The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I overhear the bearded man say to the man of the cloth
what he asked the Disbeliever:
how do you explain You?
And the two of them, conspirators now, chuckle with smug certainty
while a chill wind fans flaming leaves from a nearby woods
into the autumnal park we stand in.

Answers demand questions and science demands religion
and nothing ever ceases, not the chicken, not the egg,
not God and not Galileo.

Nothing is not nothing.

The wind that blows through the hardwoods forces me to believe in Time,
but what is Time?
What is anything but what Is?

What Isn’t, now that’s a bit harder.
An answer is only another question.

The sky never falls, Humpty is the broken egg.

I want to ask my two Believers what answers they never searched for,
What part of This is not them.

But of course they’re not entertaining questions
and Dumpty will never be completely whole again,
not inside this park anyway….

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As regular as swallows to Capistrano or buzzards to Hinkley, Ohio, the South End String Band is returning to the South Grange (2227 S. Camano Dr.) for its annual benefit concert. Mark your calendars for Saturday, Nov. 7th at 7 PM for the South Grange Hoedown, a night of ‘music to set your boots on fire’. (Last year’s Strange Grange Ganja Gig caused so much distress among the Literal Minded that this year we add the following disclaimer for those with misaligned funny bones: YOUR BOOTS WILL NOT BURST INTO FLAME. However, your hair might.)

Join us for an evening of old time Camano roots music with a decidedly South End flair. The South End String Band is Erich Schweiger on fiddle, Don Mailloux on bass, Mike Hilley on mandolin, Monika DeNasha on 6 string guitar and Jack Archibald on 5 string banjo. Beer and wine will be available legally and snacks will be served. We’re clearing a dance floor and we’re cranking up the tempo. Hope you can make it. $10 at the door. Free parking. Funny Bone Massage Available.

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Someone broke into my shack two weeks ago while I was taking the mizzus to the airport. Broke in is maybe too strong a phrase since the door was open, never locked. I came in that next morning and an electric guitar was gone off its stand. At first I thought maybe I’d moved it. But no, it was missing. So was the acoustic guitar downstairs. I looked around for What Else was purloined, but … apparently my burglar was a musician, not an art lover. Dozens of framed stained glass pieces sat right where I left them, piled up throughout the studio. Tools were left untouched too and most everything else, mostly no value except to me.

My neighbor behind me, nice woman except for poor judgement in men, has a restraining order on her junkie boyfriend. The sheriff has picked him up more than once with stolen property, including my neighbor’s credit cards despite the restraining order. He’s still around. Our sheriff apparently has bigger fish to fry than a heroin addict burglar. This is bad news for me and the rest of the South End.

I just bought a set of locks and a hasp to bolt onto the shack’s not very secure front door. Someone wants to break in, they wouldn’t have any problem — I just want to take off the Welcome sign.

I had hoped — now that the Barefoot Bandit is securely cooling his heels in a federal pen for a few years — we could return to a pastoral innocence lost when the Kid terrorized the South End. I guess not. I doubt the locks will make much difference. Maybe with some luck, the new burglar will realize there isn’t much worth stealing. That, or he’ll take up a career as a lead guitarist, make his fortune, regret the error of his ways and some day return not only my stolen guitars but throw in some classic signed by his new buddy Eric Clapton. Meanwhile I hope he appreciates the loan….

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You maybe have had this happen. Your spouse goes tweety on you and nothing will settle him or her down. Not the usual pharmacology, not the soothing words, not a few days of rest. Nothing. And the time finally comes when you throw up your hands, throw in the towel and toss her or him into the truck and drop them off at the emergency room of the nearest pain motel and let the psychiatrists have a Go. Sedate em, give em a chance to sleep soundly, see what things look like when the meds wear off.

My neighbor Phil had just taken Sheila to the Skagit Hospital. Put her — in his words — in the rubber room. He had his two year old son with him and he was in a sad frame of mind. He’d come down for a little comfort, maybe some advice, and plenty of beer, three of which I had in abundance. We started with the beer, then got around to the comfort and finally reached the advice as we were walking down the road, his boy in hand and his dog Kona running to and fro. These were the days we had virtually NO traffic, but still … you needed to pay attention.

I had just finished saying, “Keep a good attitude, man, it can’t get any worse,” or some banal horseshit platitude to cheer him up when we hear the car zooming around the curve behind us and Phil, without thinking, calls to Kona roaming the woods across the highway. I say No! but it’s too late. Kona comes running and the car comes hurtling and we watch, as if in slow motion, the car hit Kona at 50 mph and send him flying down the road and hit the pavement dead as a doornail. Phil’s boy claps his hands and laughs because he’s never seen Kona do any flying before. The woman driving the car is crying and I’m telling her it’s not her fault, just drive away. We’re sorry, just drive on, we’ll take care of this.

I buried Kona while Phil dropped his son with his wife’s parents for the night. Then we headed into town for some serious drinking. Forgetting, as always, it not only can get worse, there’s a likelihood it will….

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So I’m down at the hardware store with my one item in hand. The guy in front of me at the register is transacting some sort of complicated purchase for his 3 plastic bucket lids that involves multiple credit cards, a void, new start, phone numbers (multiple), background checks, everything but a full body scan. After 10 minutes the cashier calls for backup. The new cashier takes the guy behind me … who wants keys made which will, believe me, take awhile. Doesn’t bother him to jump to the front of the line.

But unbelievably, the new cashier makes those keys before the 3 bucket lid transaction is completed. And then he takes the woman behind me again, although this time he says, “I’ll take the next one in line.” The woman who hustles over PDQ eyeballs me sheepishly but hey, it’s a jungle here on the South End and she looks like she’d eat her young if need be to get to that register first.

There are a dozen annoyances in any given day, is what I think, and I suppose I could blow them up to something BIG and ruin the mood of an Indian summer afternoon. My old pard, Guitar Bob and I, being of similar dispositions, meaning we’re a tooth or two on the gnarly side, often talk about why we let this stuff bug us. It’s not like we’re Zen Buddhist priests, but we are a couple of old codgers on the sunny side of life’s sidewalk in a country that’s rich, living on the paradisical South End. What, we ask ourselves, have we got to bitch about? And wouldn’t a sense of humor in these situations be the more appropriate response?

Well, Bob and I agree, life would be better if, instead of getting pissed off at these minor annoyances, we leaned back and found the humor in these situations. Trouble is, we apparently aren’t ready for the Monastery of Mirth.

Today two gentlemen in suits and ties jaywalked in front of me at the airport parking garage, popped open the door of their car next to the only open stall I’d found down 2 or 3 aisles, then opened their trunk, fiddled around, looked at me stopped exactly where their jaywalking had left me, glanced at the open door preventing me parking, then went back to their trunk reorganization. I waited a couple of minutes, then decided I would run out of gas waiting for these yahoos and drove on down the line … but NOT before I flipped them off. The mizzus, always a proponent of pacifism, asked if I was angry. What, me, angry?

“No, “ I said, pulling into the next available stall, “can’t I just give the finger to a couple of arrogant, discourteous suits?”

Needless to say, my funny bone may be too arthritic for remedial help.

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