The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Over a month ago I made the soonest appointment I could with the Dep’t. of Licensing to procure an enhanced driver’s license. In the time since, a buddy, my old partner of the Piranha Brothers, asked if I would join him for a sailing adventure into the San Juans. He was going for two weeks but, rather than cancel my appointment, I said I would only sail for a week, then catch a ferry home. Which is what I did, a little heartbroken not to finish the trip with Cap’n Joe. Weather was good, temperatures were warm, the seas fair. Looks like a great week coming up to be on the waters of the Salish Sea.

This morning, the day after leaving the voyage, I traveled 40 miles to the DOL office for my interview, got there 15 minutes early and found a small group of muttering fellow citizens staring at the CLOSED sign above the posted hours that told us today they opened at 8:30. My appointment was for 9. It was 15 minutes to 9. Some people sat in their cars waiting to see if anyone would show up and open the doors. One of the men said he figured the closure was due to budget cuts, probably give that money to housing for the poor. Pretty obviously he thought the poor should be left on the streets.

At 9 one of the group googled if by chance there was another office nearby or if maybe this one had moved. Indeed, there was a DOL office a mile north and a few of us jumped in our rigs and drove up there, only to find that office issued tabs and not enhanced or regular licenses. The secretary told me, yeah, lots of folks come to them when they find the office closed and yeah, that office has a history of insufficient staff.

So, being an optimistic idiot, I drove back to the other office hoping to find an OPEN sign with a full or even partial staff, but found instead another cluster of incredulous and pissed off folks, one who’d taken time off work, another whose license had expired, some who had driving tests scheduled. All pretty incensed, all shaking their heads, most blaming government.

When I got home two hours and 80 miles round trip later, I found an email sent exactly 5 minutes after I’d left the house informing me my appointment was canceled and … sorry for any inconvenience. Do Not Reply to this message, it informed me. I think I understand now why these are sent without any possibility of a reply. And I’m starting to understand why people hate the damn gummint.

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

Down here in the start-up labs of the South End we’ve been printing DNA. Got ourselves some sterile vats full of 4 major amino acid groups, hooked em up to a 3-D printer, ran a USB port to a laptop and went to work experimenting with interesting combinations. Make our own stem cells with unusual variations of chromosomes, another year or two, you’ll see Wal-Mart offering kits for the kids. Make your own sibling! Puppy in a test tube! Fun for the whole family!

Course we’re still working out the bugs, literally sometimes. South Endomex Technologies made a fast mutating paramecium that ran rampant in the dumpster behind their lab a couple months ago. Two or three cats lost more than their allotted 9 lives before Billy Brandon, the night manager, noticed clumps of matted fur behind the building and alerted Frank, South Endomex’s project manager next morning. “Looked like they’d been turned inside out and twisted,” he whispered before giving notice.

Kind of a wake-up call, I guess. They double bag unwanted recombinants now, no point taking unnecessary chances. Not that anyone’s very worried. I mean, what are the odds of escaped life forms surviving in the hostile environment of the nettled South End? Humans barely eke out an existence, what chance does an unstable pile of amino acids have?

Still, always good to err on the side of caution even if the government hasn’t gotten around to clamping down on the profit motive with overly burdensome regulations.     Yet….     Which only makes us all that more inventive. Time, after all, is not on our side. But judging by the influx of venture capital, the potential is nearly unlimited. Forget Silicon Valley. This here is the Next Big Thing. This is the new Garden of Eden, a chance to get it right this time. You want an apple, Adam? Tart or sweet? Red or yellow? With or without seeds? Just punch a program, Big Fella, no need to disobey orders from On High. But … maybe keep an eye out for any odd looking worms. Still got some flies in the ointment….

My old construction partner, boat building mentor and former roommate nearly 50 years ago is sailing up today from Seattle and Gomorrah to pick me up for a second run into the San Juans, that snooty archipelago that refuses Camano entry into its ritzy island club. Our last adventure ended in a flipped sailboat, my prized Pelican, the S.S. Pterodactyl, off the shores of Lummi Island. We did not drown, but we were more than slightly embarrassed to be rescued by the Coast Guard and other boaters, after which we hightailed it to solid ground near Bellingham.

Undeterred, bent but not broken in spirit, a great deal older and probably no wiser, we’re off again in his 15 foot sailboat, cramped quarters but we’re not Mark Zukerberg who needs 3 mega-yachts to boost his puny ego. No, we have what we need. And hopefully calm seas, a steady wind at our backs and stars to steer us by. Cap’n. Joe wants to cruise for two weeks. Me, I have one week before I have to return to shore duty.

Enjoy some time off yourselves from these Daddle diatribes. We both deserve the respite.

Smith Blar

I guess since all my cronies are throwing in the towel and taking retirement on schedule, it’s only reasonable I’ve been getting calls from the Mabana Financial Services asking if I’d like to come on down to their lavish offices overlooking the Port of Mabana and discuss fiscal strategies for my upcoming Golden Years. Ho ho, would I ever? Course, like I tell Ben, the head honcho down at MFS, it’s a little like saddling up the horse that ske-daddled when I left the barn door open back in my earning years. Earning years. Old Ben loves expressions like that.

I said I’d talk to him, but only over beers down at the newly opened Bar 282, named after our zip code’s last three numbers, probably some numerology factoid that becomes apparent deep in the cups. Better, I suppose, than 666, what the Little Church in the Ravine refers to it as. So if Benjamin and I are going to discuss finances, what better place? At least that’s what I told him when he asked, why there?

We got through the first two schooners okay, managed to navigate around my Social Security numbers which, admittedly, were poor, a reflection of my life as a fiddling grasshopper while my neighbors labored as productive ants. My mistake, at least from the vantage point of an old grasshopper, but I wouldn’t change anything even if I had a time machine. Ben commiserated the way a funeral director would offer comfort to the bereaved, not totally heart-felt, but what his job calls for. What’s he gonna say, you deserve poverty, Skeeter? Instead he mentioned annuities, aggressive equities, municipal bonds and a dozen other financial instruments. Instruments. I kid you not, that’s what he called them. Like something in a fiscal orchestra and he, I guess, was the maestro.

By the 3rd beer we were both convinced it was hopeless. I wasn’t going to catch up to Warren Buffet, not in the remaining years, not if I worked until I was 300 years old. “Ben,” I said, “I appreciate you trying to help. But you can’t prime a pump if you don’t have water.” Ben shook his head wearily. “You change your mind, Skeeter, drop by and we’ll strategize some more.” I haven’t been in since, but I might go for another beer with him. Maybe some of that high rolling fiscal firepower will rub off. That, or I could trade a few of my banjos for a couple of his instruments.