The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I’ve always maintained, rightly or wrongly, that if necessity is the mother of invention, boredom is the midwife of art. Most of my artist pals would probably disagree, but I can only speak for myself. If I were busy with a job or a family or any of a countless other enterprises, I doubt I’d stay up late to find the time to make art.

Course my pals would point out that I somehow chose art over careers and family and all the rest and I’ll grant the point. But … I suspect it was my laziness or contrariness that kept me from those and so ultimately I ended up living hand to mouth with part time jobs, as a recluse on this American backwash, too much time on my hands, not enough TV maybe, but eventually succumbing to the siren song of art as a cure for ennui. I sure didn’t intend to be an artist anymore than I planned a career as a business executive.

No doubt there are plenty of folks who do — just not me. A friend of mine who rode cross country moving his divorced daughter from Seattle and Gomorrah back to Madison, Wisconsin with me for four days told me us artists with our mantra that we’ve found the perfect ‘job’, one that we love and doesn’t even really qualify as ‘work’, just screws it up for the people who need to take some crappy job in order to live, to raise a family, buy a house, all that stuff we call the American Dream. They don’t need to hear some yahoo like me telling them art isn’t work, it’s a passion, gee, just find your own passion and you’re all set.

Bullshit, he says. You want society to operate, people have to work jobs that they’re, no way, going to be passionate about. But they’ll be fine, even fulfilled. Shut up, he told me, giving folks false hope.

So … I’m telling you, if you’re not bored, be happy. Life is good. Sure, us artists are probably passionate, but maybe not happy. If I’m bored, rest assured, I’m not contented. But if you think I’m going to get a job, don’t kid yourself, I’ll just go make something, keep myself busy. Not saying that’s what everyone else should do….

Not too long back I got myself invited to a ‘men’s group’. I guess I thought it was mostly a drinking society startup but after the first couple of drafts up at the new bar at Terry’s Corner, the Tippler or some name like that, the conversation detoured from politics and art to subjects on the decidedly morose side. Meaning, our old friend Death, capital D. Gotta say, I was a bit blindsided by the change of topic but these were mostly old geezer friends and they didn’t seem too perturbed, so sure, let’s get Serious.

Serious is not my usual mode for coping with life’s problems. And certainly not the End of Life, which seems to me, is the solution for all the others, welcome or not. Crazy Eddie, fresh off a brush with the Grim Reaper and sporting a new pacemaker, avowed as how he wouldn’t mind sharing some insights after his near death experience. Bobby, having just received the bad news that his chronic back pains would require major surgery, said he was In. When Ralph, the head organizer, looked over at Phil, Phil shook his head wearily. “I don’t know, Ralph.” Phil had lost his wife a month earlier to pancreatic cancer.

Ralph bored in. “Do you a world of good to unburden yourself of some of that grief. What harm would it do?”

One by one Ralph roped them in, old fellas like himself, probably frightened of the waning light … or whatever poetic metaphor keeps the dark glasses off. Of course he had a reading list, most on the subject of How to Cope with the Big D, a syllabus, apparently, for those of us in the Final Stage.

Ralph no doubt will assume I’m in denial. And who knows, maybe I am. But I’ll be damned if I’ll spend one lousy hour of whatever time is left to me on this green planet sitting around with my geriatric pals talking about coping strategies for death and dying, I don’t care how good the beer is. Worst case I’m gonna find some younger friends to drink with.

I’m organizing an exploratory committee to determine the logistics of running for President on the GOP ticket. Why not, everyone else and their 3rd cousin is shooting for the moon, hoping Trump is so under siege with multiple indictments and possibly even incarceration, that the odd man out will become the next candidate for the Republican Party. I’m not going into this naively, don’t even think that for a nano-second. I’m aware that my usual leanings will have to plumb up a bit if this longshot is going to have a snowball’s chance in the hellbroth of today’s politics.

To that end my platform will need to be tweaked a tad. Trans, of course, will now rise to the top of my Greatest Threat to the American Way of White Life. Little girls will no longer have to contemplate suicide worrying about some so-called, maybe not, man coming into their bathroom and scarring them for life. And of course no man turned woman will be allowed to play in the sports of their new gender. In fact, all transgendered people will be required to return to their original sex.

The point here to my future constituents is that I will be running far to the right of my competition. Very far. Guns will be mandatory in every household. Bibles too. Jobs in construction and the service industry will go only to white kids. At a reduced minimum wage. An iron curtain, a Great Wall, will be built not only along the southern border but between us and the lib/woke Canada. America for White Bread Americans, that will be my slogan. All others, those not like us, will be asked to vacate the building. Who needs the complaining?

Welfare and food stamps will be eliminated and those motel and burger flipper jobs will be offered instead. After all, work gives a person dignity. A free lunch sure doesn’t. Rather than waste the country’s time which could be better spent on listening to podcasts debating which books should be banned in our libraries, I will simply ban libraries, saving taxpayers fortunes in wasted money. My first act in office should you, the happily unwoke, elect me, will be to close down Disneyland and Disneyworld. Mickey has had a long enough run. Time to move on.

And, of course, count on me to pardon Donald J. Trump and eliminate the weaponized Department of So-called Justice. The man has suffered enough. We’ll let the local police handle things from here on out. I think you can plainly see, I’m the far right candidate for these right wing times. Victory will be ours … if we can stop the opposition from voting. And after all, isn’t that the American Way?

Back before the building booms when Camano was discovered by the denizens of Seattle and California seeking low cost gated communities, the Piranha Brothers plied their trade in the South End backwash. Their motto, We Don’t Need No Stinking Permits, explains why they worked after hours, on weekends, often times in the gloom of night, anything to avoid the dreaded building inspector. They worked fast and they worked cheap, hammers strapped to their construction belts slung low the way a gunfighter hung his .45, safety off, trigger filed.

They used recycled materials gleaned from tear downs and salvaged structures, not so much out of environmental concerns as a strategy to building on the cheap. Sheds, garages, chicken coops, artist studios — no job was too small, no building too demeaning. They moved surreptitiously from site to site, word of mouth spread to prospective clients the way a virus travels by stealth and speed. The jobs they turned down were those that might arouse the neighbors or were visible from the highway. Cash only, the Brothers demanded. Leave no trace.

It was only a matter of time, of course, before the long reach of the Island County Building Department tracked the two men to an unpermitted barn south of Tyee Store where Jimmy Kennedy found the pair hammering rafters into place three stories above ground. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. ‘I’ll need to see a building permit, boys,” the lawman shouted above their hammers’ racket, ‘and I’ll need to see it now.’ Even though they’d never laid eyes on the county’s agent, they knew who this was and they knew too the jig was up now that their cover was blown. It was, Josh told his partner Pete over a long afternoon of beers at the Stanwood Hotel after paying their fines and receiving their reprimands, inevitable.

‘You aren’t suggesting we go legit, are you?’ Pete asked bleary-eyed. ‘No way, partner, that’s for other construction outfits, not the likes of us.’ And so, maybe sad to say, maybe not, the heyday of the Piranha Brothers seemed at its end.

There are some who say the Piranha Brothers never really existed, just a rumor from the scofflaw days of the island when we built our own homes without permission or permit, us pioneers of Camano. Others claim they retired, drifted back into time and the backwash where even today they construct odd buildings that defy gravity and the law. But if truth be told — and it seldom is down here at the end of the island — the boys drifted into legend. Even if it was only in their own minds.