The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Trump U.!

[A paid advertisement]

Just when you thought, if you listened to the GOP convention speeches, that America was going right down the toilet, good news reached your shores. Trump U. is coming to Camano. That’s right, quality education, good jobs, reinvigorated economy, all coming to mobile trailers near you. At least until the brick and mortar classrooms and lecture halls are completed. Rest assured, the light at the end of America’s dark tunnel is up ahead and it’s an LED. This is no mail order degree mill, this is Donald J. Trump University.

Soon you’ll be receiving four color, six page glossy brochures advertising the vast array of degrees that will be available at T.U., taught by PhD’s who themselves graduated summa cum loud at the prestigious University, for not much more tuition than a student would pay to go to Harvard. And! If you act now, they’ll give you, not one, but two additional degrees in the subject of your choosing. Just add shipping and handling. For you veterans the government will subsidize the cost of this education. Thank you for your service!

Problem with diplomas from high school? Not a problem at Trump University! You won’t even need a G.E.D. Dropouts are welcome at the U and their mentoring program will help you earn your degrees in no time flat, almost literally. And isn’t it refreshing to know, in these recessionary years, that in a matter of only a few seminars, you too will join the entrepreneurial elite. Apply now for our fall registration. The future beckons. The future is you. Don’t delay. Education was never so easy.

Some of you fair readers out there might not know it, but in actuality, I’m a biznessman. One of the few here on the corporate-challenged South End. Admittedly it’s a small bizness. And okay, full disclosure here, I’m not real high on the Job Creator list, although, I have hired half a dozen folks over the years, not enough to bring the economy to full roar, but hey, how many have you hired? If it’s more than half a dozen, don’t write to me. You either, Donald, I don’t care if you are running for President.

As a bizness, a legal entity known to the state of Washington and the IRS as Revisionary Glassworks – okay, it’s a hippie dippie name, but how was I to know back in 1980 I would become the economic engine I am today – I am required to do most of the things Boeing or Microsoft do to operate a company. No, not outsource my work to China, I mean I have to fill out L&I forms, proof of insurance, get contractor’s licenses, pay quarterly taxes (which I always forget to do, which reminds me, damn, I forgot this last one too) and file Intent to Pay Prevailing Wages, this last I’m trying hopelessly to do online. The Big Boyz hire people to manage this stuff. I tried to talk the mizzus into doing this tedious crap but she’s a little busy working full time and doing our household finances. So I’m stuck with most of it. Good thing I’m not real busy myself working.

My handlers at the WA Arts Commission put out a little booklet they call the Handbook for Artists. It’s 60 pages of hoops us artists have to jump through before they pay us a dime for any public art projects we have won commissions to do. Little things like structural engineering stamps, conservator evaluations, proof of insurance, business license, blah blah blah for page after page, plus this brand new one: Intent to Pay Prevailing Wage. I recently got a contract, signed it, sent it in with most of the above and said Yes, I will pay prevailing wage. I got back a message Not so Fast, Charlie! You got to send us a form.

Nice to let us know. Next Handbook will probably add a few pages to explain where to get such a form. Turns out L&I handles that little detail. So I go online to fill out their form and pay their fee (which, call me anti-government if you have to but don’t bet heavily on it) is really the basis for this, I think. Well, it takes money to make money, me and Donald always say, so I hunkered down over my computer and started to fill out the damn form.

I’m going to spare you the ugly descriptions of this torture. You don’t need to visualize waterboarding or online form fill-outs. I even apologize for inflicting this minimum amount on you. But after an hour I had to stop. When I went back later, the site was gone. Or so my computer told me. I tried alternative places. Same message. Half an hour later I got in. Same site, so you tell me. Alice in Wonderland would have a field day in bureaucratic mazes. I spent two more hours filling out a one page form only to get stalled trying to print it. Fast forward an hour. I’m on a different form, online alternative version I guess of the other one, and it asks, about question #3 who my funding agency is so I put down the WA Arts Commission. It says it has no record of this. How could it? I’m putting it down now. But … you can’t go to question #4 if you can’t get #3 done. And I can’t get paid if I can’t get to question # 378,934 and hit Send.

Okay. Catch 22. Somewhere in a perfect world where the sun shines all day long and the moon is full every night, we could forego this red tape. No, wait. That place exists!! I have had projects in Florida and Alaska and Oregon and Utah. They don’t give me a 60 page Handout. They don’t require 35 hoops to jump through. They don’t need an Intent to Pay Prevailing Wages, as if I would know what the guy I hire should be paid to hold a panel in place while I screw the moldings on, some union scale for Panel Holder On-ers. And okay, yeah, I’m frustrated, I’m more than a little pissed off, I’m 66 years old and still trying not to be forced into involuntary retirement. But I tell ya, I’m starting to see what the small business folks are screaming about. I feel their pain. I definitely do. And no, I’m still not gonna vote for Donald. Pain is one thing, torture is another.

When I was just out of college — we’re talking the early ‘70’s here — I wanted to join a commune and be a hippie. I know, a little late for the show, but better late than never, I figured. And anyway, I didn’t want to work so that narrowed my options down to very few. Bum, artist or hippie — or, in my case, all of the above. So a few of us went up to an abandoned farm in Northern Wisconsin and set up shop in an old Polish farmhouse, no indoor plumbing, a couple of electric outlets, a handpump out in the yard and a falling down outhouse.

Rick and I were the two males in the encampment so we he-men took it on ourselves to construct a state of the art outhouse. We found some lumber in the barn — which we learned later, much to our embarrassment, belonged to Ernie, the son-in-law of Felix, the farmer across the road — and armed with hammer and hand saw, we set to work. Now maybe you know how to go about outhouse construction, but Rick and me didn’t have Clue One. We were like Cro-Magnons who’d heard rumor of wheels but had never seen one in action. We knew you needed walls, roof would be good, a seat with one or two holes and of course one in the ground. That last one we figured out okay, but the rest, they were real headscratchers.

Somewhere on the 2nd or 3rd day we’d nailed together some boards, hoping, I guess, inspiration would carry the day. Eddie, our other next door neighbor, who’d probably been laughing himself sick watching from across the field, finally took mercy on us wanna-be hippies and brought over his extension cord, a skilsaw and his cousin Tony who lived in Chicago but had the house down the dirt road we all lived on. Rick and I managed to do just enough to make nuisances of ourselves while Eddie and Tony slapped up our new shithouse in no time flat.

We all sat around afterwards, all us men, drinking cheap beer, warming ourselves in manly companionship and camaraderie, pleased as punch like all masculine carpenters at our ability to erect cathedrals and skyscrapers with our own two hands. So okay, civilization rests on shaky assumptions. Nevertheless, you’d have been pleased too to have an outhouse, not the woods.

Even on the politically scarred landscape of the South End where scorched earth campaigns are now considered, not just normal, but mandatory, I would be remiss if I didn’t, at least in passing, make mention of this week’s GOP convention. In full disclosure I am not a Republican, have never been a Republican and even if the Republican Party survives this humiliating year they’ve saddled themselves with, I will not become a Republican. Maybe if I lived in fear of neighbors with different sexual preferences or watched through binoculars the hordes of Hispanic lawncare providers poring into our suburbs or worried that the kid down the block had pledged allegiance to ISIS, maybe I would reconsider. But by then I would be drooling in my wheelchair in front of Fox News down at the Mabana Home for the Hopelessly Insane, pounding my liver-spotted fist in cadence with the hate-spewed chanting LOCK HER UP.

My old man is a dyed in the wool Republican who thinks Fox is a news channel, not an opinion factory for the rabid right wing. And even he sits in disbelief that his party is nominating, no, HAS nominated this billionaire braggart who admits the evangelicals supporting him probably shouldn’t have, who supports LGBT rights when the party platform is vehemently stuck in the Eisenhower closet, who still wants to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, who wants to run from the globalization Republicans and the Chamber of Commerce have supported for decades, who plans to renegotiate trade agreements unilaterally, who … oh, why go on? Donald J. Trump is no more a Republican than Obama is a Muslim. Although … there will always be doubters.

Democracy is a more fragile political system than most of us think. I walk down the aisles of the grocery store now and I realize half of the folks pushing carts are really very angry. We all live on an island here in paradise, we’re mostly white and privileged, mostly retired and well off, we all count ourselves Americans and Americans, last time I looked, are the 1% of the world and we’re pretty much the 1% of America or at least 2 or 3%. What, I want to ask my fellow grocery cart pushers, are you so pissed off about? Hillary Clinton? Mexican rapists? Black Lives Matter? Teachers Unions? Terrorists? Benghazi?

Well, yes, I guess, judging from Trump’s acceptance speech. America, we’re told, is going down the rabbit hole. Economically, militarily, politically, all is lost. And only one man, one man alone, can save us. A white man. A rich man. A man who cannot be bought but who bought others. A man who sees this country as a lost dream in need of a strongman. If he’s right, if most of us share that dark vision, we may get the leader we deserve. And I’m going to need to find another grocery store to shop in.

I got a buddy who claims he was the first Owner-Builder on Camano Island. The year was 1977, the same year I bought my shack. I met him 13 years later and we ended up building 3 sailboats together, one for each of us and one for his pal the building inspector who became my friend too. Ironically, I may be one of the last Owner-Builders in Island County. I don’t think my permit was ever signed off on so I may well be the last official O-B.

I guess maybe they figured the codes got too complex for us amateur housebuilders, all those R-factors for insulation and E-glass in fenestrations and X-factors for our marriages. Or maybe it was this: a permit for an Owner-Builder was next to nothing, something like $50 when I got ours. The county might’ve done the taX-factor and realized us hippies were costing them revenue. Maybe some of us built our own palaces to save the permit expense, but I would’ve paid full freight just for the right to build my own place the way I wanted. A few hundred bucks wasn’t gonna stop me.

I spoze we can still build our own Xanadu, nothing to stop us. Just have to disclose that a rank amateur threw the hammer and ran the saw, flashed the windows, shingled the roof, installed the electric and plumbing and if you’re the prospective buyer, best beware!!! The people at the county sheds told me I’d be a Total Idiot to apply for an Owner-Builder status. Boy, he read me like a book. A comic book, I’d bet.

By the time I got our permit, us Owner-Builders had to meet the same codes as any fly-by-night contractor, go through the same inspections, all the rigamarole as the Big Boyz. In other words, the government here doesn’t allow for hippie shacks or slam-bang cabins. We got to build our parents’ suburban homes. Might explain why kids just stay with their folks now — why bother building the same damn place twice?