The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The wag who said the only certainties in life are taxes and death never dropped into the many real estate offices on the South End for a ‘free’ map. An earthquake could separate us from the rest of the Civilized World and no matter the land values, real estate would be the Real Show. If a nuclear explosion ended most life as we know it, there’d still be cockroaches and realtors, both equally adaptable to any environment.

Not that I’m suggesting they’re equally unsavory. I can list a whole lot of professions more detestable than a land and home salesman. But most of those are SOME kind of salesman, from snake oil to stocks and bonds. And it’s not that I think they’re inherently dishonest or greedy. Most are good folks and most are poor as me. It’s just that there are so damn many of them. They’re more prolific than us artists who apparently breed up every holler and down every ravine. So many …. none can make a decent living competing with one another. The folks who moved here either become artists or realtors because there’s no other employment available within a tank of $4 a gallon gas.

So now we got 17 flavors of real estate, everything from ReFlux Realty to Windy Rear, all vying for the same properties. Which, if you’ve lived here more than the time it takes to close a mortgage, means about a third of us are selling, a third are buying and about half must be the realtors. Drive down the island and it looks like more For Sale signs than mailboxes some years. It’s too bad the signs aren’t painted by the artists — we’d become the Art Island practically overnight, famous up and down the Sound.

But don’t tell the realtors – it would only draw more Art Lovers hoping to buy a small studio. And in a year or two, they’d become real estate agents themselves. It’s a vicious circle and we need to break the cycle. Although … I’ll worry more when the realtors start painting tourist art.

H&H B&B

Down in the economically distressed hollers of the South End, many a man (and almost as many a woman) has turned to desperate measures to keep from falling into the abyss of full time employment. We’ll try damn near ANYTHING before looking for a job. And essentially, isn’t this what capitalism is all about?? The god-given right NOT to work? Course it is! We’d rather kill ourselves laboring for ourselves, we’d rather go broke and hungry trying some bonehead endeavor, we’d rather jeapordize our mental and physical health before we’d take a job doing something we hate 20 to 40 miles away from hearth and home.

The Hearth and Home B&B was Earl’s idea, but Patti signed on too. It was that or welfare, she figured, so why not humor Earl. She did make it clear, though, she wasn’t going to do all the cooking and cleaning, buster – he’d have to make beds and clean toilets. Earl hemmed, Earl hawed, Earl said he’d have plenty to do setting up the website and handling the reservations that were certain to pour in, that and ‘cuting up’ the place so the old farmhouse would look more quaint than shacky, but in the end, Earl, desperate to escape the horrors of real employment, signed on to bathroom duties and bed making, figuring, if I know Earl, he could wiggle out of those before too long.

Home and Hearth Bed and Breakfast spent a small fortune on web designs, on yellow page ads, on fancy signage, stationary, all the rigamarole of business start-ups not imagined at the outset, took a second mortgage on the property, then waited for the tourists to pour in from the smog-sickened cities. “Charming turn of the Century Farmstead. Spectacular views of orchards and fields and Mt. Baker in the distance.” The orchards were overgrown and played out, the field was impossible to mow, the farm equipment didn’t look rustic, just rusting, and Mt. Baker was barely visible on the best of days. H&H B& B lasted about 6 months before Patti took a job cutting hair at the salon beneath the real estate office. Earl soldiered on, but finally he found work at Boeing 45 miles away. It’s a long commute, but as Earl says, there’s great views of Baker and the Cascade Range on the way. And home is like a vacation at a B& B. Only he doesn’t have to make the bed or clean the toilets anymore. Patti figures it’s a pretty good trade-off.

Spies R Us

This week the Hot News is this: The Government Is Spying On Us!! Turns out they can check with the phone companies, get a few billion of our numbers we called and using algorithms, figure out who’s been calling Bin Laden. Or their mom in Keokuk. Folks are up in arms. My neighbors are afraid to use their cellphones. Down at the Diner, there’s talk of Big Brother and the necessity to maybe get MORE firepower in their arsenals. GTE Johnny, who used to work in telecommunications, said we ain’t seen nothing yet. “The government knows when you were born, when you got divorced and probably when you’ll die,” he pronounced ominously over his newspaper headline that read: White House Defends Spy Activity. His veggie omelette coagulated while he warned us poor victims what was coming, everything from cyber surveillance to space cameras so powerful they could read the Diner menu from the Hubble.

“There’s no more hiding,” he whispered, although we all knew the hidden microphones in the salt shakers were picking him up Loud and Clear, transmitting his seditious comments to a Cray Super Computer a mile deep under the Rocky Mountains where it was being transcribed, collated and filed in the vast data banks the National Security Agency maintains. Even as Johnny finished, we could imagine storm troopers loading up the black helicopters, GPS set on Camano’s South End, instructions given to breach no resistance, possibly take no prisoners.

“The damn government!” a few soon-to-be-gulag residents shouted over their biscuits and gravy. “Intruding in our private lives. What’s next?!”

Oh, I don’t know. Credit card monitoring? Facebook statistics? Google info gathering? Grocery store scan cards to track our grocery preferences? Yahoo monitoring of our internet so they can customize our ads to maximize profits? Rental car companies using GPS to check our speeds and locations? Cellphone interceptions by crooks and hackers? Security cameras in every store, mall, streetcorner, bar and restaurant? Corporations mining our meta-data to tailor their sales pitch. Phone companies that record every tweet, twitter and text?

If the boyz at the Diner want privacy, well, they should throw away their credit cards, ditch their cellphones, soak their computers in the bathtub, don’t drive, don’t go to town, don’t talk out loud. Do like the Barefoot Bandit — only don’t steal the planes. You think government is spying, welcome to corporate and social networking. You gave Facebook everything you got. Whadja think??? The damn government, as always, would be the last to get this stuff. The NSA shoulda maybe joined Facebook a long time ago. Or YOU shouldn’t have….

Ma and me got this notion back when she first arrived by mail order – hoping for a new start, a New Land, an employed suitor, only to find herself at the tail end of an island where jobs and work were non-existent – to start our own little business. Being a librarian, well, an unemployable librarian unless she wanted to commute to hell and gone, she considered a used book store. We dug around a little, looked into renting a space above some shops in downtown Stanwoodopolis and made inquiries. They wanted a three year lease, no escape clause. We worried the elderly would never make it up the stairs. Or the lazy either. And we fretted that the illiteracy rate of Stanwoodopolis might spell our doom the first year and we’d owe two more years of rental on the dust bunnies.

Our next entrepreneurial investigation was to start a nursery, maybe buy some land, plant a few botanicals, grow the business organically. Meaning, it would be a slow return on our investment. But hell, we weren’t hedge fund managers, we were managers of hedges. We’d do it the old fashioned way, work hard, be frugal, build the business step by step.

We needed a few acres and a water source. Down on the South End there were plenty of acres, not much water. We didn’t have the money to buy a parcel AND dig a well so we looked for land with springs, something we could dam up a little stream maybe and use it to irrigate in the drought months, and sure enough, we found a place a mile south, got the asking price – about $15,000 for five acres – then called the County to make certain we could operate a nursery.

The nice folks at the County said they didn’t know. We could if we lived on that five acres, not sure if we didn’t. I said we sort of need to know if we were going to buy the land and get a loan to start up operations. They said they just couldn’t say yes but they didn’t want to discourage us by saying no either.

I won’t say we had a real firm business plan developed, just some seedlings of ideas really, mostly like the kind that die off for lack of money. Or water. Or a county closing us down when word got out we were operating an Illegal Flower Operation. In the end we didn’t buy the land and we didn’t go into debt and we didn’t corner the nettle market on the South End. We did manage to make a Go of it here, we worked various jobs, we stayed together. I’m kinda glad the County wasn’t more helpful. I’m real glad we never asked about a marriage license.

Some of you out there who stay abreast of fake news coming in 24/7 probably already got the word. And the word isn’t good. Impeachment. I know, you’re tired of it. You’re sick to death of it. And I hate to be the bearer of bad news for those of you who finally turned off your computer, dropped out of Facebook, said you’d rather drink rat poison than listen to one more MSNBC or Fox News commentator drone on half an hour about it. You’d rather go and listen to the South End String Band than endure that.

Yeah, I know. But sometimes you can’t put your head in the sand. You can’t plug your ears. Sometimes a story is too Big, too important, too … life changing to ignore. They’re impeaching Santa Claus. I couldn’t believe it either. The jolly old guy was ratted out by Donder and Blitzen, probably pissed they had to work every Christmas when Santa could have contracted to Amazon Prime. Quid Pro Quo, they claimed. Santa wouldn’t know a quid from a quo, but that’s no defense. The elves had the lists of Naughty and Nice, but Santa had them sequestered before the subpoena came in. Might’ve saved his bacon except Mrs. Claus admitted that yes, the presents for the kids were conditional on their good behavior. Quid … pro … oh no!

I can tell you, the North Pole will be a litiginous place this season. Fa la la? I don’t think so. Next year, if I don’t miss my bet, even the naughty kids will get gifts. Nobody said this was a fair world. And if I were the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy, I’d be afraid. I’d be very afraid.