The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Psychiatrists this week announced the discovery of a new mental malady: Sluggish Cognitive Tempo Disorder. This apparently is a sub-order of Attention Deficit Syndrome and is sure to raise a controversy in the medical community as to whether it is really a proper psychopathological disorder. Apparently it is characterized by slow learning, chronic daydreaming and lack of interest in the world around the victim. Patient, I mean. What we used to call Stupid before we became more touchy-feely and enlightened.

No doubt the next step is a pharmacological breakthrough, something akin to coffee, but not as potent as crystal meth, and hopefully (unless you’re the pharmacology company) not overly addictive. Bring the patient back to reality gradually, no point trying to make it TOO interesting. This is great news for the South End, you no doubt realize. All those artists and musicians have been struggling for years with stargazing, cloud watching, daydreaming and other similarly wasteful idle pursuits. We just didn’t have a name for it, but now, thanks to psychiatric research, we not only have a name and a diagnosis, but possibly the hope for a cure.

With counseling and the proper drugs, we South Enders can imagine the day when our idyllic but lachrymose lives are given new leases. Jobs, responsibilities, duties and a focused commitment to meaningful undertakings. Finally we can put down the banjos, drop the paintbrushes, store the blank canvases in the cellar and look forward to normality. We can drive to our satisfying new job at Boeing, we can balance a checkbook, we can scan the TV guide for exciting new programs, we can do all those things the rest of you take for granted, but for us were always far far away.

It is undoubtedly a New Day down here. We’re going to take that sluggish cognitive tempo we’ve been sleepwalking with most of our adult lives and kick it up a notch or three. Multi-task! We’ll be able to juggle half a dozen activities at once while making appointments on our new cellphone for job interviews and doctor visits and financial planning and car repairs and ….well, I get goosebumps just thinking about it. The future is wide open, just like my eyes, and I trust you’ll understand if I don’t finish this, but hey, I haven’t got time for literary nonsense now. It’s a big world out past the garden and I’ve got to make up for lost time so if you’ll excuse me, I have to go march to a similar drummer ….

A few years back while we were still living in our hundred year old shack, I was at a graduation dinner for a friend and her family. The seating arrangements worked out in a way that I was at the far end of the long table and even further down was my friend’s aunt who was obviously peeved at the prospect of an evening with no one else to talk with than my miserable self. This lady had actually stayed a night many moons prior at my shack, before even the mizzus arrived some months later, and so she knew first hand what my socio-economic status was, somewhere near the bottom.

In the intervening years she had married a man closer to the top of that status, a high mucky-muck for a major corporation who sat on no fewer than 7 board of directors for other major corporations. And in full honesty, was a nice guy when I met him, despite being filthy rich. In the course of our shared exile from the rest of the dinner party we chatted amiably about this and that, talked about the divergent paths our lives had taken and eventually grew pretty comfortable with one another.

At some point past dessert she mentioned that her two high school boys had taken a vacation to some southeast Asian country I had never heard of, which they loved and which she suggested I make plans myself to go touring. At the time a trip to Wisconsin was about as far as our budget would extend, something she might have surmised but obviously didn’t. Later she waxed nostalgically about the guided fishing trip to Alaska, a weeklong safari with their own chef and a fabulous lodge. Only cost about 10,000 for the week. She told me in all earnestness we needed to take that trip too. I said it sounded wonderful. She no doubt assumed I would be on the phone to my travel agent as soon as possible following a quick call to our broker.

My point in all this was how, in only a couple of decades, this woman who had stayed with me in a shack where the mice kept her awake all night gnawing on the walls, could lose sight of what it was like to be … well … poor. We can all drop what we’re doing and jet over exotic lands. We can certainly afford a guided fishing excursion with our own chef in tow. The gulf between her wealth and our poverty had disappeared. We still stay in touch. She and her husband are very nice people and very generous to their niece. They just seem to have lost touch with us unwashed masses. Even though they had been here themselves once.

On a recent encounter at their niece’s wedding, one catered by a restaurant hours away in Portland, I asked about the house they had bought in Pasadena and been restoring for the past few years. At some point I asked, gee, this is a long shot, but this isn’t the Greene and Greene arts and craft house you see in all the architecture books, is it? No, they laughed, we’re the house next door. Probably a modest neighborhood, I’m thinking. In a galaxy far far away….

1. START THE DAY BEFORE NOON

At least on work days. The other five days, sleep in. You earned it.

2. LEARN HOW TO READ
Writing is no longer essential, but … the successful South Ender can tweet, twitter and text, even if spelling is marginal.

3. LISTEN TO OTHERS
Especially on Facebook and other social media. Keeping track of friends’ and enemies’ likes and dislikes is an invaluable tool in the South End toolbox. Decision making is easy, just see what the herd is doing.

4. WORK AT LEAST ONE HOUR A DAY.

No matter how severe the hangover, the lethargy, the ennui or excess hedonistic activities. Work isn’t ALL bad.

5. WORK OFF THE GRID

No South Ender worth his or her salt works in order to pay half his or her income to the IRS. Barter heavily with your neighbors and friends. Crab, clam, trap, fish, hunt or grow it! Food is free and food is fun! If you buy your dinners, food is neither.

6. LEARN TO REPAIR

Your own car, truck, toaster, wellpump, toilets, etc. You can’t barter or sell busted stuff and repairmen cost an arm and a leg per hour PLUS that service fee to drive half a day to and from your hell-and-gone address. Knowing a few handyman tricks can save you another part-time job at the fast food joints 50 miles away.

7. MARRY UP!

Chances are you’ve embraced an aesthetic lifestyle. You artists and musicians need supplemental income and unless you plan to work full time low paid minimum hour jobs, a second salary is essential. Marry one.

I got a wild hair this spring, no doubt from lack of legitimate work, and decided I’d build myself a banjo. I play one so I’m familiar with the basic form. Bunch of strings, thingamabobs to hold em to the end and more up at the top so you can tighten or loosen em. I mean, even a banjo, it helps to be in some kind of tune. It’s got a round pot made of wood and some have a round brass metal piece on top of that to give it a ‘ring’. Banjos have a skin head or a store bought plastic job pulled down over the pot and you need some kind of gizmos to hold it down tight and better yet, to be able to tighten it up like a drum. Then there’s a neck that has the fretboard and the peghead and this has to fit up against the pot and something has to hold it at the right angle so you aren’t playing strings about half a foot off the fretboard which makes playing a lot harder than it already is.

I don’t mean to make it sound complicated. I mean, early banjos were made out of gourds with some catgut for strings and a stick neck and you just wailed on that thing like beating a drum. Banjo! Not exactly as complex as a harpsichord or a saxophone. Seems doable. Seems like a person with the right attitude and a little nerve could just go at it and a few days later might come out the other end with all his digits intact and an instrument that would sound at least okay, if not totally tolerable to most listeners.

I think life is a little like that. Meaning, sometimes you have to wade out into the water. It isn’t as deep as you think and worse case, you can dogpaddle. Too many of us think we’re going to drown, just flounder out there when the bottom drops out and then flail until we’re worn out and finally just sink down into a watery grave. Why risk it? Why take a chance when there’s all this dry ground to stand on and just look at the beach and the water from a safe distance? Well, lots of us do just that. I mean, I don’t mountain climb and I don’t race Formula Ones. Some things do seem risky.

But … nothing ventured, nothing gained, my old man used to tell me. Course, he never figured I’d apply that to a career in art and he probably felt bad for steering me down a rutted road. I remember when I told him I was building my own house. The silence on the other end of the phone was all I needed to comprehend his horror. Poor Karen, he was thinking, or so he told me later when he and Mom came to visit and view this construction debacle firsthand and he fully expected some plywood lean-to drafty as a chicken shed and leaking the first rain. Instead he drove up the drive to find a two story house, sturdy and durable and handbuilt with slate floors, mosaic tiles, curly maple staircases, stained glass transoms and sidelights, custom made doors, brick fireplace, handcrafted furniture, birdseye maple cabinetry, hardwood floors, cedar paneling on the interior walls, cedar on the exterior. A nice house, perfectly comfortable. Took two years to build. Best years of my life.

Did I know what I was doing? Not really. Sometimes a purpose and a little faith in yourself will carry the day. Most things in life aren’t rocket science. Although that seems to be changing. Too often we’re just afraid of failure. I guess I’m not. It seems like it’s one way to learn what you need to learn to be successful. And anyway, sometimes they’re not totally different. That’s what art taught me. You have to be your own judge, finally, even if other people will be too.

So … I’m making banjos. Some play well, some not. Some sound sweet, some not. Some are beautiful, some are a little like your kids, beautiful maybe only to you. Could I sell them? my friends ask, wondering I guess, who needs this many banjos. Well, that wasn’t my original intention. But then again, when I started making stained glass, it wasn’t going to be my career either. It doesn’t really matter. I’m not going to build houses for a living. I’m probably not going to be a banjo luthier. What I’m doing is what any kid does, just following my nose, trying stuff out, seeing what’s fun and what isn’t. In the meantime I get to live in my house. I get to play my banjos. And hopefully my life will be my art. It’s about all I can ask.

We humans have walked upright on this planet for 6 million years. About 90,000 years ago we learned how to use tools. And then, only 12,000 years ago, we became farmers, grew our food instead of hunting it and developed towns and cities, nation states and countries. Civilization, on a planet that’s 4 and a half billion years old, is fairly short-lived, although most of us homo sapiens think of it as fairly permanent, all of us crowns of creation, made in God’s image. Took Her awhile to get around to us, but now that we’re here, probably forever, right?

But if something happened to our species, god forbid, and in some distant future another civilization rose from the ashes, would they even know we were here once? Or put another way, if a civilization preceded this one, maybe before the dinosaurs, how would we know? The fossil records? Planet Earth is a churning waring blender, continents in movement, mountains forming and disappearing, oceans rising and falling, the climate in constant flux with or without human intervention. Those dinosaur prints archeologists find represent a minute record of life on this planet. Even in our lifetime entire civilizations disappear beneath the jungles — imagine millions of lifetimes, billions even.

You think maybe the Empire State Building will be the clue to past cultures? You think steel and concrete are forever? Better think again. If aliens landed on this third planet from our sun and set up shop, managed to make this their home for a few million years then died or immigrated elsewhere, how would you know? Not like you could go down to the salvage yards and find rusting spaceships to prove there were folks here before us. Even nuclear waste has a limited half-life. Nothing is permanent, not even us. Suns burn out, God herself gets tired, and all us infinitely egotistical humans, well, maybe we should get over ourselves. The dinosaurs thought they were pretty hot shit too….

For most of my life I’ve had this quaint notion that school was, for the most part, meant to give you skills that you could use AFTER you LEFT school. Teach you, for instance, how to read so you could, on your own, pursue further education. Teach you, as an example, how to reason, how to analyze, how to navigate the world after graduation. Sure, I know, school was a means to acquiring the skills to get you employment, a job, even a career. But mostly I’d hoped it would encourage curiosity and offer the skills to explore that curiosity.

When I taught 8th grade back in the Dark Ages before computers or AI, my goal was to convince my little students that reading was the KEY to it all. You can’t read, well, life was going to be a rough ride. Now, of course, you can watch You-Tubes and even let ChatGPT substitute for your own thinking. Reading the 21st Century is like using a slide rule to do your math problems — are you kidding?? You got a computer to do that crap.

Now I know I sound like an old fogey, possibly even a Luddite, but I still believe in reading more than a few sentences of Google articles and calling it knowledge. More than half of us don’t read one single book in a year. 50% of us can’t read at 8th grade comprehension. I don’t think you have to go to college to be an intelligent person. I went to college with plenty of dumbasses. I’ve known plenty of people who never even cracked a book — and were proud of it. Some of these were actually intelligent, they just decided being an ignorant dumbass was perfectly fine.

I don’t know where the kids I taught reading to in 8th grade are now. Plenty didn’t want to read even though I let them pick Anything to read, just read, goddammit. I read them great books just to convince them reading could be enjoyable. We had entire classes, outside even, for reading days. Just read!!

My guess — just a wild shot in the dark — 50% never cracked a book after high school or college. Call me Old School. Call me Mr. Chips. But I’d hate to be a teacher now. Books? They don’t need no stinking books!

Cafes come and go on the island about as fast as the weather. Open up one day, seems like a month later they’ve put the CLOSED sign in the window, locked the doors and another business bites the beach sand. When I first got off the banana boat down by the Yacht Club, a boutique café hung a shingle where the first Senior Center thrift store would eventually take over. Seeing’s how there wasn’t much food service on the island, you’d figure a breakfast and lunch joint would have a pretty easy time making a success of it.

But you’d be wrong. The yuppie couple who ran the place offered macadamia nut waffles, strong fresh ground coffee (long before Starbucks ruled the world) and a menu of fresh vegetables, sprouts, whole wheat breads and local eggs and meats. They were maybe half a century ahead of their time.

I took a boatload of pals up from the smog-smitten city who were crashing at the shack for a wholesome breakfast and a little relief from the hangovers from the previous night’s revelries. We ordered big mugs of coffee and the owners went around the table studiously writing down our orders. Since they were the chief/cook/ and bottle washers, we waited a long time for our servings even though we were the only customers, but the coffee was refilled, our lethargy seemed to subside and life on this side of our foggy island was good once again.

At some point – about a gallon into the coffee – one of us inquired where the restroom might be. We were solemnly informed there was none. This was dire news indeed for nearly all of us. We shrugged it off and waited patiently for our breakfasts. And waited for our breakfasts. When they came, they came one at a time, with five minute intervals in between. Fine fare, however, and we ate our plate’s worth, individually as the rest watched enviously while our bladders swelled like a Guernsey at a dairy where the farmer overslept.

We ate fast. We refused further refills. We crossed our legs and slapped ourselves with knives and forks. We began low moans. I couldn’t tell you if the food was good. Maybe. Probably. All I know is 8 guys stood in the parking lot as soon as we could pay our bill and let loose the floodgates right beside our Volkswagen bus. If we left a tip, that was it, but near as I can tell, they never took it. A month later the café was closed and another dream bit the dust. Well, hit the mud….

We all make mistakes. So okay, us South Enders make a few more than most. I don’t know whether poverty leads to more tragedy per person or tragedy leads to more poverty. My Republican neighbors think they know. Even the ones who are poor and have more than their fair share of bad drama.

I’m not one who thinks money can buy you luck, but it can sure narrow the odds. And I am a believer in keeping a buffer between me and the wolves outside the shack door. Bad luck comes to us all; I just don’t want it to carry me over the Edge.

Jenny was driving her beat up Chevy station wagon to town a month ago. It’s a relic from the days of cheap gas, wide as a semi and half as long as the Exxon Valdez. She needs it to haul hay for her horses, she says. I could ask, of course, how it is a woman barely able to pay the rent can afford horses, but I’ve learned to keep my prying mouth shut. It’s a free country, they tell me, at least until the credit stops.

Jenny was lighting a Marlboro, trying to reach the length of Kansas to the cigarette lighter gizmo over by Abilene, and hit the CD replay to hear her favorite song one more time, dropped her unlit cig on the floormat and of course reached down to find it. Happens all the time. One brief moment of inattention, next thing you know, you’re in the ditch, wheels up, blood on the dash.

Jenny’s in shock, the ambulance hauls her to the Skagit hospital emergency room, Carl hauls the Exxon Valdez to his South End Towing impound lot back behind O-Zi-Ya trailer court, the sheriff issues a citation for Inattentive Driving, Jenny goes through a few surgeries for lacerations and a torn shoulder, the hospital and doctors bill her more money than she’s earned since 2004, the horses go hungry and are given away, Carl wants $600 to release her wagon, Jenny can’t work with a cast, probably couldn’t work with one, and now the rent is due.

I sure don’t want to cast judgement, but judgement is definitely at issue here. The very least I can say is if you live on the South End, watch where you’re going. It’s a winding narrow road. And trust me, the ditches are damn deep…..

Darlene’s Antique and Collectibles was once an honest to Abe vintage emporium. One hundred year old oak chests of drawers, apple cider presses newly oiled but still glowing with the patina of fruit juices, rusting resort signs, ornate brass beds lascivious with untold stories, dollhouses from the Victorians, real stuff, not facsimile. Old wood stoves she bought from South Enders converting to heat pumps, wringer washers still able to churn a family’s laundry, coil top refrigerators cooled by sulpher dioxide rather than Freon. The one I bought from Darlene punctured a line a year later and the SO2 in combination with moisture, what we chemists call H20, formed sulfuric acid, what I called when I dragged it outside hissing like Assad’s assassins: Chemical Death. Foliage turned brown Right NOW in an invisible line snaking into the woods.

Darlene was a huge woman. Sitting at her table by the front door where her brass cash register sat like a South Sea icon ready for sacrificial offerings, she was half Cajun voo-doo queen, half posterchild for diabetes and definitely mostly intimidating, especially after you got to know her. She had a network of pickers who scoured the thrift stores and junk shops and garage sales throughout the state. And she had a steady supply of sellers, mostly neighbors broke and desperate, willing to part with the mizzus’ prized china or her mother’s silver, rarely some good tool of their own. She could burn a Tennessee horse trader, sell you a knockoff you’d never learn wasn’t really old, spin you a yarn that was finer than spider thread. You had to be on your toes with Darlene. She had the scruples of a southern politician and the aim for the jugular of a gypsy car salesman.

When E-Bay drove her prices down and she wearied of watching the city slickers – what she called ‘cidiots’ – checking prices on their I-pads and tablets, she began to carry ‘gifts’ too, junky look-alikes of vintage signs, antiques knickknacks and craft items –what she called ‘crap’ items – but her sales plummeted despite watering the trade down and she closed up finally.

Rumor has it she moved down to Sedona or maybe Taos and opened up a high end art gallery for tourists. One of my neighbors told me she’d bought a Georgia O’Keefe signed print from a woman with 6 chins wearing a Navajo blanket shawl and enough silver earrings and turquoise bracelets to start a jewelry store. I’m guessing Darlene is still nicking us South Enders, just a longer drive for us to get fleeced.

You might think, what with a war in Ukraine and the destruction of Gaza by the ally we supply weapons to, the Commander-in-Chief would be a little too busy to concern myself with edicts banning modern architecture for future Federal buildings. Or task himself with running the Kennedy Center for the Arts in order to inflict his own artistic sensibilities. Or take on the interior decoration of the White House right down to the final gold filigree. And still find the time to play plenty of round of golf, pardon friends accused or convicted of crimes, market Trump crypto, MAGA hats and tennis shoes, choose unilaterally what actors and artists are to be honored at the Kennedy Center awards plus manage the dozens of lawsuits his policies and firings have generated.

The other day he held a 3 hour cabinet meeting —- not to discuss policy but to give each member the opportunity to praise and flatter him. Which all in obsequious turn, they did. Without a hint of embarrassment, no less! It was like watching POW’s paraded out by their captors for the camera to tape their confessions, each one testifying their treatment was very good despite obvious wounds and evident emaciation.

Hitler hated modern art too. His architecture leaned toward the brutal. Trump’s harken to Louis the 14th, maybe with Golden Arches for the entryway and plenty more gold throughout. Gaudy is back, gaudy is good. He’s building a ballroom for the White House. No doubt he’ll design it, choose the chandeliers, pick the color scheme (gold, of course) and declare it the greatest single architecture conceived since Jefferson’s Monitcello.

When he’s finished composing the inaugural music for the first grand ball, he can turn his attention to rewriting history for the Smithsonian. Eventually, maybe, he’ll end the Ukraine war, declare Gaza a Palestinian-free zone and award himself the Nobel Peace Prize. But first, there’s the Emmy, the Academy Award, the Pritzker for architecture, the Pulitzer for news that isn’t fake. He may need to remodel the Oval Office to fit it all in, but … he’s the man to do it.