The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

When I first came to the desolate South End, my first priority was finding a job, sad to say. I tried some dead ends, then got a school bus driving gig, but my boss decided I was probably a long-haired dope smoking leftist radical who needed to find other means of employment. The writing, as they say, was on the wall. So … I picked up a part-time furniture stripping job 35 miles north just in case the ax fell.

I’d finish my morning bus driving shift, then head up north for my dose of ketones and other chemicals known to the State of California as Killers. Trouble was, the repair shop didn’t open til 10 so I would drop into the Freedom Café in downtown Mt. Vernon and have coffee and breakfast, fritter some time and maybe do a little writing while I waited. I still had visions then of becoming a poet. Or a novelist. Who knows? I had a notebook, I had a pen, I had time on my hands. You can write the Great American Novel over coffee and eggs and toast if you keep at it. And if the stripping solvent fumes don’t scramble your brains first.

My waitress, after a month or so, asked what was I writing? They evidently don’t get a lot of would-be Kerouacs in for breakfast specials. The sight of rambling Jack scribbling away over his omelette provoked some serious curiosity. When I told her, she seemed mildly impressed. After all, how many literary furniture strippers had she served?

Well, after some light banter over the next few months, she finally asked me out, maybe shoot some pool, drink some beers, see how the wind blew. I said sure, be fun, but when I came up to find her a week or so later to make it official, this date of ours, she’d quit her job and taken another one up at the Farmhouse, the new café on the highway to Whidbey. So I drove up there, figuring what’s another 10 miles more. Of course when I asked at the restaurant they told me it was her day off.

So I drove home and had some time to wonder what it was about her that was so attractive to me. On the long lonesome drive back to my shack, it hit me. She reminded me of Karen, the woman I’d left back in the Midwest, and so, I resolved to call her up after these intervening years, see if she was married with children, and if not, maybe ask if she would forgive this fool, see if she was footloose and fancy free, see if this cruel universe offers a reprieve occasionally, deserved or not. And just so you know, just to offer some small glimpse of optimism in this otherwise bleak old world we live in, sometimes it does….

My brother and I were comparing notes on our mutual maturity this last visit. I guess we both inherited some genetic predisposition toward hair trigger tempers, something we both thought we had made some progress on holding in check, but of course, we have our stumbles. He was telling me his latest, a sad little story of a woman who didn’t quite make it through an intersection before the light turned red, leaving her blocking the pedestrian crossing.

My little brother was the pedestrian she was blocking. He shook his head sadly before continuing, obviously embarrassed at his behavior at the ripe old age of 64. I cut into his recounting to guess that he had walked across this miscreant’s hood just to teach her a lesson. Which, I told him, I had done once or twice, but you know, when I was less temperate than my mellow self is now. But no, he didn’t stomp across her hood. Instead he walked around behind her car and then, beyond helping himself, he smacked his open hand on her trunk, something I’m sad to say I’ve done plenty of times.

But … this time the lady, startled at the apparent collision from behind, hit her accelerator and plowed into the car in front of her. Day ruined. Car too. My brother said he just put his head down and walked away as fast as possible, feeling like a total you know what. I did know what.

I said my last road rage I had a tailgater crawling up my bumper for a few miles. I tried slowing down but the driver wouldn’t take the hint and inched even closer. This, of course, infuriated me to righteous indignation and finally I’d had more than enough so I hit my brakes without warning, expecting to give my too close friend a little driving lesson that might back him off for the rest of the trip into town. Except instead of braking, the little jerk lurched out into the oncoming lane.

This, like my brother’s anecdote, is an example of Unintended Consequences. People can be hurt or killed, vehicles can be damaged or wrecked. Lessons may or may not be learned. Our combined ages, my brother and I, are 130 years on this little planet. If we both got as old as Methuselah, we probably will still be telling these stupid stories. “So this woman rolls out into the hallway in her wheelchair, see, and blocks my way into the cafeteria and all I meant to do was give her cart a little bump, then next thing you know….”

Me and the robins are picking pie cherries this week. All of us think the cherry trees belong to us, but … my thinking is I planted them so maybe I have more rights than the birds. Course, there’s no cherry court to adjudicate our claims so we are left with what all of us South Enders have for justice, Law of the Jungle. For the most part we all get a fair share. The deer and I split the apples. The raccoons and I divide up the corn. This wasn’t as true for the sweet cherries. The crows and the robins took most of them, leaving me sputtering with rage and revenge.

One year I found a recently dead crow and walked it around the orchard. Within minutes I had a dozen or more live relatives of the deceased cawing and screaming from every tree in the vicinity so I made a couple of circles just to make my point, then tied the dead boy in the branches of my favorite cherry tree trussed up wing to wing, a very dark and ominous corpse that the crows and the mizzus found more than a little troubling. Trust me, they left the cherries to the guy who was now their sworn enemy, but there are only so many dead crows you can scrounge up every harvest time and only so much marital criticism you can withstand so eventually they all outnumbered me.

I planted new cherry trees the last couple of years, the kind that don’t turn red, just a nice yellow so the birdbrains don’t think they’re ripe until I’ve picked them. We may find out the birdbrain is the one who wears the hat, but I’m willing to give this a shot. Admittedly I’m not too optimistic.

We had a grove of filbert trees awhile back, thousands of nuts on a few dozen trees. The jays and the squirrels took every one. Occasionally they’d leave me a solitary nut on the ground, I guess as a peace offering, but 100% of the time the nut was empty. They knew it was empty. All the 25 years we had those filberts we never got one single nut. This, I would argue in tree court, is unadulterated greed, pure and simple and unconscionable. Worse, the blue jays would sit in the branches and scream at us if we came near their trees. They are a beautiful shade of blue, but the screech of a jay isn’t something you can tolerate for long. No more than ten seconds in my case.

Like I say, I’m willing to share. Squirrels and blue jays, not so much. They’re like the rich, enough is not a word they understand. They want more, they want way more, they want yours too, they want it all. The poor? Tough luck. Grow wings and fly up to the top branches where the goodies are. If not, shut up and go home, Loser. If you even got a home….

The 1% might want to listen to the next part of this story. Us losers get fed up eventually. I took my chainsaw out to the filbert grove one autumn after another season of nut-grubbing greed and one by one I took down those nut trees, every single one of them. They were shading the garden and blocking my view of the Puget Sound anyway so it wasn’t a hard decision and now I’ve planted cherry and plum trees instead. Whatever predator comes in to supplant the jays, I can only hope they plan to share. Living in harmony with nature down on the wild wild South End isn’t the easiest thing to do. Right now they’re just lucky I’m not a hunter. But I wouldn’t count on it staying that way.

When I first moved to the Left Coast, I had a yearning to get myself a motorcycle, learn to ride, then set myself free on the byways of the Cascades. Being poor, I bought a used Honda 350 that hadn’t run in years, wouldn’t start and looked like it was ready for the crusher. I paid $100 for the piece of junk, hauled it back to my house in the ghetto and pushed it down the basement stairs where I could spend some quality time diagnosing why it wouldn’t start over the winter months.

By summer I had the problem solved and so, with the help of my roommates, I hauled it back up and out to the backyard, kick started it into an oily smoke idle and admired the thing in the full light of a Seattle sunny day. Now all I had to do was figure out how to ride it. I called the police and asked what kind of temporary license I would need to take it for some learning spins on their city streets and was told it was illegal, no temporary licenses were to be had. I said how am I spozed to learn how to ride. The sergeant said it wasn’t his problem.

So right from the start I became an outlaw biker, stalling my crappy bike on half the shifts, careening down the mean streets of my neighborhood, searching for large empty parking lots to practice sharp turns and fast starts. Trouble was, my clutch didn’t shift right and every so often the engine would shut off in mid-travel for no apparent reason that I could diagnose. On one of my ventures I came across a fellow biker working on his Harley at Seward Park, tools spread on the parking lot and so I thought why not ask an expert about my clutch problem. He was hard at it in his Joker leathers with his tattoos bulging as he strained to his work, a fellow outlaw. I interrupted him to ask about my clutch dilemma. He looked at my battered scooter and said — I can remember it clearly to this day 40 years later — ‘Get the fuck away from me, man.’ I took it to mean us real bikers fix our own bikes without outside help.

On the way back to my ghetto house I was idling at the red light on Jackson and 23rd when a menacing group of black gangbangers roared up beside me on both sides, about 15 or so, all revving their Harleys as we waited for the green so that I thought I was inside a Boeing 747 engine. I didn’t think this was an initiation test. And I didn’t think it would end well either. The light, after what seemed like an hour, turned green and we all popped our clutches, ready for a tire burning, wheel skidding jackrabbit start … and my bike died right then.

I suppose a lesser man, a man not accustomed to the outlaw biker life, might have been embarrassed. A lesser man might have thought the laughter and catcalls from the black Banditos was too much endure. A lesser man might have junked his prized Honda 350 and succumbed to the temptation to buy a Vincent Black Shadow and show these hooligans who really ruled these mean urban streets. But me, I pushed my spray painted motorcycle ten blocks back to the basement and sold it a month later. For $100. My easy riding days had come to an end. There was nothing more to prove, I guess.

Breakfast of Champions

My friend’s thirty-something daughter called today to ask her what was this Brexit thing anyway, some kind of new breakfast? I guess my friend and I assume kids, grownup kids anyway, keep abreast of things like international affairs and presidential elections. At least she didn’t ask her who this Donald Gump was. And I’m pretty sure she knew Brexit was the most important meal of the day.

The Donald was in Scotland today congratulating the kilted ones for voting to leave the E.U. while he was promoting his golf courses and hotels. Trouble was, the Scots didn’t vote to leave the E.U., they voted overwhelmingly to stay. Facts can be such damn nuisances. No wonder we’ve decided to go with our gut hunches on everything from politics to science. Easier. Less messy. Ends most arguments. Less filling and tastes great. Kind of like breakfast cereal. Kind of like chocolate covered Brexit. Since the currency there had devalued, our presidential candidate was happy the British pound had gone to its lowest level in three decades so foreign tourists would find it more inviting to golf at his new course. He was, as he said, a winner. The American stock market and folks with 401-K’s, not so much.

I can’t go to the grocery store now without scanning my fellow shoppers, 50% who say they will be voting for a reality TV show host who has attributes most folks once thought of as reprehensible, but now, through the miracle of erasing ‘political correctness’, they think of as okay. Racism, misogyny, bigotry, bullying, arrogance, ignorance and … well, the list goes on and on … it’s okay once again to say what they think. I don’t really mind them saying what’s on their mind, I just worry about what is on their mind.

I listen to a lot of Hot Talk radio. It drives me crazy, but it’s obviously driven a lot of folks crazier than me. They believe this stuff I find maddening. They feed on the venom and the anger. They think Obama is a secret Muslim and believe me, they hate all Muslims. They love America, but they hate the government, the president, the Congress, everything but the military. They love the Constitution but they want Muslims banned from this country, they want gays put back in their closet, they want profiling, they want God, the Christian God, put back in their classrooms. Their parents or grandparents or great grandparents came from somewhere else, but they want immigration ended. They want government off their back but they want government to stop abortions, to stop homosexuals, to stop atheists. They want to make America great again.

These folks want to lay off the Brexit and go back to Wheaties, Breakfast of Champions. You know, the one with Bruce Jenner on the box back when she was a he. Back when America was Numero Uno and men were men and women did what they were told, no backtalk. Back to the Good Old Boy Days.

I don’t want to suggest that a person who listens to Rush Limbaugh and is voting for Donald Trump is ignorant. That might fall under lack of political correctness.