The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Yup, I’m flying cross country again. Always an adventure! You think you’ve heard every excuse for flight delays, you underestimate the airlines. I’m waiting in Minneapolis/St. Paul because, you ready?, the stewardess spilled hot coffee on herself, burning herself so badly she’s incapacitated. They’re looking for a spare stewardess right now. The last flight the pilot apologized for not having Wi-Fi. Seems the plane was brand new and they didn’t install it yet. I guess they like to break a plane in first, get the coffee spills out of the way.

It’s two hours later…. Evidently they couldn’t hire and train a stewardess on such short notice. Plus there’s the scorched coffee lawsuits to consider. We were herded down an eighth of a mile for new seat assignments on the next and last flight out ‘for most of us’ on a flight four hours from now at the other end of the terminal. Course we got plenty of time for that marathon walk. I plan to hike it 4 or 5 times. The guy in front of me really wanted his first class again, but hey, that’s evidently beyond a computer’s meager capacity so we’re in Random Shuffle. The lady next to me wanted a food voucher. Ho ho. She thought these were still the ‘friendly skies’ of yesteryear. I was the only yahoo they needed to see ID from, maybe see if my temper snapped, make room for those poor saps who weren’t getting out tonight.

Those who say government couldn’t run anything but into the ground, tell someone else. I haven’t made a flawless trip by airplane in years. Maybe I’m just unlucky and you’ve got tales of efficient monopolies running like well-oiled machines, lower costs and improved services, happy travels and complementary dinners, competitive pricing and roomy seating, convenient schedules and direct flights, plenty of overhead baggage room and free luggage once again. But … I seriously doubt it. Santa is dead, the Easter Bunny’s a drunk and the airlines don’t answer to anyone but their shareholders … who no doubt fly in private jets.

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I’ve had my share of bad Thanksgivings. Family arguments, odd combination of guests, friends who wouldn’t eat the dinner for fear of salmonella poisoning (I guess they didn’t believe the shack kitchen met Washington State Health Dep’t. standards). I don’t ask for much, just plenty of food and libation with folks who are friendly. We’ve had storms and power outages. Didn’t matter. We have a wood cookstove and plenty of oil lamps.

The one Thanksgiving I remember most we had maybe eight of us at the table, all neighbors and friends. Dinner was fine, the conversation was pleasant, the adult beverages were working their warm glow. All, it seemed, was well in this little corner of the world. And … there was still dessert on its way.

Somewhere in that toasty conviviality one of our guests, the eminent Dr. S____ who preferred the high class moniker to her given name, decided it was time to go around the room, each of us, and offer us assembled epicureans our best scenario of leaving this Mortal Coil. Maybe she was working up a post-doctoral thesis, I don’t know, but she insisted everyone make public our favorite manner of death. She, in fact, would begin.

Maybe a good host would’ve let this proceed. Which, in fact, I did, not quite believing this was actually going to be our dinner entertainment. The Doc wanted to die on her blue water boat cruising the world, a watery demise. She had quite a romantic narrative to fill in the plot. I could feel my cranberries curdling somewhere buried beneath turkey and dressing.

“Who wants to go next?” she asked and a neighbor friend began hesitantly, mistakenly thinking the House Rules somehow made confessionals mandatory. “Wait!” I demanded. “It’s Thanksgiving, for crying out loud, not the Day of the Dead. Maybe we could tell what we’re thankful for and forget this morbid death fantasy stuff. No good. It’s no damn good!”

A few years later the Doctor nearly did die on her sailboat near the Fuji Islands. Demasted the boat in a storm, motor conked out, the radio gave up the ghost and now they were adrift in the South Pacific. A dream come true for the skipper maybe, but for the crew, a couple of friends from the South End, not so much. I wonder today before I go in for Thanksgiving dinner what poor yahoos are sharing turkey with her this year. Me, I’m thankful, Big Time, I’m not sharing it with her.

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I’m sitting at the airport waiting for my jet to load and on the TV news channel they’re showing photos of a satellite’s attempt to attach to a passing comet. My fellow passengers seem uninterested, no doubt weary of science in this Age of Cynicism. If Rush Limbaugh carried the story as another Obama over-reach, we might have some reaction here in the waiting room, but lassoing an iceball? I don’t thinks so.

We live in a world of miracles. Orbiting space stations, cures for diseases, self-driving cars, cellphones, nanotechnology , robots, instant answers on Google. We live in Science Fiction. Sticking a harpoon into Comet Moby Dick isn’t going to make anyone cut short a text message to get updates, that’s for sure.

I remember as a kid in gradeschool assembling to watch on black and white TV John Glenn’s ride into outer space. Walter Cronkite provided all the gravitas needed and us 3rd graders waited in wide-eyed awe to see if our astronaut made it back to Earth in one piece. Walter made it pretty clear what would happen if that little capsule caught fire or went out of control or hit re-entry at the wrong angle. God only knows what would’ve happened to us little witnesses if John Glenn had burned to a crisp on live TV with no grief counselors to comfort us, just a generation of scarred Baby Boomers who vowed never to fly in a plane or any other contraption that left Terra Firma.

As it was, John probably inspired half of us to be scientists, engineers or even astronauts. And Walter engendered a trust in the media that lasted almost into the 21st century before we stopped believing much of anything we read or hear in the press. Before we started questioning science itself even though we live in a world hurtling away from the past’s gravitational pull the way Glenn left the earth’s. He came back okay. We never will. And that comet …? Well, I expect I’ll have to wait til I touch ground back home somewhere in the Future. The world here might be growing smaller, but the universe is still expanding.

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Back when I first came to Seattle and Gomorrah, I had a buddy who lived in a dive apartment that was going to be sold and remodeled. They were tossing the old 1940’s era refrigerators the junkies and alcoholics had used for decades and my pal asked me if I wanted to go in with him on the capitalist venture of hauling, cleaning and selling these vintage frigidaires for fun and profit. Not being employed and in full possession of a half ton Chevy pickup, I said sure. And by that afternoon we owned 60 reefers of various stages of mold and decomposition.

I had access to a garage none of my six roommates used, so we stored them there after a couple days lugging them down 2 or 3 flights of stairs near downtown, then hauling them up to the university district where I rented a room in a house full of students. Each one got cleaned, disinfected and plugged in to see if it still worked. They all did. Tough units, those old Kelvinators and Frigidaires. Not particularly efficient, but they’d run until the next century if you asked them to. All we asked them to was run for the 30 days we offered as a ‘quality assurance guarantee’. If we’d been savvier biznessmen, we would’ve offered a 2 year service plan like Sears. Course, Sears is in about the same shape today as some of those refrigerators were back then.

Our ‘advertising’ campaign was simple in those pre-Craigslist times — we put flyers on telephone poles.
$30 30 DAY GUARANTEE FREE DELIVERY CALL THIS #
The Freon filled appliances sold like hotcakes, mostly to little bistros and coffee shops and student renters and our friends. I kept one for my room after my roommates started stealing my beer and food. Then I locked my room. I guess they were young communists, share and share alike, mine is theirs. They weren’t bad people, but I learned why communism doesn’t work unless the others do and you don’t.

By the end of a month we’d sold every last unit. We made about $800 dollars each, more than I made the entire previous year, maybe two. My buddy said maybe we should’ve grabbed the stoves too, but by then it was too late and our experimental entrepreneurism came to an abrupt end when demand outstripped product. Probably lucky for both us Appliance Kings.

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I bought my first house in a government auction. I’d moved to Seattle and Gomorrah to reconnect with my wife at the time after a summer’s hiatus from each other who’d connected instead with a new boyfriend who she lived with while I lived with a houseful of University students who mostly majored in drugs. My wife and her beau were intent on making a fortune in real estate so they’d gotten licenses and were working as realtors. Don’t ask me why, but my missuz — let’s call her Alice — decided we should buy a house together, live in it long enough to defer capital gains, then sell it for the profit and repeat the above until we were rich.

My roommates were people who stole my food and beer, never washed a dish until there were none clean and then only the dish they would use. I was ready for a new place to live and a house of my own looked more than okay. Not having much money and virtually no sources of income, the pickings were poor. But Alice found a HUD house for sale down in the ghetto, a large two story house with no distinctive features other than a hardwood floor that had been ‘rehabbed’ top to bottom and was offered up for bid at a minimum price of $18,000. We bid $24,000 and won, according to our realtor who specialized in HUD houses, by a few buck and change. A mortgage company his real estate office must’ve owned gave us a loan and we became homeowners for the first time.

Alice stayed with her boyfriend/business partner and I rented rooms to friends and weirdoes and psychopaths at $50 a month. It paid the mortgage of $180 a month and it kept life interesting at a time of my life that welcomed demented and derelict diversion beyond the dreary bottom feeding neighbors that surrounded me in my introduction to true urban depravity. Life, I thought, certainly can take some odd turns. I looked at myself as a character in the modern novel I planned to pen, no doubt a tragedy, but hey, an interesting one. The house, I gradually realized, tied me to my wrecked marriage, to a city on the skids, to my own broken dreams, to a real estate fantasy I wanted no part of and on and on through chapter after chapter.

I could see a bad ending coming. I could even see myself taking the ride down, accepting my Fate as some kind of Lord Jim contrition, blaming myself, becoming bitter and no wiser. It might be a good book, but hell, it didn’t look like a good life. Maybe the squalor and the crime and the low life neighbors were the rewards for a life of laziness and dreamy inattention. Maybe I was in some subliminal atonement for my own failings. Maybe this was Just Desserts.

But I’m not much for martyrdom. I’m not much for contrition either, it turns out. I guess, thinking myself a writer by inclination, I decided to write a happier ending even if it made for a second rate novel. I’ve heard it said that happiness is overvalued. But I’ve never heard it from those folks who are happy. And you won’t hear it from me. Life isn’t a novel and us would-be writers would be wise to remember that.

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