The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Someone mentioned to the mizzus the other day he was glad to see her husband’s bi-weekly column in the Crab Cracker was funny again. I guess he figured I’d misplaced my sense of humor for awhile there but thankfully gotten it returned from the Lost and Found. Moonshine Wit and Wet Powder Wisdom is the maybe not so catchy name of my diatribes and musings which might imply bad philosophy could easily be substituted for a funny bone. Occasionally I even wax serious, if not exactly profound.

Maybe I’ve misjudged my readership. If so, I apologize to the dozen or so of you who follow Skeeter’s literary meanderings. I suppose I ought to be grateful for the criticism, maybe steer myself out of the ditches and back onto the freeway. Art is like that too. You sell something and straight away you think maybe stick to that design, no point going all ‘creative’ here when you’ve got a winning formula. After all, you need to make a living.

But … this is nothing less than a curse for anyone hoping to explore his or her or they’s creative imagination. I know plenty of good artists whose work in a certain direction didn’t sell well so they went back to work that did. Believe me, this is a prescription for self-imitation and eventually the demise of artistic exploration. I should know — I find myself pulled in the direction what few past successes pointed me. It’s like a riptide, you have to swim perpendicular to the pull, otherwise you’re sucked out to the sea of your own stunted creativity. And yeah, you may die of starvation instead of drowning in your own mediocrity.

Course, here I am once more yammering about something that’s not what anyone would call humorous, probably risking losing those two dozen readers’ attention, maybe yours too, all because I want to keep mine. If you were expecting some punchline to cap this rant off, well, just not feeling funny today, I guess, my apologies. Again. Maybe next time….

Maybe you wake up in the middle of the night, cold sweats and a fevered brain, unable to sleep, impossible to think clearly. You feel an anxiety, you have labored breathing, you feel mood swings from rage to despair. You’ve talked to your doctor and he suggests you try an extra adult beverage in the evening before he prescribes lithium. He tells you you’re not alone, that half his patients lately seem to be suffering similar symptoms. Mass hysteria, he mumbles to himself, and you go home thinking you should seek a second opinion. Or a third. Or double down on those adult beverages.

You decide to quit watching the news, stop reading the papers, forego the radio. It doesn’t help, not a bit. Menopause? you wonder, or in half the cases, male menopause. Hot flashes, mood swings, depression. You discover half the neighborhood is suffering the same malady. Something in the water? Something in the air? A terrorist nerve toxin, maybe?

And then, out of the blue, right after the President sides with Putin over his own intelligence agencies and even some of his Fox Friends wonder what in the world?, Rand Paul, of all people, comes out and says this hysteria is nothing more than intense hatred that blinds you to … well, maybe not facts exactly, but Trump’s latest diplomatic move. He even gives it a name; after all, he is a doctor. Okay, an ophthalmologist. And you are having trouble seeing straight. He calls it Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Meaning, you hate the guy so much you can’t see what he’s doing is smart, strategic and possibly even visionary. You can’t see it because you’re blinded by hatred. If he calls the EU our foe, if he believes Putin when he tells him he didn’t tamper with the elections, if he tells you he’s saved you from nuclear war with N. Korea, if he lambasts our NATO allies and drops tariffs on them and the rest of the world, well, you only see red. You’re locked and loaded with piss and vingear. You have TDS, my friend. You’ve doubled down on the double negatives.

You want to hold him accountable for all the wild promises he made this last election, end the war in Ukraine in a week, find peace in the Middle East immediately, end inflation right away no problem, build the Wall, round up the illegal immigrants. Well, he’s rounding up the immigrants but all you can see are shades of the Japanese internments of World War Two. Why? Cause you hate the guy. And when he says he’ll clear out Gaza and make a beautiful resort playground there, you probably can’t imagine making reservations. No, because, well, you know the reason.
And from here on out, you will hear that diagnosis again and again. There’s no cure and I suspect no one is looking for one. So today, when the Trumpster reverses once more, imposing new tariffs, reducing others, suspending a few, jumping back to his original position, which, if you remember, was before he explained the double negative he actually meant to say, well, you probably gnashed your teeth and beat your fists and screamed into the storm. Because you hate the guy so much, you are blinded to the genius of his strategy. You probably even think, like me, that Trump Derangement Syndrome isn’t a description of us, it’s a perfect description of him. Quite a disease….

I been listening for the last year or more this growing drumbeat against public service employees, social security entitlements, health care run by the government and, well, damn near everything run by the government. You’d think teachers were communists and firemen were Marxists and anybody who wasn’t working for themselves or for a corporation were leeches on the body public. We suddenly got ourselves a debt crisis and some folks thing the only solution is to shrink government down to a size they can flush in a toilet.

I used to be a school teacher way back in the Paleolithic. And I don’t mean Sarah Paleolithic. I find it troubling that public employees are the bad guys now. That somehow they don’t contribute to the wealth of America. The Ayn Randians think the corporations are the only way to restore the nation to its former glory days, but I’m not sure what glory days they mean, although probably any time before last year would do.

We got a lot of folks out of work right now who can’t pay taxes if they don’t make a living. And we got a Congress with a lot of senators and representatives who want to cut government jobs some more. Because, I guess, they aren’t real jobs. Don’t pay real taxes. Don’t buy real groceries and cars and television sets. Don’t pay into social security. Don’t get loans or put their phony money in banks. I guess. These senators and representatives, it should be pointed out to them, don’t have real jobs either. And lately, most of us might at least agree on that point.

What I don’t understand, being a communist on the South End, is how we watched the banking industry and the Wall Street boys and the hedge fund managers and all the heroes of Ayn Rand take us down a subprime mortgage meltdown and nobody seems to think anyone is to blame but the government. Call me stoopid and paint a clown face on my hat, but something is terrible wrong with this picture. Something’s upside down and inside out and distorted like those old funhouse mirrors at the carnival. Why aren’t some people in jail for gaming the system? Why aren’t laws being passed to keep it from happening again?

I’m not a Bolshevik just because I want to lock up thieves who were supposed to be capitalist heroes, am I? I just want somebody to tell me how it is we think one job is more valid than another, why a private construction worker is more important to the economy than a government construction worker the FAA laid off the last few weeks, why we should want a private agency security person instead of a municipal cop, why we think a corporation beholden to its investors is more honest than an employee working for us, the people.

Course, I’ll have to admit, in full disclosure, most of us down here on the radical South End, aren’t too much interested in jobs. Any jobs. Work, I hate to admit, isn’t high on the value chart. And here’s something for the Sarah Paleontologists: you won’t find too many communists here either. Everybody’s supposed to work under communism. That isn’t gonna fly down here. We got a few better things to do than work. Maybe we should’ve run for the Senate.

76 trombones led the big parade. With a hundred and ten cornets close at hand.

Aw, who doesn’t love a good parade, marching bands, twirlers, floats and banners and our boys in uniform? Women too now! And Transgenders! Followed by tanks and artillery, jets flying overhead in formation, bunker buster bombs carried on carriages two blocks long. Formation after formation of the Army, the Navy, the Marines and the Air Force. Battalions and generals and military hardware. The Commander-in-Chief looking down from the stage specially constructed for his viewing pleasure, salutes to him as thousands pass by rank and file, hail to the Chief!!

Damn the expense! If we can’t put on a good military parade once a year, what kind of cowpie country are we? Let the rest of the world cower before our display of drones and cruise missiles moving mile after mile down the banner festooned streets of D.C. Patriotism on Display!! Military Might on Display!! Who doesn’t love a good parade?? Forget that Mickey Mouse balloon stuff. Homer Simpson three blocks high. We’re talking about Fire Power, not Star Power. Save the Disney stuff for the Mummer’s or the Rose Bowl or Mardi Gras. Bring on the Bradley Fighting Machines, the 1126 Stryker, the MK19 grenade machine gun, the Black Hawk helicopters, the MK-54 torpedoes, bring it all out and let the world tremble.

Shock and awe on the streets of the USA, that’s what we need. You wonder how we won the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria, well, sir, check out that hardware we’re selling to every hungry dictatorship around the globe. What’s on display here is more than Uncle Sam’s mighty muscles, it’s a runway for arms sales, pure and simple and who better to brand that than the Trumpster himself, Captain America. You need a second generation jet, we got em. You need some Surface-to-Air missiles, we’re your supplier. Just don’t resell them to terrorists. Don’t want those SAMs falling into the wrong hands like that time with the Taliban back in the cold war days when they were fighting the Soviets.

No, give me a good parade any day. Celebrate the weapons of destruction. Hell, drop a nuclear bomb out in the countryside, nothing too big, just a little show of atomic power, a warning to the enemies of liberty. Small mushroom cloud over the capitol, better than the 4th of July. Guns and God, let freedom ring. 76 trombones and a huckster Music Man, is this a great country or what?

My President doesn’t really read anything other than ‘news’ articles about himself. Mostly he watches TV, news stations whose talking heads talk about him. In reverent tones. Far as anyone knows he doesn’t listen to music, doesn’t dance, doesn’t sing or play an instrument, doesn’t write much of anything beyond a florid signature, doesn’t paint or mess with art. What art he appreciates is anyone’s guess. My guess is the only art hanging in the penthouse of the Trump Tower would be a full size mirror. In a gold frame, of course.

Maybe I’m being ungenerous. Nobody has to read literature, no one is required to listen to music, you don’t have to appreciate art to be a full human being. I know a few South Enders like that and they’re plenty happy to go to work, come home and watch ESPN sports without becoming narcissistic cretins. They just don’t care much about the arts. C’est la vie.

But they didn’t fire the Director of the nation’s premier Art Center and any of the Board Members he felt were too Woke. The man with zero aesthetic appreciation just put himself in charge of the Kennedy Center making himself the Czar of Culture in America.

Apparently Trump isn’t content to wage war with his own government. Isn’t content to make enemies of the press. Doesn’t mind alienating neighboring countries or allies. Is willing to denigrate the leader of Ukraine, call him a dictator and accuse him publicly of starting the war with Russia. Seems to be open to alliances with true dictators who have traditionally been our enemies. And with malice toward all, now he needs to co-opt the Arts too??

My friends who voted for him think he’s the businessman this country needs, a billionaire who’ll bring back the Gilded Age, who’s transactional, meaning he sees the world as a zero-sum game, everything through the lens of profit and loss, money, goods, relationships. The Art of the Deal and only the deal. A gold toilet is the throne for this kind of thinking. But a full size mirror is not art, merely a narrow two dimensional reflection of a small one dimensional man, the last man on earth who should be the Czar of Culture.

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.

You can hang this over the Main Hall of Trump University: Ignorance is Bliss! Maybe you thought another term for the Chancellor would be tuition-free, why not enroll in advanced coursework in Economics from the professor who has declared bankruptcy six times? Of course, if you have been considering bankruptcy, this would definitely be required credits. If not, there’s plenty other advanced coursework for those who care to learn at the knee of a renowned businessman. Bible Studies 101, Tennis Shoe Sales for the Complete Novice, Baseball Cap Politics, Tax Evasion PhD, Legal Tips from the Roy Cohn Files, Emoluments for the Politician, Stock Market Manipulation and Inside Trading, Tariff Calculations and Deferred Tariffs — all in all, plenty of classes whether you signed up or not.

But tuition free? Better think again. If you thought the price of eggs would be going down or inflation would be tamed in the first week of the University reopening its doors, you missed last term’s featured study in Hyperbole, Prevarication and Doubling Down. Not to worry, that class will be offered this term as well. Nevertheless, the cost to you, the consumer, will be enormous. Price you pay for that Bliss poster over the entrance.

The Chancellor has offered us students a front row seat on the workings of a global economy. His required reading, Art of the Deal, should have made it abundantly clear that all negotiations must have a clear winner, a zero-sum gain. If we have a balance of trade deficit, we are losers. (This will definitely be a question on the final exam you are required to sit through.) There is no such thing as soft power. Aid to foreign countries in expectation of their appreciation is a fallacy and has been curtailed as of Immediately. Tariffs will be imposed on … well, every country on the planet, even those without import or export potential. The math is simplified, the balance is in our favor, foreign investments will flock to our shores, the future will be beautiful, more beautiful than it’s ever been before.

Don’t even think about asking for a return on your non-tuition. The semester runs four years and if you think the first few months were eye-popping, hang on to your seats, the best courses are coming up fast. Recession 101 will begin shortly. Advanced Trade War may have already begun. Tax Cuts for the 1% will be required coursework. Medicaid Roll Slashing, IRS Defunding, Social Security Fraud, so much to look forward to. Textbooks are not required, in case you were wondering, but you will be expected to pay for them.

When I ask my MAGA buddies what it is they like about the guy they voted for, they invariably say they want a biznessman in charge. They don’t care one pronoun about Woke stuff, DEI stuff, touch-feely B.S. — they want a capitalist, a captain of industry, a corporate magnate to steer the ship of state. They couldn’t care less if he’s been bankrupt a few times. They don’t give a damn if he left his contractors holding the bag. They don’t mind that he’s a chronic liar, a convicted felon, an egotistical womanizer or … well, much of anything, really, beyond the fact that he’s a billionaire. It goes without saying, without analysis, that if he’s filthy rich, he must be a savvy entrepreneur, exactly what this country needs.

The wealthy just want a fellow 1%’er to lower their taxes, get rid of burdensome regulations, cut the government down to size and protect their interests. The bizness of America, they will gladly tell you, is bizness, pure and simple. If they get richer, if more of us get rich, the money will trickle down to everyone. Sure, they’ll get more but fair is fair. Government needs to get out of their way!

A good biznessman, most folks will tell you, hires excellent people to surround him. Experts. Professionals. Trump gets rid of these people because they aren’t Yes Men. His people, sycophants all, are there to do his bidding and to flatter him endlessly. He is, he thinks, the smartest guy in any room. He listens to his gut. That right there is his genius.

This week he put blanket tariffs on nearly every country on earth, even some with no populations unless you count penguins or migrating birds. The price of nearly every imported product will be going up. Inflation will go up. A recession will be coming up too, more than likely now, if not, worse case, a full blown world Depression. The Dow and the S&P and the NASDAQ plunged, his advisors are calling each other morons and worse, the real bizness CEO’s are running around social media with hair-on-fire five alarm incredulity.

And my buddies are now desperate to get their retirement money out of the stock market which is a roller coaster ride every day. We’re going to find out soon if we elected a biznessman. Or just a tennis shoe salesman with dreams of grandeur.

The desert is a menacing place, I don’t care if you’re a native or a moss-backed tourist on safari to the dive taverns of Arizona with names like Jackass or Burro or Sidewinder. The boyz and me were hunting beer down in the flashflood washes and arroyos from Phoenix to Prescott. We’re old hands at this beerhunting, having gone every year for 30 years. We know the drill. Walk to the bars, do not drive. Drink, if not responsibly, at least semi-moderately. Eat. Even if it’s greasy bar food, put something in your belly to soak up alcohol. Try to maintain a modicum of control. Do not disturb the snakes or the natives, especially the venomous ones. The point is to hunt with passion, but also to bring ourselves back alive.

We made reservations in Bisbee a short walk from the historic Silver Dollar Hotel and other weathered historic taverns, but … our fellow slayer in Phoenix had asked his son and his son-in-law, confirmed golfers, along on the Hunt. These boys, nice guys in their 40’s with wives and two children each, decided to cancel our reservations and make them adjacent to the golf course in Prescott they intended to tame. None of the grizzled and seasoned Hunters had a say, but being get-along go-along yahoos, we acquiesced with subdued mutterings. In hindsight, we did not offer the sage counsel professional Hunters should have offered these tenderfeet.

The first warning sign was when they pulled their vehicles into a bar back in the hinterlands that had yet to open but did so in 5 minutes. While we sipped coffee, they threw down shots. Obviously the kids thought they were young and invulnerable. Beer? Not for them. They opted for the hard stuff. It took three or four roadhouses to wind our way up the canyon to our basecamp. By then they were feeling no pain and the day was young. Day two, they had tee times while we hiked the cacti lined trails nearby. They were throwing down shots for breakfast. Midafternoon we rendezvoused at the Palace Hotel, one of the ten best historic bars in America, downtown Prescott. Jerry was dragged in like a dead buck between the other two, blacked out from one and a half bottles of tequila. They laid him into a chair where he slumped from his wounds, unconscious but alive. We ordered another round of beers.

Hunting is not all that difficult if done correctly. Done with disrespect for the Rules, it is a nasty business and leads to all manner of vicious and unforeseen mayhem. By the end of the second night we had turned what should have been an exotic beer hunt into a morass of criminality, fear and abject self-loathing. The police finally intervened, pulling a carload of cocky amateurs onto the shoulder, hauling the intoxicated driver to jail and impounding the car. At three in the morning we went to retrieve our contrite fellow Hunter at the hoosegow. At eight we received a call that the Mex’s wife was in a Seattle hospital, under induced coma, intubated and possibly dying of what appeared to be opioid overdose. By noon we were driving him to the Phoenix airport. A definite chill had settled over the Hunters.

We’re back now and so far no lives have been lost. Next year, count on it, we’ll hunt in the Cascades once again, trespassing on the dam access patrolled by Homeland Security since Nine Eleven who threaten us or crossing the dangerously rotten old bridge high above the Cle Elum River to get back to our cabin. We won’t be inviting the kids. They can drink at home.

I guess I’ve been working in art for about 45 years. Some of it I’ve been doing okay at, even made a so-called Living at, and most of it, well, I’m not the poster child for Starving Artist, but maybe Anorexic Artist. We artists have a tough row to hoe in corporate America, that’s the truth, and so we try all sorts of strategies ranging from art fair booths to just giving up and getting a job, a real job. But probably too late for one that pays well or offers benefits and pensions. The money belongs to the Job Creators. Us creators, well, good luck.

I went up into the mountains this past weekend with a box of the Skeeter Daddle Blues, hoping to do a book reading and maybe sell a few copies. Ever since my old outlets for book sales dried up, I’ve been headscratching how to market these babies, get them out of my basement and into the hands of folks hungry for great literature. Tyee Store closed up and so did the Copy This Mail That office supply store that sold the first book Skeeter Daddle Diaries so well I ordered a second printing. The South End String Band CD’s sold like hotcakes too at those places, but when they closed shop, the only show in town was the Snow Goose Bookstore. And now they’ve shuttered their doors too. We probably sold two to three thousand CD’s before that. I sold maybe 1000 books. Not bad for a backwash.

This past year I haven’t sold more than ten books and the band is giving CD’s away at concerts for ‘the price we finally figured they were worth’. For free. One concert alone we handed out 150 CD’s.

A high tech, fast charging friend convinced me to try Amazon. Against my better judgement I signed on, figuring I’d be sending them a box of hot sellers they could pass out faster than candy on Halloween. But no, they wanted me to send one book at a time, priority mail, to their warehouse in Maryland or someplace far far away. I spent about $5 per book for mailing envelope and postage, losing a couple of bucks on each one. This went on for a couple of months, never enough sales apparently, to justify shipping them a full box. I might have continued this brilliant sales strategy right into bankruptcy but one day I noticed Amazon, love these guyz, had used copies of the Skeeter Diaries listed at 1.99 plus shipping. This was great. Me competing against me and the only winner was Amazon. It took me awhile to get out of this crummy cycle, the company not really responsive to any inquiries. In fact, they had no way to make inquiries.

I finally just kept sending them messages on the sales requests that the book was Out of Print. Which, finally, it was. Sadly, I buy my own book back from them occasionally just to have a few copies around. Cheaper than reprints by far. Bookstores competing against Bezos, like I mentioned at the last Snow Goose reading before they closed shop, are like Godzilla vs Bambi, it won’t be long before they’re toejam. Now I see where they’d like to be my printer too, print on demand. Probably ship them to me, then have me ship them back each sale. Lose even more money on every point of sale.

So I wish I had a tried and true strategy for you prospective artists out there looking for ways to sell your wares, I really do. It was always dog eat dog, but now we got Godzilla too. My only advice is to be like the little furry creatures during the Dinosaur Era, stay low, keep a close eye out, maybe move at night. I know, not much help, but the trick is to survive.