The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

People always ask me, how is it you can manage to live down at the Millionaire Club of the South End when you don’t really have a job? They think the way the world works is you make an hourly wage or a salary, then you hop right out and buy a new car, a palatial house, a super size TV —- all of it on time, all of it figuring out those payments the mortgage company or the credit card company or the car dealer is gonna fit into your income.

I think the schools in America, at least the ones I went to, wanted to keep us in the dark about interest and principal. The only principal me and my wiseass buddies saw was in his office, reading us our detention notices. I don’t owe anybody anything. Except maybe an apology. I drove a jalopy. I lived in a shack for 17 years. I built my ‘new’ house myself. I’m not saying it’s going to make the Street of Dreams, but it’s paid for and I tell you young’uns, that’s a dream come true for a boy a mortgage would’ve made into an indentured servant.

I had a former friend’s punk teenage boy ask me one time if I was rich. Big smirking grin. Real smug kid. Already a con-artist like his old man. Smarter than you and me by a country mile, he figured. I thought about wiping that smile right off his map. But finally I said, naw, I’m not rich, not the way you mean, not in any way you’d ever understand. But I am free. I don’t owe anybody a red cent. Don’t have debts weighing me down. Don’t have to worry about the mortgage. Course, that’s a rich money won’t touch. That’s a wealth you can’t take to the bank.

I won’t tell you my buddy’s punk son got any lessons here — but at least I figured he wouldn’t come back after dark to see what he could steal. He’d go find a rich guy….

I know you folks have probably heard the news: Stanwood wants to bring a 4 year college to the area. Univ. of Stanwoodopolis. Higher degrees in Lefse Rolling, Lutefisk Engineering, and Storage Unit Management.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. The town’ll be over-run by eggheads. Professors taking over the barstools at the Stanwood Hotel, ruining our rural backwash hick ambiance. Expecting political discussions, not fishing stories. Wanting napkins with their hand-crafted malt beverages and hors douerve plates, not peanuts. The Stan-Isle Bookstore will sell 5 pound tomes with 5 dollar words nobody but the PhD’s will understand. FOR 50 DOLLARS! With titles like the Socio-Economic Dialectic of 3rd Generation Scandihoovian in the Stillaguamish River Drainage.

The whole town’ll go to hell in a hurry. Just when the fast food franchises were giving us a glimmer of hope of joining mainstream society. All those student shops will take over now. More art galleries. Boutique soap stores. Boutique clothing stores. Boutique furniture stores. Head shops. Movie houses, Art movie houses. Fancy pants restaurants. Ethiopian Epicure. Persian Pizza. La De Da Linguini.

Gonna look like Berkeley in the 60’s. Long hair. Free love. Dope smoking, anti-war, bohemian anti-establishment types. Weird clothes. Weird music. Weird period. Weird as a Way of Life.

Which….. if you stop and think about it, is a perfect description of the South End. Which … if you been following our logic here, is exactly why the new campus should be located down by us — the University of the South End, Tyee Branch. Save em from hiring new professors. The woods are thick with em. The Band alone could be a quarter of the art faculty. Think about it. It’s the obvious location — and it’ll preserve the Stanwoodopolis we all love……

If you were to wander into half the South End’s garages or tool sheds or the artists’ studios, you’d find what a good entrepreneur would need to start a Second Hand Shop. Course most of that stuff came from the 2nd hand shops that flowered and wilted down here where capitalism came to die. Half of us layabouts and slackers were searching for a livelihood that required little or, preferably, no work. After all, we didn’t migrate here looking for jobs or careers. Telecommuting came a little late for us.

No doubt there are other backwashes, box canyons, dark sides of mountains and swamp country where dreams go to mutate, but hope springs eternal on the South End, nourished by the compost of failures lost and forgotten. If you know where to look, buried behind a nettle jungle or peeking through a blackberry barrier, you can still see a sign for DONNA’S KLASSY ANTIQUES, one for SOUTH END COLLECTIBLES, paint mostly gone and posts rotted, JERRY’S JUNQUE over a building gone to powder post beetles, collapsed into weeds and a twenty foot cedar growing through a hole in the roof.

Dirty Dan’s Trash Emporium opened last winter. Recently emigrated from the wilds of Tacoma, Dirty Dan is really Dan Vandiver, newly divorced from wife and job, a refugee from a past life same as the rest of us, figuring he can parlay his IRA’s against his alimony payments, maybe make a Go of things here in the outback of the island. Covid put a stake in the heart of that fantasy.

Timing, the philosophers will tell you, is everything. Location location, the realtors will argue, is everything. Luck, I will counter, is the joker in the deck of the best laid plans. Dan … well, Dan had three strikes against him from the start. A kindred spirit is what Dan is, no shame down here in failure. The graveyard here is filled with Dirty Dans. Welcome to the club.

My neighbor Fred is standing next to his 40 foot expandable travel trailer with his SUV hitched to its bumper as he’s venting his ire at the free transit bus that’s just gone by. “See that?” he asks, waving irately at the emergency lights flashing while the driver picks up another neighbor’s teenage kid, skateboard under one arm. I give him a fish face, not much meaning he can read, because I know where Freddie’s headed. He’ll start with the bus subsidy for all the freeloaders on the South End, then he’ll move on to taxes, most of them wasted, frittered away on government services he sure doesn’t want or need. He voted for our Tea Party commissioner, he’ll tell me again and again, in hopes she’ll ‘starve the beast’, what he calls shrinking government down to something the size he can flush in a toilet.

Freddie worked all his life at Boeing, bastion, he says, of a Free Enterprise system. I used to argue with him about all the military contracts and tax breaks, but Fred worked on 747’s , not cruise missiles. He retired a wealthy man after 30 years, bought a nice home, owns motorcycles and sports cars and travel trailers and about every piston driven device that he can fit in his driveway, the motorcoach shed and a three car garage. He’s got HIS and by god he doesn’t want a red cent going to someone who didn’t work to get THEIRS. Not directly and not indirectly. That free bus bugs him no end and it’s only one item on a very long list of Grievances.

No one says you have to be generous. Or magnanimous. Or take care of the needy or the poor or the infirm. Freddie doesn’t see any, not one, familiar face among the downtrodden and he doesn’t see it as his problem. More than half us South Enders and the island too don’t either. They got theirs and they can’t imagine losing it to bad health or a bad economy or just bad luck. They aren’t their brothers keepers.

“See that kid getting a free ride,” Freddie says sneeringly. “you just taught him he doesn’t need to work.”

“He’s 13 years old, Fred,” I say. “Too young to drive, too young to buy a car. He goes to middle school. You think he should pay tuition?”

Fred pauses a nanosecond. “Might not be a bad idea.” I expect he’ll write a letter tonight to our current commie commissioner.

You maybe read about the town that had its water system hacked. Some evil yahoo with a cellphone managed to instruct the city’s system to pump in extra poison, no problem at all for an amateur hacker bent on serious malfeasance. Imagine what the Russians could do if they were bent on an all-out water attack! But nobody thought it was those Russian trollers, they’re a little bizzy sending out misinformation for the right wing networks to pick up and air as if it were the evening news flash.

But … it got me to wondering in all my Covid lockdown spare time, if all these Qanon conspiracy theories weren’t the result of a multi-pronged, nefarious meddling with the water systems of every major city in the Land of the Gullible, Home of the Rumor, by hackers bent on destroying our very sanity, pitting Republicans against Democrats, blacks against whites, Jews against Evangelicals, artists against, well, everybody. Just a few keystrokes and slowly, pitilessly, demonically, the Kool-Aid seeps its poison into the chlorinated water of Chicago, the lead contaminated water of Detroit, the pesticide fouled agua of Los Angeles, the industrial soup of New Orleans and all the other cities across this once great land. Only the plastic bottle addicted citizens would be unaffected. At first. But who knows where that water in those polycarbonate containers came from. Not secret mineral springs from the caves of France, bet your butt on that. No, more probably they come from Kansas City, San Francisco, Philadelphia. They come contaminated with the same Kool-Aid toxin!!!

At first I thought I was safe. Our well water comes from one hundred feet below ground. We’re not on a community well with its simple controls any sixth grader could probably hack. No sir, pure, unadulterated, clear H20 from the bosom of the island, same aquifer as the neighbors. But then I noticed the neighbor’s sign still up TRUMP 2020. And another. TRUMP 2024. And just up the road STOP THE STEAL! And that’s when I realized anyone could slip into our wellhouses, dump the Kool-Aid and who would know???

I put a lock on the wellhouse door, of course, but now I’m afraid to drink the tap water. All I can say is thank god for beer. And … I notice the cereal is even tasting better these days.