The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I listened to a report  recently on public radio extolling the virtues of using Instagram to further an artist’s career.  As an artist with a career in definite need of a jumpstart, I paid close attention, figuring maybe a tutorial in social media might be just my ticket to fame and fortune.  They featured two artists, the first being some guy I’d never heard of (no surprise since I don’t subscribe to Instagram) who painted colorful murals but apparently didn’t make enough money to quit his day job.  So, using the power of a photographic platform, he marketed his art on T-shirts and coffee mugs.  Sometimes he tried out new mural designs, see what folks bought and what folks wished he’d never drawn.  Democratic art, I guess, vote for the winning design.

The other artist was a painter and she was doing okay on Instagram but complained how it sucked up all her time trying to stay current, keep posting, respond to her fans and adoring public.  She admitted she was thinking of dropping off the social media rat race, maybe spend some time making art instead.  She mentioned how her fanbase would almost always respond negatively to about anything new or different she was trying out — they only wanted the tried and true.

There are folks I’ve been unfortunate enough to meet who think good art is defined by its sales potential.  If it sells, it’s good.  If it doesn’t, probably bad art.  Nice, I guess, to have a quantifiable definition.  Jeff Koon’s stainless steel rabbit just sold for 91 million dollars to the dad of our past Secretary of the Treasury, Steve Mnuchin, making Koon’s the greatest living artist of our time.  Give me a break.  The guy’s a PR guy who couldn’t, as one critic once said, carve his name on a tree, the kind of putz who photographed himself having anal sex with his Italian porn star wife.  Jeff would have loved Instagram.

I don’t pretend to be the final arbiter of what good art is.  I just know it isn’t what sells the most.  Otherwise I’d probably be printing T-shirts and coffee cups with stained glass designs, probably only the ones my clamoring fans bought multiples of.  The danger, at least to me, of being an artist is falling into the trap of following the money.  I’d rather have a crappy day job if money was the goal.  Which, I guess, is why I was a graveyard shift orderly for 10 lousy years.  Okay, a crappy night job.  Beats boxing up those T-shirt orders, if nothing else.

Most folks think homeless people live in the Big City. Seattle and Gomorrah. Portland. Stanwoodopolis. But that’s not true. There’s homeless people living everywhere — even the South End. If you’re the type of cautious soul who’d never pick up a hitchhiker, you’d never have met Stinky Steve. Or you’d think, even now, how mean it was to call Steve ‘Stinky’.  For those of us who DO pick up folks with their thumbs out, we didn’t call him that out of spiteful cruelty. Steve was genuinely, and I mean Full Bore, Head On, Hold Yer Nose, No Kidding, olfactorily displeasing. He had an odor part old B.O., part beer breath, part cigarette smoke and the rest I probably wouldn’t want to guess. I don’t think he minded us rolling a window down even in rain or cold weather. After all, those were his elements.

When I first picked him up, he was living in an abandoned shed a neighbor a couple miles north kindly let him use. He was on his way to work digging soft shell clams on the tideflats near Stanwood, or so he said. Later he lived in a pup tent near me and worked various jobs clearing trail or weed-eating the neighbors’ land for minimum wage. Some even offered him free use of their showers, but Steve wasn’t much for personal hygiene and always politely demurred.

Guitar Bob and me got to know Steve better than most. We used to play the 12 beer blues every Sunday night, and at some point Steve joined our little outdoor guitar duet, singing some ditty to our rambling fingerwork that always sounded oddly familiar. When some kids slashed his tent and strewed his meager belongings, Bob’s neighbors gave him a little trailer to live in … on condition he work around the place and go to Social Services and sign up for disability. Mental disability. They meant well, these Do-Gooders, but the end result of all this was that the State of Washington gave Steve a modest stipend that effectively resulted in Steve’s early retirement from the part time workforce and paid for his malt liquor without him having to work all day to earn it. Steve, predictably enough, had his alcoholism subsidized by the State. And we had a singer more and more off key, schnockered by the time we’d only started to warm up.

I guess the ditches beside the Road of Good Intentions are strewn with folks like Steve. We forget that not all of us want a suburban home, a square meal or even a hot bath. Some of us just want to be left the hell alone, to live our life a different way altogether, without sympathy, without a handout, without a whole lot of socio-psycho hand wringing. I’m not saying you should pick them up hitchhiking into town for their cigarettes and beer. I’m just saying they’re here, they’re not that crazy and they’re okay decent people. There’s no law that says they have to bathe.

Well, long story way too short, the good-hearted neighbors signed him up for computer training in Spokane, detox, three square meals a day and a life as alien to him as a heroin addict in a nursery school. Guitar Bob and I got a couple of letters, half computer hieroglyphics, half semi-sensible musings on his new life and about 2/3rds sadness expressed with a stiff upper lip. We never saw him again. Shortly after those letters he was diagnosed with colon cancer. Then we heard he died. Bob and I bought a 6 pack each and played our 12 beer blues long into the dark night for Steve, a fallen comrade, another loner on the sad old South End the newcomers won’t have to pass by as he stands in a cold drizzle with his tobacco stained thumb held out for the alms of a ride.

I got a friend who called me up asking if I had some colored glass he could get his hands on.  Sure, I said, whatcha need it for?  He explained that he was making mermaid sculptures and decorating them with everything from crushed seashells off the beach of Baby Island to possibly pennies as mermaid scales.  He needed some glass to break into pieces and glue onto the mermaid’s tail.  Okay, I said, I got some scrap glass you can use, anything to help a fellow glass breaker.

My pal is a real estate agent.  Meaning, he’s in the same boat as a lot of us here on the lackadaisical South End, folks who basically are self-employed, work when we want, play most of the time.  If we can handle the guilt of not embracing the Protestant Ethic, we’re fairly happy campers.  But now, with this Pandemic Panic, the entire island has self-quarantined.  Every manjack of us is holed up in Paradise wondering what the world will look like after the plague subsides.  Whatever jobs were out there, they may not be after the dust settles and the virus leaves stunned survivors in its wake.

Whatcha making the mermaids for, anyway? I asked my buddy, thinking he was embarked on a mercy mission, maybe take a few to the nursing homes in the area since he’s a pretty philanthropic guy, the kind who takes firewood to shut-ins in the winter or organizes trash pickups alongside the roads.  What do you mean? he asked.  I mean what’s your plan with these mermaids is what I mean.  No reason, he said, just bored.

So you got four mermaids done, now you’re making more?  I was thinking about the 5 guitars I’d just made, no good reason.  “You need to be careful, Zorba,” I warned.  Whaddaya mean? he asked, a slight tremor in his voice.   “Can’t you see, man, the thing has got a hold of you.  One or two mermaids, sure, I get it.  A little hobby to fill the time while the plague passes by.  But the third?  And a fourth?  You can see where this is going.  Be careful is all I’m saying.”

“It’s harmless,” he protested.  “Just something to keep me from being bored.  What’s wrong with that, Skeeter?

“What’s wrong?” I asked.  “You’re playing with a loaded gun, my friend.  Another mermaid you’ll be hooked.  Sure, it’s a few seashells glued on, then it’s some broken glass, some pennies to make scales, next thing you’ll be making full size sculptures, casting bronze, there’s no telling where it leads.  You’ll end up like the rest of us on this desolate hellhole of an island.”

“What do you mean?  What are you talking about?” he fairly squeaked.  I hated being the bearer of bad news but hellfire, someone has to speak Truth to the moths circling the flame.  “What I’m talking about is falling into the trap.  One mermaid okay, two, sure, but the addiction starts there and next thing you know ….”  I paused to let this sink into his bald skull.  “What?” he asked, “Next thing I know what??”

“You become like the rest of us, Zorba, you become an artist.”

“I’m just killing some time, Skeeter, I’m just bored,” he protested.

“That’s what we all said.  If we were honest.  Just … be … careful, that’s all I’m saying.  We got too many lost souls here now, we don’t need some retired realtor joining the ranks.”

Next day when I took him the glass he said he wanted more colors, not just the blues he originally requested.  I shook my head, sure, why not.  Too late, I could tell, nothing for it but to take him the whole crayon box.  Sometimes you just can’t talk folks off the ledge.

The Floyd Norgaard Cultural Center will host the third annual fine art crafter show, Small Craft Advisory, Saturday and Sunday Oct. 1st and 2nd  from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 27130 102^nd  St. in Stanwood, WA.

Small Craft Advisory is an invitational art show of high-end crafts featuring the works of 15 artisans. Their work runs the gamut from pottery to banjo luthiery, glass-blown art to jewelry, stone carving to furniture building, extraordinary headgear to avant-garde ceramics, sculpture to mixed media, Native American art to fiction writing, guitar building to stained glass. Our intention is to introduce the public to artistic and original works of craft. Are they art or are they craft? We think you’ll find a simple answer to that age-old and time-wearied question at this, our third annual exhibition of fine artisans.

Sometime back when Tyee Store was still the economic center of the South End I walked in from my trail connecting our Shangri-la-la with the other side of the island after spotting a car like we had, same vintage, and since we were pushing 275,000 miles on it, I wondered how many miles this one had, hopefully an additional 100,000 which would give me unbridled optimism about ours longevity.   We were the only two customers so I assumed it was his car.  “How many miles on that rig out there?” I asked the guy at the counter purchasing his cigs and beers.  He looked around at me and the look on his face immediately veered from innocent bystander to potential casualty.

He said he didn’t know and stopped looking me in the eyes.  His were glued to the floor.
“You don’t know how many miles your own car has?” I persisted, thinking maybe we could wander out and just have a look-see on the odometer.  Logic is one of my strong points, as you can see.  I think I might have asked it in a somewhat incredulous, possibly even rude tone of voice, one that rattled him.

“It’s not mine, it’s my uncle’s,” he finally offered lamely, trying to get his bill paid and his change back.  His nervousness quotient was palpable now but hellfire, all I wanted to know was whether I could expect my own chariot to run into the next decade or not, what’s the problem, kid?  Patty behind the counter watched this dispassionately.  Tyee gets plenty of weirdness, nothing to make her reach for the panic button or a phone to alert the authorities.  Yet.

“Your uncle’s?”  I asked, starting to wonder if this was a stolen vehicle, none of my business, of course, but then again, a concerned citizen.  That might be my car the punk had hotwired and made his escape to the hideaways of the nettle savannahs of the South End.  Civic duty required maybe I ask one more time, “So you don’t know how many miles on that jalopy of your uncle’s.”  By now Patty had given him his change, bagged his goods and parked the receipt in the bag.  The kid was sweating noticeably, hands shaky, eye contact non-existent.  “I told you I don’t know,” he muttered as he swept by me and out the door.

I looked at Patty and said, “Man, that guy was nervous as a cat.  Whaddaya make of that?”

“Your hat,” she said.  “DEA.”  I had forgotten that I’d tossed a ballcap on before taking to the woods, one that meant Drug Enforcement Agency to the kid, I guess.  Whatever sadistic pleasure I’d taken from our little tete-a-tete gave me some idea what a cop must feel like when a few questions, innocent enough, break the subject’s will.  Cat and mouse.  Sadism could rear its ugly head.  When I got home, I put the cap away.  The cops don’t need my help anyway.  My car died a couple weeks later, ran out of oil, blew up the engine.  I guess that answered my question without the kid’s help.

Every day I get a call, sometimes 3, from some nice stranger who wants to know if I’d be willing to sell them my house.  My house, it seems, is very very popular.  I wish I was that popular but I’m the owner of said house and maybe that should be enough for me.  Course, none of these would-be buyers have ever seen my house, at least not the inside.  I suspect they can find a google shot of the street and the outside, probably know what Zillow thinks it’s worth, surely know what I paid for it or have a guess since I built it myself so the county records wouldn’t have the price I paid if we’d bought it 30 years ago on the open market.

For awhile I’d tell my nice stranger when they asked if I was interested in selling, “You bet!”  This almost always caused a long pause, no doubt my caller wasn’t used to a potential sale and certainly not one whose owner was enthusiastic.

“Well, um… did you have a … um … price in mind?” they would ask.  And I would practically shout, “I do indeed!!”  “And … um… what were you thinking, price-wise, I mean?”

Sometimes I would say two million dollars, sometimes less but a helluva lot more than they hoped some Alzheimer owner might throw out, some grandma with dementia still able to sign over the deed for double what she paid for the place 50 years ago.  Which inevitably resulted in another long pause before they recovered enough to state that we could probably come to some kind of mutual agreement.  To which I would reply that the price just went up, take it or leave it.  When they started to speak again, boom, price just went up another hundred thou.  Followed by a click.

You get tired of fooling around with these people, though, after dozens and dozens, one after the other, sometimes, I suspect, the same yahoo.  If you haven’t got anything better to do, tell them a low ball number and wait for the heart palpitations and the salivating you can hear over the phone.  Got a live one here!

Got a sucker who’s selling for a fifth what the place is worth!

Sure, fun for a few times, then you start calling them names, question their morality, engage in some back and forth curses, and then, well, you do like I do finally when they ask if you’d be interested in selling your house, just say I was hoping someone would want to buy this place, I need to move to the Home and this is practically a godsend.  Then hang up …

Whatever you do, don’t answer the next few times the phone rings.

Twenty-five years ago I agreed to put a stained glass window into the proposed Visitor Center the Chamber of Commerce was planning to build at the strategic Y where traffic north separated traffic south for most everyone coming onto the island.  I guess I figured some small panel in a doorway sidelight maybe, nothing to write home about, just a small donation.  When I sat with the architect, the original design was basically a box with a shed roof and when he asked me what I might consider doing for glass, I drew in a quarter moon over the door.  He shook his head in confusion and I said it looks like an outhouse, why not pop in the iconic quarter moon insignia.

Yeah, I wonder too why I seem to never get along with architects.  He said give me a minute and walked back to his drawing table, then came out a few of those minutes later with a sketch of what would become the Visitor Center, tall box with a curved roof and a giant X metal framework in the entire front, fifteen feet high by twelve wide.  And so I volunteered to do the entire front, a dramatic piece for the highway traffic.  For the first weekends of construction I offered my help, after all, I had built my own house and I was full of piss and vinegar, but after the initial structure was up, the contractor who’d volunteered his time and his crew told us he had to get back to his day job.  And so I became the de facto project manager.

It took me from spring into late fall to complete the Center and its sculpture park.  Lots of politics, fights with the Chamber folks, arguments with my artist buddies, begging for donations, all that fun stuff … but we did it, we built an Art Park and a Visitor Center.  And we ended up with 3 and a half acres behind it for extending the Sculpture Park, what is now Freedom Park.  The Chamber, about five years ago, decided to vacate the building and rent it to a local artist who promptly stuck huge posters of comical animal asses on the front and covered the artwork of our most well-known artist with a caricature of himself.  You bet I was annoyed.

A month or more ago the folks from Freedom Park who now own the property in front asked if I could repair the damage to the original glass mural.  I took a look and told them the panels were almost all shot with pellet guns, thrown bottles and lawnmower rocks, but if they were serious about rehabbing the building and park, I’d give them a new mural, new design, all gratis.  The tenant wasn’t happy about being asked to vacate for a few weeks while all this upgrade took place and he ultimately took his butt banners and his posters and went home .  Adios, amigo.

Fast forward to two days ago.  Grant Shaw, the hombre spearheading all this upgrade, the guy who scraped and primed and painted the metal front, the spark plug for what will be a complete refurbishing of the building and the landscape, Grant hauled in ladders and I hauled in ten panels of new glass.  Took us all day and had to recruit a couple of unsuspecting volunteers from the playground behind to help us hoist the 4×5 foot upper panel to the board we’d run through two ladders where we stood 12 feet up, but we got it done.  You think it didn’t bring back memories from 25 years ago, you’d be dead wrong.  You think I’m not worried that something similar to the past fiasco would happen down the road, yeah, same as the above.  You think I’m not happy to see a new bunch of volunteers helping put this corner back together, maybe better, well, think again.  For awhile I feel about 25 years younger, a little sore from the installation but once again proud of what a few people can accomplish.  And yeah, I know, most folks won’t notice.  But I’m used to that.

My neighbor Jill was working down at Labor and Industries and since I needed to get a contractor license so I could install my stained glass in a state project for two whole days, I ended up with Jill.  The whole process took half an hour so we covered subjects ranging from dogs we have owned to retirement strategies for us geezers.  Jill’s main point was the necessity ‘to keep moving’ when you retire.  She herself wanted to establish her post-retirement interests pre-retirement.

“I used to work at the Casino,” she said, something I didn’t know.  “Lot of people spent their whole day sitting on a stool playing the slots.  You didn’t see em for a few days, you could figure they probably died.  The Casino was their whole life.  We even provided funeral services.  Why not?  Half their friends were us casino workers.  You have the funeral in-house, we didn’t take half a day off to go to a funeral downtown.”

I said it was something I never imagined.  Maybe scatter their ashes under the crap table, one stop shop.  Jill muttered ‘why not?’  and kept stamping my documents, checking stuff against her computer screen read-out, asked an occasional question.  “Lot of those folks,” she said, “they thought of retirement as dying.  Kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Kind of like filling out this endless paperwork, I thought.  “Uh-oh,” Jill said after half an hour and I thought here’s where you return to jail, do not pass Go.  She asked a few questions, made one small change on the form that warns NO CHANGES PERMITTED.  Casino work, I thought, might not be as far removed from government bureaucrat as I thought.  I bet L&I might even provide funeral services for those of us who died in these long lines … but I was hoping I wouldn’t find out today.

I confess.  I have a TV.  Not a very big TV, not a drive-in theater size TV, just a TV that our friends find maddening if we want to watch a movie together but that seems plenty big enough for the mizzus and me.  I don’t want to build another house to make room for a 60 inch television.  But I do want to watch the news and a few shows.  And I don’t want to pay for cable or satellite.  Not that I wouldn’t want to watch 100 stations with the weirdest content imaginable just to get PBS.

So it probably won’t surprise anyone to know that I have an antenna on the roof.  Since everyone went to digital, the old antenna wouldn’t pick up anything.  Nada, zip, zero.  Thanks a lot, FCC.  The first UHF antenna would catch a few stations, not most, and even then you had to haul up to the roof, turn the antenna, climb back down and see if that picked up the station you were after and when it didn’t repeat the above.  Great exercise, not good viewing.  Like the internet, TV reception out in the boondocks is for the birds.  Sure, the providers promised high speed updates, but any fool knew they were lying.  And now that the pandemic has forced us all into quarantine, the internet with everyone logged on is reminiscent of the old dial-up days with buffering that lasts longer than TV commercials.

A week ago I did some buffered research on TV antennas, ordered one online and got it a few days later.  The old one, which actually wasn’t very old at all, had replaced the previous one that refused, no matter what compass direction I pointed it, to pick up PBS.  PBS, we learned through further internet buffered research, had a slightly weaker signal than any other station this side of Portland or San Francisco.  Close, but no cigar, so I figured get a slightly bigger antenna but maybe not as big as a large array telescope.  With high hopes and plenty of pessimism I hauled the new aluminum job up to the roof peak, attached it to the metal mast, pointed it in the direction of Seattle and Gomorrah, climbed back down the ladder and turned on the TV.  Wow.  The stations were really a lot crisper, all of them.

All of them except PBS.  Which didn’t come in at all.  PBS asks us for contributions all the time.  Maybe when they offer a repeater station instead of a cheesy coffee mug for a donation of 120 bucks a year, they might have a shot.  Until then, they can quit asking.

We used to stand in our garden and look out across the highway with great views of the Olympic Mountains and Puget Sound.  But, of course, inevitably progress reared its ugly head, the acreage on the bluff side got parceled and houses got built.  The new folks refused to honor some of the commitments the developer had agreed to, cut the green belt between us and closed off our promised access to the beach below.  Our ‘view’ rapidly became a suburb, our neighbors had themselves an Association and we planted evergreens along the road.

Jump ahead a few years and our hedge had grown into a 20 foot green wall, giving us total privacy to replace our view, not a bad trade-off.  Our neighbors on our side of the Green Curtain had also put in hedges so that for a stretch of highway across from the Association nothing could be seen of us pioneers and our less than majestic hovels.  Out of sight, out of mind, so say the philosophers of social inequity.

Eventually I made peace with the suburbanites.  Nice folks mostly, especially the second generation of newcomers.  And so one spring day I pruned the lower limbs of all the evergreen laurels lining the road, opening up views of our shack and gardens and greenhouses.  For days, for weeks, I cut and hauled and burned, slowly revealing what had been hidden for a decade and a half or more, our Shangri-La-La chic chalet and its estate.

One by one every neighbor dropped by to tell me how nice our pruning was, what a great difference, how pleased they were.  Good fences, I concluded, don’t make good neighbors, they screen them out.  The next year I cut those laurels down to the ground, the filberts too.  Even put up artwork along the road as a gesture of more goodwill this past year.  We get along okay, but lately, I don’t know, maybe just the ornery curmudgeon in me, maybe all the fighting going on over there this past year, I sometimes miss that big green wall.