The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Last week at our Small Craft Advisory craft show in Stanwoodopolis, I met the Director emeritus of the world famous Pilchuck Glass School who was instrumental in bringing Dale Chihuly’s vision of promoting all things glass.  Pilchuck Glass School sits in the foothills just above town and started back in 1971 with a couple of instructors and 18 students who lived in tents and makeshift huts overlooking the Skagit delta and Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains.  If you’re ever wondering why the area has a glass blower behind every fir tree, the folks who studied at the school fell in love with the place and stuck around the Pacific Northwest.

When the school was small, we locals were invited up once a year for a free tour of the facilities.  Bring a picnic lunch, bottle of wine, watch the glass blowing, wander the grounds.  They were a welcoming bunch back then.  Course, like most successful enterprises, they changed, started charging $25 for a visit, copped an attitude of artistic superiority and pretty much ruined the sweet ambiance of the earlier years.  Fame will do that in case you’ve lived on the South End too long.

I was up there with Smoker Bill, one of my cronies, in the early ‘90’s to visit his friend who was in charge of maintenance.  Bill was probably the best and most creative woodworker I’d ever met.  Might still be.  He could do things with wood most folks couldn’t begin to imagine.  His buddy Richard the maintenance man was no slouch either.  We drove through all the signs prohibiting entrance to unauthorized personnel and met up with Richard who gave us a tour of the new and old facilities, then we found seats in the open air glass blowing arena to watch two women work the furnace in a choreographed dance of glass gathers on the end of a pipe back into the furnace, blow a bubble of molten silica, another pass in the blast furnace, add an outer layer of glass, etc., etc.  These women were known for their giant fruits.  Apples, pears, big lemons.

Gotta say, not my idea of great art.  Not even good art.  Big ass fruits, c’mon….  But part way through an apple the size of a small poodle, one of the artists spoke to an assistant, pointed in our direction and next thing you know we were unceremoniously being escorted out of the premises.   Richard apologized but we said it was okay, rules are rules.  Although, to be honest, when I hear someone say how bohemian the lifestyle is at the School, how free and untethered, just let their imaginations soar without earthbound restrictions, I mostly think of a long row of mutant apples and pears lined up, price tags affixed, ready for shipping to adoring buyers across the nation.   So it really doesn’t bother me … and actually makes me say with some unwarranted pride , as I did with the former Director, yeah, I was kicked out of Pilchuck Glass School.

I had the honor this morning of emceeing the Stanwoodopolis/Camano Food Bank Fundraiser, an event to help kickstart and support the new grocery store style food bank in town.  When I mentioned to a buddy last weekend that I would be doing this shindig, he wanted to know why they needed more money.   Now understand, we’re talking about donations from biznesses and the public, you and me and the shops on the island and in town.  What I never understand and never will are the folks who begrudge the homeless, the hungry, the deprived, the single mom trying to raise a kid or two, the people who lost their job, the downtrodden begrudge just giving them a helping hand.  They think, I guess, that these folks are losers or drug addicts or alcoholics or they’re just lazy good-for-nothings.

Life can be cruel for a lot of us.  Society has a game that’s rigged for the privileged, the white, especially us males, for those whose parents could live in the right places, send their kids to the right colleges, feed them well, love them, educate them.

But … for a lot of us we might have been created equal, that doesn’t mean we have equal opportunities for life liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  Don’t kid ourselves.  And don’t listen to the hard hearted who had an easier time navigating the American system.  Folks get left behind, folks become homeless and hungry thru no fault of their own.  We don’t have to blame anyone, not them or the government or the American Way of Life.  We just have to find it in our hearts to help the folks who never had the same advantages, who fell on hard times, who ran into a streak of bad luck.  We just have to be part of the safety net.  We have to help these people who, after all, are part of the family.

This is what I said to the assemblage this morning.  But ya know, I’m preaching to the choir.  My buddy wouldn’t have ears for this.  He’d tell me the government gives the foodbank subsidies and grants, why should he be obligated to spend his taxes or make a donation.  Why should anyone get what my buddy thinks is a free ride.  He made his, they could have too.  Like I said, I’ll never understand this kind of thinking.  And he’ll probably never have to walk a mile in their shoes.  Or even a few yards.

So the World Health Organization just declared a new psychopathology, Gaming Disorder, the addictive propensity to sit for hour after hour with an X-box, disdaining sleep and food and exercise.  Good diagnosis, guyz!  But you forgot to include Facebook, You-Tube, computer addictions, porn and cellphone.  Maybe, just maybe, they’re really all one disease.  Ya think?

I guess the Facebook zombies actually stop to eat.  And it could even be argued that this social media is really social.  A new social, I guess, no face to face necessary, just tweets and instagrams, nothing too up-close and personal.  Tim Cook, the new warden at Apple, recently declared sitting at a computer terminal to be the new cancer.  Thanks, Tim, for asking the troops to stand up.  How about asking them to go outdoors and exercise?  Or quit their carcinogenic jobs?  Or get a life?

We’re rewiring our brains, no doubt about it.  B.F. Skinner and the Pavlovian dogs, peck a button and the bait, I mean the reward, comes tumbling out, time after time, predictable as an IV of opiods.  Try this experiment if you’re a doubter:  put away your cellphone, turn off your computer, unplug the TV and peripherals and devices, see how long you can last before the shakes and the fevers start.  I bet about an hour.  We might be missing important stuff.  You know, Trump, Beyonce, Oprah, the photo from a friend you rarely see, Trump, the latest movie star scandal, did I mention Trump?  If I did, let me add Trump again anyway.

This is our reality now.  We even made a reality show huckster our Leader.  We get what we deserve, the old adage goes in regard to a country and its rulers.  Times certainly change and now they’re changing in hyper-drive.  If anyone thinks, myself included, that there will be a cure for this disorder, we got another think coming.  In about two tweets.

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.