The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/audio-version-bygone-building-days.mp3[/podcast]audio version —bygone building days

I know there’s still a few of you builders out there whose knees haven’t given out completely, whose backs are bent but not quite broken, whose minds are still … well, let’s not go there. You boyz have seen some changes since the heydays before Growth Management, permit delays and draconian building codes. And I’m not just talking about profit margins.

Some of you old growths might remember when Bruce Kennedy was the building inspector. Golden days, that’s for sure. Some of us — and I won’t embarrass you – might remember his dad, old ChucK Kennedy, when he was inspector. I’m not sure you even needed a permit back then. Bruce is gone now — hiding out in Lewiston/Clarkston — and his old man’s there too. I guess they aren’t coming back so I’m going to tell you a story — and if they do come back, you didn’t hear it from me.

Bruce was out one weekend helping a buddy of ours build an illegal cesspool, what we called a Costa Rica septic system, three 55 gallon barrels lined up and connected with high tech, highly engineered, not quite fully approved PVC pipe. Bruce was up on the backhoe —- it was his day off and he was nervous about getting caught by somebody from County, you know, losing his job, his career, his pension, his whole future. I got wind of this and so I had my brother, who was visiting at the time, stick a clipboard in his hand, walk up to Mr. Kennedy on his backhoe and identify himself as a state health department inspector. He orders Bruce to shut off that machine and I mean Right Now, Mister! and let’s have a look at those health department permits If You Don’t Mind.

Now I know it sounds mean. I know it may look cruel. But hey, those opportunities for practical jokes don’t come everyday. Course when I saw Bruce slump over the steering wheel, I thought sure he’d had a heart attack and I ran out of my hiding spot and said enough’s maybe enough. When he saw me it was like a jolt off a defibrillator. He started breathing again. Swearing revenge, of course.

Shortly after that Bruce quit the county. He said it was all those rules and regs, those codes, all that rigamarole. But deep down I suspect it was the guilt of being a renegade fly-by-night septic installer. Oh, I suppose some of you think I should share the blame. But hell fire, if we all quit our jobs over side-skirting county regulations, who’d be left to build the houses??

Bruce is happily retired now, probably still bitching about Island County Building Department Management. And we’re all left learning the new rules, the new ropes, even with our Tea Party Commissioner who builds her own palace without permits. Okay, we’re bitching too…. But I hope occasionally we all think back aways and maybe recall fondly the era when our building inspectors not only looked the other way, but actually ran the backhoe for us old renegades. Knowing Bruce, you can bet it was one damn nice septic system.

audio —- metal detectors and geiger counters

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/audio-metal-detectors-and-geiger-counters.mp3[/podcast]

The Commissioners up at the Port of Mabana were holding their semi-annual meeting and high stakes poker game the other night when Melvin, the self-named Porta-Potty President, introduced into the minutes the ticklish subject of tsunami debris. “The entire west side of the South End is going to be Ground Zero for all manner of invasive species and radioactive garbage and foreign junk,” he warned ominiously. “And it’s the Port’s job to anticipate this.”

Willy, the Port’s #2 man, raised $5 and his Rolling Rock, looked around the table with his best poker face — the one that broadcast to everyone he was bluffing on a loser hand — and said maybe they could get some grant money for beach clean-up, whereupon Rick, real estate agent of the year in 2011 for Windy Rear Realty’s worst sales year, opened his cards to look  a pair of jacks straight in the eyes and asked, “Who’s going to give us this money, Willy? The Feds are broke, the state’s selling its liquor stores, the county has us cleaning up its parks? And in a minute, you’re going to be broke too. I’ll see your 5 and raise you 10.”

Melvin groaned but his two pair held him in and he reluctantly pushed 15 bucks into the pot for a look at Rick’s hand, figuring both boys were bluffing. “Be a good way to promote the Port,” he motioned, tinkling the ice in his scotch. “The Port,” Willy grumbled, tossing his cards with no little disgust, “is nothing but old pilings, Mel.”

“Half of Japan is on the way headed right at us,” Melvin repeated as he raked in the pot while Rick shook his head woefully, ready to call it a night and wrap up the meeting before his losses became personal. He hadn’t sold a property in two months. And that one looked like it would flip any day. “Stop your worrying,” he muttered. “The beach will look like a Goodwill for awhile, only cheaper. Be a beachcomber’s paradise. The only downside is sales at the Last Chance Thrift will plummet for awhile. Not our problem.”

Willy brightened a bit and gestured with his beer bottle. “How about this: we hide a blown glass ball or two down by the Port, advertise the hell out of it, and they’ll clean up that beach like it was a resort hotel in Waikiki.” He killed the Rolling Rock in a grand gulp and moved to adjourn. Melvin seconded and Rick pushed away from the table. Outside in the rainy driveway, starting up his battered Toyota Camry, he could almost hear the waves churning housewares and broken furniture, appliances and broken boats. Mostly he wished he hadn’t bluffed on that last hand.

audio — my brother-in-law’s keeper[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/audio-my-brother-in-laws-keeper.mp3[/podcast]

I’ve been vacationing recently to various mental illness get-aways. Some on the South End, some further afield. For some reason, unfathomable to the rock solid foundations of my own worrisome mind, I’m helping friends and relatives deal with sisters and brothers who have journeyed past the signposts, not only of normality, but possibly even the Twilight Zone — and I don’t mean Forks, WA. Maybe it’s the recession or maybe it’s the intensity of solar flares or, well, who really knows? These folks aren’t sure and if they were, you wouldn’t believe them anyway.

As I write this I’m in the Brown County Courthouse in Green Bay, Wisconsin where my brother’s brother-in-law is trying to get released to personal recognizance if he will agree to drug monitoring and many other requirements in return for a guilty plea to reckless endangerment and resisting arrest for destroying eight automobiles and leading the Green Bay Packer Police Dep’t on a 120 mph chase through downtown 3 months ago. Like the Blues Brothers he was on a ‘mission from God’ to root out Satan. Lots to do, not much time to do it, apparently. Now fully medicated, he is way less evangelical and far more contrite. In a day or so we’ll see if the judge agrees.

Being a South Ender, I witness mental instability on a near daily basis, even discounting my bathroom mirror. Art may very well be a 2nd cousin of incipient insanity in my case, but I suspect we all have an artistic streak or two and none of us is more than a warm day or two from going through the thinning ice of what we blithely refer to as reality. Or normality. Or sanctioned behavior. Beaver Cleaver never lived in anything firmer than the warm fiction of an electronic TV womb. June Cleaver took to her bed when Ward lost his job in the recessions of those days and Wally died in a Viet Nam rice paddy from friendly fire. If the Beave lost his moorings a few blocks from a perfect Norman Rockwell suburban two story Cape Cod, we might hope for a touch of compassion from an enlightened justice system. After all, we are our brother’s keeper in a world where reality may not be what it’s cracked up to be.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/audio-4th-of-july-on-the-south-end.mp3[/podcast]

Just a quick note to leave on the back door here as we motor down to the aerodrome and off to see family back in beleaguered Wisconsin.  Fortunately we avoided the recall election.  Unfortunately they’ll still be stewing about it.  The weather isn’t the only thing that will be hot there.

So old Skeeter will be off-line for awhile.  About a week.  Kind of the spiritual equivalent of a kid who stops texting for, oh, five minutes or so.  Almost forever in digital time.

I know some of you are going to suggest I’m leaving because I’m disgusted we live in the only place in the country that isn’t having the warmest spring on record.  Or that we’re sick and tired of picking moss out from under our toenails every morning.  Admittedly I’d have more luck growing seaweed in my garden than bibb lettuce.  I mean, if we’re going to have global warming, let’s include everybody.

Meanwhile, enjoy the peace and quiet of this website.  Watch a sunset and count the stars as they pop out from the strato-cumulus. Listen to the cicadas chirping.  Wait, that might be your hard drive going to hell.  Anyway, no need to thank me for the respite.  But come back later and sit a spell on the back porch.  I’ll promise to fix the leaks in its roof.   Not that I think it’ll still be raining….

4^th of July on the South End

We got our fair share of veterans down here, heroes of the wars, past and present, maybe too many wars, you ask me, but nothing anybody should voice too loudly any particular night at the VFW Hall.  Patriotism means a lot of things to every person, but most of the veterans I know pretty much believe they got the patent on it.  Maybe they do.  After all, they marched into the fray and a lot of their buddies didn’t march back out.  You don’t question the loyalty of these vets, not ever, and you don’t doubt their patriotism.

The other night some of the boyz were waxing nostalgic over a bottle of some privatized CostCo single malt Baghdad Bill had brought to the Marina and Bait Shop for the usual Friday night poker game.  Two Toke was there, and Big Larry too after closing up the grill at the Diner, plus me and a few other draft dodging, student deferred, anti-war types, and what with the 4^th rolling right up and the fireworks stands about to set up red white and blue bunting to sell incendiaries legally, we naturally gravitated to holiday talk and that led to Independence Day, not just here but for Iraqis and Egyptians and Afghan women, and that got us going on wars, good and bad, won and lost.  Two Toke was about one toke — or at least one shot glass — over the line when he started musing about Viet Nam.  Two Toke was there during the Tet Offensive.  He lost most of his unit and a part of a knee there.  He doesn’t have one good word to say about that war, and really, none about any since.  I guess he earned the right.  Bill was in Iraq.  He argues with T.T., but it’s like arguing with a Stanwoodopolite whether they’d like to be annexed into Camano Island.  You’re just asking for some vicious yelling.

Big Larry served in Korea, meaning, we got about all the wars covered since WWII.  Except maybe Granada.  Okay, Panama and Bosnia too.  Some nights we even have Jimmy Z sit in for a hand or two and he was in on the tail end of the Big One, kind of the grand old soldier, and when Jimmy’s sitting in, not even Two Toke questions the point of the latest wars.  Jimmy, though, doesn’t talk much about his two years in the Pacific theater, which took him through Iwo Jima and some nasty business on the beach and then back in the jungle.

Two Toke was wondering aloud if the Revolutionary War was fought so we could just march back over to some foreign country and make life hell for somebody else while Big Larry and Bill were starting to take swigs with every one of Tom’s verbal shots.  I might’ve let them duke it out if it wasn’t for the fact that I had 3 kings over a couple of jacks and the pot was by far the fattest it had been all night.

Boyz boyz boyz, I said, trying to sound like the cool head I never am.  Let’s agree to, you know, not agree.  But hellfire, we’re all in this together, aren’t we?  We got food to eat, a bottle to finish, we got friends and family, some of us got jobs, we got the great good luck to be born here and not in Smokey Point, let’s just be a little thankful, shall we?  4^th of July is coming and we can all at least be glad we’re sitting here in the Land of the Brave Home of the Free.

Course, that set Larry off, fuming over mangled quotations, and before I could get my bets down, the Marina was its own 4^th of July, fireworks ablaze.  I don’t know who won the argument by the end.  I know this: one of us lost a plump pot while he held a winning hand.  Poker, I guess, is a little too much like war.  But we’ll all be at the table next Friday night.  Probably fight about privatizing liquor.