Teaching the Kids
Posted in rantings and ravings on September 1st, 2013 by skeeterMy neighbor Fred is standing next to his 40 foot expandable travel trailer with his SUV hitched to its bumper as he’s venting his ire at the free transit bus that’s just gone by. “See that?” he asks, waving irately at the emergency lights flashing while the driver picks up another neighbor’s teenage kid, skateboard under one arm. I give him a fish face, not much meaning he can read, because I know where Freddie’s headed. He’ll start with the bus subsidy for all the freeloaders on the South End, then he’ll move on to taxes, most of them wasted, frittered away on government services he sure doesn’t want or need. He voted for our Tea Party commissioner, he’ll tell me again and again, in hopes she’ll ‘starve the beast’, what he calls shrinking government down to something the size he can flush in a toilet.
Freddie worked all his life at Boeing, bastion, he says, of a Free Enterprise system. I used to argue with him about all the military contracts and tax breaks, but Fred worked on 747’s , not cruise missiles. He retired a wealthy man after 30 years, bought a nice home, owns motorcycles and sports cars and travel trailers and about every piston driven device that he can fit in his driveway, the motorcoach shed and a three car garage. He’s got HIS and by god he doesn’t want a red cent going to someone who didn’t work to get THEIRS. Not directly and not indirectly. That free bus bugs him no end and it’s only one item on a very long list of Grievances.
No one says you have to be generous. Or magnanimous. Or take care of the needy or the poor or the infirm. Freddie doesn’t see any, not one, familiar face among the downtrodden and he doesn’t see it as his problem. More than half us South Enders and the island too don’t either. They got theirs and they can’t imagine losing it to bad health or a bad economy or just bad luck. They aren’t their brothers keepers.
“See that kid getting a free ride,” Freddie says sneeringly. “you just taught him he doesn’t need to work.”
“He’s 13 years old, Fred,” I say. “Too young to drive, too young to buy a car. He goes to middle school. You think he should pay tuition?”
Fred pauses a nanosecond. “Might not be a bad idea.” I expect he’ll write a letter tonight to the commissioner.
Crime Wave
Posted in rantings and ravings on August 30th, 2013 by skeeterEven on the cable-free South End, we still get the evening news out of Seattle and Gomorrah. Mostly chilling tales of drive-by shootings, carjackings, arson, medical marijuana robberies, kiddie porn, celebrity divorces, all those Big City horror stories the neighbors think has spread up here with the rising tide of moral turpitude. They got security systems, deadbolts, surveillance monitors from Costco with 6 cameras they can watch Sector 1 through 6 on their Smartphones. Must be some great videos of raccoons going through the evening garbage….
Now… I’m not suggesting there’s no criminal activity going on here in Shangri-La-La Land. We just had some campaign signs torn down in the heated race for South End Fire Commissioner – big news! – that would indicate not only the race is heating up, but crime too. And down the block a purse and laptop were stolen … while the homeowner was at home in the broad daylight. Even their dog failed miserably in basic bark duty. And even closer to home, I recently gave testimony to a deputy regarding a beach shanty that had been nearly ruined by 14 teenage kids on a baseball team partying at a parent’s cottage down at the aptly named Summerland. We spent close to two hours going over my deposition — only to have the deputy who’d put this painstakingly into his police laptop, tell me he’d need a signature and would need to come back next day. Crime being rampant, he never returned, probably too busy with terror prevention than testosterone fueled vandalism. Not all crimes are created equal.
When I fell off the rutabaga truck here on the pioneer island, we had one deputy sheriff on evening duty. At midnight he went home for a nap, leaving the South End and the rest of the island to do the same until 6 A.M. next morning. Criminals sleep too, contrary to the evening news’ alarmist pronouncements. At least ours did. A neighbor told me he was awakened at 2 in the morning recently by 2 squad cars when his neighbor called 9-1-1 to report his sliding door to the beach open. Two more sheriff’s cars arrived for backup. He explained the door was ajar for his cat to go outside. They seemed suspicious, but finally, with an admonishment to secure the premises, roared off to the next emergency, all 4 vehicles. As my neighbors would say, you can’t be too careful.
A Fun Gun Club
Posted in rantings and ravings on August 28th, 2013 by skeeterThe South End Gun Club meets every 3rd Thursday of the month, rain, shine, Hell or High Water. They have a short meeting, discuss New Bizness, welcome the new recruits (mostly women these days), then move right on out to the Range. Drinking used to be allowed, but after the incident with Fast Draw Davy, the club reluctantly voted to make abstinence a requirement. Probably a wise decision.
Davy was always, drunk or dead sober, a hothead. He could shoot the eyes off the Obama photo the Club loved to use for a target at 50 yards with everything from his Glock to a favorite semi-auto to a full auto. Some of the boyz had mixed feelings about this. No, not the President as target — they were almost universally hostile to a Muslim as Commander-in-Chief — but whether Davy should brandish his AR-15 at the Range, considering it was illegal to own a weapon of mass mayhem. But Davy had helped half the membership in conversion techniques and they felt somewhat reluctant to take a stand against a gun they themselves now owned … or coveted. Davy was damn proud of that machine and its undisputed firepower. He meant to show it off every chance he got.
The Range has a long and checkered history of late night firefights and high decibel debates, and the new arrivals to the adjoining properties, once pastures or woods, but now expensive McMansions whose professional owners liked their peace and quiet, didn’t much cotton to all these NRA zealots with their high caliber hi-jinx. As always, one man’s rights are another’s pain in the ass, but … welcome to the land of the free, home of the bravado.
When the sheriff’s deputies had come out on successive Thursday night meedings responding to the neighbors’ complaints that there was automatic weapon fire, Davy, being Davy, had become belligerent. He could quote the 4th Amendment backwards and forwards and by god, no tin star punk kid was going to tell him what gun he could or couldn’t own. Maybe the fact that he was holding his prized rifle in one hand a beer in the other set off alarm bells in Deppity Richards playbook, but fifteen minutes later every available cop on the island was parked with blue lights strobing at the Club’s back lawn next to the shooting range and they were moving in, shotguns up and safeties off, and for a few moments it looked like an O.K. Corral showdown. Everybody but Davy put their armaments on the ground — obviously this was out of hand.
Davy, though…. Davy seemed to be considering his options. Seriously considering them. Which, if you’re an officer of the law and you’ve asked an armed man once, in a not polite way, to drop his weapon, you are expecting an immediate acquiescence, not a fidgety wild-eyed hesitation. When Davy set his beer can down, the Gun Club stepped backwards almost as one crowd. The cops brought down their riot guns and holy moly, what seemed almost comical a minute ago, wasn’t at all funny right now.
Billy Wasserman, the current president of the Club, said, ‘Jesus Christ, Dave …” about the time Deputy Richards repeated his demand the gun be put down NOW!
Well, Davy did. The officers handcuffed him, put his AR-15 in a squad car trunk and that night’s practice on the Range turned into a late night conference where alcohol was banned from all future meetings. As well as illegal firearms…. Davy got his gun confiscated along with a steep fine and two years of probation. He got himself another semi-automatic, converted it, but he never tries to bring it to the Club. Just like the rest. Laws might be made to be broken, but not flaunted. Even on the wild South End.
audio — if a tree fell in the forest with no one to hear ….
Posted in pictures worth maybe not a thousand words on August 27th, 2013 by skeeter
audio — lament for stinky steve in A minor
Posted in audio versions ---- the talkies on August 26th, 2013 by skeeterStinky Steve
Posted in rantings and ravings on August 25th, 2013 by skeeterMost folks think homeless people live in the Big City. Seattle and Gomorrah. Portland. Stanwoodopolis. But that’s not true. There’s homeless people living everywhere — even the South End. If you’re the type of cautious soul who’d never pick up a hitchhiker, you’d never have met Stinky Steve. Or you’d think, even now, how mean it was to call Steve ‘Stinky’.
For those of us who DO pick up folks with their thumbs out, we didn’t call him that out of spiteful cruelty. Steve was genuinely, and I mean Full Bore, Head On, Hold Yer Nose, No Kidding, olfactorily displeasing. He had an odor part old B.O., part beer breath, part cigarette smoke and the rest I probably wouldn’t want to guess. I don’t think he minded us rolling a window down even in rain or cold weather. After all, those were his elements.
When I first picked him up, he was living in an abandoned shed a neighbor a couple miles north kindly let him use. He was on his way to work digging soft shell clams on the tideflats near Stanwood, or so he said. Later he lived in a pup tent near me and worked various jobs clearing trail or weed-eating the neighbors’ land for minimum wage. Some even offered him free use of their showers, but Steve wasn’t much for personal hygiene and always politely demurred.
Guitar Bob and me got to know Steve better than most. We used to play the 12 beer blues every Sunday night, and at some point Steve joined our little outdoor guitar duet, singing some ditty to our rambling fingerwork that always sounded oddly familiar. When some kids slashed his tent and strewed his meager belongings, Bob’s neighbors gave him a little trailer to live in … on condition he work around the place and go to Social Services and sign up for disability. Mental disability. They meant well, these Do-Gooders, but the end result of all this was that the State of Washington gave Steve a modest stipend that effectively resulted in Steve’s early retirement from the part time workforce and paid for his malt liquor without him having to work all day to earn it. Steve, predictably enough, had his alcoholism subsidized by the State. And we had a singer more and more off key, schnockered by the time we’d only started to warm up.
I guess the ditches beside the Road of Good Intentions are strewn with folks like Steve. We forget that not all of us want a suburban home, a square meal or even a hot bath. Some of us just want to be left the hell alone, to live our life a different way altogether, without sympathy, without a handout, without a whole lot of socio-psycho hand wringing. I’m not saying you should pick them up hitchhiking into town for their cigarettes and beer. I’m just saying they’re here, they’re not that crazy and they’re okay decent people. There’s no law that says they have to bathe.
Well, long story way too short, the good-hearted neighbors signed him up for computer training in Spokane, detox, three square meals a day and a life as alien to him as a heroine addict in a nursery school. Guitar Bob and I got a couple of letters, half computer hieroglyphics, half semi-sensible musings on his new life and about 2/3rds sadness expressed with a stiff upper lip. We never saw him again. Shortly after those letters he was diagnosed with colon cancer. Then we heard he died. Bob and I bought a 6 pack each and played our 12 beer blues long into the dark night for Steve, a fallen comrade, another loner on the sad old South End the newcomers won’t have to pass by as he stands in a cold drizzle with his tobacco stained thumb held out for the alms of a ride.