The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I did not have sex with that Ukrainian President! No wait, that was a Democratic President who was lying. This is different, fundamentally, different. We did not talk quid pro quo on that phone conversation. In fact it was a perfect phone conversation, perfect. So perfect we locked it up in the super secret Cone of Silence at the Deep State Data Bank Vault, but we have a transcript, not quite as perfect, mind you, but pretty perfect. You can judge for yourself that I’m innocent.

Well, okay, I did ask the comedian president, Zelenskiy, or Zorro or whatever his goofy name is, for some help cleaning up corruption in that shithole country he’s running. Sent Rudy right over there, see what’s what, get it cleared up before things get worse and they elect a clown for president. They got the goods on Biden and his kid. We just need to get them to dig a little, find something we can use before the 2020’s. You believe that guy, Sleepy Joe, using his name to get his kid a 50K a month gig on their oil board? Corruption! They both ought to be in jail. High crimes and treason.

So what if Little Adam Schitt has a whistle blower, fake news, third hand rumors, who cares? There was no quid pro quo, I only asked Zorro to look into Biden’s boy, big deal. What, another whistle blower? First hand information? There’s treason, you ask me … the guy ought to be outed and shot. Along with Shifty Schitt. So yeah, maybe I did put the chill on those weapons we promised Zorro to fight the Russians. Who, by the way, aren’t bad people if Putin was being honest with me and I think I know honesty when I hear it and I hear it louder than anyone ever has now or before. I hear it like a bell beat by a gong, a huge gong. It sounds great.

So I asked for a favor if he wanted those weapons. I admit it, big deal, who cares? That’s how we do business. Maybe you read my book, The Art of the Deal? I still have some copies you can buy. I’m the deal guy, the best, nobody like me since Kubla Khan, and I could take him with one hand behind my back. If I could reach that far ….

Trading influence for political gain? I don’t think so. Read the transcript. Perfect phone conversation, I won’t say too many times again. No, the real one is locked up. You’d just cherry pick it, twist it around, make me look like a crook. I’m not a crook, I’m a businessman, that’s why you morons elected me, time for a change. I just want to weed out corruption, nepotism, drain the swamp, make America Great Again. Go look at what Biden did, it’s a crime, a real felony, why pick on me? China, you listening? I’d take any help I can get. Give me a call. Rudy’s got a jet ready to roll.

Impeach me?? Who you kidding? Rick Perry is who you want. Made me call that Zorro guy. Now the coward has quit. Looks guilty as hell, quitting like that. Talk to him, I don’t know anything about it.

Well, it’s definitely been a relief to spend a week or so detoxifying from politics. You take the ‘cure’ in Wisconsin, they substitute sports for methadone and the Green Bay Packers for Donald Trump. Part of the reason I left the Badger State in the first place back in ’76, a happy adios to deer hunting and the Posse Comitatus. Still, when you have nearly overdosed repeatedly on the news and there’s no Narcan for political junkies, a tonic of football and walks in the Driftless Area prairies isn’t the worst substitute. Course, now I’m back on the needle.

An addict could feel like Rip Van Winkle gone cold turkey to come home to the latest batch of outrages. Our Fearless Leader has obviously gone rogue, looks like to this asylum seeker. He admits he’s asking foreign countries to meddle in the next election, all to the good so long as it benefits himself. He figures, I guess, that Uncle Joe is going to be his opponent so naturally he’s looking for mud. I was sitting with a Republican friend — and yeah, I know, I’m consorting with the enemy, but if you have as few friends as I do, you’ll take what you can get. Last night he was defending his President against those unfounded charges by those mean and nasty Democrats. “What about Biden and his kid?” he kept asking. “How did the kid get a job that paid a fortune with a Ukrainian oil company, huh?”

I said the same way most of our lobbyists get theirs, parlaying their connections or their previous jobs in the government. I don’t like it but it isn’t illegal. Asking the Ukrainians to dig up dirt, well, sir, that’s a slightly different issue and we won’t even mention Biden and the boy haven’t been shown to have done anything wrong.

What we got here is the usual tactic when wrongdoing is discovered. Deny deny deny … until they get the goods, then attack attack attack. Go after Biden, smear Schiff, mock Pelosi. Worked for the Mueller Report.

My buddy is like a drug pusher for politics, sets your teeth on edge and forces you to fact check the internet to see if you’ve completely lost your grip on reality. Which, judging by the news overdose I got the last couple days, either I have or else the country has gone crazy. Sure gonna miss those Packers….

Yesterday the temperatures hit 90 degrees here in the Driftless Area of Wisconsin, all glaciers already melted so don’t be concerned at the unseasonable weather. A student of meteorology would suspect this was a harbinger of some radical change in the global climate and yeah, the front rolled in with winds, lightning, thunder, pestilence, frogs , flash floods and biblical omens for an already saturated state. Driving through the storm last night, I crawled along leaf-covered blacktop through huge puddles with wipers that couldn’t sweep fast enough. Lighting blistered the sky, illuminating an ominous watery landscape.

Time, I think, to head home to the land of soft drizzle now that the monsoons are here and the temperatures are falling 50 degrees from yesterday’s, no time to slowly acclimate. And trust me, I didn’t bring winter parkas.

Said goodbye an hour ago to the Old Man. Left him standing forlornly in his driveway, 96 years old and you wonder if this may be the Last Adios. Course, it’s not the first time I’ve wondered that, probably not the last. Hopefully.

I remember saying goodbye to my grandfather after our annual yearly vacation in Northern Maine. He always gave me his old fedora and when I said see you soon, Grampy, he shook his hatless head, pulled my hat lower and said no, you won’t. And I didn’t.

Tough coots, my relatives. Stoic, hard-nosed, no nonsense. You live, you die, whadja think would happen? Take your best shot and accept the results. The world belongs to the living, don’t look back. Yankee Puritans, I guess. Long winter coming, though. This 96th one won’t be any easier.

My 96 year old dad and myself are holed up for the weekend in Northern Wisconsin, bullshitting and reminiscing, but mostly watching the leaves turn color and sky moving across the glassy surface of Silver Lake. Minnesota and Wisconsin, lands of more than 10,000 lakes, long ago ran out of names for all of them, having reverted to multiple uses for Pine, Fir, Birch and Silver, of which even Google Map couldn’t differentiate the multiplicity. There’s even an Archibald Lake, but near as I can tell no Lac du Skeeter or even a pond bearing that noble moniker.

The only movement this morning is the percolating coffee, a few bugs skimming the lake surface, one sparrow hawk sliding swiftly through the pines on the lakefront and nothing else.. The day, the lake, the woods, the world … all frozen in near perfect beatitude. Not even the loons break the silence. Thoreau, eat yer heart out.

Bruce, next door, a rough, tattooed, chain smoking, alcoholic ex-over-the-road truck driver, inherited his cottage from Petey, who lived hard and died harder. He’s lived on Silver Lake all his life, knows who lived where and how long. Petey called his live-in girlfriend ‘squaw’ but loved Bruce who looked after her when her health spiraled downward. Bruce, no stranger to xenophobia and racism, ignored Petey’s admonishes to shack up with his ‘own kind’, a kind of tolerance in itself, what gives him some small right to consider himself religious.

Soon, but after we’ll be long gone, the lake will freeze two feet deep, buried under snow, and the great north woods from Maine to here will empty out its summer vacationers, leaving only the real residents, hard scrabble folks who watch us interlopers with mistrust and for maybe some work repairing cottage roofs, frozen pipes, deck replacements, snow plowing driveways. They may think they will inherit this earth, but eventually they’ll sell their share.

Here it is, Day One of my new 12 step program to quit. So far, so good. No chills or uncontrollable shakes, no night sweats, no spiders crawling up the walls, no violent outbursts of unspecific rage, no crawling to the closest friend for a fix. I know, it’s only been a few hours —- the worst is yet to come.

Still, I’m optimistic I can beat this addiction. Course, to do it, I needed to change my routines, stay off the internet, avoid friends who mean well but would only hasten the eventual ‘falling off the wagon’. I need to refocus my attention, get myself busy, leave town. Right now I’m waiting for a plane to Chicago, then on to Wisconsin.

Wisconsin should be the perfect tonic. Autumn colors, crazed football fans, deer hunters, Indian Summer, rural roads, school buses back on their routes. Back to my roots, a nice trip down Nostalgia Boulevard, maybe go down to the U.W. campus and bask in those memories of halcyon days back in ’68, a zit-faced kid with his future waiting to embrace his hopes and dreams. You know, before the Siren’s lure of his addiction.

Maybe Wisconsin isn’t the best choice, I’m thinking now. That year, 1968, the campus exploded in violence, anti-war riots, National Guard bivouacked on the football field, curfews and student boycotts, the year —- years, really —- when the addiction began with its tiny tentacles growing in my still-forming brain. The Chicago Convention, Johnson, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, Nixon, Agnew, Cambodia, Watergate, all spreading like a toxic mycelial mat across my synapses. Easy to see in hindsight, not so obvious back then.

50 years later and this monkey rides my back like a giant tick sucking blood, engorged to monstrous size. Killing it might kill me. But we’ll see, won’t we? Maybe by Day 6.

Meanwhile, one step, one day at a time. No newspapers, no news, no debates about impeachment, no mas, no mas. Politics Anonymous. Nobody said it would be a cakewalk. My plane is about to board. Wish me luck!

Oh, and if you get word Trump has been impeached … go ahead and call me. ASAP.

I know what you’re thinking,Trump really screwed up this time but he’s going to get away with it, going to stonewall and throw accusations at his accusers, going to get support from the scoundrels who call themselves patriots in the GOP Congress. Just like after the Mueller Report. Sure, they caught him red-handed extorting the Ukrainians. Sure, the whistleblower spelled it out. Course that idiot Giuliani admitted they were asking for quid pro quo, money for arms to fight the Russians in exchange for investigating Biden and Biden’s son. Absolutely they were involving a foreign government in American elections. Just like they did in 2016. So what else is new?

My buddies on the Left Coast all worry that impeaching this guy will just open up the Democrats to charges of poor sportsmanship, sour grapes over losing the last election, make the Donald a victim that will garner renewed support. They think the GOP apologists will rally behind him, form an impenetrable wall between impeachment and conviction, end up throwing the 2020 election to Trump when it might have been better to stay quiet.

I spent one entire summer watching Watergate. Yeah, I could have been looking for a job, me being right out of college, but I was planning a career as a Slacker and Watergate looked pretty damn interesting for a guy who came out of the ’60’s with a degree in sociology. I thought of it as kind of a graduate study, an audit with no future diploma. I still do. Course, it was the beginning of an addiction that has menaced me for a lifetime.

Nixon was a pretty savvy crook too, even ran a secret war in Cambodia, but he seemed bullet proof just like the Trumpster. Looked like even napalm wouldn’t dislodge the guy from his perch in the White House. But in the end he was the victim of those tapes in his office and by the time he was drinking heavily, praying with Henry Kissinger on the floor, raging like Lear at the injustice of puny underlings nibbling at his socks, he was a broken man tossed into the garbage bin of history.

Poor Donald doesn’t even have the balm of booze to fall back on and I seriously doubt he’s getting on his knees to ask supplication from the Lord with that boob Pence. There’s no Kissinger to give advice, Donald plays by his own dim lights. Admittedly the sycophants will defend him, but when the ship starts to list and the water churns below decks, the rats will flee. After all, it was the Republicans who came to Nixon and said resign or else. Courage in the face of disaster is not in Trump’s cards either. And in the end both will go down howling they were not crooks. But of course they are.

Maybe you worked most of your life, might even have gotten a pension or a 401-K for a reward, that, or you were a savvy investor, took your hard earned loot and invested it wisely. Me, not so much. Not the work part, not the investment strategy. If you remember your 3rd grade fable of the grasshopper and the ant, well, I wasn’t the ant.

I was the lazy fiddling hopper, job to job, then worked for myself, nary a thought to the coming winter. Or for what ‘retirement’ might hold when the work ran out and it was time to think about my Golden Years. You know, the years without a pension or a 401-K, the ones where it’s time to pay the piper. Time to maybe go down to the Social Security office and sign up, see what I’d paid in the past 50 years, find out the price of my slothfulness.

The nice folks behind the bullet proof glass with the armed security guard sitting a few yards away (just in case), explained my options and said they didn’t have a clue either how the numbers were arrived at, but did I agree with them? I said I did. Beggars can’t be too choosey – unless they’re mathematicians maybe. I was happy to get about anything.

What I got was better than I hoped for. Considering. They even offered the mizzus half of my paltry amount on top of mine. Just for being the mizzus. (I told her way back how lucky she was!) So now they were giving us 50% more than our measly monthly. And to top it off, they added 6 months backpay to boot, even asked if that was okay with me. Okay? Sure, I said enthusiastically, pour it on!

I got the first check this month. It’s not huge but I’ve never had the government pay me. Sure it was my money really they had held onto for me, but gotta tell you, it’s gonna feel like Christmas every month from now on. Who says there’s nothing good about getting old?

Back when I first got off the Mayflower south of Utsalady, I hitched my fortune to an unlikely looking piece of bottomland which had a shack, a large shed (or small barn depending on your agricultural perspective), a chicken coop, doghouse and a pen for some rabbits. Better than raw land, I figured. But not by much ….

Those early years I mostly hunkered down and tried to stay warm. Some folks would just look at this and shake their heads. Can’t say I blame them, but looking back now 35 years, I’m glad I bit it off. Occasionally I’d get friends coming up to see the estate. We were all pretty much layabouts from our days driving school buses in the Big City, not big dreamers, just slackers getting high on getting by, or so the song goes…. We were an aimless bunch, lacking in ambition and drive, plenty short on cash, but optimistic the future would play out all right for us. Why? I couldn’t say, just that a good positive attitude might, in the end, carry the day. I guess we drank the Kool-Aid —- or if we hadn’t, we were more than willing.

Some of those weekends, come nightfall, we’d load up the VW bus and motor into town, figuring to catch some Stanwoodopolis night life. Rudy the Banjo King played every Saturday night at the Hotel, but once was plenty and so we went to the other side of town to see what the Sportsman and the Sundance and the East Side had to offer a half dozen of us thirsty revelers. First tavern up, the Sportsman, we ordered schooners of tap beer. A minute later every barstool was empty and we were alone with the scowling bartender. Couple of beers, some pool, we moved next door. Our absentee barstool pals were all there, waiting, I guess, for us to bring the party.

We bellied up to the bar, ordered pitchers and watched our fellow revelers finish their beers and head for the door, about half a dozen fellas exiting. Was it something we said? The bartender took our money, but offered no clues. An hour later we were at the East Side, little shotgun of a place, shuffle board half its width. The locals kindly gave us their stools, tipped their hats and left. Once again.

Some places the drinking establishments are lively, a democratic conviviality. Alcohol has its negatives, but for loosening up inhibitions, it’s tried and true. I’ve lived here now 40 years. I’ve been to every drinking establishment that’s come and gone, lived and died. The mizzus says you can’t judge a town by its saloons … and she’s a historian … but I say you can. I could live here longer than Methuselah on scotch and soda and I tell you what, it’s way more fun to drink alone. Which is what we got in spades down here on the bibulous South End.

So I’m in the Dairyland State here in Wisconsin showing the liquor store clerk my driver’s license and he notices I’m from Washington. He notices this every time I come back here so I know he’s going to mention he was out my way a few years back. Which he most certainly does. But instead of waxing nostalgic over his memories of the San Juans like usual, he segues surprisingly into a reverie of wanting to return to the mountains.

Okay, I say, we got those. “I want to look for Sasquatch,” he announces. “You ever seen Sasquatch?” he wants to know, a look on his face that tells me he’s dead serious. We’ll be on alien abductions before I can get my change and I’m seriously considering bolting for the door.

“No,” I answer, “haven’t seen him.”

Plenty of others have though,” he says, “and I wouldn’t mind seeing him myself. Might even have to drive down to Oregon.”

“Yeah,” I say agreeably, “Oregon seems to have lots more Bigfeet than we do.” My boy doesn’t seem like the outdoors type, more a full time mouse jockey, but the quest for Bigfoot has apparently gotten a grip on him, probably alien voices controlling his dreams, maybe just the thrill of the hunt, who the hell knows and what fool would ask, not me for sure. We live in a world coming unmoored from facts or logic, untethered from gravity or reality, a world populated by people who obviously rarely visit my own.

Sure, I want to respect their visions, their different perspectives, their unique world views. I don’t subscribe to the idea that normality is real, or quantifiable, or even desirable. I am, after all, a child of the ‘60’s. But … I don’t want to live in the psycho ward either. This past week folks were traveling to Area 51, UFO-ville, alien sightings, crashed flying saucers, green people autopsied in government morgues. Me, I just go to my liquor store in Wisconsin. You think about it, there’s no escape.

I think it was Einstein – or maybe some other Bright Guy – who famously said Insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. What others might call Magical Thinking. What a quantum physicist would explain as the observer influencing the results of the experiment simply by observing.

When it comes to the definition of insanity, I guess I’m no stranger. So when I tell you I’m embarked on building one more acoustic guitar, you can certainly invoke Einstein and I’d probably concur. But … I have a small sliver of superstition in me, a sprinkle of magical thinking, that makes me believe, maybe, just maybe, this next quixotic luthier attempt will succeed where the others fell short. I admit, I lack the skills, I lack the tools, I lack the patience … but if at first I didn’t succeed, why not flail again?

For you folks who ask not what goes into creating a wooden box capable of making noise, count yourselves the fortunate many. A guitar for you exists merely to make music in the same way a sailboat catches wind to move through the water. You don’t need to build one, you need only set the sails. People like myself hear the siren call to build one, lashing ourselves to the mast.

This is my fourth guitar. When friends ask how many I have already, the unspoken question is Why? I don’t know why is the unspoken answer. But here I am, knee deep in shavings, glues, clamps, designs, various woods, lost in a quest for a sound I think I’ll know when I find it. And probably will never find it.

My maple guitar plays rockabilly, bright, hard, no nonsense, not very sweet. The walnut one is sweet, but the trebles not so much. The last one, the bubinga, is loud, balanced, a little hard to play but close to that sound I’m after. But only close.

This one now is African-American. Black limba body. Jobota and padauk neck. All African hardwoods with an old growth redwood top and a birdsye maple fretboard. The design is different too, retro-deco, two soundholes to match. Which means the bracings beneath the soundboard are a guess. And they make a world of difference in shaping the sound that the instrument projects.

If I were 20 – which I’m not – I might imagine 200 guitars, each a lesson in tonewood and design, each a learning curve, each a step toward another sound. A person could dedicate a life to that pursuit only to discover the ‘sound’ was as elusive as ‘truth’ is. Maybe that’s the definition of insanity. Or maybe just magical thinking.