The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I got an e-mail today with a link to the ‘best’ and ‘worst’ jobs in America.  Gotta tell you, I dreaded opening it up, fully expecting to find Artist probably the worst.  In all honesty, I almost hit the DELETE button, but this had come from a friend and he probably expected a response or a confession or a vow to do better in my next career choice, one from the ‘best’ list.

Turns out the ‘best’ jobs were pretty much judged on the basis of salary.  Actuarials, statisticians, mathematician(!), no kidding: high paying, technical, number crunching corporate gigs.  Boy oh boy, if I’d only know known back when I drummed out of school and began my desperate search for a ‘meaningful’ job.  Nobody told me the best careers were the highest paid ones.  I thought maybe they would be the ones that made me the happiest.The ‘worst’ jobs were the dangerous jobs.  Like Lumberjack.  Probably cut your leg off or be killed by a miscalculated cut in a leaning Doug Fir.  Poor pay, hearing loss, amputations.  And forget health care or vacations or sick leave or a pension.  Not gonna get to pension age anyway….

No mention of Artist in the group.  I guess poor wages, no bennies, no pension, not really the ‘worst’ job if it isn’t dangerous too.  Although I got to thinking how about those glass installations I did back when I was too eager and too stupid, climb up on a skinny ledge two stories above a concrete floor to hoist 30 square foot panels of stained glass into place with barely a few toes on secure footing at 3 a.m., every cell in my body screaming NO NO NO! and the sweat smelling like fear.  Fear, in case you don’t know, that kind of fear at least, smells like excrement.  Truly, unforgettably.

Anyway …. I didn’t find my ‘job’ listed on this link.  I’m just sort of glad I got something I can call a job.  Although, between you and me and the pegleg lumberjack, I never think of what I do as a job.  Someone asked me about retirement two nights ago at an art gallery opening. Would I — could I — just stop?  It’s not like punching a time clock, I guess.  It’s not about making the money.  And it’s not about being afraid of the danger.  My danger was really starvation, poverty, failure and humiliation.  Too late for that now.  The fear now is the creative well drying up, the days growing longer and emptier, the boredom settling in like a slow metastasizing dread.  I don’t know yet, but I bet it still smells the same.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/audio-dragent-reunion.mp3[/podcast]audio— dragnet reunion

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I’m really saddened to report that after decades of hiding, I was recently ‘found’ .  I haven’t dug spider holes like Saddam, but I did go to the end of the world the way the Unabomber did, just dropped off the radar, got deep into the hinterlands, eschewed credit cards and cellphones and the other obvious digital crumbs that lead the hunters to the lair.  I didn’t change my name  —- although I sort of inhabited the alias Skeeter of late, who, judging by a Google search, is more real than me in virtual reality.

But it wasn’t Skeeter who was Outed.  Naw, I got a phone message from some mumbling person who apparently knew me as a high school graduate of a Northern Wisconsin paper mill factory prep school and want More Info on me to put in their anniversary reunion book.  The ‘tracker’ left a call back number and an e-mail depository that, incomprehensible to me, referenced an old schoolchum that I should remember nearly half a century later.

Now I know High School is pretty much a war experience for most of us unpopular kids, one indelibly etched into our scarred brainpans, a peak experience.  Add to this the fact that I didn’t grow up in this redneck burg, didn’t ask to be transplanted there and ended up in classes inhabited by two different age groups.  I was an Outsider, in other words.  Or what I like these days to think of as an Outlier.  Although not yet an Outlaw.

Damn the stupid internet!  Damn the idiotic Facebook!  Damn these boosters of a past that holds no nostalgia for some of us!  I couldn’t leave my hellhole town fast enough.  Although apparently I left without the memories.  Course, judging by my rentention level of recent events, this was no hard task.  My interrogator even sent me a  j-peg of some group of us Young Turks offering a prize of some sort if I could identify the others.  Yah, they looked vaguely familiar.  Me too.  Vaguer still.

All I ask:  let me live in obscurity, gang.  Let me forget the war years, the snubs, the adolescent angst, the petty politics of cliques and in-crowds.  You NEED a few of us who left and never came back.  You NEED a little mystery.  That, or a scapegoat.  I don’t much care.  Just don’t call again.  And please, don’t ask me to join Facebook.   There are limits to my forgiveness.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/audio-rich-guys.mp3[/podcast]audio — rich guys

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People always ask me ,how is it you can manage to live down at the Millionaire Club of the South End when you don’t really have a job?  They think the way the world works is you make an hourly wage or a salary, then you hop right out and buy a new car, a palatial  house, a plasma TV  —- all of it on time, all of it figuring out those payments the mortgage company or the credit card company or the car dealer are gonna fit into your income. I think the schools in America, at least the ones I went to, wanted to keep us in the dark about interest and principal.  The only principal me and my wiseass buddies saw was in his office, reading us our detention notices.  I don’t owe anybody anything.  Except maybe an apology.  I drove a jalopy.  I lived in a shack  for 17 years.  I built my ‘new’ house myself.  I’m not saying it’s going to make the Street of Dreams, but it’s paid for and I tell you young’uns, that’s a dream come true for a boy a mortgage would’ve made into an indentured servant. I had a former friend’s punk teenage boy ask me one time if I was rich.  Big smirking grin.  Real smug kid.  Already a con-artist like his old man.  Smarter than you and me by a country mile, he figured.  I thought about wiping that smile right off his map.  But finally I said, naw, I’m not rich, not the way you mean, not in any way you’d ever understand.  But I am free.  I don’t owe anybody a red cent.  Don’t have debts weighing me down.  Don’t have to worry about the mortgage.  Course, that’s a rich money won’t touch.  That’s a wealth you can’t take to the bank. I won’t tell you my buddy’s punk son got any lessons here — but at least I figured he wouldn’t come back after dark to see what he could steal.  He’d go find a rich guy….

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/audio-south-end-mayoral-election-ends-on-a-high-note.mp3[/podcast]audio — south end mayoral election ends on a high note

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A collective sigh of relief could be heard from the South End Diner parking lot to the newly opened Greenworks Medical Marijuana Outlet once the Mayoral Election results came in after the preliminary votes were tabulated at Crab Cracker Election Central.  With 17% of the vote tabulated, the Cracker is projecting the outcome of the election for 2012 based on algorithmic models utilizing programs so powerful even the FBI and CIA  have subpoenaed our editorial board to turn over our data.

Nevertheless, in one of the most contentious electoral battles in recent history, the mayoral mudslinging campaign has finally come to a conclusion.  The ad campaigns, funded by unheard of influxes of cash from Camano Crossroads and the Puget Patriots Political Action Committee, sent a virtual landfill of extremely negative mailers during the final weeks.  Perhaps none were more vitriolic than the South End Anti-Newcomer PAC whose incoherent legions of ground troops offended most everyone south of the Mountain View/Dixon divide.

The Cracker Central team found that the last minute write-in candidacies of ‘Two Toke’ Tom Fiehlgud and Colton Harris-Moore were essentially tied for the lead at 43% each (with a margin of error of 22%).  Trailing by significant margins were Tweeter Daddle of the 47% Party (7%), Sarah Doolittle of the Do-Nothing Party (4%) and Bubba Frisk the 3rd and his Job Creator Party (2%).  The South End String Band received a scattering of write-ins but were disqualified with multiple hanging chads that gummed up the voting machines.

Because Colton Harris-Moore is a convicted felon currently serving time in a federal penitentiary, Cracker Central confidently projects Mr. Fiehlgud as the winner of the South End mayoral contest  in an electrifying outcome certain to be studied for generations.  Mr. Fiehlgud, , apparently riding the cannabis tsunami of Washington State’s 2012 referendums, was unavailable for coherent comment, but an anonymous spokesperson for his ‘grass’ roots campaign stated in a phone interview that Two Toke was ’higher than a Katmandu Kite’ and would use the powers of his newly won office to promote world peace and galactic understanding between species.  “This election,” she stated, “is incontrovertible proof, if proof was needed, that the South End is the epicenter of cosmic consciousness.  Long Live Mayor Tom!!”

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/audio-back-wash-days.mp3[/podcast]audio —- back wash days

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Historically the South End has been a place where the lumber companies cut down the forests and the developers sold off the scrub and slash that was left as ‘view property’.  You look around and times haven’t changed too much.  Except the price of a lot now is more than all the five acre chicken ranches of Mabana sold between 1910 and 1950.

Folks wonder why it took so long to discover’ the island you can drive to’ never knew our history as an exploited backwash.  The developers didn’t worry about zoning here.  Blast a bluff down with hydraulic hoses and call it Tyee or Tillicum.  Sluice down Summerland and build a rock jetty around it out into the bay.  Dig out a canal at the country club and double the waterfront.  It was wild west stuff, all right, where a man and his bulldozer could cut a wide swath without fear of government regulation or horrified neighbors.

Nowadays we look askance at dynamiting bluffs to make waterfront or dredging a lagoon to create lakeside gated communities or draining the wetlands to make quality 18 hole golf courses.  Judging by the agonized screams of the developers, you’d expect growth would reverse, forests woulde expand, housing starts would sit half finished, abandoned and rotting.  Oddly the juggernaut of gated communities and developments with names like South End Estates, Elger Bay Meadows, Tyee Vista all seem to be doing just fine with more on the way, thank you very much.

Clear Cut Cul-de-Sac, Blast Zone Barrio and D-9 Trailer Court are going to struggle, but the South End is gentrifying now that some of the trees have grown back and the chicken farms are broke and the Dot.com retirees are priming the pumps.  Won’t be long before we South Enders celebrate Back Wash Days and the rough and tumble no-holds-barred pioneers who carved out our civilization over the past century.  Thank you boys!

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