The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I remember about 40 years ago first coming up to Skagit Valley and seeing the tulip fields. Pretty amazing. Ten years later I drove down Best Road thinking I might catch a view of the fields and maybe lunch in La Conner. It must’ve been two days later when I finally managed to get off Fir Island. For some reason I’ve never liked tulips ever since. Sure got to thank the Chamber of Commerce for that. I’m sure the farmers thank em too.

But I been thinking — how can we turn this public relations machine to our advantage — and I hit on something I think the Skagit Valley Economic Council can sink their sharp little teeth into. Tulip Fuel. Bio-diesel with Hi Octane Petal Power. You drive in the Tulip Station and you can choose from candy apple red to lemon drop yellow. Earth Friendly, Home Grown Flower Power Fuel. The Valley’s sort of where the 60’s hit the Sound, never really ended. So Flower Power won’t be real hard to sell. The Co-op’s next big Expansion will include 10,000 gallon underground tanks and those colorful pumps. High pollen octane for the BMW crowd. Bulb mulch for the Volkswagens.

Oh, I suppose the backups will be sort of long, but spread out longer than 2 weeks, nothing like the Tulip Festival. Plus knowing you’re doing something great for the planet should help. Something that should’ve been done long ago. You know, putting a halt to that Tulip Gridlock.

Petal Power —- think about it!

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Six months until the November elections. Whoo hoo, the fun we’re gonna have. Kari Lake, running for Arizona Senator, suggested that the True Americans should strap on their Glocks and be ready for anything the next few wild months. If that isn’t literally a call to arms, well, nettles don’t sting when you eat em raw. She claims the last elections were rigged, hers in Arizona and Trump’s in America. She also accused Maricopa County of tampering with ballots in 2020. A Republican election official sued her for defamation and oddly enough, Ms. Lake filed a default judgement accepting her own culpability. Probably figured the courts were rigged against her anyway so why not just admit guilt and hope the fines won’t be too egregious.

Meanwhile her hero is on trial in New York, more evidence of swamp monsters trying to destroy everything that’s good and decent in this once great Christian nation, proof enough for her that evil walks among us. While her rally bemoaned the demise of democracy under an illegitimate regime that had stolen the election, they raffled off an assault rifle. Nice optics if you’re looking to incite a civil war.

January 6th was a warmup, I guess, prelude to what’s coming if these folks don’t get their way. If they win the next election, it must have been legitimate. If not, there’s only one possible explanation. Time to turn over the chessboard and grab a Glock. Storm the Bastille! Erect the guillotines! Hang the traitors! Once again, time for some armed tourism at the Capitol. Thanks, Kari, thanks a lot….

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An old friend of ours recently wrote to say he was trying to test drive some Buddhism. Be Here Now. Be in the moment. Pay a little attention. What my old man called Wake the Hell Up! …when we were what he referred to as ‘glommy’. My response, typically smartass, was something to the effect, what ELSE you gonna do? We’re paying attention to SOMETHING, even if it’s dopey.

You want to update your Facebook, well, I guess that’s your world. You want to watch Fox News all day, I figure you like being pissed off incessantly. Your choice. What I think is the world, your universe, is pretty much those thoughts in your head all the livelong day. Change your thinking and you change the world. Course, you could still get hit by a meteor coming right out of left field and WHAP! Brand new day. Or not.

We mostly live in a virtual world now. The kids already put down earnest money on the mortgage. Us old farts are working on how to forward e-mail jokes, but the computer’s tractor-beam is reeling us in, slow at first, but even if we never notice, accelerating all the time.

On the South End we still prefer the Old World, the one where we let nature and weather have a say in what turns and twists our day takes, the one where we still throw ourselves into a building project or a repair job or an art project or planting a garden, what I think of as the creative process, but is really just an attempt to do more than just Go with the Flow, maybe actually try to bend the river. God isn’t the only dude who believes in creation, not down here, no disrespect. You ask me — and, as usual, I know you didn’t — a good religion should ask for more than just paying attention.

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A couple years ago we stayed with some friends for a couple days in Sedona, Arizona who had a house rented for a month. Sedona is a tony little burg nestled in the red hills beneath a vertiginous climb on its northern border where tourists come in droves in search of palm readers, gorgeous scenery, high end shopping, crystal therapies, woo-woo healers and various dream-catcher shysters. Prices are astronomical, needless to say, so much so that the folks who work minimum wage jobs to service the rich cannot possibly afford rents in the village or nearby environs since most apartments and houses are lodging for the Airbnb vacation industry.

What to do? Well, the good people of Sedona are floating the idea of offering these indentured servants use of a municipal parking lot to sleep in their cars between shifts. This, as you would probably agree, is wildly big hearted of the city fathers. Free parking! Their generosity is overwhelming. Of course, given these bitter partisan times, there are those who cry foul, who worry that their city parking lot will become a tent city that draws the homeless from Phoenix and Yuma, making their idyllic boutiquey village an attractive ghetto for more impoverished workers who couldn’t possibly make a living wage.

Welcome to the Land of the Privileged. Welcome to America. Even here on the South End the possibility of finding affordable rents for those willing to drive long distances to places of employment is daunting. Our food bank in Stanwoodopolis is crowded, the homeless are sleeping in town doorways or in the parks while, maybe you heard, the rich are getting richer. God forbid we tax the corporate wealthy or the billionaire ruling class to narrow the income inequity. After all, we might become them someday and after all our hard work to make that first billion, how unfair to take a bigger slice to use to solve problems like homelessness. No, let them eat cake, these impoverished losers. And in Sedona, let them live in their cars. Just park outside the city limits….

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I got a lot of friends who are O.C.D., obsessive compulsive disorder folks, what we on the South End call Anal. Harsh word, anal, so for our purposes here we’ll stick with OCD. Don’t want to offend anyone, but linguistics can be a two edged knife. My pals suffering from OCD are mostly engineers, but they don’t see their symptoms as suffering. Or a disorder even. In fact, they would argue that the orderliness they demand of themselves is quite possibly the panacea for the problems the rest of us have. Course, they don’t factor in the fact that the problem I have is mostly them.

But let’s be fair. The new psychiatric diagnostic description for myself is: S.L.O.B. Seriously Lacking Obsessive Behavior. Poor toilet training as a kid, I guess. I don’t have to wash my truck every damn week. I don’t wash it every year some years. I accept that the universe is falling apart, what we call entropy down here in the South End Scientific Community. It’s just how things work. They go to hell in a handbasket and if you want to spend your life pushing rocks up a hill like Sisyphus, be my guest. They’re going to make a nice rock wall for yahoos like me when they end up down my way at the bottom.

I don’t make my bed. I don’t clean my windows. I don’t dust my shelves. I don’t edge my lawn. I don’t stack my firewood in nice rows. I don’t organize my files. I don’t follow directions. I don’t even look at the damn directions. I don’t follow a recipe or write one down either. I mean, why? The next batch of bread or homebrew or the next meal will be different, maybe better, maybe worse. C’est la vie, amigo! Routine is the killer, lists are for someone closer to death, order is for the delusional, life is chaos and the sooner you accept it, the better off you’ll be. So yeah, I’m SLOB.

I’m sure there’s a pharmacological cure for my ailment. But hey, I’ve got a pharmacological cure for lots of my ailments, why add one that might have side-effects for the others? In the final analysis, I suppose there’s a nice equilibrium between me and my OCD cronies. They draw in the lines, I draw the rest. When it works, we got a great little homeostatic community. When it doesn’t, well … we’ll find out what happens when gravity hits anti-gravity. Probably sounds like my banjo…..

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