The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Yesterday I drove over to Hutchison Park and the Little Library that has been vandalized a few times the past couple of weeks. I have been mouthing off about a mural that was airbrushed in the worst part of Seattle and Gomorrah around 1978, one where I chatted with the artist and lamented that in a week it would be desecrated. He told me it wouldn’t, that the community would respect it for what it was, Good Art unselfishly donated to them. Turns out he was right.

So I decided if I’m going to talk the talk, I needed to walk the walk. When I went over to the Little Library to board up the broken windows, the cyclone fence guyz were repairing the battered and busted up old one that had gone unfixed for four or five years, what to me was an indication that nobody cared about this little park and for that reason invited vandalism. Maybe, I told myself, this was the right time to upgrade the library, give the park a bit of new aesthetics, see if the improvements might not offer a Protective Art Shield to the place. What the hell did I have to lose other than a day or so of work building a stained glass replacement for the broken glass? Right?

Right? So yesterday a crabbing buddy of mine helped me clean up the broken safety glass, pull out the book racks and install a 2 foot by 3 foot framed stained glass replacement window. I suspect he thinks I’m a total idiot to put a bullseye on that library. And I suspect he might be right. But … I’m willing to put it to the test. If I’m wrong, okay, a day lost, a lesson learned and another notch in the belt of my cynicism. What are ya gonna do? I’m trying to put art in all our public places on our island and in Stanwoodopolis. If this is quixotic, or simply self serving, which a lot of folks think it is, then I’m kidding myself. Or I’m a fool. Or both.

But if I’m right, maybe, just maybe, this little island will become an Art Island, not just my stuff but the art of dozens and dozens of us, hundreds of us. Not everyone will be happy about that, trust me. Some folks think Camano could have stayed pristine and rural, just happy farmers tending their radish, milking their goats. This art stuff, it’s changing the pastoral ambience, it’s too modern, it’s not in keeping with the commuter crowd and the rich retirees. It belongs in the cities down the freeway, not here, not in their faces. Who’s paying for that? they’d ask when we built the Visitor Center and Sculpture Park and I would answer, not you, pardner. All a donation. And they would say, well, I hate it anyway.

I get it. Some folks wouldn’t hang a poster on their drywalled walls, much less a watercolor or an oil painting. Sure don’t need it, sure don’t want it, wouldn’t hang it if you gave it to em free. Sometimes, I guess, you just have to give it to em anyway….

One of our newspapers gives the Covid stats county by county each and every day. For a long time our county, Island County, had 11 deaths. A few weeks ago it surged to 12. Uh-oh, we thought, the spike has finally hit, time to hunker down even more, avoid all outside human contact, wear a mask even around each other. But then, miraculously, a few days later the number of deaths returned to 11. This week the number suddenly shot up to 13, a percentage rise that looked like Brazil or what’s about to hit Sturgis, South Dakota after the Harley Rally. We started locking the doors, bolting windows and avoiding each other.

The other day I noticed the death toll had reverted back to 11. You can imagine the toll this roller coaster ride is taking on our mental equilibrium, which, in my case at least, was already suffering plague vertigo. What I suspect, and I’m sure my conspiracy theorist cronies will agree wholeheartedly, is that the dead are rising up, returning to life and possibly being secreted away to some Deep State laboratory for further study or horrible experimentation. Or both!! That, or the Covid virus is something that escaped from government labs working on a plague that makes zombies of its victims, probably Republican zombies if my guess is correct.

That’s right, the Undead are going to vote! Mail in, walk in, whatever it takes. And worse, they’re no doubt among us now, infecting the population, killing them then bringing them back to life. Or some semblance of life. Republicanism is the new Zombie-ism. If you don’t believe it, check Qanon for proof. It’s all there, the quotes from doctors at the Z Lab, statistics of the death toll’s shrinking totals, the irrefutable studies by bots in the think tanks, all of it. Don’t just believe me, believe the Q!

The GOP convention is ongoing now. The President promises huuge surprises. I hate to give you a spoiler alert, but … no one will die very long of Covid under his watch. He has the Lazarus Cure, far better than any vaccine that would probably cause autism or worse. The newly undead will be forever grateful as should we. No doubt he’ll have their vote. Undertakers, maybe not.

Suppose you woke up one fine morning and discovered the place where you live was actually an insane asylum. You could tell yourself all these fellow inmates were the crazy ones, all those nutjobs raving half the night, even the caretakers with their whacky conspiracy theories, they were the mental defectives, they were the stark raving mad. Not you. No, not you.

The world is a slippery place, a quicksilver concept of shifting realities, one day this the next day that. Some of us put our faith in religion, some in science, some just go with some kind of viral flow that seeps across the internet like a brain eating plague. People believe what they want to believe these days. Virtual reality is perfect for the folks who feel beleaguered by the old reality. Dreary jobs, dead end careers, bad marriages, deferred dreams, kids who didn’t turn out well, who knows? The world wasn’t what they’d hoped for, wasn’t what their leaders told them it would be, wasn’t fun, wasn’t easy, wasn’t much of anything the ads promised. All lies, all broken promises, all just bullshit.

The government, the corporations, the politicians, even the movie actors, phony phony phony. Who ya gonna call? Who ya gonna trust? Who ya gonna believe anymore? Somebody’s to blame, right? Somebody must be winning while you’re losing, right? Somebody’s got the power, the money, the secrets. The game is rigged, you know that at least. Maybe the Masons, maybe those Rosicrucions, maybe the Jews, maybe Hollywood, maybe the welfare queens, maybe the immigrants, maybe the Democrats, maybe the high tech CEO’s, maybe, just maybe, all of them. There’s a conspiracy going on. To keep you down, to keep you pacified, to keep you from finding out what is really what. Q knows. Q anon has the news. The President, that king of conspiracy theorists, tells you they’re good Americans. But he doesn’t, wink wink, nod nod, know very much about them.

Suppose one fine morning you wake up and discover the insane have taken over the asylum. Find out YOU were the enemy. And all along you thought you were the sane one. Maybe, you think, there actually was a conspiracy. The loonies were planning how to do this all along. One state senator at a time. One Representative. A Governor here, a Supreme Court judge there. The President himself. One fine morning you wake up and everything has changed. Everything. And you might find yourself asking who really is the insane one.

The ladies at Jolene’s Gift and Boutique were eating their bag lunches in a corner of the back storeroom they’d converted into a break room. Microwave, coffee maker, mini-fridge and a small TV hooked up to a crummy antenna they’d mounted on the back of the building and run a coaxial hookup thru a window. Since their usual soap opera wasn’t on for another 5 minutes they were watching CNN’s coverage of Trump’s tax returns.

“You imagine losing 900 million dollars?” Alice said, munching her cucumber sandwich. “How many lifetimes would it take to make that much?” Shelly laughed, put her iced tea down and pretended to do the math. “Oh, too many if you mean ours? Maybe with plenty of reincarnations.”

From behind her cup of coffee Katie volunteered, “My Jim could lose that much at the casino in a year too if he had it when he walked in. Heck, he may have lost nearly that already. I sure don’t see a paycheck these days. Goes to the tribe.”

“White man’s guilt,” Alice observed with a smirk.

“Maybe he can write it off as a loss,” Shelly suggested. “Isn’t that what Donald did, gamble and lose?”

“Or a charitable donation to the Indians,” Alice tossed in. A commercial for the Washington Lottery came on with improbable timing, its snappy slogan appearing at the end: You cannot win if you do not play. Katie groaned. “Jim should have that tattooed on his fat ass.”

“More like you cannot lose if you do not play,” Shelly suggested, taking one final gulp of her cold coffee and considered pouring a fresh cup, then decided her stomach was already upset.

“You suppose he really is rich?” Katie asked aloud.

“Jim, you mean?” Alice asked and laughed.

“The rich don’t pay taxes,” Katie muttered, “so I guess he must be rich.”

“And the best part?” Shelly moaned, “ it’s all perfectly legal.”

“He claims he’s the only one who can change the laws because he knows how to use them so brilliantly. Brilliantly, he said,” Katie added bitterly, switching the channel to the Young and the Resentful.

“We must be dumb as rocks,” Alice pronounced. Katie got ready to go back to her register. “I might vote for him, though.”

“Dumber than rocks,” Alice reiterated.

“He got rich, didn’t he? And we’re working for minimum wage.”

Shelly got up too. “And we pay taxes.”

Alice turned off the TV. “Dumb as rocks.”

About 45 years ago I lived in a rough part of Seattle and Gomorrah, vacant lots, drugs, gun running, white slaving, stolen goods sold door to door, my introduction to life in the urban ghetto, quite a wake up call for a young idealistic hippie. A few streets over from my house was a block on Yesler Street and 12th where the cops not only patrolled but parked for long stretches to surveil a notorious tavern that called itself a club, not a bar. One day, walking by, I came across a guy with an airbrush painting the warehouse wall facing that gin joint. I asked him what was up and he told me he was painting a mural the length of the block on that concrete block wall. When I heard that I shook my head and said man, they’ll deface that before the paint dries, but he only smiled and said he didn’t think so. ‘They’ll appreciate the art. They won’t touch this.’

I wasn’t an artist then but I thought this yahoo had been eating fairy dust to think the animals down on that block wouldn’t graffiti up his monumental work in a day or two. 25 years later, when I paid a nostalgia visit to my old haunts, that mural was as vibrant and unmarked as when he painted it. Trust me when I tell you that made an impression on me. When committees would ask if I thought my own murals would be vandalized, I would tell them this story. They were about as convinced as I was back then talking to my anonymous artist.

Twenty years ago I became the project manager for the new Visitor Center on the island when our contractor finally got weary of dealing with us artists and went back to his day job. We put sculpture and art on the grounds, built a small Center with a modern design and dropped a 15 foot by 15 foot stained glass window in the front. Folks would drop by to chat with me that summer, about half just wondering what we thought we were doing, who was paying for all this crap, why were screwing up the rural character of their bucolic existence. Bottles were repeatedly tossed against the building and the glass, pellet guns put holes in the mural, a couple of our sculptures were stolen. My faith in the prophesy of that muralist long ago was a bit perforated too.

So yesterday when I went over to measure the broken window some vandals had smashed, intending to put a stained glass panel in as a replacement, figuring, I guess, that my little library in the old 60’s telephone booth would be vandal proofed if it had more art in it, not just literature, imagine my disappointment to discover the door had been shot out and another large window too. Needless to say I didn’t bother to measure anything other than my despondency. Today I’m thinking about my muralist down there in the ghetto and his art that still resonates nearly half a century later. My own mural at the Visitor Center sports bullet holes and cracked panels and the building itself has been kitsched up with posters of animal butts and adolescent humor. I tell myself someday those posters will come down and the Sculpture Park we built will be honored by the citizenry. I tell myself that as I just finished a 21 foot long mural for the island’s new Administration Building which I’m donating. This is the 20th donation of glass murals, something I do to bring an aesthetic to the island and to the area. That’s what I tell myself. And some days I even believe that. But not today. Today I feel like Don Quixote, not just tilting at windmills but moronically building them. And no, I don’t know what I’ll do with that smashed up Little Library of mine.