The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The blowhards down at the Kustom Kar Body Shop loved to speculate lewdly and loudly what went on next door at Wanda’ Massage. Anybody ever complained about back pain, someone invariably suggested Wanda’s, wink wink, nod nod, the boys snickering lasciviously. Wanda, a closed door to them, slowly elevated to a virtual goddess of earthly delights. Laugh and snicker, they were intrigued, they were mystified, they were as entranced as Odysseus’ men before Circe turned them into pigs. Wanda, no great beauty, became something beyond beautiful, something unnameable, something ineffable.

Like any great mystery, the masseuse fired the furnace of their meager imaginations. Half her clients were women so naturally visions of Sappho danced in their fevered, porn-fueled brains. Since none of them had ever contemplated a health related massage, the fantasies churned in their paint-fumed heads. They might just as well have sniffed glue, the delirium was growing weekly. The boys laughed about drawing straws, see who would make an appointment to enter the Inner Sanctum. They imagined satin pillows, black sheets, soft music and dim lighting while the sorceress worked her magic. Nothing was too implausible and it sure beat talking politics half the long days.

Six months after she opened for business, the men of Kustom Kar or Lust Afar noticed the panel truck roll up to Wanda’s and two guys loaded up a few filing cabinets, a desk, some lamps and chairs, but nothing like a king size bed, then drive away. Little Jimmy reported a week later he’d seen a small sign in downtown Stanwoodopolis for Wanda’s Massage, down the hall in the refurbished old hardware store that was now a warren of professional services and lately, antique consignments. At Wanda’s old storefront a bait and tackle shop opened, run by a retired Navy bosun who lasted about two months when business fell from sparse to nothing. Little Jimmy said the shelves were mostly empty, crab pots, a few rods and reels some tackle, but not much. Just like with Wanda, none of them ever got a line in the water but they still tell stories, whoppers really, of the one that got away.

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

Alternate Facts, Fake News, War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength. George Orwell is dizzy whirling in his grave. Truth isn’t True. There was no collusion, the Russians didn’t meddle in our election, the Mueller investigation is a Witch Hunt.

We’re living among madmen and half of us voted for them. Nothing you read in the paper, see on the news, hear on the radio, none of it is true. But who cares? Truth isn’t true, the news is fake. Up is down most of the time, alternate facts are as valid as facts. 2 plus 2, who knows what it adds up to? I don’t know what the definition of insanity is, but I know the President is the poster boy. Too much time on the gold plated toilet, I presume, his lies don’t stink.

These are weird times in Wonderland circa 1984. The anarchists must be having a ball, all these monkey wrenches in the machinery of government. The populace is aggrieved and nothing less than heads on pikes will do. Trump would be wise to remember the worm does turn. The same folks who voted for Obama voted for him. They were looking for change and when they didn’t get it, they went looking for blood. And trust me on this, they haven’t had their fill.

Don’t bother them with facts, don’t try to give them the news, forget arguing what is true and what isn’t, they’re the same thing: irrelevant. The fox is in their henhouse pretending to be a rooster, but the day is coming when the ruse is up. Go ask Alice. When she’s 10 feet tall.

I’m parked in the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport waiting my turn to fly the friendly skies, reading a little, writing some, watching my fellow passengers checking e-mails or their stock markets or whatever else they monitor on their ‘devices’. I’m going home after a week on the River with my old man and my brother, a bunch of geriatric Huck Finns searching for childhoods thought lost, our raft a small houseboat we navigated through 10 Lock and Dams over 250 miles between Minnesota and Wisconsin’s Mississippi River valley where the eons have carved through limestone bluffs hundreds of feet high to create canyons we wove our way past in channels surrounded by islands and swamps, estuaries and sandbars.

We passed old river towns, rusted railroad bridges, interstate overpasses, dredging barges, parks and wilderness, steam paddle wheelers, flocks of white pelicans and cormorants, eagles’ nests, fishermen and tugboats pushing 1000 foot barges. We slept on sand bars and the occasional marinas, docked at historic towns, biked on river roads, kayaked the backwashes, swam in the muddy Mississippi. The sun set red from the haze of western wildfires and the moon rose a red fingernail in starry nights. If I paint a romantic adventure, don’t let me underestimate the journey. The Old Man told stories of his time in the Maine woods one cold winter with his dad, running a logging camp in the Great Depression where he went in in the fall and came out when the river ice melted for the spring log drive downstream.

Lots of stories of life in the American Past, told and retold, probably soon to be lost, another history slipped unnoticed beneath the river’s current. We’re all old men now, refugees of another era clinging to our own sentimental past and knowing they’re the same dreams as the pioneers and loggers and bargemen, legends now only in our own minds. Tell the androids, why don’tcha, we were here. Tell the machines what came before them, who imagined them. Tell them they’re welcome, the ingrates. It’s their world now. And be sure to tell them they don’t have a freaking clue … and never will. Oh, and ask them – nicely – if they’d take care of the forests and streams, the oceans and the air. Be good karma for them if they did.

When I was young and heading off to college, Humanities were still an honorable degree. History, Art, Philosophy, Music, Literature — you could get a diploma even if your chances of getting a job were slim to none. I guess I was more interested in getting an education than a career because I took a double major in the humanities at the Univ. of Wisconsin in Madison, a time when the Vietnam riots were in full swing, a different education altogether.

Jump 50 years into the future, a half century — the trend now is to downsize or eliminate the Humanities, the argument being that high tuition costs DEMAND degrees with maximum employment potential and a salary to pay off the huge student debt. Bizness degrees, I.T., engineering, high tech — that’s where universities and community colleges are funneling their students. Microsoft and Amazon, Google and Facebook, the billionaires of Silicon Valley, they’re all driving the pilot-less train into a brave new future of automation, artificial intelligence, drones and a wired world. The Digital Age is rapidly replacing the Industrial Era, leaving the Romantic Era beneath deep sediment. Who needs poetry when you can program the next generation of androids to write a ditty?

We call the Humanities humanities because we’re exploring just that, the qualities that make us human and not machine, an altogether necessary endeavor in this next evolution of mankind. It is more than alarming to watch the diminution of the Humanities at the same time humans are inexorably merging into their own technology. As an artist, I’ve never been one to argue that we’re the saviors of the culture, the Sensitive Ones, the Visionaries. I may have been wrong. More worrisome now — we may be canaries in the mine.

So the guy parked next to us at the Red Wing Marina with the ¾ million dollar boat sez: Buy Gold! He’s hopped up on our poop deck to introduce himself, offer up his bio and inform us of his plans to buy a trimaran sailboat and cruise it to Florida, then from Florida head around South Africa’s Cape Horn and end up in Madagascar, no doubt the result of extensive research on the Nature Channel since he doesn’t know much about the place except its approximate location.

Our investment advisor made HIS fortune by spraying herbicides under state power line right-of-ways, then retired at 45 ‘before the toxins killed me’. He and his wife are partying with a few other retirees on the dock where we’re all moored up and trapped like ghetto rats here at the marina, nothing better to do than compare boats, talk travel dreams and, of course, drink. Everyone, apparently, is invited.

Buy gold, he sez, not an ounce of doubt. When we ask what the reason is for that fiduciary surety, he answers: the Federal Reserve will be gone in 6 months. None of us offer up a scintilla of skepticism. Probably knowing this is a lead-in to a political skirmish. We’re obviously going back, apparently, to the Gold Standard. And given the current state of affairs, who knows? Trump might just give it a shot.

They say money talks and bullshit walks, but today they’re both in full voice and no one is going anywhere. Although we’ll be debarking early in the morning before our new rich friends wake with hangovers and possibly new schemes and dreams. I doubt if we’ll be phoning our brokers to liquidate and start piling up bullion. We might, however, consider buying stocks in herbicides.

95 years old, my old man is. We called him the Old Man back when he was younger than we are now. The guy still drives, still lives in his house, still shops, still manages to fend for himself. Our mother died a year ago after a steady decline that finally landed her in the assisted living apartments nearby and kept Dad tethered to home when we used to haul him on long trips to everywhere from the Suwanee River and the Gulf to fishing trips up in Ontario. About 15 years ago we rented a houseboat and took three weeks to pilot the locks and dams of the Mississippi from mid Wisconsin and Minnesota down to where the bluffs level out in Illinois and Iowa. By the time we motored the boat back into port, it was snowing, the docks were being pulled in for winter and the boat looked like the ghost of the Flying Dutchman, curtains fluttering out a broken window, one outboard with a bent prop, the other breaking down. Great trip!

So we decided to go back, this time head north on the Mississippi, a Huck Finn adventure repeated, just my brother, myself and the Old Man, Dad and the River. If all goes well, I should be back in a couple of weeks. All of us. For the time being I plan to be Incommunicado. I know it isn’t the Amazon, but it is the Mississippi. Old Man River.

As Hamlet asked after his bipolar musings on being and not being, Is it Art or is it Craft? That is the question. Poor Hamlet, always a little flummoxed. The Small Craft Advisory is coming too late to help the Danish prince, but we can help you answer that age old question on Sat. and Sun. August 18th and 19th at the Floyd, Stanwood’s Historical Society Cultural Center. And no, we’re not raising a 3rd question: whether or not Stanwood has culture.

Uff da! Of course it does! In fact, that same weekend Art by the Bay has its annual show on the East side of Stanwoodopolis, something like its 26th or 27th anniversary. So okay, it’s not on the bay, but it’s a great show nevertheless. And the Small Craft Advisory fine arts craft exhibition isn’t a weather report. Let’s not get hung up on details, all right?

A bunch of us yahoos decided it was high time to bring fine craft out into the light of day. Back when we started the Ma Day Studio Tour, folks weren’t aware the artists had slowly but surely infiltrated the area with their mutating species of brush-wielding, paint spattered, plein air denizens, all quietly biding their time hidden in the nettle gulches and brackish backwaters of the area. Now they practically dwarf the number of realtors, and worse, rumor has it they may be intermarrying. God help you all!

But never fear — we have the appropriate antidote. Legions of artisan/craftsmen who have also been laying low in their dilapidated shacks or hiding out in sea caves, plying their crafts out of view, but now coming out of the eelgrass, bringing with them the nearly lost aesthetic of making stuff yerself.

Boats, banjos, beadwork, cigar box guitars, sculpture, pottery, quilts and fabric art, mixed media, ceramics, furniture and morel. Did I mention banjos. If I didn’t, be assured, homemade banjos will be in the show. Banjos will save you from artistic egos and crazed realtors.

Come on down Aug. 18th and 19th, 10-5 pm. Guaranteed a more effective cure-all than a polio vaccine, easier than fleeing the area. Small Craft Advisory. Hell, we don’t know if it’s art or craft. And that’s Hamlet’s answer too. You’ll have to figure out yourself where the bay is at Art by the Bay. But by all means, go see their show too. Art and craft will fill the streets those days like butterfly pheromones. Y’all come.

Home – 2022

I grew up watching Roy Rogers and John Wayne. We pretty much all did. Now we watch violent video games and Tarantino movies. If that isn’t plenty enough, turn on the news at 6. We Americans are a violent bunch of yahoos. Okay, we American men are a violent bunch of yahoos. We like it, apparently. Oh sure, when there’s a mass killing, we wring our hands and hold our heads and say, what can we do, what can we do? Then we repeat it in a day or two. It’s like shampooing — lather, then rinse. Blather, then wince. We mostly start to take it for granted.

Machismo, American style. I’ve had neighbors who carry a handgun down to the beach. For packs of dogs, they tell me. One, a little tough guy who apparently feared rabies or worse from roaming hordes of frothing seadogs, used it on himself later, the Hemingway ending, no rewrite, a Real guy’s way out. After all, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

You don’t see too many women lugging AR-15 assault rifles into the mall and letting loose a barrage of bullets at innocent shoppers. Maybe if Mom had given me a realistically bosomed Barbie doll to play with instead of that Hop-a-long Cassidy cap gun to play shoot-em-up, I’d be a tad more pacifist in my adult years. Okay, at least a teddy bear, if not swimwear Barbie. Who knows? I’m not a psychologist, but hey, a lifetime of male heroes who beat the crap out of their opponents or just dispatched them with a well-placed bullet, I’m betting our propensity to settle arguments with our fists or our .38’s might be diminished without estrogen if we weren’t constantly told that being a man in this society meant having the courage to smash an opponent ruthlessly.

Course, I’m not sure walking down the Mean Streets with a Barbie is the answer either … but it might open up the public discourse in a gentler way than the NRA’s.

These are strange times and getting stranger by the minute and by the tweet. We take it for granted now that every morning we’ll rise and shine to a new law of physics handed down by the logic-averse White House and ratified by the toadies who, like Pence, smile their frozen acquiescence and wait their turn. To say Democracy hangs in the balance, well, maybe that seemed hysterical a year ago, but how about now? A buddy, a veteran of Viet Nam, asked me how I liked Nixon these days. Nixon looks pretty damn good.

The Trump Reality Show operates on the premise that the audience needs constantly new shocks and awe, otherwise we would turn our limited attention spans to a different channel. The sad truth is, the clown king is right, we crave the tension and the suspense. It’s a cliffhanger every day now, forget who won the ballgame yesterday, forget your kid’s birthday, forget changing the oil on your car. You got what short attention you can give fixed totally on the Next Tweetstorm. Today it was threatening Iran with Total Annihilation Unlike Anything Seen in the History of the Universe!! Does that grab your attention??

Well, not as much as it might’ve before he said the same thing to the North Koreans…. My worry is that the Trumpster has sense enough to realize that he can only ratchet up the rhetoric so far and then he’ll have to actually DO something. You know, maybe a small pre-emptive strike on a Balkan state who hasn’t paid their share of NATO dues. THAT should bring your attention back to sharp focus.

What most of us are focusing on these days is how we have a rogue President in the White House, a man uninterested in reading much of anything, not even a one page briefing report, and who has decided the only bright person in the room is the guy he admires in the mirror every morning. If ignorance is bliss, we can count our blessings here in the Yew Ess of Aye. But if it’s a prescription for error, hang on to your seats, the ride is going to get a lot rockier before we get rid of this narcissistic huckster.

Lately this past year I’ve been going to a lot of funeral services. Too many and I guess a sign of my age. So it’s a bit of a relief to be down here in San Francisco to officiate a wedding for some young friends even if it is half a century past the Summer of Love and I’m not wearing flowers in my receding hair. The kids are here and they seem happy and optimistic facing what, to this old timer, seems a bleaker future than the one we faced back when.

Course, we had Viet Nam going great guns and the assassinations of King and Kennedy, Watergate, civil rights riots, so maybe they got reason for optimism. My old man once told us boys he thought he’d lived in the best of times. And he’d fought in World War 2 on a PT boat in the Pacific and the Mediterranean. Like Dickens said, these were the best of times, these were the worst of times. I guess they’re OUR times and the future isn’t.

At a dinner the other night I was describing to a Vietnamese woman our place up on an island in the Pacific Northwest. She grew more and more animated until finally she clapped her hands and cried, “You live in a dream!” I said , what? And she said, “I want live where you do!”

We take our lives for granted, I know, even though the mizzus and me try to remind ourselves how truly fortunate we are, how the paths we took might have turned out so much worse, how happiness itself can become banal and taken for granted. We do live in a dream, all of us, and the trick is to walk the fine line between the waking and the dreaming, not falling asleep. Today we’re going to marry the kids. They’re dreaming of love, of each other, of a perfect future together. They’ll have flowers in their hair and stars in their eyes and once again it will be the Summer of Love.