The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I got a lot of friends who are O.C.D., obsessive compulsive disorder folks, what we on the South End call Anal. Harsh word, anal, so for our purposes here we’ll stick with OCD. Don’t want to offend anyone, but linguistics can be a two edged knife. My pals suffering from OCD are mostly engineers, but they don’t see their symptoms as suffering. Or a disorder even. In fact, they would argue that the orderliness they demand of themselves is quite possibly the panacea for the problems the rest of us have. Course, they don’t factor in the fact that the problem I have is mostly them.

But let’s be fair. The new psychiatric diagnostic description for myself is: S.L.O.B. Seriously Lacking Obsessive Behavior. Poor toilet training as a kid, I guess. I don’t have to wash my truck every damn week. I don’t wash it every year some years. I accept that the universe is falling apart, what we call entropy down here in the South End Scientific Community. It’s just how things work. They go to hell in a handbasket and if you want to spend your life pushing rocks up a hill like Sisyphus, be my guest. They’re going to make a nice rock wall for yahoos like me when they end up down my way at the bottom.

I don’t make my bed. I don’t clean my windows. I don’t dust my shelves. I don’t edge my lawn. I don’t stack my firewood in nice rows. I don’t organize my files. I don’t follow directions. I don’t even look at the damn directions. I don’t follow a recipe or write one down either. I mean, why? The next batch of bread or homebrew or the next meal will be different, maybe better, maybe worse. C’est la vie, amigo! Routine is the killer, lists are for someone closer to death, order is for the delusional, life is chaos and the sooner you accept it, the better off you’ll be. So yeah, I’m SLOB.

I’m sure there’s a pharmacological cure for my ailment. But hey, I’ve got a pharmacological cure for lots of my ailments, why add one that might have side-effects for the others? In the final analysis, I suppose there’s a nice equilibrium between me and my OCD cronies. They draw in the lines, I draw the rest. When it works, we got a great little homeostatic community. When it doesn’t, well … we’ll find out what happens when gravity hits anti-gravity. Probably sounds like my banjo…..

Being a card carrying South Ender, I’m a little mistrustful of fiduciary institutions. I don’t bury my savings out back in the nettle field, but I’m not real happy keeping it in the bank’s mattress either. I hear we’re coming out of the Great Recession after, oh, 7 hard years, but what I think is the folks who had enough money to play the stock market, they’re doing fine. The Fed dropped interest rates to near zero so if you happen to want to make money with the money you already got, you pretty much had to invest in the market. If you’re like me, you just wanted to play it safe after that same market dropped 40 % back in the Dark Days of the subprime mortgage collapse.

Fool me once, shame on you … fool me twice, well, I’m not happy about my options. If inflation kicks up, that money in the bank will start to dwindle. But … I learned a hard lesson about the stock market I won’t forget real soon. So when I went into my current bank, one of those Too Big To Fail conglomerates, to deposit a check awhile back, my friendly teller looked at our account and asked if I’d care to talk to one of their investment advisors. “You might want to consider something that would make more interest than your savings and checking account,” she said.

It’s wonderful to have my bankers concerned for me, it really is. Why would I ever think they were a predatory pestilence? So what if I have friends who’ve lost their homes or are even now fighting with their banks who for years have threatened them with evictions and mortgage default? Obviously they just want me to succeed. Good people, good hearts. I said, “You mean sit with one of your brokers who would suggest stocks and bonds for me to invest in?” My teller smiled beatifically. I was tuned in. Just a few keystrokes and that money sitting safely in our no interest account would electronically transfer to the Wall Street hotshots and earn us who knows how much money compounded annually over multiple years. Capitalism, what’s not to like?

“This bank,” I said, “no offense, but you folks played fast and loose back before the Recession. Bad loans, subprime mortgages, collateralized loans, hedge fund bets against your own investors. You and the other banks and the investment firms drove the economy into the dirt. And you want me to walk over and talk to your advisor? You guys are like a casino, take a cut on every hand and you win whether the rest of us do or not. Good racket, but I’ve got to pass this time. My gambling days are about over.”

No doubt I have an asterisk by my name when their computer logs me in, one that means Willing To Stay Poor. When the Fed raises interest rates — and it will before too long — we’ll see how the stock market does when financial cowards like me can make money by saving money, not gambling it. Until then it’s a bull market all right and my friendly little bank is raking it in but not loaning much out. Maybe that’s why we bought the property next door. We didn’t bury our money there, we just bought the hole to put it in.

Biker Billy was leaned up against the chrome of Johnny Banshee’s old Hudson showing the boys from the Flatheads, our vintage car club, his newest tattoo. Most of the boys don’t sport body art, figuring, I guess, customizing an old automobile is artistic expression enough. Billy had some heart with the knife in it, dripping drops of blood, and under that the words BORN TO OOZE. “Kind of Old School, isn’t it?” Ronnie asked, risking Billy’s ire which, trust me, no one wants to do. Billy isn’t in an Outlaw Club now, but once a biker, always a biker.

Billy grinned, showing his two missing teeth which none of us ever asked how they got missing. He looked like a pirate gone to seed prematurely. I helped Bill and his girlfriend who was an old bus driver friend of mine from our city days build their cabin too many years ago to count. I like Billy okay, at least when he ran solo or he was sober or he was rehabbing. I didn’t like him much when a few of his biker buddies rolled in with bottles of cheap wine and six packs of beer they’d swill down in record time. Wouldn’t take long until you were the odd man out in their gang and if they were looking for a victim, they didn’t have to draw straws.

Billy’s a tattoo parlor’s wet dream. He went for the clichéd stuff and the Needleman could do skulls and crossbones, snarling dogs and the business end of .38’s in his sleep. Billy was practically covered and running out of room. Once I asked him why he didn’t get a tattoo that was, oh, more artsy fartsy. He glared at me like I was some idiot making fun of his Harley. “Just a thought,” I mumbled and dropped the subject.

I never got the attraction for body art. For one thing, it seems like tourist shop art to me. Butterflies and dragons, Celtic crosses and rainbows, sappy slogans and cornball cartoonery. I figured if I had to look at something dyed onto my skin for the rest of my natural life, I’d want something interesting, something arty, something that maybe I didn’t get sick of in about six months. But then, I’m an old geezer now and that explains a lot.

I had a pal, Norm, who walked up to my artist buddy Prof. Jim one summer day when Jim’s tats were exposed out of his short sleeves and asked him, thinking he was being funny, how drunk was he? This was back in the ‘70’s, before tattoos were all the rage. Jim gave Norm the stink-eye and asked what he meant. “The tattoos. You must’ve been drunk on your ass, right?”

Jim pretty much gave Norm an education that day and I learned not to ask much about folks’ body art. It’s their body, as the women’s rights advocates say, to do with as they please. And if you’re thinking of questioning guys like Billy, he’ll do what he wants with yours too. Beauty, worst case, is in the blackeye of the beholder.

A lot of the new folks downriver never heard of UpCreek. They hear people talk about it, they think they just mean ‘up stream.’ Like a lot of places lost to rot and ruin and history too, UpCreek once was a prosperous town of prospectors and gold panners around the turn of the last century. Prospecting in 1890 was like high-tech startups are a hundred years later, fat money to be made and plenty of thieves waiting to steal discoveries. Mining towns sprang up like human molehills, tunnels leading everywhere. Monte Cristo made a few men rich, but UpCreek made most men poor.

Except the storekeepers and the bars and the ladies of the night…. Before I was born, but the old timers tell me UpCreek was a wild and lawless place back then, a frontier when most folks farmed down in the fertile valleys. I guess it was the same in the Klondike, the same in Silver City, the same everywhere men leave their wives and family in search of fast riches. Nowadays the casinos make it a little easier, even put ATM’s by the slots for the folks grubstaking their way toward the gold vein or the hot hand. They’ll sell you food and entertainment. They’ll pick you cleaner than an eagle scarfing spawning salmon on Beaver Creek, nothing but bones and head without eyes when they’re done.

My place is an old cabin built from fir logs and roofed with cedar shakes right where a little steam hits the Little Beaver on its way down to the Big Beaver and on to the Stillaguamish. There’s a mineshaft at the back of the property, covered now with vines and lost memories, but occasionally I cut my way into the entrance, just a few rotted timbers left I don’t have much faith in. I go a few yards in with a lantern every few years, but not being a gambler or a daytrader, I back out into the sunlight where poverty looks better than risking everything on a roll of the dice or a turn of the shovel.

I’ve never understood Gold Fever myself, but UpCreek wouldn’t be here if folks didn’t imagine winning the Lottery. Course, now it’s just me and the rest of us who bought the abandoned mines and played out dreams. Maybe we were the winners after all….