The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I know you’re probably sick unto death of hearing me ramble on about my little projects. Home improvement, self-improvement, who out there cares and why should they? The stuff I do, everybody used to. At least before TV and computers made my world boring and anachronistic. Sure it’s nice to pretend I live up some holler a stone’s throw from the 19th Century or that someday they’ll name my crappy pond Walden Too. Truth is, that pond will maybe hold a footprint of mine in its mud, a future fossil drying up and of interest only to archeologists back to explore the planet. Hominid South Endosaur, bipedal, semi-upright, omnivorous, small brain, tool user from the Menopausal Era before the global warming extinctions.

They won’t find much of us, I’m betting. They’ll make bad guesses from my middens before the mizzus made dump runs mandatory when she arrived on the scene. I don’t even want to tell you what I buried back then, but let’s just say you piece together as much of my civilization as the folks who dig through the Jamestown dumps in the Virginia colonies. I find artifacts myself from prior pioneers. Hell, my shack is an artifact, built over 100 years ago. Up the ravine we’ve found 17 brass beds, an old Studebaker, empty liquor bottles, a copper washing machine tub, assorted glassware, coffee pots, zinc canning jar lids, you name it, it’s out there. I buried a cast iron wood/electric Monarch stove too heavy for me to lift, but okay to roll into a hastily dug grave.

So I was gonna tell you about making a bed this week. I planed rough cut madrona, designed a headboard and a footboard, ripped the wood but saved the ones with bark, assembled them, finished it and hauled it up to the house we just bought next door. You’re thinking, Big Deal, so what, shut up already. You can buy a bed in Goodwill. Or get a job and go buy a nice bedstead downtown at the furniture store. Who in holy hell makes a damn bed anyway?

My father-in-law, visiting a couple months before I finished the new house I’d spent one and three quarter years building already, found me making homemade doors. I was on Door #2 or so with 9 total to build. He said I could buy those at the hardware store and maybe move into the new house before me and his daughter died of old age waiting to finish building it. He had a good point, I guess.

But I’m not much for advice, especially when I’m knee deep already in a project. I finished 7 more doors, hung them and moved on to artsy fartsy floor tiling, stained glass transoms, maple floors, window casements and slate in the entryways and the hallways downstairs. Tedious work a lot of it. We did manage to move in before our demise, I’m happy to report. Course now I’m building an oak bed to replace our brass one. I guess it’s always going to be a race to the finish, one I’ll eventually lose. Like they say, you made your bed, now lay in it. I’m trying…..

Karla’s Kut Above sits below the WindyRear real estate offices right across from the fire station. We don’t have much commercial on the South End so space is limited and rent is astronomical. Karla does okay, despite the overhead. She has a couple of stylists who rent chairs, Billie and Veronica, neither from around here, which keeps the gossip almost under control.

Veronica kept saying Camahno for Camano the first year, but tomahto, potahto, who cares? One of the recent candidates for Island County Commissioner pronounced it Camahno too. Who knows, maybe Veronica styled his hair? Actually we do know cause he said he’d never been here before. It’s an odd name for an odd island. Billie called it Commando Island and still does.

Karla figured she’d get to experiment a bit on styling, become the tonsorial artiste she’d dreamed of being. Course, mostly she does perms and blue hair touch up for our more geriatric crowd. It pays the rent, but she would be the first to tell you it doesn’t exactly set her soul free, but hey! life isn’t a chick flick.

Veronica plans to move on soon, so she says. Set up a salon herself closer to Seattle and Gomorrah, maybe draw a hipper, younger clientele than here. Course, the competition is worse, rents are even higher and there’s that whole nuisance of accounting, advertising, payroll and hiring, stuff that sort of ruins capitalism for her. Me too, if you want to know….

Billie’s my stylist … although maybe that’s not the most accurate description. I get a Lop Job about once every 9 or 12months, depending on my need to look halfway respectable at finalist art presentations, what you might call job interviews. The rest of the time I wear hats in various stages of decomposition. Hair style is pretty much moot. I know Billie’s been at the Kut Above a long time because she’s cut my hair 3 or 4 times. Might explain why she never remembers me. Well … at least until I put the hat on over her tonsorial artistry. Also explains why I always leave a generous tip.

Quite a few islanders ask me if they’re South Enders or not, thinking, I guess, there’s a geographical demarcation, a Mountain View/Dixon Line. I usually tell them it’s more a psychological barrier, but then they think I mean psychotic and before you know it, misunderstandings turn into subtle hostilities and they decide they don’t want to be one of us after all. It’s not exactly a social club. Most of us down here didn’t choose to be South Enders. These things just happen.

Nevertheless, it does get a person to thinking: maybe we should annex a few acres here and there, suburbanize the backwashes and the bayous, zone them as Free Thinking refuges, then while we’re at it, liberate the gated communities trapped behind remote controlled bars and alarms with their high def TV’s and their BMW’s. Lower their taxes, if nothing else, fair compensation for the loss of their overvalued self esteem. Get em off their High Horse and their high property tax.

Hellfire, sometimes I get grandiose and imagine we could bring our enlightened way of living clear up to the north end, maybe even Stanwoodopolis. A little Shucks and Awe or maybe Aw Shucks and Law, liberate them from their backward ideas on government and philosophy. South End Exceptionalism! The 21st century’s answer to Manifest Destiny. I know, it sounds good to me too.

But then I pause and think: if we break it, we own it. Iran just went to pieces this week and if we couldn’t bring those folks some good old fashioned American Values, how do we expect Utsaladians and Camalochers to get behind our South End Ideals? They got their tribal ways, entrenched for decades and barely hanging together by a thread. Upset the delicate balance and we’ll reap the whirlwind. Onamac vs. Finistere, grabbing for that northern gas pipeline. Juniper Beach sweeping down on Twin City Food, overtaking its strategic barricades on the river. Terry’s Cornermen capturing Cascade Lumber. It would make Middle East sectarianism look like Wednesday night women’s mud wrestling at the 282 Pub. No, I think to keep the peace we need to keep the boundaries defined. You folks envious of us South Enders, well, you probably need to talk to a realtor down at Windy Rear. Or just wait til you lose your job. You’ll find your way here….

Mama said there’d be days like this. You get up on a sunny hopeful morn, you take your shower, brush your teeth, wash the breakfast dishes, toss in a load of laundry, help yourself to another cup of joe. You’re psyched for another day in the mine, just glad to be alive. You go back in the bathroom, get rid of those first two cups of caffeine … and hear the sink gurgling like a bad gargle. Odd, you think. The kitchen sink chimes in, a drain duet. Then you noticed the toilet water isn’t going down, it’s coming up!

What the …? And then you find the bathtub filling up … with … omigod! With what should never be in your bathtub.

Who ya gonna call? Crapbusters? Being a modern South Ender, I postpone my optimism and pull the shades down on the mocking sun. Ain’t no sunshine when the sewage comes home to roost, trust me. Then I go to my computer and google up Invasion of the Turds, pass up the first ads and go to the How-To and You-Tube and the Suicide Hotline. I pick the How-To. The Hotline will come later, I’m half certain, but it’s a last resort. I have the internet — I have a global support team.

I’m no novice to this plumbing paradox, I pretty much know the bad news that’s coming. I’m just hoping to find a glimmer of hope, some yahoo who sez check the toilet float, jiggle it, you’ll be good to go. My ‘team’ focuses instead on more likely and infinitely worse diagnoses: a plugged sewer line, a ruined drainfield or a full septic tank. Pick yer poison! The tank was pumped recently so I’m down to 2 options. I choose the only one I can fix myself — the line.

That was yesterday. I started at the tank and dug down, found the line a few feet down, then trenched back toward the house. An old growth forsythia thwarted my forward progress. I sawed it off, whacked at its roots, chained it to my truck and jerked it out like a bad wisdom tooth. Sure I felt bad. For me! Its roots were what had clogged my line where the pipes had broken. Iron to clay to PVC. It was like an archeological dig through plumbing eras, Roman to modern.

Today I joined the new pipes, ran some serious water as a test then filled the grave. I tell you, there’s a damn good reason to keep the old outhouse!

I was following a Cadillac SUV with a bumper sticker that read: YOU’RE THE REASON YOU’RE SUFFERING. This is bad news indeed for most of us down here on the South End, but at least now we know who to blame for our misfortunes. Although … I don’t think I care for the Winners in the Game of Life telling us Losers we deserve what we got. Some of us sure do. And I’m one. But I don’t ask for favors … or sympathy … or welfare either. I’m not going to make it to the 1% and I’m not gonna work myself to death trying.

But there are folks like Janet down the road, two kids in preschool and daycare, a husband John back from the Oil Wars with one leg and a head bounced too many times in IED explosions who’s pretty much a permanent casualty. She’s trying to hold a job and hold things together too. She’s 24 going on 60 and I seriously doubt she thinks her suffering is on account of her.

Joe the Plumber — and no, not that Joe the Plumber — has meliosomethingorother, the cancer from breathing asbestos when he unknowingly worked with the stuff in his youth. I doubt he’s going to take kindly to a Cadillac bumper sticker that thinks his Attitude must be to blame for his disease.

The rich think the rest of us are lazy, I guess. The 1% think the losers are takers. The corporate boyz think they made it on their own, no help from the education system, no assistance from the government that built the infrastructure, no subsidies or tax credits or loopholes in the law. They got theirs and if it happens to suck up most of yours, well, tough. You coulda done it too. Course, you might have been born black or Hispanic, you might be autistic or handicapped, you might be a single mom or a laid-off worker, you might get sick, you might be discriminated against, you might have been born on the South End.

We all want to believe we’re the captains of our destiny. But the waters we sail are more treacherous for some. It doesn’t take much compassion to pick up survivors in the water from the lifeboat off your yacht. Course, when the time comes we take the yacht away from you, I hope you’ll understand, it’s going to be your fault.