The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I’m planting the third succession of beans and peas down in the garden today. This year I built a fence inside the outer fence, a double perimeter for the deer and rabbits that breached the outer barrier last year. I’m considering a moat, possibly a security system, and last resort, my granddad’s old 16 gauge shotgun. If I have to channel Elmer Fudd, so be it.

For those of you who don’t have vegetable gardens and even those who refuse to eat ‘rabbit food’, you can stop reading right now. I’m not going to pull a Come to Jesus and Jacama on you, but I will tell you a garden is one very easy connection to the earth. To the Land. To what was once, before the spinning jenny and the I-phone, as close to a cosmic umbilical as I can imagine. You know, not counting sex.

A garden is optimism shaded by luck. Bad weather, pests, varmints, blight — but you plant it and hope for the best. You learn to share with those pesky wabbits, with the crows and the deer, the slugs and the snails, hopefully with the neighbors too. You weed, you water, you pray to the gods of weather. And you curse, you howl, you plant a second time. Or a third. This is the world, the universe, the big roulette wheel, the game of chance and the luck of the draw. You succeed and you fail and mostly it’s out of your hands.

Yeah, you can buy potatoes at the Kroger, corn from the vegetable stands on the highway, frozen peas from Costco, fresh tomatoes … but don’t let me go postal on fresh tomatoes, a fruit the agri-assholes have completely ruined. Gardening is farming on the micro-scale. It’s maddening and it’s hard work. But … I wouldn’t stop for anything. Growing some of what we eat is a joy, pure and simple. Well, maybe not so simple.

I was chatting it up with a couple of fellow artists down at the South End Galleria this week, comparing notes on aesthetic strategies, bizness practices, encounters with philistines and other assorted moral hazards of the art trade. The sculptor among us avowed how he chose to eschew my public art avenue and regaled us with tales of clients and looky loos, folks who might suggest that rather than pay full price they could check Ebay or Etsy for fabulous deals, as if that original stone carving might be had from WalMart for hefty discounts.

We artists love displaying our wounds and scars from the Culture Wars. I mentioned how I lacked bizness acumen and so public art took me out of those sorts of encounters … to which our gallery owner mentioned being a finalist three times for public art commissions only to lose. ‘No prizes for runner-up,’ I said. ‘No Miss Congeniality either.’ Afterwards I started adding up my own losses over the years, something around a dozen. You get a small stipend for a design, maquettes, plane fare, motel, car rental, etc., usually less than what you spend and zero for your work. It’s a tough racket and after a couple of second place finishes, plenty of artists quit throwing their hats in the ring. Me, I got plenty of hats.

My first loss, a fire station entry against a famous Seattle glass artist with a buddy on the jury who gave him helpful hints at our site visit, left me feeling like the game was rigged. But instead of quitting I took my 4 foot by 3 foot glass model, cut a hole in my shop wall and installed it in front of my work table, a wound I could salt every damn day, a reminder that I needed to up my game.

What I’ve learned over a few decades of competition is that it isn’t always fair, it is sometimes rigged, the juries are occasionally a sham, an opponent may actually be better than you and lose … or vice versa. Art in the public arena is a bloodsport. I try to accept the losses and thank my lucky stars for the commissions I win. Mostly I’m glad I stuck it out. And best of all, nobody’s going on Ebay and finding a cheap substitute. Yet.

Back in the Paleolithic Era I used to put my allowance of 50 cents a week into 25 dollar U.S. Savings Bonds, something my folks, being Depression Era kids, wanted us to learn, the habit of thriftiness. And … a little economics too. Like how interest rates work and our little pile of money would grow bigger if we just skipped candy and comic books. Later we would buy IRA’s and CD’s, etc. and when interest rates were high, money accrued rapidly … assuming inflation didn’t eat it faster.

After the Great Recession the Federal Reserve Board, those watchdogs of the economy, drove interest rates into the ground. My little savings accounts weren’t going to grow much when the interest was point something. You wanted to make money, boy, you invested in the stock market where the Fed hoped you’d stimulate the economy back to health. Great if you like to gamble, not so great if you’re old and cautious like myself. That Dow Jones or the S&P 500 or the Nasdaq drop 40% like it did in recent memory, you maybe won’t live long enough to see that money come back. Needless to say, a decade and a half after the interest rates bottomed out near zero, I’m not a big fan of the Fed. My pals who threw the dice on the Dow, they love the Fed. The rich are getting richer, way of the world. The poor? Well, they might as well bury their paltry savings accounts in tin cans behind the garage.

Now we got cryptocurrency. Bitcoins and a bunch of wannabee digital monies, the currencies of the future, they say, and a chance, if you buy low, to watch your money mushroom exponentially, legal gambling, oh boy, and a golden opportunity for untold riches. Without working! What’s not to like? Except, of course, bitcoin yesterday dropped 50% from its recent high. Nothing I like more than volatility in my money and I suspect most CEO’s probably feel the same way. Might as well use 2×4’s for currency. Lumber prices are spiking but futures are dropping. My kind of legal tender: legal timber. Which, now that I think about it, I have. My house. Times get tough, we tear off the back bedroom and sell the lumber. Bitcoins, good luck. The only thing backing that currency up is gullibility. Apparently there’s plenty of that.

Nothing I like much more than a good intra-denominational dogfight. The Southern Baptists are squabbling down at their convention in Nashville, mostly over abortion strategies. The Catholics are drawing up papers to ban politicians who vote for abortion rights from receiving the Eucharist. If that seems like religion is crossing over into Caeser’s territory, you’re probably on the money. Biden is Catholic and Biden is pro-abortion rights. In the eyes of a majority of the church’s bishops, he’s just right of a spawn of Satan. Or a pawn. Or … well, you know what they mean.

Churches and their doctrines, man oh man, they just dig their heels in and resist anything that might seem Enlightened to a secular yahoo like myself. Women priests? How long did that take em? And some religions, well, God made Man first and then took a rib to make Woman and if that doesn’t prove superiority over the fairer sex, what does? Gays are a thorny subject for most of them. Love thy neighbor, love your fellow man, but whoa, don’t take it literally, buddy, that’s Abomination and a one way ticket to Hell. The rest of society seems to have moved on, but the Bible Thumpers are still parsing Leviticus, maybe skipping the injunctions not to wear dissimilar fabrics or eat certain foods. And that part about stoning to death those who lay man with man, thou shalt not kill doesn’t apply apparently.

The ban on communion seems okay to me. Ex-communication is fine too. My question really is why would folks want to be in a religion that is exclusionary, especially based on the politics of the day. You folks gonna deny the Eucharist for the Senators who support the death penalty? Unless, of course, it’s for homosexual abominations. In which case, pick your rock and have at it. So when all these good and righteous folks demand to have church back in the schools or the courtroom or the government, we need to ask them, which church you want to let in. And if the answer is none of the others, just ours, well … maybe you see the problem. If you don’t, wait til the Supreme Court decides Roe v Wade one more time now that most of them are Catholics who would probably prefer to take communion, not be banned from it.

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.