The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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This past summer a buddy and I were hauling up from the crab fields out front, bitching about our current President’s latest idiocy as we were wont to do almost incessantly, when we met Ken, my neighbor across the road, and in a burst of enthusiastic rancor I decided to share our political animosities with him, starting with, “Well, not really sure what your politics are, Ken, but Dave and I were just …” As most people know by the time they’re in long pants, assumptions about politics or religion are, what we call on the South End, a slippery slope. So naturally Ken pointed out that he and his mizzus had voted Trump/Pence, stopping my screed in mid-screech, sending Dave and me and two buckets of crabs home kind of embarrassed. Or at least as humiliated as two crab killers are capable of.

But just before we exiled ourselves Ken asked if I would participate in our local library’s new podcast series he explained he was putting together. Possibly it was out of a chagrined fluster brought on by our curtailed political gaffe, but in a moment of weakness, I said yeah, sure and immediately put it out of mind and returned with Dave to our pleasurable ranting and an agreeable afternoon of crab mutilation and devouring.

Well, maybe I forgot about my promise, but Ken didn’t, so when he called a few months back, I drove to the Sno-Isle headquarters, entered a state of the art sound booth, put on big cushy headphones, sat close to a very sensitive microphone our Band would dearly love to own and let Ken and his cohort, Jim Hills, ask anything they wanted. They weren’t the Mueller investigation, thankfully, and better yet, they were very nice fellows who were sweetly gentle with this old codger.

For any of you out there in Cyberville who’ve read more than a couple of these blog sketches of Skeeter’s, you probably notice I don’t talk much about my so-called career as a stained glass guy. So you can maybe imagine my argument with myself about injecting a podcast interview into the Skeeter Diaries. But it’s New Years Day, the year of our Lord 2019, and I’m a tad hungover and sleep deprived from last night’s late hour bash, meaning my willpower is weak and my logic flawed. If this podcast seems long and boring, you are probably right … but in my defense, I blame Trump. Unless of course you voted Trump/Pence. In which case I have no excuses.

For the foohardy, here’s the link:
https://blog.sno-isle.org/news/podcast/episode-12-the-art-of-breaking-glass-with-jack-archibald/

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I seem to be always warning you good folks out there in your thermostatically controlled world about the perils of plumbing, the horrors of auto repair, the nightmares of everything from carpentry to toaster fixes, fully knowing you probably think I’m a complete anachronistic moron to throw myself at these endeavors when all I have to do is pick up my cellphone and call for help and a repairman would be at our doorstep in half an hour. Of course you don’t live on the South End. Number one, I don’t have a cellphone and #2, no repairman is going to come out that day, not that week and probably not even within the remainder of the year. At least not while the economy is humming and the tradesfolks are back to work after that long recession. Thanks to Trump. Thank him too for getting us out of the Great Depression, all his doing, making us great again. Good job, Brownie.

But I digress. I’m afraid I have to speak to you about something we all, well, most of us, take for granted, something that really hasn’t been around too much longer than our lifetimes, mine anyway, and that rarely gives us much trouble. I’m talking about electricity. Rural electrification in my case. Alternating current, thanks to Tommy Edison, and brought to me by my quasi-socialized utility, the PUD. Unlike most of you, I do not take electricity for granted. Winter storms knock out our power for days on end and while the neighbors power back up with generators that sound like a lawnmower marching squad, we just go without, a small reminder of how the folks a couple generations ago lived. Yeah, like cavemen.

I have a shack —what was my old abode for 17 years, now my glass studio — that started exhibiting strange behavior nearly a year ago. Lights would flicker erratically, grow constant again, then kick out the breaker. I would walk out to the breaker box outdoors, throw the switch, then … nothing. Next day, the power would return. I replaced breakers, I tried troubleshooting, I googled, I prayed, I started replacing every switch, outlet and light in the place. Sometimes, actually many times, I thought I had found the glitch. But inevitably the following day, or the next few hours, same damn thing.

Sure I worried about fires from electrical shorts. I even broke down and called some electricans. One actually called back. He didn’t have a clue any more than I did. He said work my way down the circuit and change everything. Which I’ve been doing. Now … understand … my wiring in that shack is not what you would call exactly code. Not by the book. It is, if I can be honest with you, kind of seat of the pants. Probably dangerous, definitely illegal. And maybe you’re thinking I’m getting what I deserve. But before you judge me harshly, if fairly, let me say in my defense that I was desperately poor when I did most of this. And okay, ignorant too. And yeah, I know, ignorance of the law is no excuse.

But what I’m getting at is the Law of Electrons, at least the little buggers down in my shack, aren’t playing by the rules. So we’re equal, I guess. All my life people have explained to me, patiently, that electricity is like water, it flows where you allow it and stops where you block it. It is, in other words, like plumbing. And if you have been paying attention the past few years, you know I think plumbing is faux science. I think it is more akin to voodoo than it is rational. Now I see that electricity belongs to a creepy underworld unbeholden to logic as well. At least the electricity in my haunted house of a shack. Don’t think, though, that I have admitted defeat. I intend to fight on, outlet by outlet, switch by switch, light by light. And if I have to work by lantern, by god, I’ll work by lantern. No tiny little electrons are going to break my spirit. No sir, tomorrow I’m going back down to that dark place and may the best man win. Or particles….

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Maybe you haven’t set up your funeral arrangements yet, nothing you really want to spend time thinking about while you’re healthy and mobile, not when you need every spare moment to cruise the internet. Chances are you haven’t even drawn up a will or one of those Do-Not-Resuscitate living wills so the Hippocratic docs won’t keep you on life support until the relatives are bankrupt. I haven’t done any of that either so I’m not casting the first stone, believe me.

But I was reading about a woman who wanted to be planted under a Gravenstein apple tree, her favorite fruit, great for pies and so she was launching a company, Recompose, that would compost your mortal coil, dust to soil, then spread on the garden you may or may not have. Nothing like a Grammy Pie, you’re thinking. And yeah, I get it, waste not want not, but it seems like an idea whose time has maybe not quite arrived if it’s even left the station.

We have a compost pile by our garden, toss in the kitchen scraps and the last of the garden when we do the fall cleanup, maybe some leaves and occasionally some manure, some wood ash and there’d still be room for grandpa. The squirrels forage there and probably some rats who check out what offerings we tossed in today. A lot of red worms, plenty of bugs that like decomposing vegetable matter. A regular ecosystem down there. And when it’s done composting, we spread it on the flowers and vegetables and fruit trees. Part of the cycle of life.

I kind of like the idea of returning to the earth, not with a silk lined casket, just toss the shovels of dirt directly and let nature do its job. Cremation, well, it’s cheap and sanitary and for those who like keeping a bit of the Loved One on the mantle, probably fine. We have a glassblowing buddy who makes little glass vessels using some of the ash, very elegant, nice paper weights. My mom is in a cheesy urn at the old man’s house. Kind of gives me the creeps, tell you the truth. My neighbor, Guitar Bob, keeps his papa in a coffee can, says he’s going to take him back to North Carolina someday. He won’t. His dad will end up in the Camano Island recycle with the bottles and cans and plastics, count on it.

It’s good, I guess, to have alternatives. No doubt the funeral homes will get a jump on this before the Gravenstein lady, show the bereaved the Cadillac compost bin with the imported French worms and the sterilized manure mixings. Maybe even provide the favorite fruit tree or an indoor house plant if eating dear old Uncle Fred makes the client queasy. If you can’t afford the Top End, they’ll have something akin to our own compost bin, sort of a mini-Potter’s Field. Hopefully without the rats, but then again, part of the Cycle of Life, right?

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