The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I got a friend who was bothered that we spent tax payer dollars, HIS tax dollars, to conduct a survey of the island, maybe find out how many people are homeless here in Shangri-La-La. If you think if this bothered him, imagine what his irritation level will be when the next step pops up: funding for shelters or god forbid, small houses. Out here on the Left Coast we have warmer winters than most places back east so homeless folks can survive a bit easier without frostbite or hypothermia. From Seattle and Gomorrah to San Diego, our cities are crowded with people living in their cars, in tents, huddled over heat vents, hiding under freeway overpasses and back alleys, entire families struggling to stay alive in whatever shelter they can scrounge up.

RV’s can be found lining multiple blocks, rusted and busted vehicles that no longer run, without water or power or sewer, without garbage pickup, without most of what the rest of us in the Land of Plenty have in abundance. But … there are those who find no compassion for these American refugees, no sympathy for their plight, no pity for the poor. If my pal is any indication, the best remedy is to keep them out of sight and out of mind and definitely away from his wallet and tax dollars. He believes the ‘homeless situation’ is a hoax, just a ruse to use tax money for bogus bureaucratic bullshit. He asked me if I had ever, ever, known anyone on this island who was homeless. I said of course. Stinky Steve, for one. My heroin addict thief for another. And that was only on the South End. Up north, closer to town, there were plenty more than that.

I’m not on the homeless census count committee. And I doubt it’s epidemic here yet. But on any given day the Food Bank is open, the number of folks seeking handouts is incredible. Most have apartments, I’m betting. Some might even own a house. But there must be plenty who haul their bounty back to a tent or a shed somewhere back in the woods. Why begrudge them these morsels? Why go ballistic over trying to count them and, god forbid, even help them in some small way. We’re not going to build them a 3 story house and buy them a BMW so they can feel like a part of our community. Although maybe if we did, they’d side with my buddy and stop all future funding for those other leeches who want a free ride. Maybe I’ll try that argument on him, see if it works. Cause I want this whining to end. The rich have got to stop complaining!

One of the curses of being wired to the world in our modern, advanced civilization, the one we think of as the zenith of mankind’s endeavors, is feeling like what happens in some village in Indonesia somehow should be of interest to me. ‘Honey, I shrunk the world’ should be the theme song to every YouTube, Yahoo News, Facebook and Google feed. It’s important to stay tuned in, I suppose, maybe know what the folks in Tierra del Fuego think of the recent killing or the Estonians are doing about Russian meddling in their politics. Hard enough when we’re swamped with news stories here in our own little country, everything from impeachment hearings to the latest mass murder in some town we may or may not have heard of before the media rolled in to cover the mayhem.

It’s not only exhausting, in case you didn’t notice, but … well, it’s a constant distraction from living your life. When I first dropped anchor on the South End, I didn’t have a television, much less a computer. We had a telephone and a stereo that played cassette tapes and records. The telephone was on a party line with a mom and her teenage daughter. In other words, we really didn’t have a telephone that was usable, not with that single mom and her chatty daughter using it 24/7. Not that we really had many people to call anyway….

I bring all this up because the last few days I’ve been sliding back into those early years. It’s winter and the days are short and getting shorter. Back then we did a lot more reading, I played a lot more music, we did a lot of hiking the beach and the woods, time was plentiful and we had to find ways to fill it without resorting to the babysitter we call internet. Early this morning I walked down to the beach with some crab bait, rolled my boat over and lowered it into the water, then rowed out to my pots. Mt. Rainier was perfectly framed in the Straits, golden glaciers in the sunrise glowing majestically. A half dozen cormorants watched me from a raft moored far out from shore and the gulls waited to see what I would toss them from the bait traps when I got to my pots. The now familiar seal that follows the wake of my rowboat kept popping up and checking on me, each time eliciting a bark from me, not maybe a real good impersonation of a seal bark, but he was listening. A fogbank beyond Whidbey lay like a dropped blanket at the foot of the Olympics, those mountains now immaculate with new snow after a summer of melt. Nothing much but me made noise. My oars dripped a line of water each stubborn stroke, circles falling back following small whirlpools both sides. The world was perfect. And I was in it. Not distracted, not jumping to the next crawler or ad, just a tiny sliver of the world with me pulling at the oars, gliding through it.

We’ve lost that, I think, now that I’m back on shore, back up at the house. We’ve let it slip through our fingers because we’re bored, we’re lonely, we’re forever looking for something to fill up the space between the last thing and the next thing. But it’s like calculus, the intervals get smaller and smaller, but they never become Now. Now is now. Some days, like today, I remember where to find it.

I was out on the road the other day trying to sell the last of my Skeeter Daddle Diaries, the second printing. I’m about as good at door to door sales as I am at hedge fund managing. Me and money don’t really mix, I’ve learned slowly over a long life without an MBA degree. Neither of us trusts the other….

I meet folks — even down here on the indolent South End — who knew shortly after teething that they wanted to make money, get rich, retire early. They didn’t go to college and spend four years on a Philosophy degree. They picked careers in law or dentistry or finance. You don’t drill for water in the Sahara, that’s what they understood.

Me, I always thought I’d rather do something I loved doing. Call me naïve and slap me with an IOU, but I figured there was always a job, even a miserably low paying one, that would pay the bills and allow me to pursue some quaint interest or other. So I took English, majored in literature and poverty, then stepped off the educational track years later with a nice solid background in arts and history and yeah, literature, then promptly discovered I had virtually NO marketable skills. Kind of a shock. You kind of figure if they sell you a degree, there be a placement.

I worked awhile in a dog pound, ran a cafeteria, drove metro buses, wrote poetry and short stories that got published for, oh, nothing, drove school buses, seriously considered graduate school (maybe get a PhD. in Unemployment or Swahili), moved around a bit, lived in shabby apartments, ate a lot of macaroni and cheese. To be honest, I didn’t mind. What I did mind was not finding the exact perfect job that fulfilled some as yet undiscovered passion in life. Four years at a university and I sure didn’t find it. Now I had to do it AND work crap jobs looking.

I can tell you youngsters — in hindsight — the only thing worse than some crummy job is looking for the next crummy job. But I can also tell you — and don’t get me wrong, I’m not a Perfessor of Smartology — if you settle for the money, or the security, or the health insurance benefits, or the pension, you’ll maybe be satisfied, possibly even happy, but you will never find the thing that makes working really worthwhile. It took me plenty of dead end jobs, too much macaroni, far too many bad bosses, but in the end, you’ll persevere. Probably not rich, but trust me on this, a helluva lot happier.

I’ve known some folks on the South End who didn’t own a car, incredible as that seems. And this was back before the Island Transit free buses plied the highways. They’d hitchhike or walk, they’d ask for rides at Elger Bay Store. Some rode bicycles. They weren’t making some ecological, enviro ‘green’ statement — they were just poor. And without transportation, they kept getting poorer since there weren’t many local jobs.

A lot of us South Enders commute. Seriously commute. After my one night at the Twin City Food assembly lines and a mangled arm, I quit and found myself in a familiar predicament: unemployed with no prospects for work. Just about when I hit rock bottom and figured I’d need to move to Seattle just to keep my homestead, I got a graveyard job at Everett General Hospital as an orderly two nights every weekend. 40 miles one way. I thought it was a trip to Oregon every week, an adventure in my old ’60 Chevy Apache pickup that needed constant mechanical attention, often on the side of the road.

Maybe it’s an indication of just how paradisical the South End is that we’ll drive to Hell and back just to live here. The missuz drove 75 miles to the University of Washington Library in Seattle for her job. I knew folks who drove to Tacoma, over 100 miles away, to find work that paid enough to keep their piece of Shangri-La-La. Course, they probably never saw it in the light of day —- mostly just imaginary real estate, sort of exactly like Heaven. Maybe without the streets of gold.

My own commuting days are about over. Walk down the hill to the workshop, fire up the woodstove on cold days, go back up for the third cup of coffee and wait for the place to warm up. Sure I miss those drives through the farmlands, the tulip fields, over the rivers and past all those Puget Sound views and the volcanoes and the mountain ranges. But my truck’s gonna last a decade or two longer and if I get real nostalgic about the good old days of commuting, I just take a road trip, you know, without the 8 hour shifts at the end.