The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

A lot of the newcomers to the fabled South End build their mega-mansions with their yards left menaced by 100 year old 2nd growth nettle forests. The first windstorm slamming them with 80 mph hurricane force winds triggers frantic calls to their insurance agent … when the power and phone service return.

It’s only a matter of time before they realize their woodland retreat is a potential deathtrap and, better safe than sorry, they decide to clearcut the property. Worst case, they can put in a 9 hole golf course with sand and water traps and never miss the forests that brought them here in the first place. The eagles and deer can migrate back inland a ways among us poorer residents, the ones with handicaps too high for golf.

Course now they need a tree expert. Or at least some logger bonded and insured with references a long resume in the woods industry. Trouble is, the logging era on the South End is pretty far back, mostly black and white photos down at the Historical Society and Tourist Information. So … after some futile internet searching, they invariably get to Jimmy the Gyppo.

Jimmy’s been topping trees for suburban worriers ever since the log market went to pot, medical and otherwise, and the price of a board foot of timber nettle plummeted to less than the cost of hauling it to the mill over in Arlington. He figured out the real money was in One-Offs, either before or after they were on a roof, didn’t matter to him either way. When clients asked if he was bonded and insured, he’d just laugh. That’s why you got the home insurance, he’d say, knowing full well their options were fairly constricted.

Jimmy the Gyppo didn’t come cheap and he even charged to haul the downed trees away. Then he sold the firewood off a flatbed down by Tyee Store, what he called a Two-fer. The rich folks didn’t mind. The whoppers Jimmy regaled them with, spitting tobacco plugs across a pansy garden, made them feel a little like pioneers, breaking soil for the next expansion of the American West, bringing civilization to the wild old South End before finally deciding to move on to the sunny southwest where the winters were dry and there were no forests left to threaten their vacation homes.

I recently had a buddy who advocated that the government, rather than pay out trillions in Covid unemployment compensation and business relief, pay each of us 125,000 dollars to infect ourselves with the virus, thereby achieving herd immunity and sparing us further deficit spending. Basically the Administration is promoting the same idea. But without the 125,000 buck incentive.

Lately I’ve been feeling happily isolated from the Herd. Course, I don’t have kids sequestered at home learning their ABC’s from a laptop instructional video, we don’t have rent payments backing up like a plugged toilet, we aren’t worried about the jobs we lost or the jobs that aren’t coming back, we live in a part of the world where social distancing was pretty much the norm and our routine wasn’t disrupted greatly by the plague. If you offered me a quarter million dollars for the two of us to infect ourselves, I suspect I might have to turn it down. Not just because one or both of us might die or be greatly diminished by the virus, just that money seems like a poor incentive when we’re already living in a South End paradise.

It’s a grand thought experiment though. How many of us would take the money? I suspect quite a few, especially if you were younger. You got a couple kids, you could walk away with half a million. Not bad for snorting up a shot of covid. If you were old with underlying medical conditions, maybe the gamble would look like a sucker’s bet.

My buddy thinks this would save the economy. Sweden thought the same way. Nice try, Stockholm. Course, Sweden never quite reached herd immunity, just ratcheted up their mortality rate. But they didn’t have to pay anybody to catch the coronavirus. The reward was the right not to wear masks and drink in crowded bars. For a lot of Americans that would be incentive enough, forget the cash incentives, some big savings!

For the good of the herd! Try that as a slogan for the upcoming election. Probably about as rallying a cry as Wear Your Damn Mask, Dimwit!

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/audio-making-money-the-old-fashioned-way1.mp3[/podcast]audio — making money the old fashioned way

The South End Senior Center—what the wags at the Marina and Bait call the Senile Center—is basically a pole building down by the Camano Cut and Curl, about a stone’s throw from the now defunct Tyee MegaStore. A pole building, for those unfamiliar with architectural stylings, is a metal sided structure constructed with beams instead of stud framing. Barns and shops are often built this way. So is our Senior Center. Cheap and stout enough.

The Center has a Board and it has a small staff—which is Jenny Hancock and various volunteers who man (well, okay, woman) the desk and phones. Jenny has the only room, other than the unisex toilet in back, that has its own door. This makes it perfect for the occasional dance and their annual fashion show, the flea market fundraiser and their gala auction, capital G, that brings in most of their yearly funding.

The auction used to be held at the close of the flea market, sort of an afterthought. Year after sorry year, the stragglers would bid on bad local art the artists couldn’t sell or give away on the Mother’s Day Studio Tour, plus the usual items from South End biznesses. A day of fishing Jesse’s Deep Sea Charters. Believe me, an hour would be plenty. Or a perm at the Cut and Curl. An hour of acupuncture down at Pins and Needle Therapy. Whoa, Nelly, you can imagine the bidding wars!

Just before they decided to throw in the towel on the auction, Jenny convinced the board to go Gala. Meaning, basically, play dress-up and serve wine and beer, charge an entry and serve coldcuts and cheese with crackers. The first year the Center made 5 times what they HAD been making. The second year they doubled that and on the third they served hard liquor. And made even more. Two Toke Tom is lobbying for medical marijuana sampling, but he’s not on the Board.

The Center is raising money now for a new building. The toxic mold is starting to be an issue and anyway we’re feeling growing pains, not so much from all the new immigrants as that demographically we’re inexorably moving into our senile years. If the auction keeps on improving, we might just make it. Believe me, 3 martinis and even the Bait Shop Boyz will bid a day’s wages for an hour with Janice, head dominatrix at the Pins and Needles.

The salon chairs have started to fill up down at the Cut ‘N Curl beauty parlor at the newly vacated Windy Rear Realty office. Real estate might have gone virtual but the hair styling business is completely hands-on and now that the island has moved into Phase 2 of the Covid epidemic, folks are clamoring for a haircut. Jennie Fitch, the new owner who moved the shop out of the flood zone of Stanwoodopolis, jumped at the chance to locate closer to home here on the Virus-free Zone of the South End, something scientists should probably take a closer look at, see if our nettle pollen might be a natural antibody. The past few weeks business has been brisk, if not actually hyper. She and her fellow stylists, Rhonda and Ronald, have been staying late most nights to keep up with their appointments, something Jennie is glad for and not just for the extra income. Her 30 year old son has returned home, her home, to live in the back bedroom while he ‘sorts things out.’

“I read today that over half the kids between 19 and 30 are living with their parents,” Ronald was saying through his paisley print mask, snipping happily on Carol Abercrombie’s bleach blond curls before touching up those dark roots showing after months without a treatment. “I tell you girls, I’m glad I’m gay without children. No way could I handle having them bringing that nasty virus home to poppa.”

“Oh, Ronald, you don’t know what you’re missing, the joy of children,” Carol Abercrombie said. “Drugs and sex and cooking for them what they won’t eat.” She laughed. “At least my little dear won’t be coming back to live in the basement.” Her little dear, Brandon, was serving 5 to 10 for a drug deal gone bad a few years back in Everett. The State could find housing for him, she said to Ronald who muttered There but for the grace of God. “You do what you can,” she muttered back as blond curls gathered on her black apron.

“I should be so lucky,” Jennie said. “Jonathon moved back three months ago after Covid ended his job. Now he watches TV and expects me to cook and clean and do the laundry. Just like old times. His father tells me it’s only temporary but now I have two of them. Grown kids, lazy and no help at all.”

“Marital bliss,” Ronald intoned happily. “See what I’m missing.”

Everyone laughed but Jennie. This damn plague, she was thinking. She picked up her cellphone and called Nancy Baumgarter. “Nancy, I got an opening late today if it’s not your supper hour. No, I don’t mind a bit staying open late. Great, see you at 7. Bye now.”

Ronald grinned. “Looks like the boys will have to fend for themselves again tonight.” Jennie chuckled. “Looks like.”