The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

If you’re a savvy investor like myself, no doubt you’ve been sniffing around the cryptocurrency phenomenon, wondering if it’s time to plunk down some of those 20th Century dollars and trade em in on bitcoins. You might even be wondering what exactly cryptocurrency is, possibly googled it, and undoubtedly come away realizing you haven’t got a clue. But then, what is an Andrew Jackson, really? Just cloth with dyes and inks and watermarks. Worth what it says on the bill if everyone keeps believing it’s real even if no gold is sitting in Ft. Knox to back it up. Economics, a faith based religion?

Cryptocurrency, forget about the gold standard. What you got is blockchain. Okay, I know, you don’t actually understand blockchaining. That’s fine, neither do I and neither do most people who own bitcoins or any other cryptomoney. You just know some economists think this is the future of monetary transactions, safer than greenbacks in your bank account some lowlife hacker can empty faster than you can say Bad Password. Bitcoins, well, their password is unhackable, but … if you forget it, no way can you or the hackers get at it, sorry.

But what you do notice is that bitcoins and their brethren virtual cash move up and down in value the way Apple stocks do, a breathtaking hedge against minimum interest rates on your savings. Now, you could ask yourself, before, hopefully, you convert your life investments and 401-K and the pension to bitcoin, what kind of currency can change value 20% in a day, up, down, you just never know. Would you put your money in a bank that offered the potential to drop in value half overnight?

Well obviously some people would. If it looks like a pyramid scheme and smells like a pyramid scheme and acts like a pyramid scheme, I think you and I know it probably isn’t a real smart investment, it’s just a high tech form of gambling cloaked in crypto-babble. Me, I’d rather bury money out in the yard. Just so long as I don’t lose the map showing where I put it.

I love Texas as much as the next yahoo. They want to tighten up their voting laws, build walls on the border, maybe even secede from the Union. Ted Cruz is their Senator and if there’s anyone I’d like to see more than Ted seceding from the country, I can only think of one or two. Texas, the state that celebrates the Alamo. Sort of like Montana celebrating Custer’s Last Stand.

Rep. Louis Gohmert recently asked the deputy chief of the Forest Service if she could think of some way, since she was interested in global warming mitigation, to alter the orbit of the moon. I know what you’re thinking, must be some phony baloney news story put out by those pesky liberals to make another Texas legislator look like a complete moron. Even for Texas, a state I dearly love, this is a synapse too far. Only a braindead Qanon whackjob would entertain for even one Dallas minute the idiotic notion that the Forest Service could manage to nudge the moon out of earth orbit just enough to slow down global warming. Not even a Texan legislator, even one who thinks the assault on the Capitol in January was nothing more than over exuberant tourists, would ask Smokey the Bear to figure out a way to spin the moon. He’d ask NASA or the Army Corps of Engineers, but c’mon, Smokey? He’s a bear, Louis. A dead bear actually. I visited his grave a couple years back. No way is that dead bear going to figure out a way to snap the gravitational pull of the earth and save the planet.

Louis, of course, probably doesn’t think Smokey can stop global warming. Louis doesn’t believe global warming is real. Or that there was an insurrection at the Capitol where he was escorted to shelter in a panic on January 6th. He may not even believe the moon orbits the earth and if he does, he probably thinks it orbits Texas, a state, maybe I mentioned this already, I dearly love. All I can figure, the Lone Star state must have something in its water, all these strange legislators with quirky ideas. Fracking oil maybe or pesticides in the Ogallala Aquifer that’s concentrating the toxins. We could maybe have Smokey look into that too.

When you run out of good ideas, I guess it’s time to throw rocks. The No to Everything Party ran out of ideas long before Donald J. Trump emerged from the swamps of reality TV. No to Obamacare, no to same sex marriage, no to women in the military, no to abortion, no to Planned Parenthood, no to progressive taxation, no to election reform, no no no, by god, NO! Mitch McConnell put up roadblocks for decades, first with Obama, then preventing the Mueller investigation from leading to impeachment, then again after Trump instigated the assault on the Capitol, now with obstruction of anything Biden might try to slide by him.

Now we’re going to see some rock throwing and mudslinging. Bipartisanship on this infrastructure bill? Who’s kidding who? When you see every GOP senator vote down every bill that comes before them, I ask you, who’s kidding whom? Not me. So what is an idea-less party to do if they’ve abandoned all pretense of policy? Wedgies! Wedge issues. Guns, they’re taking our guns! Statues, they’re saying Stonewall Jackson wasn’t a hero! Black Lives Matter, they’re trying to start a race war! Abortion, they’re murdering babies! Corporate tax increases, they’re torturing the rich! Immigration, they’re flooding the country with non-whites! Transgenders, boys will be in the girls’ lockerroom! Global warming, they want to take away your gas powered Cadillac! Religion, they’re waging war on Jesus!

Socialists, pedophiles, commies, libtards, revisionists, Moslems, they’re all coming to take away your Bible, your guns, your money, your Confederate heroes, your freedom! They’re evil! They’re part of a satanic cabal that does unspeakable things to your children. Then … oh my god … then they eat them! They have to be stopped. At any cost! Donald Trump couldn’t stop them. At least not yet. Mitch McConnell couldn’t stop them, not really. Revelations is at hand, Armageddon is on the calendar, the End Days are nigh, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are riding toward Bethlehem.

I don’t know about Armageddon, but I do know the Crazy Times are upon us. The population of America, fed on the pablum of social media and not very reality TV, open to every crackpot conspiracy theory you can think up and splatter on websites across the internet the gullible soak up like addicts, well, maybe it’s time to put lithium in the municipal water system. Or, wait! Maybe that’s what the Deep State has been doing all along!

Lately there’s been some internet buzz rejecting the strategy of NASA to hurl signals into outer space, maybe make contact with some advanced species beyond our solar system. Decades ago we launched a craft full of a time capsule’s worth of stuff, everything from da Vinci sketches to Chuck Berry singing Johnny B. Goode, figuring, I guess that if the data dump of scientific memorabilia didn’t attract extraterrestrial tourists, the rock n roll might do the trick. Swell, it’s a little like the Wampanoag tribe sending out flyers to would be Pilgrims to come visit. Oh, and bring some of those smallpox blankets to trade, why don’tcha?

Maybe it’s the congressional investigations into UFO’s the past few months that got folks thinking about space visitors. That, or the Qanon folks suspect the Lizard People running the government are actually Chuck Berry aficionados. Either way, some of us terrestrials are rethinking the idea that visitors from outer space might really enjoy Disneyland and our reality TV shows. They might not agree with our humanoid tastes in art and entertainment, but they might really enjoy our taste. Barbecued homo sapien, mmm mmm, finger lickin’ good. The thought has occurred to a few folks that any alien capable of navigating across the galaxies might be far more advanced than the citizens of Earth who think landing on Mars was pretty special and who still can’t figure out what to do with spent nuclear fuel rods. I seriously doubt any galactic immigrants will bow down to the folks who binge watch the Kardashians.

The assumption must be, these people who look forward to First Contact, that an advanced alien species would naturally be not only intelligent but kind and even caring. Maybe bring us the recipes for happiness and time travel. Oh sure, we’d have to be super careful about space bugs and viruses and who knows what else we’d have no immunity for, but the good visitors would help us with that. Right? And no, don’t get going on Covid being some virus developed in a lab on Pluto, bad enough we got conspiracies about Wuhan vs wet meat markets, last thing we need is a trans-species mutation, forget about vaccines.

No, maybe we should just put a sign up, out by the moon maybe, that reads No Trespassing, This Means You! Let them know we’re not inviting anybody to our Thanksgiving Dinner. The last thing we need are some interstellar Pilgrims singing hymns, not Johnny B Goode. Go ask the Wampanoags how that worked out.

About 2008 I got a phone call from a woman who said she was doing a documentary on glass, had seen some large windows I’d done and would I meet with her and her cinematographer for an interview. And … did I know any other glass artists whose work was in the area they could interest? Sure, I was skeptical. Us artists get inquiries all the time from publishing outfits that want to include us in their compendium of modern art, mostly a scam to get us to buy expensive coffee table size copies for our friends and family, show em how important we are now.

But I thought why not talk to these people, no harm in that, no money has to be passed when they inevitably ask if I’ll fund their project, just a couple lost hours. I had plenty of hours to lose and no money for wild-eyed investments. The day they arrived I had some crud or cold or flu, the usual yearly malady. I felt rotten, I looked rotten, I probably sounded rotten as they interviewed me about my work, photographed me in a beat up hat and a torn coat, then packed up their gear and went back to Seattle. A few weeks later they had edited their ‘pilot’ film ‘Fire and Glass’ and planned to take it to PBS where they would pitch it to the execs there. Would I consider, assuming they got funding and the public TV buy-in, being the narrator? I guess Dale Chihuly or David Attenborough were busy, but since I wasn’t I said I would love to. They said I’d be the face of modern stained glass, start with America, next season hit other countries, see how it goes.

You can maybe imagine the fantasies that played through my mind. I’d be the Rick Steves of the glass world, hopscotching from cathedrals to courthouses, introducing the viewer to fantastic glass murals from the South End to Tokyo, expounding on design and blown glass, educating a TV audience to the wonders of contemporary stained glass. And whoa ho, a lot of those examples would be mine! I, of course, as your guide to the world of glass, would be properly modest.

Well, timing is everything and it so happened that the Great Recession hit right before the months they pitched the project to prospective funders. Money had dried up and whatever dreams my handlers had dried up too. C’est la vie. Another road not traveled, another life not lived. I’m not a man who looks back with regret, but … I do look back and wonder where those forks might have led.

It’s a pretty notion to imagine What Ifs, let the possibilities play out and try to guess at unforeseen consequences. Sure, I would have liked to highlight the modern glasswork that rarely gets publicity, the murals that transform our secular cathedrals, the ones basically ignored by the artworld. But I can also picture myself stepping out of the glass shack, never having time to build another window myself, maybe not caring but maybe looking back and realizing I’d stopped being an artist and become instead a pitchman. Since then I’ve built a few dozen murals of glass that might never have been built if I’d taken that gig, if the funding had come through, if if if… It was a close brush with celebrity. Assuming I didn’t fall flat on my face. Us moths are better off avoiding the flame and us artists, I suspect, might be better off avoiding fame.

He’s baaaack! You thought maybe you’d heard the last of him after Facebook banned him for at least the next two years. You thought he’d be a little too busy huddled in the Mar-a-Lago office with his team of attorneys prepping for the New York indictments coming soon to a theater near you. You figured he would just fade away from the national consciousness same as the Covid plague, all of us just weary of the constant drumbeat, the endless articles, the tsunami of statistics and mortuary tables.

But then, you really didn’t know the man. He’s the opposite of Dracula. He dies in the dark. He thrives in the spotlight. No way was he going to stay buried very long, not our boy, not when he knows we all miss the thrills and chills of his every word, who cares if he just keeps repeating himself. Witch hunt. Stolen election. Return to the White House. I am not a crook.

No, wait, that was the other crook, what’s his name, the tricky one. This one thinks he’ll be back in the Ovoid Office before August. The lib press keeps referring to this Trumpless Void as the Big Lie, as if repeating that will convince the true believers the election was fair. And possibly balanced. Qanon believers, definitely unbalanced, would disagree, possibly violently if voter suppression laws don’t do the trick.

Democracy itself is at stake, so say my libtard pals. Ignorance rules the right, the Dark Ages are coming back, the internet is the only truth (and you can pick from an incredible buffet of theories). Democracy. If the voters want Donald back, well, there’s your democracy. Sure, you can blame gerrymandering, voter suppression, the electoral college, Mitch McConnell, the Supreme Court, dark money, the Koch Brothers and the think tank apologists. And you’d be right. So what? Democracy in action, my friends. I know, it looks more like a bad late night horror show with the appliance salesman host dressed up as Count Dracula with a toupee and a cape. But the zombie president is out there, fingernails clawing at the hastily dug grave we left him in, digging his way back into the limelight. As usual, the sequel will be much worse than the original.

I’m out here in the wilds of Spokane, the Inland Empire where folks happily hang FUCK BIDEN flags in their front yards for their churchgoing grandmas to read along with us cannibal Democrats. We’re visiting old friends from the radical ‘70’s who we’ve stayed close to for going on half a century. Politics were wild then and politics are wild now. America – love it or leave it. None of us, of course, went anywhere.

But time, so they say, stands still for no man. We’ve lost a few wars, supposedly won a couple, put satellites on Mars and flown helicopters there, sent probes beyond our own solar system and probably have Qanon believers waiting for the replies. China has become a capitalist country and Russia a quasi-criminal state. Refugees and immigrants are fleeing natural disasters, wars and gangs are shifting entire countries to the right toward nationalism and isolationism. Meanwhile science marches on … despite the fact that half of us think like superstitious 15th century peasants.

The folks we’re visiting drive an electric car. They have a lawnmower that’s battery powered too. Half their tools now are the rechargeable kind. The mizzus has a hybrid car and I have a new batteried chainsaw. What’s the world coming to, you ask? Is this part of the Deep State’s nefarious Plan? Is Bill Gates behind this? Or George Soros? When I was back in Wisconsin a month ago, I noticed a Tesla charging station. In the middle of nowhere, some small rural town where I would bet a bitcoin nobody owns a Tesla. Maybe it’s for a battery run tractor. Or maybe they just see the future coming up fast on that blacktop leading into town.

Yesterday’s paper had an article about the good folks east of the Cascades fighting to keep some wheat farmer from turning his fields into acres of solar arrays. Same thing with those wind turbines marching across the hills. And it was no doubt the same when Bonneville erected transmission towers from Grand Coulee to Seattle. Just a conspiracy to ruin the rural ambiance in order to power the left wing cities over the mountains. I suppose the native Americans thought the same thing when barb wire crisscrossed the buffalo grounds. And I might think that too. At least until I’m stranded in Dogfart Dakota looking for a charging station, muttering to myself that I should have bought a cellphone now that microwave towers are ubiquitous. As my old man sez about every conversation, always something….

Not long ago a friend asked me if I thought the rest of the country was pretty much the same, economically, as the South End. Obviously my buddy needs to get out more once this Covid business recedes enough to allow traveling again. What he was really asking was if most folks were fairly well off in America. Now, to be fair, my pal isn’t exactly in the 1%, he’s more likely down in the bottom quarter, no Social Security, no retirement, still working manual labor under the table at 74 and will be until he dies.

Traveling through the Deep South one year with my father and brother on one of our Trips with Dad, the Old Man mused how in his lifetime most of us boats had risen with the economic tide. He and my mom grew up poor in Northern Maine where nearly everyone was in that same boat, not much water underneath. And of course there was the Great Depression, then World War Two, what some historian yahoos call the Good War. Please leave your college degrees at the door when you leave, guyz….

We got a few leaky dinghies on the South End moored next to the yachts, but most folks don’t have a boat to pee in and some not even a pot to bail with. We’re 99% white bread with the few immigrants working on our lawns then leaving by dark. The South End has a few homeless people, but not many. It has a few millionaires, maybe too many. Rents here are high, real estate is hot, retirees are many and working couples few. I’m no sociologist (although I have a degree in sociology) but no way is the South End representative of the America spread over 3000 miles east of us. We’re white, we’re fairly well off, we’re insular and we’re divided about equally by politics.

I told my friend that parts of America are poor and getting poorer, rural but the farms are played out or bought by agri-corporations, urban with ever marginalized ghettos, suburban with the malls dead and abandoned. The South End is a backwash of a lost American Dream on an island with a rising sea level. If my buddy is any indication, ignorance is bliss. For the rest of us, it may just be a tactic.

Yeah yeah yeah, I know the expression, behind every great man is a great woman. I even suspect they mean the Great One’s wife. Personally I don’t know a lot of great men, no offense to the folks I know. But I believe a lot of us down here on the South End, us artists especially, owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the woman beside us. Or the husband, case may be.

We got plenty of layabouts down here. Guys with no ambition, retired fellas at the ripe old age of 30, yo-yo’s who think work is for suckers and by god, they aren’t suckers. Some marriages fall to pieces, others get patched and sewn back together but never really well. A lot of single women down on the South End, easier to go it alone than live with some lazy good-for-nada yahoo who would rather drink with his lazy good-for-nothing pals.

The trouble with being an artist is really not so much lack of imagination but lack of money. Those years working at our art, well, those are years not earning an income. And believe me, there are plenty of partners who might look at their spouse and think, when is he going to give it up, throw in the towel and the paintbrush, pick up a shovel and help with the mortgage and the insurance and the car payments and all the rest. It takes more than love to shoulder the yoke and become the breadwinner while hubby noodles around in his so-called studio. It takes a kind of faith that some just can’t summon. A faith in the relationship, a faith in the art itself, a faith that this guy might just make something of himself eventually and even if he doesn’t, well, she loves the jerk.

I count myself one of the lucky ones. We lived in our shack for 17 years, scraping up mortgage payments and taxes, scrimping on clothes and food, worrying about the future when the shack would begin to cave in on itself. Back in 1990 I quit my two day a week job as orderly at the Everett Hospital with the promise to build a real house, even get permits and such, and in the meantime figure out a strategy to make my glass art pay. Karen had just taken on a full time job as a department head librarian down at the University of Washington, a long two hour commute going and coming back, plenty of time to mull over marital commitments to a so-called wannabe artist with virtually no gameplan for success. For better or worse might have seemed like a bad vow driving through rush hour traffic four hours a day.

There are folks who deceive themselves into thinking that what little success they have in life must be the result of their own perspiration, their perseverance, their skills and their imagination. Captains of their own destiny, they think. But most of them couldn’t be more wrong, these Marlboro Men, these macho American males who value independence over collaboration any day of the workweek. Looking back at my own luck and a happy tenure as a glass artist, I know it wouldn’t have worked out without a partner who did have a little faith, who took the risks and never complained, who made my life possible. A lot of it was luck, some of it was perseverance, but most of it was her. A smart man should be eternally grateful. Smart or not, I am.

So I’m in the airport check-in line and the guy in front of me is giving the TSA an earful about his rights as an American citizen. He’s not wearing a plague mask even though we’ve passed 100 signs telling us travelers they’re required at all times in this facility. By the time he’s bending their ears about being forced by the federal government, the damn government, to drink his pop before going through screening I figure I’ll be here for another half hour while they put him on the floor and do a cavity search in front of the rest of us compliant citizens. I’m praying that he won’t be a fellow passenger on my flight, the one who gets the place turned around so he can be taken into custody back where we flew out of.

Freedom for some folks is just nothing left to complain about. No shoes, no shirt, no service must be practically a call to arms. A friend of mine has a neighbor who drains his septic into the ditch by her house, no doubt another freedom fighter. The guy next door on the other side likes to shoot his automatic assault rifle after midnight, testing the patience of the sleeping neighborhood, maybe see who wants to confront him. The cops don’t care to so why would she? I need to reread that second amendment, see if the right to bear arms means the right to shoot them night or day below my window.

This pandemic has certainly brought out the new Minutemen, folks who think the government has a boot on their necks. Nobody has the right to tell them anything. And watching them storm the Capitol a few short months ago, I got an eyeful of what freedom means to them. More for them, less for me. You wonder why I live at the end of an island at the edge of a continent, it wasn’t to escape the reach of Rome, it was to escape these yahoos. That kind of freedom, trust me, is getting harder to find.