The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I’m pretty much beyond child bearing age. Plus, I’m not a woman. And even if I went through the sex change, I don’t think I’m likely to get pregnant. But even so, I follow the abortion laws the red states are implementing, not fearful for my own consequences, but because it interests me how the same folks who want government out of everything but our bedroom think it’s politically advantageous to use abortion as a wedge issue. Most folks in the Yew Ess of Aye think abortion should be legal. And most folks think abortion is bad. I’ve never had an abortion but I bet if I had, I’d wish things hadn’t gotten to that point.

Idaho just sent a bill to the governor for his signature that bans abortion after 6 weeks and allows, like Texas, private citizens to sue doctors. Idaho added a wrinkle allowing each family member to sue for 20 grand, figuring, I guess, that the lost joy of babysitting grandchildren ought to be worth a lot of money. Not sure what the loss to aunts and uncles would be, but hey, 20,000 dollars ought to cover about any grief, forget about the savings in birthday and Christmas presents.

A lot of right wing Republican states are lining up to hit the road running if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v Wade so Idaho, one of the most crimson in a growing constellation of anti-abortion states, caught my attention with its clause that would not allow a rapist to sue for his victim’s abortion. This seemed mighty liberal to me … until I got to the part about the rapist’s relatives who could file suit.

Now, I respect the rights of a rapist as much as the next baby loving kook, but c’mon, the brothermotherfathercousin of Ted Bundy whose victim survives and becomes pregnant can be sued for tens and tens of thousands of dollars by the creepy family? Are you kidding me?

Idaho should change its license plate motto FAMOUS POTATOES to something more current. VICTIMS TWICE.

My last attempt at South End luthiery was a black limba parlor guitar. I had to tear it apart once, maybe even twice, I can’t remember now after a couple of years of Covid isolation, to fix a problem that made the neck pull down and the action go up. For all you non-luthiers out there, count yourselves lucky. For me, it was the last straw in a year of guitar building misadventures. Most of the five I made got disassembled, repaired, rebuilt and finally just hung on the wall, testament to my obstinacy and incompetence. Some of us are slow learners. And one of us never learns.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right? How about plenty ventured, nothing gained? You can learn a lot about yourself attempting to accomplish what might actually be impossible. The fiddler in our band went to violin making school for three years. Our new mandolin player makes his own and I don’t think he went to school to learn how to do it, but his mandolins are beautiful and the workmanship is superb. I don’t know him well yet, but I suspect he’s meticulous as a clock maker. Me, not so much.

By the time I tried my hand at bending wood for an acoustic guitar I’d built a few banjos. Banjos, well, banjos are a little easier and at the end of the day, a banjo pretty much sounds like a banjo. Oh, sure, you can hear some nuanced differences, but mostly they’re a drum with strings, a percussive instrument that defies respectability. A guitar, on the other hand, has a range of intonations that vary from sweet mellowness to brittle sharpness, mostly the result of the choice of woods, rosewood being the balanced mellow, maple contrasting with a hard tone. Course, being a neophyte, I tried everything from koa to bubinga, maple to walnut, and the last one, a black limba. About the only woods I didn’t use were balsa and plywood.

I won’t even get into the playability factor, the balanced tones from bass to treble, the bracing strategies for guitars like mine with untraditional soundholes, sometimes on the sides, usually two on top, each essentially a new experiment, each always a new challenge. After all, I wasn’t trying to make a duplicate the way my fiddler does his violins, each meticulously fashioned to be a copy of a Stradivarius. Experiments don’t sell well to symphonies. I wasn’t planning to sell to the Philharmonic players.

The truth is, there’s something to be said for repetition, especially if you fine tune the procedures, learn from the previous mistakes and try not to repeat them. But something in me resists that. I wanted each one to be entirely unique, more an artistic statement than a musical one, but in the end, maybe neither. Today I’ve got the spruce top off after an hour of red hot spatula prying without breaking it, but what I’m going to do to fix my problem, god only knows. I liked the guitar before it warped, liked how it looked, liked how it sounded. I waited a year to convince myself to repair it, swore I was done with this folly, promised myself to stick with the banjos. Stay tuned. The guitar probably won’t.

Editor’s Note: Mr. Daddle, after repeated attempts to put lipstick on his ‘pig of a guitar’, has enrolled in a 12 step luthier withdrawal program. Future blog posts, so he claims, will delete all future references to guitar building and consequent deconstructions. He has extended apologies to all, if there are any, readers.

If Donald J. Trump was a six year old kid, you’d take his pants down and paddle his fanny until he finally told you the truth. About anything…. Lately he’s been explaining his actions on January 6th. He wanted to walk to the Capitol with his minions, the ones he’d just exhorted to go down there and overturn the election, but gee, the meany men at the Secret Service just wouldn’t let him do it. No way, Mr. President, we won’t let you go out there. I guess the Secret Service ranks a degree or two higher than President of the United States is all I can figure.

So he has to go back to the White House and watch his MAGA true believers assault the Congress without their Leader, just watch it on his TV in the safety of his bedroom, probably yearning to be at the front of the mob, battering ram in hand, the General leading his troops into battle, not lounging in his bathroom with a can of diet pop and a bag of chips. But hey, he’s got a phone, he’s got twitter, he’s got the bully pulpit. It is, after all, the 21st century, not some Civil War battleground with General Grant on his horse directing the artillery fire, c’mon.

Lately there’s been a lot of commotion about the missing logs for those hours. Nixon had some missing too, but nowhere near so long and nowhere close to being as important. Alarmed aides and his kids tried to convince him to go public and stop the insurrection. Stop the insurrection? What were they thinking? This was exactly what he called for a few hours earlier. And if it weren’t for those high ranking Secret Service, he’d be down there, tall in the saddle. Besides, watching it on TV was almost like being there, after all, he was a reality TV star before he became a reality twitter President. Not all that much difference.

A lot of logs, archives, what have you, ended up, oddly enough at Mar-a-Lago which caused a fuss with the folks investigating the events prior and during January 6th. Trump claims not to have known they were taken down there, just probably tossed in by a White House maid with the half eaten bags of chips, the cases of diet pop and the non- disclosure agreements with half a dozen of his girl pals, nothing nefarious about it. If some seemed tampered with, well … maybe his dog ate them.

Meanwhile, back in reality, his aides are refusing to testify under subpoena, his backers are calling the whole investigation a witch hunt, the fair and balanced media folks are claiming the insurrection was nothing more than exuberant tourists. They’re all stonewalling in hopes the legislature will flip in the midterms and the investigation will be stopped. There are a lot of britches that ought to be pulled down and plenty of asses that need paddling. It would make great TV.

I was in college when the Population Bomb became a best seller, a happy tome about world-wide famines precipitated by over population. Mass starvation, immigration upheavals, wars and pestilence, get ready for a Malthusian Armageddon. Sound familiar? Course, that was 50 years ago, a half century, and sure, the world has been through some famines, its population has doubled from under 4 billion to about 8 billion since then, but somehow we’ve managed to hang on.

Maybe it’s a couple of years of Pandemic, maybe soon it will be the Russian/Ukraine war, but lately there seems to be another groundswell of impending Doom menacing us. Pretty obviously the countries of the world aren’t going to meet the goal of reducing greenhouse gases enough to prevent catastrophic climate changes, the glaciers are melting, sea ice is opening up arctic shipping lanes, record temperatures are climbing, the weather is wilder, the earth is going through major temper tantrums. The End is Near! The End is Near!

What’s a homo sapien to do? Well … I guess we could drive less. Maybe turn down the thermostat. Recycle more. Hell, I don’t know. My guess is we’ll mostly throw up our hands, surrender to despair, call it quits, let the chips fall where they may. If we can’t stop carbon emissions before the Tipping Point, why bother, right? Party on, Bro! Chances are us survivors will be okay, good luck to the kids and grandkids. C’est la vie…. Or not.

It’s a little like falling behind on your mortgage payment right after you lost your job. Might as well skip the next ones, the bank’s going to repossess the trailer anyway. Haul down to the Bud Hut, make a stop at the liquor store, stock up with a few months’ worth of cheap pizzas, enjoy the freedom long as you can. Just no point in fighting fate, right? Right?

Well, maybe the doomsayers are right, the planet is going to get hotter and wilder, the hurricanes will get more frequent, the floods that were hundred year floods will be yearly, tornadoes will become as frequent as robo-calls, your backyard will be a desert and some folks out there will still say it’s all a hoax. Me, I’m not going down without more than a whimper. I just grafted my favorite plum to four rootstocks, I planted two new Asian pears and just for laughs I intend to put the garden in again this year. Although … I may still stock up with cheap pizzas.

Like a lot of places, the South End is far more discerning of the oddities of others than themselves. The Avant-Gardeners’ hippie commune was the most prevalent gossip for years down here. Were they communists? Were they polygamists? Were they drug addicts? Were they pagans? There was no end to the rumors, no matter how fantastic — and, of course, the Gardeners themselves fed the flames with their fantastic behavior. Not just their colorful gypsy attire or their unorthodox social behavior, but Grand Experiments involving ship building and dome construction, all gone horribly awry, yet never diminishing their unbounded optimism or their total lack of fear of failure. They were pioneers, not just in breaking ground for their greenhouses and their livestock sheds, but in how they viewed the world. And the rest of us South Enders.

So we shunned them, most of us. Made them Outsiders in a place already Outside. Oh, a few of us bought their eggs and raw goat milk. I traded bread for those and vegetables, even got to know a few of the menfolk. The women mostly held back, kids peeking from behind their long granny dresses. Although I did teach Betsy, the most gregarious of the whole troupe, how to make stained glass. She would walk to my shack and glean scraps from the throwaway pile, then make the most beautiful suncatchers and small windows, far surpassing her teacher in no time flat.

After a few seasons I showed them where the wily Dungeness could be caught by hand and where to dig for free range clams. I took a few of the boys out in the S.S. Pterodactyl, my little sailboat, and we fished for true cod and bottomfish before they were gone, both the fish and the boys. Because one day the FOR SALE signs went up and the farm was abandoned as fast as it had arrived.

I bought a couple of their goats and some laying hens, took some greenhouse glass panels, accepted some macramé and pottery gifts, then waved adios as their gypsy caravan exited the South End one misty, fog filled autumn day. I guess they were as mysterious to me as they were to my neighbors, the only difference being I never minded. But I still remember that day when the Flower Children headed off island, north into the cruel ‘70’s, waving goodbye as I stood by my blue mailbox in a slow drizzle, wishing they would never leave. For me at least, that was the day, looking back, the 60’s really ended.

A friend of mine just wrote to say she might have discovered she has a heretofore unknown brother, discovered, apparently through the wonders of DNA analysis. He is either her half brother or the son of her father’s brothers, the result, she says of a one night stand in some hick town in Arizona with his mother who until he was 11 thought was his sister. Yeah, I’m confused too. To make the story all the more interesting, his mother is African American. Of course I’m interested in selling the movie rights…

There are studies that show between 10 and 30% of us may not have the right dad when we send those father’s day cards. This is a testament to the infidelity of the American Mom whose libido may have been vastly underestimated. I had a buddy, a white guy, who had a black kid. Kind of a surprise at the birth, but like he said, the mizzus got drunk at a party one night and hey, these things happen, but he was going to raise the kid, someone else’s genetically, his by choice. Gotta say, I was impressed. If you met his wife, you’d never guess her wild side judging by her mousey disposition.

Another buddy of mine got a knock on his door one day a few years back and found his old paramour of even further back darkening his doorway with her son in tow. He’d had a fling with her when she was 15, picked her up in a park, took her home and carried on an affair for a week or two. Yeah, I know what statutory rape is. He did too, but it didn’t stop him. So now the chickens were flying home to roost. My pal, being the distrustful sort, decided to call her bluff, especially since the kid was pretty dark like his mom and didn’t show much Caucasian. And because she wanted money. Turned out the boy wasn’t his after all. I don’t know if he gave her some money anyway, but I hope he did.

I guess these DNA tests are great for exploring the family tree. Personally, I’m okay letting Dad be Dad. I don’t need to be sending multiple father’s day cards every damn year….

Jim Shipley, the editor of the Pulitzer Prize-less Crab Cracker, gets folks all the time who think somehow I’m the chief, cook and bottle washer of this highly successful literary and art and current event bi-weekly journal that’s been publishing since way before my ‘Best By’ date. I have repeatedly told Jim that I take credit for the success of ‘our’ magazine with only a minimal number of gullible South Enders. Not too many. Well, only the people I run into.

Jim gets a lot of complaints from folks who think what I write in the hugely popular Moonshine Wit and Wet Powder Wisdom column is true. Gospel, even. Indisputable if not somewhat libelous. April Fool is nearly every other week up at the litiginous-averse Cracker, but of course, I’m not the one who’s liable, the Cracker is. I know, this doesn’t seem fair. Jim pays the printing costs, the taxes, the deliveries and worse, the extravagant advances and royalties we journalists demand … and yet, he’s on the ropes for attorney fees for, okay, my slanderous and reprehensible attempts at humor.

But then, who said life is fair? I’ll tell you who: attorneys. And humor columnists. Lovers and warriors where everything is fair, that’s who. So … maybe it’s a sense of guilt, maybe it’s a strictly financial move, maybe it’s just a quixotic whim on my part — who knows? — but I went to Jim and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.

Of course, I can’t disclose the exact terms of our non-disclosure agreement but let’s just say we came to a happy compromise and leave it for the forensic accountants to sort out if it comes to that. But next issue expect the masthead to read:
SKEETER DADDLE DIATRIBES
All the Truth You Need

You want to send a complaint to the editor, pal, good luck. The days we apologize for Attitude left the Stanwoodopolis Station a long long time ago. Say hello to the New Boss. Believe me, you’re gonna miss Jim!

Over the past 15 years I’ve been caretaking a little 5 acre park down on the South End, the only county park down this far, kind of a small and easily forgotten parcel the county can conveniently ignore. A couple of years back the parks guy, let’s call him Jim, asked if I needed anything done down there. I said the entire parking lot is a mudhole and he said he’d put it on the top of the To-Do list. A year ago he asked me the same question and I got the same answer.

This past year he’s called me occasionally, always sitting in the parking lot of the park, telling me he’s misjudged the amount of gravel it will take to level that tarpit and make it something that doesn’t swallow dogs, kids and VW bugs. The second time he told me that I thought, gee, he must be in the wrong parking lot … or else he’s not good at estimating projects this small. He would, he said, get right on it. Soon as he got the county tractor back from the shop. Ditto his pickup and oh, he had a bad leg. By the time he got all those fixed up, the mudholes were dry and only the axles of sunken autos showed in the pits, no need to get the lot graded and graveled until the monsoon season in fall.

End of last year he was re-estimating the work over there, misjudged the expense and time, and oh, the budget for that year was pretty much spent so we would have to wait until this year’s budget. Jim called yesterday. It seems he and the ever vigilant road crew had found and removed the sign I had nailed to the maple tree next to the parking lot that read A YEAR AGO THE COUNTY PROMISED TO FIX THIS PARKING LOT MUDHOLE … IF YOU WANT TO THANK THEM, CALL 360- 387-**** . I said I would like that sign put back up and Jim said no, that he would get to the grading and graveling when the weather stopped raining, what he said he had told me last conversation. What he had said last conversation was he had no budget. The trouble with excuses, like lying, is you got to keep them straight.

Well, we got a little heated and finally Jim patiently explained how every little crummy small park like mine wanted stuff done and expected it right away. I said I’ve been waiting years! He explained in a nice way how if I complained, if anyone complained, our park projects would go to the bottom of his list. Not the top where he has had it for a couple of years. I said are you threatening me, Jim and he said no, he was just explaining how it works, complain and you get put at the back of the line. Not a threat, ma’am, just a fact.

I was standing next to our County Commissioner this morning at a philanthropy breakfast honoring, well, philanthropists. Park volunteers meet that criterion, I suspect, so it would have been the perfect time to relate this little story, paid county employee versus an unpaid volunteer who buys gas, lawnmowers, chainsaws etc., one of many who mow and clean and clear and maintain the county parks , good time maybe even to ask the commissioner why on god’s green earth would us citizens volunteer for nasty threats when all we want is to make our park something other than a mudhole that invites vandalism.

But … I didn’t. I’ve never been much for tattle tails, never been a jailhouse rat, never really wanted to give bad reviews on Yelp or write letters of complaint to higher authorities. Course, the truth is … maybe I’m just worried Jimbo will take me off the top of his priority list.

When the Flatheads got to the door of the South End Diner this morning, they were greeted by Anita’s handwritten placard:
No More Political Arguments
Until After the Election
No Exceptions!!

The vintage car guyz were flabbergasted. What’s it mean? they wanted to know. What about Freedom of Speech? Walter particularly wanted to know. Brenda was pouring the first rounds of coffee to about ten perplexed Flatheads. “We’re sick of it, all of us,” she explained. “Anita’s had a dose. She’s ready to close the diner until after next Tuesday if she has to.”

“Who does she think she is?” Walter demanded, waving his porcelain clay mug in a moving target for Brenda who finally grabbed his hand to hold the cup still. “She’s the owner, Walt, that’s who. No shoes, no shirt no service. You want breakfast, no more of your Trump talk.”

Jerry clapped his hands. “Okay with me, Walt. Maybe my appetite will come back.”

“What’ll we talk about instead,” Charlie moaned, only half serious. “How about cars?” Brenda suggested, starting now to take orders. “You’re a car club, not a political action committee.”

“Anita gonna ban that next?” Walter shouted, which brought Anita herself out from behind her register. Walter had his back to her and never saw the menu before it slapped across the back of his head, knocking his Make America Great Again ballcap onto the formica tabletop. “What the …?” he sputtered and turned to find Anita rearing back for another swat.

“Holy cripes, Anita,” he stuttered. “I’m just kidding.”

Anita whacked him anyway. “Jeez, Anita ….”

The rest of breakfast the boyz spent discussing the virtues of dual exhausts, twin carbs and rebored cylinders. Next week they’ll probably argue who stole the election. Or try, anyway ….

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