The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I just spent the morning with my friendly dentist. You want to darken your day, this is one way to blot the sun from a morning. Potential gum disease, stress fractured teeth, a ‘hard bite’, old fillings, potential crown work — it’s like having a TV that only plays Fox News’ Sean Hannity, all the negative opinion that’s fit to speak. My mouth has two months to live. I’m regretting I made the appointment, better just to live my final years in blissful ignorance, gumming my soup dinners happy to never floss again.

My buddy Roger tried that avoidance route, mostly because he couldn’t afford dentists. Half his mouth is devoid of teeth now. They rotted to the point the pain got too much for him, then he had them jerked, something the poor tend to do rather than pay for a crown or implants. Teeth are way down on the list when poverty dictates priorities. And even if he’d had health insurance — which he didn’t — dental health isn’t covered, don’t ask me why.

I got a lot of neighbors here on the cavity-prone South End who look like hillbillies without their molars and incisors. One year I was working building a winery for Professor Bob up north when my co-grunt put down his framing hammer and got down on hands and knees searching the plywood floor we were laying.

“Lose a contact?” I asked, getting down with him to search.

“Naw,” Randy replied, “my &^%$#!!tooth.”

It had rotted, literally, right out of his head. The kid was 22 years old. A minute later he found it by a box of 16 penny nails, a brown little molar, horrible there on the gleaming blonde plywood deck. Next day I asked if he’d gotten in to see the dentist. He shook his head no, opened wide to show me the gap in that rotten mouth of his was filled, then he grinned. “Nothing a little SuperGlue can’t fix.”

No brains, no headache, as my neighbor used to intone, philosophically challenged. I decided right then to buy an electric toothbrush and a year’s supply of floss. Saves me a fortune on SuperGlue.

Every morning I get up out of a warm quilted bed ready to face the day ahead … only to find this continuing source of irritation and dread. I suppose I should linger under the covers a lot longer, maybe all day. Or cancel our subscriptions to the newspapers and turn off the news on radio and TV. After all, I’m not going to be consulted on the replacement of Obamacare. Even if I did know it was going to be very complicated.

Politics, like the stock market, is really driven by the mob mentality, not so much data and facts, alternate or otherwise. It’s psychological. Or pathological. Once the money boyz lose faith in the Dow Jones, the bulls lose hope and the bears start stalking. Same with politics. Create a sense of foreboding and fear, then look for remedies. We may have nothing to fear but fear itself, but believe me, fear is plenty. Today, on the heels of the president’s speech to the Congress and the nation, the bulls are running.

Spring supposedly is right around the corner. Snowdrops are blooming by the mailbox and back in the woods. Daffodils are up. The wild currants are showing blossom. So okay, it snowed this morning. But tomorrow is March, coming in, I guess, like a lion. I’ve been spending most of my time, when I’m not torturing myself with the news, cutting firewood in the back 40. The wood is for the year after next, meaning, I have hope that in another year, I’ll still be alive and kicking, that the world will still rotate okay, the sky will not be falling and the nation will survive and us too.

I suppose Global Warming will keep encroaching, the polar bears will starve, the oceans will rise and the health care system will go backward. The rich will get richer and the immigrants will be slowly rounded up and deported. Who knew that immigration reform would be so complicated? Who knew global warming would be too? Who knew life beyond the golf courses and the resorts was so messy?

Today I got band practice. Gonna take my 5 string banjo and join up with the rest of my musical cronies and pound out some lively versions of Celtic and old time and even some rock and roll to get ready for our St. Pat’s day gig at the gnarliest bar in Stanwoodopolis. Something about a banjo. Pete Seeger’s banjo had this written on the drumhead: ‘This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It to Surrender’ Kind of optimistic, you ask me, but I will say, when I play mine, it’s hard not to feel good about the world. Who knew music would have that kind of power?

The Trump Team, the folks who screamed holy murder about deficits and debt, just announced today they would present a budget for increased defense spending. Let’s see, right now we have 54 percent of all federal discretionary spending going to defense. World military spending totaled more than $1.6 trillion in 2015. The U.S. accounted for 37 percent of the total. U.S. military expenditures are roughly the size of the next seven largest military budgets around the world, combined. U.S. military spending dwarfs the budget of the #2 country – China.

So … I guess we need more rockets maybe. Or another aircraft carrier or two, just in case we take on the REST OF THE WORLD!! Are you kidding me? Last time I looked we had an epidemic of Alzheimers, diabetes, cancers, run down the list and tell the folks who have kin with those that we need to cut back on spending for cures and put it toward more bullets. Somebody explain to me this kind of priority when we’re already spending more than a third of all global military expenditures and we can’t win a war in Iraq or Afghanistan? Shoot me now.

I’m sorry, but this is immoral. Trump states ad nauseumtweet that we need to take care of Americans. So we buy more bombs? We upgrade the nuclear arsenal? We build a new Star Wars defense? Who’s kidding who here? Us Romans just keep piling up the garrisons, extending the empire, menacing the world. The current Commander-in-Chief wants to end Globalization. How about ending the military globalization, pardner?? Trade pacts, not so good. Military bases, great idea. How about 800 of them? More than any empire in history. More than the Romans ever dreamed.

Down the road from me, up in the salmonberry jungles of the interior, my neighbor Ronnie lives in a doublewide pretty much gone to wrack and ruin. His mizzus works upcountry in a hair salon, makes about enough to keep Ronnie in beer and off Medicaid. He’s got a veritable armory in the back bedroom, ammo and pistols, hunting rifles and even an illegal automatic AR-15. “Who you worried about?” I asked him the day he first showed me some of his prized possessions. “I’m worried about the damn Muslims, that’s who. And maybe you too.”

“I’d worry more about me, Ron, than I would those infiltrating, Koran-brainwashed refugees I never seem to run into.” Ron doesn’t have health insurance, says he doesn’t need it, never gets sick. His two year old Ford 150 with the gunrack in the back window probably eats up most of Kari’s salon wages, I’d bet. From our place some nights I can hear him target shooting when the wind is right. Drives the neighbors crazy. They ask if it’s legal to shoot guns out here in the wild wild South End. “Oh, it’s mostly legal,” I have to tell them. “Just part of living rural.” It’s not only the rural yahoos that love to shoot guns and collect more. It’s the whole damn country.

The toilet won’t quit running, she says, so I say I’ll take a look. I pop the tank lid and the gizmo that regulates the inflow, hell if I know what it’s called, is spurting water out the top and I wonder if that’s normal or not. The ball float on its brass lever has been bent down multiple times but now it keeps the tank so low the crap won’t flush completely when you pull the handle. The mysteries of plumbing, I sigh to myself and head to the hardware store for a replacement gizmo, full knowing this is only the beginning of what will probably be a series of cascading plumbing issues.

I decided back in 1974 to be a homesteader. I had no interest in a career or a traditional marriage or a bourgeois lifestyle, not me, not that kid who wanted to blaze a new trail, make the world his own, leave the suburbs of his folks’ last few moves behind. I wanted to be a writer maybe, a school bus driver probably, an itinerant worker of dozens of jobs but none too long, plenty very short. So we hauled our hippie asses up to a farm in Northern Wisconsin and planted a garden, pumped our water, built our outhouse and left mainstream America in our wake. But it doesn’t take long to realize how ill-equipped for that alternative lifestyle you are, about the first truck repair when it won’t start and you have no idea whatsoever how things work. How an engine combusts, how to frame an outhouse, how to fix a pump, how to repair most anything and everything. When you’re poor because you don’t have jobs that make money, you best believe you will need to learn all those skills you didn’t learn in the suburbs and I don’t mean calling the repairman.

I got hold of a mail order correspondence automotive course’s books, studied them and began to learn auto repair. The army pickup truck I bought from some sweet lady who turned out to be a used car salesman’s daughter gave me ample opportunity for hands-on experience. School of Hard Knocks and Knuckle Busting, the very definition of a continuous education. When I bought the shack here on the South End, my graduate courses came fast and furious. Well pump repair, chainsaw use and maintenance, small engine diagnoses, house framing, electrical installations, furniture building, plumbing, concrete work, tree felling, woodworking, remodeling, you name it, I took the exams, sometimes failing, but after a few attempts, passing even if barely.

Over the years I added additions to the shack, rooms out the back, a kitchen off the front, a dormer upstairs. When I learned stained glass I built a shop back in the woods far from the prying eyes of the building inspectors. I built a sailboat in 1990 or so, built some kayaks, built plenty of outbuildings on the 7 acres, then built our house up on the hill. I guess I’d learned enough to feel confident to tackle a two story building, although I will tell you, most of it I learned along the way, reading the week or night before how to California frame a corner or wire a 3-way switch or plumb a vent for the toilet or tile a bathroom floor or caulk in windows or hang an overhead fan. Took me two years working most every day. Learned how to build a door, lay hardwood floors, build cabinets and bookcases, all this from library books before Google came along. It was hard. It was also the most fun I ever had, this building our own house. It was, like all the hardscrabble stuff that homesteading requires, the building blocks of my life, the life I wanted to build from scratch, the one I would call my own.

So I’m down under the toilet hacksawing apart the threaded pipe that holds the gizmo that’s leaking for no apparent reason, catching the water left in the reservoir, most of it, the rest running down my sleeve. Yah, it’s a funny life all right. Things fall apart, entropic as always, and who ya gonna call? Me, I’m not calling anybody.

I was shuffling around in the express checkout line of my big box grocer the other day, waiting for the nice lady in front of me to unload a full shopping cart onto the conveyor even though the sign said 15 items or less. I assume she was in a hurry and the sign was for lesser peons like myself, not m’lady. Her bill came to $150. So I had plenty of time to study the gift card rack, the candy section, the gum, all those marketing strategies the store used for a last minute buying pitch to us captive shoppers.

The displays of National Enquirers, Star Magazine, Soap Opera Digest or the Globe all shouted headlines of impossible scandals, dead Elvis sightings, the affairs of movie idols, starlets gone to fat and obscurity, weird prophecies and creepy tattle-tale muckraking. Oprah’s secret love child, Hillary’s 6 months to live, Ted Cruz’s father linked to JFK assassination, Bigfoot’s logger love slave, Brad Pitt forced into rehab, Cher’s shocking breakdown, Sarah Palin’s satanic counselor — this is the stuff of viral e-mails, half insane, totally fabricated, obvious to anyone but the hopelessly drug addicted or irreparably dumb. All my life I have wondered who the hell buys these things and I have, being the elitist college educated liberal white male I apparently am, thought only the really ignorant, the poor white trash, the pathetically empty-souled, the truly gullible, the socially inept, would pay the money to toss a copy into their grocery bag laden with chips, pop, lean cuisine, candy and frozen pizzas.

But now I don’t know. We just voted in the headline for the National Enquirer: LIAR ELECTED COMMANDER IN CHIEF. TRUMP CLAIMS THE WORLD IS FLAT!! The New York Times, quoting the President’s latest tweets, might as well be the banner headlines for the Globe. How do the tabloids compete with this now? By reporting the truth? BOWLING GREEN MASSACRE A HOAX!!! SWEDISH TERRORISM NON-EXISTENT!! CRIME WAVE NOT THE HIGHEST IN DECADES!!! ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION LOWEST IN YEARS!!! INAUGURATION NUMBERS FOR TRUMP LOWER THAN OBAMA!! RUSSIANS HACKED THE ELECTION!! WORLD PROVEN TO BE ROUND!!!!!!!!

Those tabloids made my skin crawl. Just something pulpy and phony and nasty, something wrong with the need for sensational trash instead of real news, something that left a bad taste the way diet pop coats your mouth for half a day with an artificial metallic residue. The world is strange enough without manufacturing two headed babies and the tawdry affairs of movie stars. All those folks who bought and believed this sensationalism, well, they outnumbered the rest of us, apparently, and they took their belief in all this faux news down to the ballot box. It could make me yearn for the days of illiteracy. 15 items or less. I don’t believe that anymore either.