The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The talk lately around the grease pit at the Tyee Service and Lube these days invariably comes around to Medical Marijuana.  Or what most of the boys call Marital Marijuana.  Gary, the head mechanic, flat out opposes legalizing pot.  He says that’s all he needs, a bunch of dopeheads along with all the artists down here on the South End.  “We might as well call ourselves the People’s Republic of Camano, put everybody on welfare and keep em high as Katmandu kites all day long.’

Ralph works the pumps and does the oil changes.  He wonders if the Stanwoodopolis city council will let dispensaries sell marijuana.  ‘They’d make a fortune off taxes,’ he declares and Gary throws down a grease rag in disgust and twirls his socket wrench like a six-shooter.  ‘Cost em twice as much to take care of all the addicts.’

Two Toke Tom usually doesn’t weigh in on these panel discussions, at least not around Gary, but he opines that nothing much would change except now there’d be some quality control instead of the hit and miss of today’s marketplace.  ‘Sort of like bad moonshine,’ he says and Gary gives him the evil eye like maybe he’s considering urine testing for all future fellow employees.  Pretty quick Two Toke slips over to the pop machine for another jolt of high fructose and caffeine to get him through what looks like a long morning.

‘And WHY do they call it Medical Marijuana anyway??’ Gary bellows.  ‘How many potheads got diseases only dope can cure?  What’s next, you can buy meth instead of coffee? What’s going on here?’  Now it’s Ralph’s turn to shrink away, reflexively aiming at the Mr. Coffee boiling down to pure caffeine.  Ralph has plans to grow legally if laws get lenient.  Course, Ralph grows already, but it would sure make life easier if he could sell to his ‘patients’ without looking over his shoulder for the Island County Sheriff.

Times change, that’s for sure.  Not too much on the South End, although Ralph is daydreaming about using part of the Service and Lube as Dispensary.  Something to think about between oil changes.  Maybe buy the station from Gary when he retires or drops dead of a heart attack.  You never know, he thinks….. You just never know what’s around the corner.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/audio-jimmy-the-gyppo.mp3[/podcast]audio — jimmy the gyppo

A lot of the newcomers to the fabled South End build their mega-mansions with their yards left menaced by 100 year old 2nd growth nettle forests.  The first windstorm slamming them with 80 mph hurricane force winds triggers frantic calls to their insurance agent … when the power and phone service return.

It’s only a matter of time before they realize their woodland retreat is a potential deathtrap and, better safe than sorry, they decide to clearcut the property.  Worst case, they can put in a 9 hole golf course with sand and water traps and never miss the forests that brought them here in the first place.  The eagles and deer can migrate back inland a ways among us poorer residents, the ones with handicaps too high for golf.

Course now they need a tree expert.  Or at least some logger bonded and insured with references a long resume in the woods industry.  Trouble is, the logging era on the South End is pretty far back, mostly black and white photos down at the Historical Society and Tourist Information.  So … after some futile internet searching, they invariably get to Jimmy the Gyppo.

Jimmy’s been topping trees for suburban worriers ever since the log market went to pot, medical and otherwise, and the price of a board foot of timber nettle plummeted to less than the cost of hauling it to the mill over in Arlington.   He figured out the real money was in One-Offs, either before or after they were on a roof, didn’t matter to him either way.  When clients asked if he was bonded and insured, he’d just laugh.  That’s why you got the home insurance, he’d say, knowing full well their options were fairly constricted.

Jimmy the Gyppo didn’t come cheap and he even charged to haul the downed trees away.  Then he sold the firewood off a flatbed down by Tyee Store, what he called a Two-fer.  The rich folks didn’t mind.  The whoppers Jimmy regaled them with, spitting tobacco plugs across a pansy garden, made them feel a little like pioneers, breaking soil for the next expansion of the American West, bringing civilization to the wild old South End before finally deciding to move on to the sunny southwest where the winters were dry and there were no forests left to threaten their vacation homes.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/audio-retirement-for-dummies.mp3[/podcast]audio — retirement for dummies

I got a lot of retired neighbors.  You see em walking the dog 17 times a day or mowing lawn 3 times a week or driving to town 2 times a day.  They’re not acclimated yet to days on end, empty as a TV, that they have to fill up every morning all over again.

Retirement, as I’ve known since I took mine at age 27 or so, is no easy job.  Folks wait most of their lives to get to that stage of life, not really imagining the reality of it, just hungering for a cessation of their hellish jobs.  They think VACATION!   Years of it.  They think a really long weekend.  Drink a few beers, watch some ball games, clean the garage.  They don’t think of what happens when the garage IS clean, the ballgames aren’t on everyday, and a few beers becomes incipient alcoholism.  Their wives do.  They never imagined, though, that retirement meant having to share the house, share the days, share their old privacy.

I know:  I should write a Self-Help book on Retirement.  Save some marriages, save the neighborhood, even save some lives.  Get rich doing it too.   But … as I said, I’m retired. Not exactly looking to start a career at my advanced age.  Probably be Chapter One.  Or my epitaph.

Retirement’s a tricky act.  It’s not really institutionalized indolence.  It’s actually learning how to create your day.  Day after day. Week after week.  Year after …. Okay, you get it.  But a lot of my neighbors don’t.  Course, they don’t have my advantage of many decades of trial and terror.  Mostly terror, sure, but you spend as much time as me figuring out Time Management as an Art Form, you got a leg or three up on the poor schnook who stops the 8 hour, 5 day a week regimen, bam!  And then hopes to just live out the remaining years in the Lazy Boy with a remote and a faithful missuz who maybe isn’t ready to be a 24 hour maid service or an indentured servant.  Gonna be trouble, guaranteed!  Gonna be stress, high blood pressure, the inevitable heart attack.  For some of them, retirement might be a little more ominous than a trip to Maui.  If boredom doesn’t kill em, the missuz might.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/audio-south-end-pipe-dreams.mp3[/podcast]audio — south end pipe dreams

On the environmentally sensitive tree hugging South End, we’ve been exploring our many eco-options, everything from syntho-fuel to marital marijuana.  Maybe it’s post-guilt syndrome, that remorse we all feel down here after decimating our old growth nettle stands.  We can’t walk the woods without grim reminders every stump slowly rotting into swamp and history, the springboard marks still visible where our forbears stood above the impervious wood at ground level to fell the mighty beasts with crosscuts and grit.  The very heart of our South End culture got loaded and shipped to markets on the east coast and Japan.

Nettle paper, vertical grain nettle boards, nettle veneers — all lost.  As well as the nettle based civilization built around the mythic plants that cast their great shadows from the farms of Elger Bay to the forests of the Camano Head.  Baskets were woven from the fibers, herbal remedies were made from the leaves, shacks were built from the lumber.  Nothing was wasted.  And, of course, now there is nothing.  Just the stunted 8 foot third growth forests of stinging splinters, prickly reminders of another great civilization on the skid road.

Shaky Jake, once a fishing boat captain until the salmon too were decimated, has become practically an environmental evangelist, preaching the need to re-green the South End.  For a time he ran Canadian Bud through the Border Patrol, but after 9-11 there were too many Coast Guard speedboats with bow mounted heavy machine guns for his profits to match the risk.  Now that marital marijuana is about to be made legal, he has visions of hydroponic forests, hemp byproducts and the possibility of the South End rising from the blackberry covered ravines to take its rightful place on the forefront of the Green Technologies the President is advocating to take the place of carbon based fuels.

Nobody has the heart to tell him his dreams are pipe dreams.  But worst case, the stuff might make great gasoline.  High octane, anyway….