The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Hits: 21

I was out on the road the other day trying to sell the last of my Skeeter Daddle Diaries, the second printing. I’m about as good at door to door sales as I am at hedge fund managing. Me and money don’t really mix, I’ve learned slowly over a long life without an MBA degree. Neither of us trusts the other….

I meet folks — even down here on the indolent South End — who knew shortly after teething that they wanted to make money, get rich, retire early. They didn’t go to college and spend four years on a Philosophy degree. They picked careers in law or dentistry or finance. You don’t drill for water in the Sahara, that’s what they understood.

Me, I always thought I’d rather do something I loved doing. Call me naïve and slap me with an IOU, but I figured there was always a job, even a miserably low paying one, that would pay the bills and allow me to pursue some quaint interest or other. So I took English, majored in literature and poverty, then stepped off the educational track years later with a nice solid background in arts and history and yeah, literature, then promptly discovered I had virtually NO marketable skills. Kind of a shock. You kind of figure if they sell you a degree, there’ll be a placement.

I worked awhile in a dog pound, ran a cafeteria, drove metro buses, wrote poetry and short stories that got published for, oh, nothing, drove school buses, seriously considered graduate school (maybe get a PhD. in Unemployment or Swahili), moved around a bit, lived in shabby apartments, ate a lot of macaroni and cheese. To be honest, I didn’t mind. What I did mind was not finding the exact perfect job that fulfilled some as yet undiscovered passion in life. Four years at a university and I sure didn’t find it. Now I had to do it AND work crap jobs looking.

I can tell you youngsters — in hindsight — the only thing worse than some crummy job is looking for the next crummy job. But I can also tell you — and don’t get me wrong, I’m not a Perfessor of Smartology — if you settle for the money, or the security, or the health insurance benefits, or the pension, you’ll maybe be satisfied, possibly even happy, but you will never find the thing that makes working really worthwhile. It took me plenty of dead end jobs, too much macaroni, far too many bad bosses, but in the end, you’ll persevere. Probably not rich, but trust me on this, a helluva lot happier.

Hits: 20

Hits: 1184

Somehow in the course list of my varied syllabus I never got around to reading Thoreau’s Walden Pond, the musings of an individualist who decamped from civilization, such as it was in the 1800’s, parked himself in a cabin and reflected on life and living. It was a short walk to his mom’s house for lunches or dinners, tough life, Dave. But give him this: he created his own myth, true or not, doesn’t matter, Americans love a tall tale. Hell, we’ll vote for a guy as President who takes the prize for best liar in the country. You think most people care? C’mon, even the so-called Christians make excuses for his sexual affairs, his financial frauds, even his attempt to overthrow the government — they love the myth, he’s lying, cheating and stealing … for them!

I guess if you don’t have your own Tall Tale, the story of your own life’s heroics, well tag on to someone else’s, ride their coat tails. Taylor Swift or Brad Pitt’s. Identify with them, maybe make you feel a kinship, a bond, a shared world view. Nothing wrong with that. Except … you aren’t Taylor Swift and you will never be Brad and I hope to God we never see another Donald Trump.

Seems to me, a kid who grew old living a life that was maybe not heroic or enviable or soon to be a serialized Netflix drama, but at least my own, where the protagonist, for good or ill, was my own self. Yours is too, by the way. You just have to see it that way, make it yours, not someone else’s. Fine to have role models — okay, maybe not Trump — to clear a path, to show you the way. But eventually we have to bushwhack our own trail even if it means getting lost. Or worse.

Thoreau walked away from what was expected of him. I couldn’t tell you if he was disappointed maybe he didn’t move very far from town and lunches with mom. But I’ll give him this — he gave it a shot. And maybe someday I ought to read his book, see how he did. Right now I’m still working on my own pond.

Hits: 1439

Hits: 25

Hits: 22

Sometimes I lose track of time. Not just the days of the last week. I forget how old I am, all those years behind me. I’ll be looking at one of our Doug firs and think, my god that’s one bigass tree, neglecting to consider that it was fairly large when I came here 47 years ago. You stop and think how much difference half a century made the first half of last century, then how accelerated change was the second half, trust me, future shock is real.

We live down here in the backwash South End of Camano. What was a fairly desolate tail end of the island is now filling in with Boeing and Weyerhauser retirees, Dot.comers who cashed in early and refugees from California whose house back when it cost a couple hundred grand now makes them multi-millionaires up here. I suspect if we sold our homestead we could probably be the Nuevo royalty in Kansas or upstate Alabama. But then who wants to be King of the Louisiana swamps or Duke of the tundra in Upper Michigan. I already left those places — sure don’t want to go back just to own more acreage of swamp or snow drifts.

But … you stay put, the world doesn’t. I’ve resisted change ever since I parked my hippie ass down here, just wanted to be left the hell alone, good luck to the rest of so-called civilization. Still don’t have a cellphone but the mizzus does. I finally had to learn how to use a computer, got one on my desk up at the house I built 30 years ago. All those homesteader skills I learned, everything from plumbing to electric, carpentry to woodworking, they’re all mostly anachronistic now. 3-D printing, Artificial Intelligence, 5-G networks, drone warfare, hundreds of satellites orbiting, electric cars, social media, driverless vehicles, gene manipulation, not all of it bad, just the relentless push of progress, technology ascendant, all of us wired, connected to the Hive.

My father, recently deceased at 100 years old, told us boys on one of our Huck Finn Mississippi River houseboat trips back through the Wisconsin/Minnesota and Illinois/Iowa cliffs, he thought he’d lived in the best of times. Despite the Depression and World War Two. I think maybe I’ve lived through the tail end of those times. What’s coming next will be totally, unpredictably, different. Personally, I’m glad I’m old.

Hits: 27

My brother and I are about to make a long road trip back to Northern Maine where our family is from up next to the Canadian border. We’ll have our parents’ ashes in a couple of matching urns which we’ll have interred in the graveyard a block away from where our Old Man was born, not exactly a homecoming but a full circle nevertheless. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, clichéd or not. Our mother’s family graveyard is 7 miles north up Highway 1, not more than a quarter mile from where she was born at the farm nearby. She died a few years ago and the Old Man died a month ago. Time to make the journey back, I guess.

Those cemeteries go back to the early 1800’s. A lot of relatives buried there the past few centuries, two more on the way, but I doubt my brother and I will be buying plots for ourselves. Don’t think because we’re burying our parents back there we have plans to join them. Or the rest of the clan. We’re just honoring their wishes. I suppose the only requiem, the only memorial, if we can call it either, will be a weeklong reminiscence between just the two of us.

After Dad died, folks asked if I was okay. Sure, I said, the man was 100 years old, had a good life, survived World War Two, had a very successful career in the Forest Service, lived alone until a couple of years ago and still drove, still cooked for himself, wasn’t in any pain at the end, died in his sleep, an easy exit. What, I should want him to last a few more years, become a vegetable? He got to die with dignity, nothing to be sad about. We should all be so lucky…. Our mother, not so much. And still, not that bad either.

There was a poet, a guy named Bly back in Minnesota, who started some drug circle thing, men getting in touch with their inner selves, who claimed a man could never truly be a man until his father died. What a cart of horseshit! My brother and I took weeks off most years to boat down the Mississippi in houseboats, up the Suwanee and St. John’s Rivers in Florida, into Canada for fishing trip, camping up the eastern seaboard, listening to the Old Man’s life. We’d let him skipper the boats, sometimes to our peril. Great trips. All of them. We’ll take one last one together. Coming home it’ll be just us boys.

Hits: 15

Hits: 10

Desperation may very well be the mother of invention but the South End Sinerama’s dream of an outdoor cinema showing soft core x-rated porn is proof that desperation may lead to even worse straits. When the vaudeville circuit dried up for the once infamous Dr. Daring, fire eater, sword swallower and bed of nails expert, he was forced to seek creative outlets beyond the archaic stages of his youth. You don’t run into fire eaters often down at the South End — probably for good reason — but if you’d ever seen the death defying Dr. Daring take a sword down his throat, you’d never forget it, even if you’d never want to witness it a second time.

Doc Daring, for who know what reason — possibly fleeing demons or debt collectors — ended up a long stone’s throw from me. He built a primitive house at his acreage down the road, then slowly filled it with dead automobiles, rusting RV’s, rotting boats, bikes, motorcycles, deceased appliances plus a menagerie of various animals, all the junk and detritus he apparently needed to keep. Hard, I guess, to let go of the past.

Doc made the occasional appearance at alternative fairs and events, mixed in his political patter with flame throwing, but the money was too little and too far between. His life was rapidly becoming its own bed of nails. One stoned night he must have had the inspiration for the Sinerama. He erected a big top style canvas tent, built a frame for a plywood screen he painted white, ran an extension cord out from the shack and started advertising his 16mm vintage porn palace.

Any fool among us South Enders could have told him — as if he would listen — that the Little Church in the Ravine would come howling out of their pews to put a stop to what front page news as far away as Seattle called Camano and Gomorrah. Oh, a few bored teenage boys came once or twice but smirking in a drafty tent on crappy lawn chair lost its novelty pretty quick. Doc eventually got the message after multiple visits by the sheriff’s deputies looking for underage kids and after the attendance dwindled to near nothing.

Lately he’s been showing old ‘30’s fare, Betty Boop cartoons and Laurel and Hardy movies, which draws a few local folks with their kids, probably the ones who never heard of the Sinerama’s heydays. The past, I guess it’s safe to say, is always prologue on the salty South End. Or at least prolonged….

Hits: 20