The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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.

When you realize that every morning you crawl out of the fartsack, haul down to the mailbox for the morning paper, grab that first cup of caffeine and settle down to an hour of news before starting your ‘real’ day, you might figure, like I did yesterday, enough is, well, enough. You might even, like I did, think to yourself, stop shooting up the news, stop acting like a political junkie, stop stealing time from your days.

Course, yesterday it came out that a whistleblower had reported our President had called up the Ukrainian president to demand repeatedly he investigate a company Biden’s son had worked at for improprieties his competitor’s boy might have committed, in exchange for a deal to send over 250 million dollars of weapons that country needed to fight the Russians. Yet another sad story of how we’ve seemingly lost our way, this country of ours run by a man who apparently has no idea or interest in constitutional limits on his behavior.

Meanwhile millions of kids and adults too were marching in the streets, clamoring for politicians to wake up before climate change was irrevocably ruining their future lives. The Saudi oil fields were bombed with drone warfare, the Iranians say it wasn’t them, the asylum seekers at our borders were being shipped to El Salvador which is a country you want to escape from not be returned to, the Koreans are testing missiles, the Canadian prime minister is wearing blackface and, well, enough is more than enough.

My father is 96 years old. He watches the news but doesn’t seem all that interested anymore. His favorite expression lately is ‘crazy world’, as if that assessment was about all anyone could come up with to explain the endless daily assault on our sensibilities. Crazy world. He was a right wing Republican most of his life but Trump escapes his logic. Horse’s Ass, he calls his president. He fought on a P.T. boat in World War 2, thought Viet Nam was a good idea, supported the Gulf Wars and doesn’t know what to think about Afghanistan. Crazy world indeed.

I’m going out to see him in a couple days. We won’t be talking politics and we won’t watch much news. I’m looking forward to a break from the addiction. We’ll go up to my brother’s cottage in Northern Wisconsin, listen to the loons and watch the autumn leaves turn color. We’ll spend a little time in a world that hasn’t gone crazy, just two old guyz idling awhile. I might even think of it as a vacation.

Well, here it is the end of the garden, nothing much left beyond a few volunteer pumpkins, some overripe beans, a crop of raspberries and way too many zucchinis. Say what you want about zucchinis, they are a gardener’s tried and true confidence builder. If the rabbits ate your peas, if the crows dug up your bean sprouts, if the raccoons tore down your corn patch before the corn was even ripe, if the tomatoes never ripened in a rainy summer, you can always count on the zucchini to come through with a bounteous crop of never-ending, fast growing squashes. No garden with zucchini planted in it can be considered a total disaster.

In the aftermath of a nuclear war, in a world where desolation and radiation prevail, you can bet your sweet bumpkin the garden will sprout with volunteer zukes. They will re-vegetate the earth, count on it. And if we have to survive on what will grow post-apocalypse, we’ll at least have zucchini. Coming out our ears. Probably mutated to the size of pumpkins and covering acres, just one plant.

I’m not going to go all Martha Stewart here and offer up half a dozen of my favorite all-time zucchini recipes. You probably got plenty of your own. I’ll just say that when the fall garden reaches the end and the green beans hang too huge to eat and the tomatoes are split open from the rains, you can still eat fresh from the garden, just roll up with the wheel barrow and harvest those zukes. You can put off buying the pizzas and the Hungry Mans for another month. So when you offer up some of the bounty to the neighbors, forget that slogan that friends don’t offer friends zucchinis. You’re just doing a small part of saving the world.

I can remember – and maybe a few of you can too – when telling the truth was considered, oh, something of a requirement for adulthood. Cheaters never prospered, that kind of aphorism, was taught us little munchkins as early as first grade when my teacher, Mrs. Ross, told us George Washington could never tell a lie and Abe Lincoln was Honest Abe. Integrity, you were told, mattered. Better to take the high ground and lose than to sink to the low and win. Didn’t matter who won or lost, it was how you played the game. What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul? Maybe you got that in Sunday School.

Those were the days….! This week was another anniversary of September 11th and of course a few words of remembrance needed to be spoken solemnly by the current President of the United States. Sharpiegate was a few days earlier, a series of sad cover-ups over what should have been a non-issue, made quickly into headlines and threats to agency heads to support a white lie or Else. Trump, of course, in his role as Braggart-in-Chief, trumpeted his own work down on Ground Zero those subsequent days, his team of Trump Tower working in the toxic debris, doing all they could to help the firemen and police digging through the rubble and wreckage.

Nobody but an imbecile thinks the fastidious germaphobe Trump was dirtying his Brooks Brothers down on the streets. An imbecile or a deplorable. Or both, if that isn’t redundant. The man is incapable of telling the truth. Bolton was fired, he said the same day. The Russians aren’t involved. His tax returns will be released very soon. The sky is green. The election was fixed. Mexico will pay for the border wall. Obama was born somewhere else. China tariffs won’t hit U.S. pocketbooks. Windmills cause cancer and vaccines cause autism. He is a multi-billionaire. Even when the truth would make no difference, the man opts for the brag, the exaggeration, the lie, the cover-up. This is our President, a big fat Liar.

Maybe these are the times we live in. Fake news and bot websites. The truth may be out there somewhere, but we’re too lazy or too partisan to be bothered looking for it. Reality is nothing now but a very slippery slope. The ends not only justify the means, they are the means. All those first grade teachers should be tracked down and incarcerated. The world they described is a fantasy now. Someone has to be the scapegoat. Mrs. Ross, if you are still alive, we’re coming for you.

I know I know, the Democrats have all these great ideas, debate strategies, a plan for nearly every problem we have in this country. They figure an intelligent discussion, a meaningful argument, a cogent debate will win the day against a poseur like the Trumpster, that folks will see through this clown suited guy and vote for sanity once again, restore American integrity and, oh, yeah, make us great again, not grate.

I got some news for my left leaning friends. You need to laugh at this guy. Don’t stand on stage and pretend he’s a worthy opponent, that’s exactly what he wants. He wants to be taken Seriously. And the last thing you want to do for him is take him seriously. He’s a joke so treat him like one. Make fun of his hair. Make fun of it repeatedly. Give him a nickname with his hair as the butt of the joke. President Hairball. Donald Rogaine. Doesn’t matter, anything will do. Just so long as you giggle when you say it.

Mock his girth. I know I know, fat shaming is wrong. Screw it. Ask him who he’s hiding in that tailored suit of his. Stormy? Get over your political correctness. Go for the jugular, hit below the belt. Ask him if he has to use Viagra. Why the nondisclosure clauses in his affairs? Ask him and laugh out loud. Forget about his tax returns. Ask him if he can produce his GED. Tell him his attacks on the CIA and the FBI must have been an envy of a mistaken idea of what is meant by the ‘intelligence community’.

The man is the most insecure guy you ever had the misfortune to meet. Attack him in his vulnerables! Make fun of his looks, his intelligence, his shabby hotels, his failed casinos. Ask him again what his favorite book is and if he ever read another. Ask him if he and Sean Hannity are ‘seeing’ one another. I know I know, it’s okay to be gay, but lighten up here gang and put political correctness aside for one lousy debate hour. This is Entertainment now. This is Smackdown Wrestling. The rules have been altered this past few years. Climb into the ring with this phony and give him some tit-for-tat. Ask him who Ivanka’s real father is. Couldn’t be him, not with her looks, maybe her brains. Ask him how that son-in-law’s doing with that peace in the Middle East thingy? Don’t wait for answers, hit him with another left.

Walk up behind him the way he did with Hillary and give his hair a friendly tussle. Smirk and mug. Pull on his trousers and throw your arms wide, wink at the moderators. Have fun with this. Running for president isn’t serious business any more. Enjoy yourself. You’ll thank me.

Having endured a flickering lightbulb in our walk-in closet for months, one that would, if you hung around awhile, kick up to full brightness, I decided to bite the bullet and replace the damn thing. Couldn’t see what I was doing down there, socks didn’t match, shirts put on backwards, kind of like living in a cave before rural electrification. I climbed up on a chair to reach the fixture and unscrewed one of the first ice cream cone fluorescents that came out back in the last century.

I went up to another closet, this one with no lights whatsoever, and dug out the box of LED’s that I’ve been using to slowly upgrade every light fixture in the house and shack. Went back down to the cave, screwed the bulb in, one that looks exactly like the old incandescents, and voila, the closet lit up like a dressing room in Las Vegas. Whoever invented LED’s should get as much recognition as Tom Edison, far as I’m concerned. Bright, efficient and I’ll probably never change that bulb as long as I live. What’s not to like?

My President, that’s what. This week he rescinded the Obama era edict to phase out the wildly inefficient incandescent light bulb. If Obama had required we ban kerosene lamps, I’m sure the Trumpster would be advocating a return to those or whale oil lanterns. Nothing is too anti-sensible for our boy. Bring back the coal jobs, drill for oil in the Arctic Wilderness Refuge, build the pipelines for sandpit oil, spurn the climate talks with our allies. I mean, I love the 20th century myself and I call myself a Luddite when it comes to a lot of so-called modern conveniences, but c’mon, embracing plastic straws and incandescent lightbulbs, let it go, man, let it go.

And while we’re at it, how about cutting down on the hairspray? We got holes in the ozone that are widening faster than the seas are rising, probably because of that ozone killing spray you douse yourself with every 15 minutes, proud as a peacock to have a few hairs left to spray at all, I suppose.

Go take a long hard look in the make-up mirror, Don. LED’s might offer closer inspections. Course, you said this week that the newfangled lights make you look orange. I bet they do. Maybe that’s the real issue….

I read in the lying, failing press today that gun sales in the Don’t Tread on Me, Yew Ess Aye, were up 15%. All I can figure is the buyers were inspired by the recent burst in mass killings. That, or they have deduced that if they own a semi-automatic military assault rifle, when the next Democratic president is elected, they will be asked to sell it back for a handsome profit in a government buyback.

When Obama was elected gun sales went through the roof, folks so alarmed that he would take away white folks’ weapons. Ragin Cajun Roy, down at the South End Pawn and Loan, claimed he was mostly in the arms trade back in those heady years. “Hell, Skeeter,” he told me when I asked how biz was, “I get six guns a day coming in from yahoos scared the damn government’s going to confiscate them soon as Obama gets in office and I sell six to the boys who think it’s high time to stockpile weapons. They think the revolution is coming.”

Well, Obama didn’t set his sights on gun ownership, looks like in hindsight, but there’s something deeply paranoid in the Heartland, apparently. The NRA is worried, that’s for sure. And a few Republicans can see the writing on the bullet sprayed walls of high schools and tabernacles. Gun regulations are like whisky prohibition back in the early last century. The men want firearms and firewater, the women want to feel safe in their homes and know their children are safe in their schools. It’s a gender schism, all right. And I don’t know about you, but down here in the shooting ranges of the South End, not too many of the ladies are packing.

Hunting seems to have gone out of favor too. We let the deer munch merrily on our gardens and orchards and flower beds rather than fill the freezer with venison. Once in awhile we hear the soft pop of AR-15 gunbursts, not exactly reassuring, but this is, after all, the country. Or so I tell the mizzus who always seems agitated by gunfire, can’t say why. She might be thinking of my old buddy Bipolar Jim who visited recently, manic as a meth addict, then hurried back to his home in Chicago to buy an assault rifle and a titanium .45. They sold him both even though it would be obvious to anyone he was out of his head. Probably just making a savvy investment. You know, for when the government police pay him handsomely to sell them back. Smart guy, Jim. Meanwhile, he’s spinning the barrel of that cute titanium.

I hear folks say all the time how the country no longer makes anything, everything’s outsourced, manufactured in China, then imported. Course, they’re running up to Wal-Mart for all this cheap junk, save them a few bucks, half of it going back into gasoline on their SUV. Here on the self-sufficient South End, we still make stuff. Okay, mostly because we couldn’t afford to buy that stuff new. But partly because there’s still a vestige of pioneer pride. You make something yourself, you maybe understand how much work goes into it, you maybe understand the real worth of it, you maybe become a part of it and it becomes a part of you.

We got about 2 million artists down here who paint and sculpt and carve and you name it. They make stuff. That’s what art is. Creation. If they could sell it, they’d be ‘job creators’. Always that damn ‘if’. I admit, half of artistic inspiration is job avoidance, or, in my case, about 100% is. Workaphobia, almost a crippling malady. I’ve had friends, who fancy themselves psychotherapists, suggest that if I spent half as much time employed as I do avoiding work, I’d be rich. Course I explain that then I’d have to do taxes or hire an accountant, set up wills, keep records. I’m just a little too busy for that kind of complexity.

The thing is, see, if you do your own car repair, fix your own leaky pipes, dig your own garden, catch your own food, prune your own fruit trees, cook your dinners, play your own musical instrument, sing your own songs —- you don’t have time to work some silly crappy job. No way. You’d fall behind, the chores would gang up, the shack would rot, the whole she-bang would come undone, entropy would rule, chaos would ensue. Down here, you do not have the luxury of a job! What you got, as consolation, is making your own life yours. Not buying it on credit, piece by piece, from a factory filled with people paid next to nothing in a country that makes stuff for all of us who don’t have time to do it ourselves.

Day in and day out we watch this country lurching from one outrage to another, usually more than one or two a day. Mass shootings are common now, illegal deportations are too. If we had more time, I’d chronicle them, but you know what we’re talking about here. The list is long and the country is getting a firsthand look at how we can easily slide into despotism with only a whimper.

But there are countries that fight back. Hong Kong has been waging a furious battle against their Chinese overlords who initially promised, once the British turned over control, to honor their independence while still holding sovereignty. They were under no illusions so that when the edict came down that citizens could be deported to the Mainland for trials and prosecution, they understood implicitly what this meant, a thumb on their liberties. Unlike us freedom-loving Americans, they fought back. Maybe you remember Tiananmen Square. Tanks rolling over protesters, an insurrection ruthlessly put to a complete stop. You better believe Hong Kong remembered. But it didn’t faze them. They took the streets, the airport, the business district. They wore gas masks, hurled Molotov cocktails, took vicious beatings and came back for more.

Why? Because they knew this was the first step the Chinese would take to make them servile to the State. The rest would be pre-ordained. Even the United States, once that cheerleader for democracy, once the protector of civil rights, once that City on the Hill, stood mute. Wouldn’t want to spoil the chances for a trade war resolution by irritating the Chinese with our intervention. Their business, after all. Let Hong Kong fall behind the Iron Curtain, not our concern.

Today the Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam rescinded the extradition order. There would be no Tiananmen Square. But that was what it would have taken to stop the rioting and the Chinese apparently had no taste for a bloodbath in front of the entire world. Times change but tyranny still rears its ugly head.

We take our freedom for granted. We wave our little flags and go nearly crazy if someone suggests abrogating our 2nd amendment rights. We wear red baseball caps that say Make Us Great Again and we demonize anyone who dares kneel at our precious Star Spangled Banner as a protest against racial discrimination. We tell ourselves the press is the Enemy of the People, same as Hitler did, and Stalin, and Mao. Same as every despot who ever jackbooted down the highway. We can see the elections being rigged, minorities disenfranchised, income inequitably distributed. But we’d rather watch Wheel of Fortune and Fox News. We’re no Hong Kong. We’re more King Kong, hanging for one last breath off the Empire State Building, killed by our own people.

Hurrah for Hong Kong. You were courageous beyond belief. The world should take notice.