The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Some people are born to be businessmen. They know how to promote themselves, they understand negotiation, they embody what Donald Trump calls the Art of the Deal. I wish I had a couple of strands of those genes in my DNA. My kin, my ancestors, my genepool — all I can say is they climbed down out of the trees, but they never figured out they could sell the timber or develop the real estate. Plus we never remembered how to climb back up so now folks want to sell US the damn trees.

I actually have a business. I know, hard to believe. My right-leaning Republican relatives and in-laws shake their heads sadly to think I’m the only one in the two families who represents their bedrock GOP values of entrepreneurial get-up-and-go, job creation, small business struggles, all those virtues they hold dear. I sell goods. I buy materials, fashion them into art and then I have to sell the product. American? Well, it sticks in their throats, but yeah, as apple pie. Mom and country. Bootstrap success story. You might suppose, after 35 years, I’d be pretty good at it. I just made a stained glass entryway window for some new arrivals on the South End. Even though I’m cheaper than any glass shop in the Pacific Northwest … and even though my stuff is original artwork … I ended up giving them a discount. And they’re rich. You tell me what’s wrong with that picture.

I bought a new truck a few years ago when my old one almost caused me to miss a huge commission for a public art project down in Portland. You think I negotiated a lower price or argued for some ‘extras’? If you thought that, you don’t know me. All I asked my salesman was sell me the damn truck sitting out there in the lot, the one without any bells or whistles, and don’t screw around, I want to leave here ASAP, I don’t want to play the game, I don’t want the sales manager showing me an invoice proving you aren’t making any money on the deal, I don’t want to hear that bullshit. Yes, I’ll pay full price. No, I don’t want to take it for a test drive. Yes, I’m a complete idiot.

But …. I’m an idiot who would rather pay the full monte than get down in the pit and wrassle for a few dollars. I’m not going to lie and say money is beneath me. I’m frugal to a fault. I’m my Depression-era parents’ kid. I shop mostly at Goodwills, I buy Chinese, I’m so stingey I squeak. Money comes hard and it leaves hard too.

Sales is a tough job, at least for the likes of me. Buyer beware? I don’t think so. For me, it’s seller beware.

I got a friend who was kicked out of Catholic Seminary many years back for admitting he was gay. I guess if he had been a pedophile too, he could’ve been a priest. Even a gay pederast known to his parishioners would’ve been okay, although the bishop or cardinal or the Pope might want to move him along to other parishes that didn’t know his history. Like they say, it takes a lot of faith to be religious.

My buddy lost his faith. He couldn’t quite square up a church that professed love for his fellow man in the abstract but not in the particular. All I can say — as an outsider and even an infidel — they lost a good man, a thoughtful man and a man with a very big heart.

Religion is a topic best left alone, I’ve learned the hard way. For awhile the South End Diner had the Bible study group descend on two of their too few tables. They only ordered coffee, no breakfast, and drank refill after refill without leaving much of a tip or a thank you either. Anita, the owner back then, watched her business going downhill, mostly when her other regulars got sick of the debates over Leviticus. She finally asked them to go somewhere else, they were curdling the eggs.

“And besides,” she told them, “morality shouldn’t be as hardboiled as you gentlemen make it.”

Live and let live, but nevertheless she wanted them to live somewhere else half the damn mornings of the week. Jezebel, they called her. But not to her face, of course. Anita was much loved down here and known by all as tough but fair. “Take it back to the church,” she told them, “and if I want to join, I will.”

We actually got a little church on the South End, the Little White Chapel in the Ravine, a non-denominational congregation that ministers to quite a few of us sinners. Comfort and fellowship come in many forms and myriad faiths. Debating which one is the correct one, well, I leave that to the righteous. Me, I just try to do as little harm as I can and stay out of their way. Figuring out the universe, trust me, that’s not in my pay grade.

The Crab Cracker asked if I could maybe whip up an April Fool’s sketch again this year. You know, something in the line of the new Amazon Distribution Center down just south of the South End Diner or maybe Two Toke Tom’s Cannabis Emporium Grand Opening’s free edibles. Course, we already did something on this order. The editors got angry calls from some of their readers who had driven clear down to our remote regions here only to find … well, an empty storefront half lost to encroaching blackberry vines. Half of em ran out of gas before they could find their way back to the Colton Harris-Moore Memorial Bridge. I seriously doubt they’ll be back to this sunny end of the island, I don’t care how many of those glass balls we hide down here in the backwash we’re sprucing up for our Annual Spring Nettle Festival.

Folks apparently believe what they read. When the Cracker ran the issue on the new Alpaca Hunting season regulations, holy moly, you might suppose it would be fairly obvious only a Fiend of the Worst Sort (or the figment of a very sick writer’s imagination) could think he could purchase a license down at Elger Bay Store, dress up in llama camouflage and crawl on his beer belly across blackberry razor wire to sneak up on these poor cute defenseless little critters, I don’t care HOW good they taste on the grill.

The Cracker could photoshop Big Foot behind the plaza, Colton in a Cessna over Mabana, Donald Trump quaffing a pint of nettlle IPA at the Tyee Brewery, the South End String Band playing Benaroya — and folks would just naturally believe their eyes. Not simply because the Cracker is a bastion of journalistic professionalism with all their sources checked and double checked, but we’ve just become folks who either believe everything or believe nothing.

On the internet April Fool is everyday. The political e-mails and pundits’ blogs that spread faster than Covid variants are more and more outrageous, most of them outright lies if anyone bothered to fact-check. You either buy it hook line and stinker before calling the editor to complain or you walk away shaking your fist vowing never to believe ANY of this stuff.

So in all honesty I just can’t be a party anymore to the Crab Cracker’s misguided (even if humorously intended) attempt at public deception this last issue before their sale to the Stanwood/Camano News. And when the new owners vow complete journalistic integrity, I hope you know Skeeter’s going to be 100% honest in his reporting. And it won’t have one iota to do with my new raise from these really great new editors. You have my word. As any who know me can attest, my word is my bond. And I’m not talking bail.

So okay, I got my 2nd dose of Covid Kevlar last week, a Pfizer vaccine probably chock full of micro-transmitters Bill Gates snuck in there to track my every move, information he could have just asked me to give him, not too much variation. I’m now bulletproof, at least for infection from the coronavirus, maybe not for autism, future cancers, 3rd limbs trying to grow and possible susceptibility to Qanon conspiracy theories. My voluntary Lockdown is over!! I even think my sense of humor is coming back … or at least mutating.

It’s been a little more than a year since Pandemic Paranoia swept most of the world and maybe half of this country of contrarians, disbelievers, Trumpists and other kooks and ninnies. When I mentioned to a neighbor, one who’d actually contracted Covid, that over half a million of us had died in this Land of the Free Thinkers, he told me no, they died all right, but probably from underlying causes. If you want to debate this kind of logic, be my guest, but me, not so much. I’m vaccinated — did I mention? — and folks who think Covid or E-bola or polio or wasting brain disease are phony, well, skip the vaccine and take their chances. I’m on their side now — a few less of these maskless conspiracy theorists is okay by me now that I’m officially immune.

Oh sure, the virus will probably mutate and we’ll need booster shots for the Variants. But eventually the variant viruses would whittle down the non-believers. I’d call it Darwinism … but that’s just going to invite more hostility and resistance toward us folks who wore masks and got vaccinated and lockdowned during the Plague of 2020. Let’s call it instead an Upward Intelligence Trend, the smart survive. Maybe it was an underlying condition too.

I was minding my own business in the Pilot House Lounge and Bar — or at least tending to my beer and scribbling away in a notebook I always carry — when a guy I didn’t know parked at the table next to me with a cup of coffee. Army fatigue jacket, butch crewcut, aviator sunglasses hanging from a strap. Probably ex-CIA or retired corrections officer. He had his back to the ballgame on the bigscreen TV over the bar, apparently more interested in my antics. I tried to avoid eye contact, watched a bunt down the first base line, but he didn’t need a cue.

“Whatcha think of that drilling ban in the Arctic?” he finally asked. I looked up from my great American novel, took a slow sip of suds and studied him for motives. He didn’t offer anything obvious. Just a guy in a bar, a student of politics, no doubt.

“Okay with me,” I said non-committedly. And waited. “You rather have nuclear?” he countered. His coffee sat untouched. I sighed. Here we go …. “Okay with me,” I said again. Cap’n. Klink nodded.

“How about those Muslim terrorists, you okay with that?” I put my pen down. Slid my notebook to the edge of the table. Took a slow sip of beer whose taste seemed metallic now. Why me, Lord, why me? We were alone except for Jerry wiping down the bar that didn’t need wiping. The batter took a called strike. I looked at my inquisitor, some bridge troll out for a holiday.

“We don’t get too many down my way on the South End,” I finally said. “So you aren’t bothered?” he sneered.

“Oh, I’m bothered,” I said, feeling the blood rising. “I’m bothered right now.” He finally sipped his coffee and smiled. Now he was getting there. Strike two to the batter on the TV. I smiled back, hoping to cut off his air supply. It did — he dropped the phony grin. “Whatcha think of us white males turned into second class citizens?” he fairly snarled. I laughed out loud this time. Jerry looked up. Behind him a baseball landed in the outfield stands. I left my beer half finished and stood up to go.

“Try not to be a victim, friend. Especially if you’re white and male. Doesn’t leave much for those terrorists to take from you.” Jerry waved so long and gave me a quizzical arched eyebrow. The pitcher put a baseball in the manager’s hands and headed for the showers. Me too.