The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I read a letter to the editor recently from a newly minted graduate of our school system railing about that same school system as mostly purveyors of communist propaganda. It forced him to learn about Islam but didn’t teach the Bible. It taught him Egyptian history but never, not once, mentioned Moses parting the Red Sea. Apparently his science teachers wouldn’t touch it either, afraid, probably it would subvert the shaky foundations of rationalism.

I’ve lived here long enough to remember when those commies used to bring in Creationist speakers and when evolution was fairly taboo, days our Graduate would like to bring back. Religion, I’ve learned the hard way, is a tough subject to tiptoe around. Any religion. Just not an amusing topic for the True Believer. So mostly I just pick a safer target and hope not too many toes are stepped on.

But I hafta say, in a country that vents mightily about the Taliban or extreme Muslimism, it is troubling to realize the folks who hate the false gods and beliefs of others would gladly set up their own religious schools and maybe make 2nd class citizens of their Jewish classmates or their Sikh or Hindu or B”hai or Buddhist or Catholic or …. Well, anybody but their particular sect. They want freedom of religion all right. Theirs, not yours.

I wish religion WAS the opiate of the masses, but sadly, it’s the testosterone. Maybe if we didn’t have religious beliefs to fight about, we’d wage wars over scientific dogma instead. The Big Bangers vs. the Multi-Dimensionalists. Eat this theory, blasphemer!!

Facts, though, don’t seem to matter, just fervent faith. I can’t prove it … so what? I believe it so it’s true. Obama’s a Muslim, evolution is a fraud, the moon landing was hoax, God is a Christian, the universe sits on the back of a tortoise, aliens are among us, the world banking system is controlled by Zionists, the Stanwoodopolis school system is a communist conspiracy.

It’s nice to know that our taxes have done a fine job educating our children. I think they’ll be ready to take their place in society. Sometimes, honest to your God, even on the South End, there’s no place to hide from these people.

Fat Jack’s was the Second Hand shop half a mile down from South End Realty. Jack wasn’t fat and the second hand furniture and tools were mostly 9th or 10th hand. You wanted a kitchen chair all the glue had dried up, Jack had a couple. Dull chisels, hammers with half a claw broke off, screwdrivers with a broken handle, saws missing teeth, power tools without a cord, Jack had the tool for you. “Better’n that crap you buy new nowadays,” he’d say if you mentioned the defect, hoping to get a better price. You never — and I mean Never — got a good price at Fat Jack’s.

Fat Jack’s was a garage with the sliding door seized in the overhead position, a shed off the side and a small barn leaning precariously into a predictable future. Jack lived alone in the house where a few rooms were filled with artifacts, clothes, antiques and nondescript items he apparently thought enough to haul inside with him. Us customers could look past shelves of unpriced housewares, knickknacks and baby toys right into the dirty pots and pans breeding in the sink and on the filthy peeling countertops. Only the insane or the hideously desperate, would ask to use the public restroom. It was rumored even Jack used the woods behind the barn.

The year Jack called it quits, he had his Going Out of Business Sale. Three quarters of the South End showed up on a rainy windy December weekend and by Saturday Miller Time, most of the barn was empty, the shed bare to its dirt floors and the garage was ready for a couple of cars to come home. What he didn’t sell, he burned Sunday out back in the tall wet grass of the field. What didn’t burn, well, it’s still there, waiting for the 30th Century archeologists.

Fat Jack was the last of a breed, although we didn’t know that then. He was a salter of mines, a bait and switcher, a snake oil salesman, a Tennessee horse trader. He lived for the deal and he rarely wound up on the thin side of one. E-Bay and the internet pretty much ended services like his, relegating him and his con artistry to rural backwashes far from the nearest pawnshops and the perforated memories of geezers like myself.

Woodworker Bill had a shop across the island from my place where the trail I built and maintained through the interior popped out. Where it still does. The property was once the Snowdens, the folks who built Tyee Store in the 70’s, and it was one of the few places on the South End zoned commercial. For that matter, one of the few on the whole damn island. Not that Bill’s was exactly what you would call a commercial operation. He had a commercial quality shop in a huge pole building wired for power tools and set up for serious production.

The shop was set up for serious production but Bill wasn’t. Oh, he’d tackle an odd job here and there. Maybe build Jack Gunter, the gallery owner just down the road, an angular cabinet piece for one of his wild ideas like the Siberian series, something he’d later paint and gilt with gold flakes. The cabinet was the real work of art, nothing 90 degrees, everything skewed and slightly akilter, as if Escher had taken up woodworking. That cabinet took months, maybe a year. One thing about Bill, he was not in any hurry. Another thing, you couldn’t tell him how you wanted anything done — he’d fly off the handle and probably quit right then and there. And he wouldn’t give you a quote. Just an hourly. He sure didn’t want to be trapped in a bid.

His few customers, of course, were trapped in the math of multiplying hours. All of which explains why most days you could find Bill down at the Viking Café or Helen’s Kitchen drinking coffee refills all morning and late into the afternoon, slowly working his way through the paper or chatting it up with the waitresses and regulars.

Bill’s first wife had died young and suddenly of a brain aneurysm. His second died of cancer back in ’92 or so. He bought a Cortez, an industrial version of a travel trailer, and began living in it in the shop while he refitted it. A year later he motored down to Moab, Utah, drifted over to the aptly named Blanding, then after an incident with the trailer park owner, set off for Arizona where the Cortez broke down once and for all. He had it towed to a ramshackle park in Big Puddle or some hellhole of 50 people of similar xenophobic disposition, sort of a South End but without any north or east or west, just the end of the line for another hermit lost and broke in a heatbuckled highway of the 21st Century.

Living here on the ‘Island You Can Drive To’, most of us only drive to the House You Live In. Kind of understandable, considering there’s no outlet malls or fast food franchises beyond our mailbox. Further on, there’s just more blacktop, identical mailboxes and, well, more of the same. Which I guess explains why most of our northern neighbors have essentially no idea whatsoever of what lies beyond their driveways to the south. You might think that commute to Stanwoodopolis and beyond would grow tiresome. You might think idle curiosity would kick in after the 1000th commute to I-5. What the hell IS down at the end of their island? Where do those other roads GO??

But no! We are creatures of habit, apparently. Whatever pioneer spirit led us to the end of America, we’re no Lewis and no Clark either. We’re like the Conestoga family headed west that took one glimpse of the fierce gauntlet of the upcoming Rockies and decided Kansas was plenty far enough. Better to take the easy way out than risk it for the improbability of a promised Paradise the brochures probably exaggerated.

A few years back we had some serious construction on the mainline down the gut of the island. Months of detours that forced the complacent shortest-distance-between-two-points-is-a-straight-line crowd to shunt over to the picturesque and historic west side. Believe me, to listen to the outraged outcry or read the vitriol in the letters to the editor, you’d have thought we’d routed them through the alleys of Hell or the horrors of Smokey Point. They wanted a detour on a blacktop nearby that was definitely not designed for heavy traffic and they wanted it NOW. Our commissioner, Bill Thorn, god bless his decisiveness, said no, it’s a temporary inconvenience and we won’t destroy a perfectly good road to make the GPS-averse electorate shut up their weeping and lamentations. Grow up, fer cryin out loud!

Next election, of course, the crybabies exacted revenge. Bye bye Bill. You can lead a horse to the South End, but he’ll thank you by kicking you half to death. Better, we’ve learned, just to tell em what they’re missing. No need to drive any further than necessary. Curiosity, after all, kills.

Being self-employed, a lot of us artists go without health insurance. No doubt this bohemian lifestyle breeds in us a belief in our own invincibility. That, or our enlarged egos refuse to harbor doubts about prolonged longevity. Personally I think of insurance, any insurance, as the bane of my existence, basically an extortion scheme by private enterprise to shake me down through fear and intimidation. We got car insurance, we got house insurance, I got business insurance and yeah, we pay through the ring in our nose for what we’ll euphemistically call health insurance.

We got a ‘catastrophic’ plan. Meaning the insurer won’t cover anything short of a catastrophe. Huge deductible. No need for co-pay. Fat chance they’d cover anything this side of cremation. For only $9000 a year. Half my life I didn’t make $9000 a year. At least that’s what the Social Security folks tell me in calculating my projected retirement. I think they just like to rub it in ….

So naturally the mizzus and me were real interested in the opening of ObamaCare. The U.S. government shut down over yet another last ditch effort to kill it, cripple it or hamstring it. Some folks in Congress are in the final throes of apoplectic desperation. Gonna cost jobs, gonna cost a fortune, not gonna save me a dime and maybe way worse. I didn’t know WHAT we’d find but I figured it wouldn’t be worse than what we had now.

I was right. It wasn’t worse. It was vastly better. We don’t have to buy ‘catastrophic’ anymore. We won’t get the Cadillac hedge fund manager program, but we won’t get the cheapest ones either, just something in the middle. You maybe are wondering what it costs, bottom line. We were too. Try about $1500 a year after deductions for income. Sort of progressive health insurance, not regressive. You heard correcto. $1500 vs $9000. And, by the way, that ‘catastrophic’ plan. It would cost us zero, zip, nada. Nothing.

Now … I know this is anecdotal stuff, one household, maybe atypical. The TeaParty folks who think once we’ve tasted this candy, we’ll be so addicted, they’ll never be able to get rid of it — well, correcto again!! They can call it ObamaCare or DramaCare or whatever. For us it’s Affordable Health Care. The only thing that would make me more pleased is if the insurance company gave us back what we’ve obviously been overpaying all these years. But, let’s not kid ourselves. Folks can call this socialism or communism, but I bet in Russia the insurance companies aren’t still making big profits like they are here. Just a guess….