The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I got a lot of friends who are O.C.D., obsessive compulsive disorder folks, what we on the South End call Anal. Harsh word, anal, so for our purposes here we’ll stick with OCD. Don’t want to offend anyone, but linguistics can be a two edged knife. My pals suffering from OCD are mostly engineers, but they don’t see their symptoms as suffering. Or a disorder even. In fact, they would argue that the orderliness they demand of themselves is quite possibly the panacea for the problems the rest of us have. Course, they don’t factor in the fact that the problem I have is mostly them.

But let’s be fair. The new psychiatric diagnostic description for myself is: S.L.O.B. Seriously Lacking Obsessive Behavior. Poor toilet training as a kid, I guess. I don’t have to wash my truck every damn week. I don’t wash it every year some years. I accept that the universe is falling apart, what we call entropy down here in the South End Scientific Community. It’s just how things work. They go to hell in a handbasket and if you want to spend your life pushing rocks up a hill like Sisyphus, be my guest. They’re going to make a nice rock wall for yahoos like me when they end up down my way at the bottom.

I don’t make my bed. I don’t clean my windows. I don’t dust my shelves. I don’t edge my lawn. I don’t stack my firewood in nice rows. I don’t organize my files. I don’t follow directions. I don’t even look at the damn directions. I don’t follow a recipe or write one down either. I mean, why? The next batch of bread or homebrew or the next meal will be different, maybe better, maybe worse. C’est la vie, amigo! Routine is the killer, lists are for someone closer to death, order is for the delusional, life is chaos and the sooner you accept it, the better off you’ll be. So yeah, I’m SLOB.

I’m sure there’s a pharmacological cure for my ailment. But hey, I’ve got a pharmacological cure for lots of my ailments, why add one that might have side-effects for the others? In the final analysis, I suppose there’s a nice equilibrium between me and my OCD cronies. They draw in the lines, I draw the rest. When it works, we got a great little homeostatic community. When it doesn’t, well … we’ll find out what happens when gravity hits anti-gravity. Probably sounds like my banjo…..

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I can’t tell you how many people think I ought to retire, figuring maybe I’m mostly washed up, too old, too tired, too burned out. Retirement’s a lot like religions, you want to share your newfound paradise with those who haven’t yet found the Light and the Way. Either that or they feel guilty they called it quits while I toil valiantly on. Okay, they probably think I’m stupid.

Most of my buddies have thrown in the towel. Years ago. It’s hard for them to understand why anybody wouldn’t. I get it. If I’d worked some thankless job 40 hours a week, I’d probably … wait, I did work a thankless job. You try making art and worse, try selling it! Thankless? Don’t even get me started. I could write the Wikipedia article.

Let’s face it — I’m not going to get a pension. Social Security, yeah, but see how much you’d get if most of your wage earning years were less than 3 figures. Not that I’m complaining, I’ll take whatever the returns on my crappy investment in myself were. Serves me right, I guess.

An artist — and this is just an unscientific survey — probably makes way more at the tail end of a career than the early years. Dead artists make even more. Not that it would do this one much good. All those glass panels left down at the studio, sure, quadruple the worth, buy me a Cadillac coffin why don’tcha?

Meanwhile I’m hoping for some returns on work pre-demise, maybe the best earning years, maybe not. Okay, probably not. Nobody went into art thinking to get rich, trust me on that and engrave it on my tombstone. HERE LIES A STARVING ARTIST.
Course, he didn’t die of malnutrition, he died because he refused to retire.

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Maybe it was the long winter and no getaways to relieve the solar deficit on the rain-sodden South End. Or maybe I just needed an excuse to build another structure on the property, some companion piece for the other 25 or so. Could be too it was just boredom, give me something to do while waiting for spring. In any case I decided to build a greenhouse.

Now we’ve had two prior greenhouses. One we dismantled and one we loaded on a flatbed truck and donated to a small neighborhood community garden near the Head. Looked like a mobile Gitmo with those neighbors holding it down on the two mile drive south. Those two greenhouses weren’t mine – they were mizzus’. This one, by god, would be mine and I wouldn’t be giving it away.

Back behind a shed near where the woods starts I had about 50 tempered sliding door glass panels, some from the previous greenhouse, some from the glass roof in the shack, some must’ve been the result of nocturnal matings since I can’t imagine where so many came from. But I had plenty enough to build two or three greenhouses when I move into commercial growing in my golden years. For now, one would suffice.

Sure, I could have constructed one the usual size you see for sale at the local nurseries … but I had bigger plans. Bought some treated lumber, plenty of cedar fencing boards and went to work. Mostly cleaning off years of scum on those stashed glass door panels…. But a week later and voila’ I had myself a 10 foot by 15 foot greenhouse, stained glass door and side panels, stained glass in the back wall, work benches on one side, growing area on the other. I’d barely closed this in when the sun came out on a 50 degree day and the inside temperature hit over 80. For all you global warming deniers, all I can say is go pound sand in the Sahara.

So I realized I needed a way to vent this accumulated heat if a 75 degree day would fry my tomatoes on the vine in this hothouse. Cut a couple of openings in the back and made hinged cedar door panels. We’ll see what happens on a really hot day. For all you Deniers, good luck cutting a vent hole in the earth’s roof. Course by then I won’t need this greenhouse….

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I was doing a little supper shopping today at Island Foods up the road. Had my little baby cart half filled with about anything that didn’t seem double-the-price and fell in behind a lady whose overflowing groceries indicated a resident who didn’t worry much about little things like prices or specials or coupon discounts. If she’d been sporting a mink coat, I wouldn’t have expected less.

Tina, the checkout clerk on register #4, the one labeled ‘Utsalady’ as a nod to our island’s sketchy history, was scanning items faster than a TSA agent on meth. She turned to Marie Antoinette and said in her usual cheerful greeting, ‘How you doing today?’ By this time Zsa Zsa had a smart phone in her bejeweled ear and ignored Tina as any High Lady would when an impudent commoner affronted her status. M’lady was now occupied with a conversation about the horrific traffic resulting from a fender bender we’d both apparently passed earlier. It had been a terrible inconvenience to her schedule for Tea Time.

They say time is money, but they don’t say it on the South End. Tina, who lives half a mile north of me in a small ghetto subdivided with a zoning variance that made some commissioner’s friends rich, well, Tina makes minimum wage plus a buck. Time, I seriously doubt, is mostly money to her. It’s a bad back, varicose veins and a wrist brace for her carpal tunnel syndrome that will soon doom her fabulous career. Half the people she checks out never say boo to her. A quarter are on their cellphone. A few are just unfriendly like she was price gouging them.. And the rest don’t see or hear her, she’s just the checkout girl.

Tina has a husband, Billy, used to be a contractor before he crushed a disk in his spine that ended his career. He gets some disability and between that and Tina’s largesse, they make the payments on their double-wide, but barely. It’s a scrape every damn month, but I’ve never heard her complain. She’s glad to have this job. “You have a nice day!” she smiles to Her Majesty who’s still chattering on her cell. Tina turns to me and asks happily, “How’s it going, Skeeter?” If she and I weren’t happily married, I swear to God I’d propose to her on the spot.

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It’s not uncommon down here on the much maligned South End to be at the leading edge of the breaking wave. So far ahead, actually, that those trailing behind misunderstand us. And of course misunderstanding leads to mistrust and mistrust leads to avoidance and avoidance leads to contempt and contempt leads to fear and fear leads to hatred. We artists understand this implicitly. Or at least we like to say that is why our work is reviewed with such negative criticism. We’re just ahead of the Curve. We’re misunderstood. We’re too sensitive for this world.

Redemption sometimes comes too late to do us much good. Down here, we’ve been stigmatized for our handicaps and ostracized most of our lives. We’ve been badly misunderstood, isolated from the island mainstream and treated as third class citizens. Maybe it’s too late to help most of us, but in light of the medical community’s latest findings, we can at least take some cheer that we were victims of ignorance.

Branded as shirkers of work, lazy lay-about and shiftless men of leisure, we now have the full backing of the AMA that ours was a bona fide, certifiable physical affliction, not some bogus hypochondria intolerance to work. Just recently the Institute of Medicine called for a review of the malady we South Enders have lived with most of our lives, one that heretofore was considered, not a disease, but a psychosomatic condition. Those who have never known its symptoms easily viewed us as whiners and misfits, slaggards and sloths. We were treated as psychological lepers, shunned by our newly arrived neighbors and subjected to their silent scorn, just as those with depression and anxiety were once similarly abused before science substantiated the underlying root cause. We suffered silently, secure in the knowledge that we were victims of a disease little understood or studied by the medical community.

Until now. What previously was diagnosed by our decidedly non-medical neighbors to the north as chronic laziness or chronic fatigue syndrome has now been deemed a true physiologic pathology deserving of a proper name: Systemic Exertion Intolerance Disease (SEID), a crippling affliction most of my buddies and me have lived with for years with little sympathy from our mizzuses. Well, guess who’s going to have to apologize now, eh, little Miss Critical?? And, with a kinder gentler healthcare system in place, maybe now we can get the care and treatment we need … and even a sizeable disability check to help us cope with our difficult lives.

So next time you feel see a South Ender balking at work or employment, maybe you’ll show a bit of compassion. All I can say is you better hope this isn’t contagious.

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