the unwary.  Aggressive, fearless birds that come at you with beak and spurs.  They’ll open you up before you can say chicken cacciatore.  And you’ll never turn your back on one again, trust me.

Well, we swapped a few whoppers before Professor Bob mentioned he’d been up to Darrington for the cockfights awhile back, a couple hundred Tarheels betting their moonshine earnings on birds bred for vicious violence.  When I first came to Camano Island, the cops were busy busting cockfighting rings in Stanwood and Gomorrah.  I know what you’re thinking: didn’t this sort of bloodsport die out in the 1800’s?  And the answer is apparently NO.  Down south where I grew up, they fight dogs in Dixie.  Yeah, it seems barbaric.  But … we still got boxing and now we got kickboxing.  And if you want mayhem, tune in some Sunday to NFL football.  They’ll study us someday like we were Romans, professional gladiators.  Only real difference is we figured how to make it profitable.

Maybe the cockfighters need to sell television rights. Line up some advertisers.  Sell beer and hotdogs.  Make it respectable for more than the Tarheels and a few UW professors.  On the other hand, maybe it wouldn’t generate a mass audience.  After all, we got politics now 24/7 if you like your violence vicious.  Course, maybe they should sell beer and peanuts and advertising rights.    Monday Night Congressional Cockfights.  Probably take a few months to balance the budget with the profits.  Think about it is all I’m asking.

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My buddy Sam lives in a dilapidated house down by the newly opened Katmandu Kite Shop and no, it isn’t a kite store, it’s a recreational marijuana outlet.  Sam’s place is back in the nettled interior, down a dead end dirt road near the old trout pond that once held trout but got dredged back in the early ‘80’s on one debauched weekend that ended my trout fishing on the South End.

Sam’s been living the bachelor life since his wife left him.  She’d grown weary of the power being turned off for non-payment and the back taxes on the place reaching critical mass and since neither of them were willing to work, they played ‘chicken’ with each other, hoping the other would swerve first back into the job market.  No way was Sam going back to wage slavery so ultimately Bobbie packed her things, left a short and not-so-sweet note and headed back down to an old boyfriend in Eugene, Oregon who at least worked part-time driving schoolbus.

Sam says he never saw it coming.  I believe him, not because all the signs weren’t pointing inexorably toward a dissolution, but because Sam doesn’t have peripheral vision.  He would have to hit a sign head-on.  In fact, he didn’t find Bobbie’s kiss-off letter until four days after she left.  Which isn’t as myopic as you might think.  Sam  is a Hoarder.  His house is like one of those ant farms I had as a kid, nothing but tunnels, stuff stacked along the paths head high, trails leading to the bed or the bathroom or through the kitchen to the stove on one side, the fridge down a different path.

Bobbie kept the piles slightly more passable, but now that she’s gone, the tunnels have narrowed.  Nothing much gets thrown away, but stuff apparently is coming in constantly, at least by my observation after not seeing Sam for a few months.  The folks who dreamed up ‘planned obsolescence’ never counted on the Sams who keep the broken crap and live in their own midden.  Another year, I figure he’ll run out of room completely.  I don’t know how many Sams are out there, but I have to wonder if this isn’t why Sears, after a century, is going broke.

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There is something seriously discordant about President-in-Exile Trump going to the conservative Christian Faith and Freedom Coalition to rail about the con artists running the Jan. 6^th hearings.  Me and Don both listened to them, but we heard differently the testimony regarding how Pence and his advisors prayed together before coming to the Capitol, then read their Bibles (which they apparently carry) to find strength and solace during the assault on the chambers.  Don Sr. had cursed Pence earlier, calling him a wimp and a pussy, but he felt no embarrassment addressing the evangelical right to denounce his Vice President, one of their own faith but maybe not their own freedom, whatever the moniker means to them.  Honestly, I’m boggled by the disconnect.  One man is fervently religious, the other is fervently not.  Can’t these yahoos tell the difference???

Well, as one who is more than a bit distrustful of religion, all religions, it only confirms my prejudice.  I would want my church or synagogue or mosque to be able to recognize a phony, a sinner, a man without scruples or morals or the sense god gave a donkey, as the charlatan he is.  But no, apparently that is a bridge too far for them.  He gave them a Supreme Court that will soon outlaw abortions and protect us citizens’ right to own and carry military assault weapons.  And hopefully they think that Court will rule that religion and government can mix all it wants.  So long as it’s the Christian religion, at least theirs.

In his speech to the assembled holy, he testified that he would, if elected Fuhrer once more, pardon those patriots who were convicted of rioting in the Capitol.  The man is nothing if not an unrepentant criminal.  Of course he would pardon these insurrectionists, they were there to do his bidding.  He’ll pardon all the crooks, probably give them a job in his White House staff.  If Rudy Giuliani could be his attorney without embarrassment, bring on LaPierre from the NRA to be his Attorney General.  The hogs are at the trough, dinner is served.

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