The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Well, they didn’t like being called Deplorables but I’m not sure they’d have liked being labeled racists either. Or homophobes. Pretty sure they wouldn’t care to be called bigots either. But they’ve elected a guy who feeds their fury and their boundless resentments, a vindictive self-righteous instrument of their revenge. He told them he would be their Retribution and they voted for him to be just that.

Oh yeah, they were sick and tired of the elitists, the East coast yuppies, the Wall Street crowd, the immigrants, the Woke, the trans and the gays and any religion other than theirs. Deplorable? They’ll show you deplorable!

Try this: get rid of foreign aid, eliminate the Department of Education, NOAH, the EPA, half the Department of Agriculture, fire the bureaucrats, deport anyone their Leader takes umbrage to, put totally incompetent sycophants in charge, alienate our allies and suck up to our enemies. How do you like that?

You wanted a Biznessman for Prez, you figured the billionaire who’d gone bankrupt how many times? would be the right fit? Sure, privatize the Post Office, let Musk get rid of his competition for satellites and space travel and EV’s, figure out how some weather company will take the place of NOAH. While you’re at it, ditch the fire and police, just more government, let the private sector sell you protection. Way more efficient, right? Doesn’t take a Harvard professor to figure out government is mostly waste and fraud and incompetence.

And while you’re at it, close the borders, lay tariffs on everything that crosses them, who needs an economist, you got the guy with all the answers. Fortress America! The one true God on the money! Put religion — yours — back in private schools. Get rid of science while you’re downsizing. Vaccines? Who needs em? Scientific research? Don’t make me laugh. Global warming studies? Hell, no, drill, baby, drill!

Slash the IRS too. Why make the rich endure an audit for those bogus exemptions? Social Security must be rampant with abuse, all those 150 year olds collecting your tax dollars. Time to slash and burn, so what if you get your check a little late. If at all….

Deplorables? You tell me. What I think is you’re just ignorant. Time will tell if you’re making America great again … or just breaking its back.

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Rebecca Snowalter runs her own business, the Top to Bottom Cleaning Crew. The crew consists of, well, her. Primarily — and nearly exclusively — the clientele are VRBO and Airbnb leasers, houses all over the island rented out by the day or week to tourists who vacation here. Used to be winters were slow but not sinc Covid kept folks in lockdown. Now everyone wants to travel. Rentl prices soared but Rebecca’s cleaning fees really didn’t, just more profit for the landlords.

Rebecca rents an old double wide down at the Mabane Mobile Village. Rumor has it lately a Canadian consortium may buy the Village lock stock and rain barrel, then jack up the rents. Way of the world, she figures, but she’s not happy about it. These days she’s not happy about much of anything.

“I’ve got to hire help,” she told me the other night at the Pilot House Lounge. “I can’t live on the few clients I have.”

Trying to detour her pessimism, I said, “Maybe the new owner’ll turn the Village into vacation rentals, more work for Top to Bottom.” Rebecca looked at me like I’d just spoken in glossolalia, babbling gibberish about the Promised Land. Or the sweet hereafter, the after being her death.

“Sure,” she said, “and maybe I’ll make a fortune in the next year, buy a house or maybe two to live in, sell the business and retire in Costa Rica, live happily ever after.”

She was imagining what it would be like to find affordable rents here on the island, the same island the millionaires have found the last decade or two. The only cheap rents were being converted to VRBO’s, vacation rentals five times what the owners charge for yearly. “I’ll be living in my car before long,” she moaned.

What can you say? Hope you got a big car? You won’t have to cook for yourself? Think of it as road trip vacation every day? Instead, I just said, “Next drink’s on me, Rebecca.”

The South End — might not be a paradise for the poor anymore.

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There are plenty of folks who would gladly send their hard-earned dollars to the TV ads for abused dogs and abandoned cats but would never give one thin dime to some charity that helps us humans. Which, in all fairness, is their right. Their money, their choice of charities. We can’t save the world so pick a cause and hope it does some good, maybe even makes a difference.

The Tyee Rescue Farm, just down the road from the now shuttered Tyee Store, take in unwanted dogs and cats, injured raccoons, eagles with broken wings, lost possums, unsaleable ostriches, crippled llamas, sick parrots, three legged squirrels, well … they take in whatever critter or creature gets dropped off by its owner or the Island County deputies, the concerned citizens and even Jim Jensen, the official ‘animal control officer.’ Martha Petersen started taking in strays back about 1975, built a small kennel, taught herself basic veterinary skills and within a year she was swamped with a veritable zoo of inmates, detainees, patients, the unloved and the unwanted. Which, when her husband John left her the night she drove to the State Park to retrieve an injured deer, she became too. Unloved, I mean. John said he’d had enough. “You love that rabbit more than me,” he accused her before she shut the door on both their way outs.

Martha has told that story to most every volunteer and staffer who’s helped her build her 10 acres to what it is today. Kennels and barns, sheds and walking paths, a small hospital, aviaries and pig pens. “He said I loved that rabbit with the ear half torn off more than him,” she’d narrate, immobilizing a crow’s bent wing or applying antibiotic to a raccoon’s dog-eaten tail while the newest volunteer held the injured beast. “And you know,” she’d say, pausing for effect like she always did, “he was right. The animals people bring in when they don’t want them anymore … you know what? They’re better off here.”

Love, all I can say, is love. Martha, I guess, has more than most. John? I’m betting he doesn’t have a dog or a cat or gimpy alpaca. He probably counts himself the lucky one. Maybe they both are.

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Let’s say you got a bizness like mine and maybe Ford Motor Company. Most of us corporate types worry about short term profits to keep our investors happy and our shares on the Dow Jones up. But we always plan for the future, five years or so at least. If we have a regime in power that gives incentives, say, for buying Electric Vehicles and maybe supports government investment in public art, particularly stained glass art, me and the Ford boyz will probably tool up, upgrade our facilities, plan for additional hiring and basically veer in that direction rather than, say, stick with fossil fuel guzzlers or, in my case, residential bathroom window art.

Now the Detroit crowd can’t run around the country installing tens of thousands of charging stations that will incentivize EV purchases, even with some heavy discounts on pricing, which means their investment needs that kind of infrastructure support. You drive a Model T cross country back in grandpa’s day, you wouldn’t go if you worried about locating a gas station in Nowhere, South Dakota. You might not even buy a horseless carriage at all, just stick with the nag and the buggy. And if the government’s Art in Public Places Program disappeared, why would I buy extra inventory, rent a large studio or hire assistants when all I need is a table, minimal supplies and just myself as underpaid employee?

What me and my corporate companions need most is some consistency in our government. The last thing in the world Ford MoCo wants or needs is the New Regime rolling in with a pledge to drill baby drill, discontinue buying incentives for EV’s and cutting the infrastructure funds to build a nationwide network of charging stations and loudly proclaiming that fossil fuels are the real future of America. All those cheap and very competitive EV’s being built in China, well, we’ll just ban them from being imported into our country. Trouble is, China will sell them to every other country in the world. Competition, the capitalist motto? Fuggetaboutit!

And as for public art? Well, let’s be honest here, we used to build courthouses, fire stations, university buildings, city halls and all the rest with the idea that the architecture and the art would inspire its citizenry. Think Rome, Athens, Paris, London, Stanwoodopolis and Smokey Point. They didn’t build the cheapest and quickest construction. They built modern day secular cathedrals. Those days are past for this capitalist yahoo. I only hope folks still want some artistic privacy in their privvies….

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I’m reading a book this week. Yes, a real one, not an audiobook, not an E-book, but a Gutenberg ink-on-the-papyrus novel that’s 500 plus pages. I can guess what you’re thinking: I’m missing 500 cat videos, nature flicks, influencer suggestions and who knows what else on Tik-Tok, X or Instagram. I got friends now who can’t wade through a two paragraph e-mail, not after Twitter convinced them less is more. Or at least enough.

Without ratcheting into an essay on loss of concentration, short attention spans, ADHD and the evils of social media, I just wonder how libraries still survive. Or bookstores. Or the U.S. Post Office. When was the last letter you got? How about the last letter you ever wrote — and no, that Christmas card with your signature on the bottom does NOT count. Forget about claiming your name has six letters in it, don’t gaslight me!

Sure, by year’s end AI will write whatever you want for you. Even write a 500 page novel. A poem. A short story. An essay. Lyrics to a song — and the music too.

The Tech Boyz will tell you this is the Brave New Future, faster, better, way more intelligent. Oh, I know, at first we’ll tell ourselves the Bots are merely an adjunct to human creativity, an appendage, not crutch. And anyway, you can probably tell the difference, poorer quality, so you think. But have no doubt, the machines will go beyond mere mimickery, they’ll learn our tricks and they they’ll become, for want of a technical term, creative. What, you think humans are that special?

So okay, maybe I read books to escape the world I see passing me on the shoulder of the digital highway. When I find out the author isn’t human, just a box of algorithms, those cat videos may look damn tempting. Course by then the Bots will probably be making those too.

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START THE DAY BEFORE NOON

At least on work days. The other five days, sleep in. You earned it.

LEARN HOW TO READ
Writing is no longer essential, but … the successful South Ender can tweet, twitter and text, even if spelling is marginal.

LISTEN TO OTHERS
Especially on Facebook and other social media. Keeping track of friends’ and enemies’ likes and dislikes is an invaluable tool in the South End toolbox. Decision making is easy, just see what the herd is doing.

WORK AT LEAST ONE HOUR A DAY.

No matter how severe the hangover, the lethargy, the ennui or excess hedonistic activities. Work isn’t ALL bad.

WORK OFF THE GRID

No South Ender worth his or her salt works in order to pay half his or her income to the IRS. Barter heavily with your neighbors and friends. Crab, clam, trap, fish, hunt or grow it! Food is free and food is fun! If you buy your dinners, food is neither.

LEARN TO REPAIR

Your own car, truck, toaster, well pump, toilets, etc. You can’t barter or sell busted stuff and repairmen cost an arm and a leg per hour PLUS that service fee to drive half a day to and from your hell-and-gone address. Knowing a few handyman tricks can save you another part-time job at the fast food joints 50 miles away.

MARRY UP!

Chances are you’ve embraced an aesthetic lifestyle. You artists and musicians need supplemental income and unless you plan to work full time low paid minimum hour jobs, a second salary is essential. Marry one.

If none of these suggestions work for you, plan on moving soon. Life on the South End is mostly for those with alternative-fact occupational schemes. If you landed here thinking this was just a suburb of America, get yourself a GPS and head back to the mainland. Not guaranteeing jobs necessarily, but at least the possibility exists out there in Trumpland when America’s CEO brings them back. And those of us who stay, well, we could use the extra elbow room. Good luck to ya!

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While I was cutting glass in the shack for a stained glass project, I was listening to a woman who won the McArthur ‘genius’ award for her theory on ‘grit. I think maybe by that she means stick-to-it-ness, what we South Enders call stubborn as a mule. If mules and jackasses are ever considered smart, we South Enders may yet win Nobels and Pulitzers, although maybe not the McArthur award.

This Grit Theory, though, caught my interest. Awhile back a fellow named Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book that postulated that successful people put in 10,000 hours of work before they reached competency enough to be considered successful. Masters of their Chosen Field. I guess it takes true grit to put in 10,000 hours of anything so maybe they’re saying the same thing.

Me, I consider myself a Dabbler. A dabbler, if you look it up in those old dictionaries nobody uses anymore, is a person who refuses to take himself seriously. Probably drinks, sleeps in, doesn’t read directions or take instruction, would rather cut off his right arm at the elbow than shoot for perfection, can’t be bothered with too many details, probably wanders the garden rather than finish an honest day’s work ….

I’m happy to be a Dabbler. I always intended to be a Bum, but dabbling saved me from the vicissitudes of bumhood. I found this old shack when shacks cost what shacks should cost. Then I stumbled into glass art and managed to dabble myself into gigs that kept me from working. I’d tell you I have 10,000 hours logged, but hell, I’m not going to waste time doing the math, all that multiplication, and anyway, I don’t punch a timeclock. Plus, then I’d want to do some long division, figure out my hourly wage and send myself spiraling into a deep depression.

Always dabble, that’s my preference, that’s my motto. Although, I will admit, I’m pretty gritty about it.

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I listened to a guy the other day on the radio postulating how, in a few decades or so, robots will be so ubiquitous in our lives that we’ll actually marry them. I know, I know, it sounds whacked. Until you take a step back and watch your friends with their ‘devices’. I know people who sleep with their cellphones. I don’t ask them questions, I don’t pry, I don’t pass judgement. But it does get you to wondering. Me anyway.

I called up a credit card company yesterday and got the automated voice operator. Except now, instead of the usual 4 options to ‘her’ questions, my robotic friend could understand what I asked outside the parameters of her options when I asked to speak to a homo sapien, nothing that would surprise you folks with smartphones used to chatting it up with Siri.

I watch with no small dismay the frantic and pervasive text messaging of kids these days (and now my own friends) who prefer digital communication over the messy face to face of human contact. They have pretty much abandoned phone conversations too, once the preferred domain of the shy, and now correspond with thumbs and 140 character maximum messages. We are bonding with our machines. The Flatheads, our local vintage car guyz, probably could explain this in 20th century terms, this love of their Buick 88’s and ’56 BelAirs, all that waxing and rubbing, but so far they haven’t entered into matrimony. Although … Fairlane Freddy sleeps in his a night or two a month when the mizzus is fed up with his drinking. If it could talk reassuringly to him, god only knows where things might lead.

Trouble is, we’re making these robots smarter than us. Probably make them more beautiful too. If you thought artificial intelligence was frightening, couple it with a movie star body. We’ll be slaves in the time it takes to say pornlove. I suppose we won’t have to worry about children so in one short generation the androids will have won, no doubt part of their master plan. We’ll probably think it’s worth the sacrifice. At least Fairlane Freddy will.

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What can a person say to the richest guy on Earth whose main goal in life is to leave the planet on one of his spaceships, making him an immigrant on Mars? He’s ranting about millions of dead people collecting Social Security while other Trump appointees are blathering on about immigrants collecting money on the entitlements, probably, so they say, they’ll vote Democrat. The billionaire makes Marie Antoinette look like a socialist. Even the most devout Trump sycophant must be getting nervous when one of the mainstay 3rd rails is about to be monkeyed with, forget about this weeks’ heavy losses on the Market thanks to the Artist of the Deal’s waffling and threats and pullbacks and more threats. Tariffs and trade wars are one thing, fooling with Social Security or Medicare is a whole ‘nother tarbaby that a chainsaw isn’t going to cut through.

Somebody somewhere, but not here on the South End, decided that if you got a lot of money, you must be smart. If you’re a billionaire, by god, you must be a genius. Trump and Musk certainly think they’re the brightest boys on the block but I’m sorry, a dollar does not an IQ point make. Tesla stock is plunging and even worse, its image is so corrupted the poor saps who bought one of those cars of the future are slapping the bumper sticker that says I Bought This Tesla Before Elon Went Crazy. You will never see a MAGA hat sporting anything similar for their boy, but wait til eggs become the new currency, replacing crypto.

When the rich decide laying off tens or hundreds of thousands of employees because they’re part of the government they hate, when their economic policies enrich themselves with tax cuts that do nothing for the poor, when their sole objective is slash and burn, what are we to deduce? Me, I laughed when the GOP called themselves Compassionate Conservatives, an oxymoron if I ever heard one. These new so-called Populists, who have no interest in anyone poorer than themselves, they need a reminder that when folks wake up, the guillotine isn’t far behind.

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The stock market has the Jitters, apparently, because yesterday the Dow dropped nearly 1000 points and the NASDAQ fell over 4%. Right now the Dow is down another 500. I long ago gave up my dream of becoming a hedge fund CEO so maybe I’m not the right hombre to weigh in on fiscal policies under the new Trump regime, but I do know corporations and even small businesses like my own hate uncertainties. Will those tariffs drive up the cost of my stained glass? You bet it will. Will they kick up the price of my Canadian lead came and zinc border metals? Hell, yes!

Last night some arsonist in Seattle and Gomorrah burned a few Teslas sitting in a warehouse, no doubt venting their anger at Musk and DOGE, not sure what the thinking was there, but a message of some sort was delivered. Lately I’ve noticed a few bumper stickers that read: I Bought This Tesla Before Elon Went Crazy. Call me a hopeless optimist but I’m hoping to see plenty more of those and another one that says: I Voted for Trump Before Donald Went Power Mad.

These are very strange times in the Land of the Free, Home of the Capitalist. My neighbor dropped by today and before we could say Shut My Mouth we were debating politics, his Libertarianism to my Cynicism. He thinks tariffs might be a good remedy for what’s wrong with America because, well, because Trump is a great businessman, knows what he’s doing, knows how to handle trade negotiations and delivers a hard deal. Employment, he says, is already up. So … he missed the government layoffs and firings by DOGE evidently. Not real jobs.

I said I’d bet him a dozen eggs soon to be worth a bitcoin or two that this economy will take a hit from Trump’s recklessness, same as his casinos he drove into bankruptcy, smart businessman that he was. But … really, what do I know. These Trump Bibles might be selling faster than bitcoins and the gold tennis shoes, maybe even better.

When we finally called our debate a draw to save a friendship, my neighbor said he doesn’t pay attention to the news, too depressing. It was all I could do not to mention I pretty much assumed that.

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