The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

So okay, I got my 2nd dose of Covid Kevlar last week, a Pfizer vaccine probably chock full of micro-transmitters Bill Gates snuck in there to track my every move, information he could have just asked me to give him, not too much variation. I’m now bulletproof, at least for infection from the coronavirus, maybe not for autism, future cancers, 3rd limbs trying to grow and possible susceptibility to Qanon conspiracy theories. My voluntary Lockdown is over!! I even think my sense of humor is coming back … or at least mutating.

It’s been a little more than a year since Pandemic Paranoia swept most of the world and maybe half of this country of contrarians, disbelievers, Trumpists and other kooks and ninnies. When I mentioned to a neighbor, one who’d actually contracted Covid, that over half a million of us had died in this Land of the Free Thinkers, he told me no, they died all right, but probably from underlying causes. If you want to debate this kind of logic, be my guest, but me, not so much. I’m vaccinated — did I mention? — and folks who think Covid or E-bola or polio or wasting brain disease are phony, well, skip the vaccine and take their chances. I’m on their side now — a few less of these maskless conspiracy theorists is okay by me now that I’m officially immune.

Oh sure, the virus will probably mutate and we’ll need booster shots for the Variants. But eventually the variant viruses would whittle down the non-believers. I’d call it Darwinism … but that’s just going to invite more hostility and resistance toward us folks who wore masks and got vaccinated and lockdowned during the Plague of 2020. Let’s call it instead an Upward Intelligence Trend, the smart survive. Maybe it was an underlying condition too.

I was minding my own business in the Pilot House Lounge and Bar — or at least tending to my beer and scribbling away in a notebook I always carry — when a guy I didn’t know parked at the table next to me with a cup of coffee. Army fatigue jacket, butch crewcut, aviator sunglasses hanging from a strap. Probably ex-CIA or retired corrections officer. He had his back to the ballgame on the bigscreen TV over the bar, apparently more interested in my antics. I tried to avoid eye contact, watched a bunt down the first base line, but he didn’t need a cue.

“Whatcha think of that drilling ban in the Arctic?” he finally asked. I looked up from my great American novel, took a slow sip of suds and studied him for motives. He didn’t offer anything obvious. Just a guy in a bar, a student of politics, no doubt.

“Okay with me,” I said non-committedly. And waited. “You rather have nuclear?” he countered. His coffee sat untouched. I sighed. Here we go …. “Okay with me,” I said again. Cap’n. Klink nodded.

“How about those Muslim terrorists, you okay with that?” I put my pen down. Slid my notebook to the edge of the table. Took a slow sip of beer whose taste seemed metallic now. Why me, Lord, why me? We were alone except for Jerry wiping down the bar that didn’t need wiping. The batter took a called strike. I looked at my inquisitor, some bridge troll out for a holiday.

“We don’t get too many down my way on the South End,” I finally said. “So you aren’t bothered?” he sneered.

“Oh, I’m bothered,” I said, feeling the blood rising. “I’m bothered right now.” He finally sipped his coffee and smiled. Now he was getting there. Strike two to the batter on the TV. I smiled back, hoping to cut off his air supply. It did — he dropped the phony grin. “Whatcha think of us white males turned into second class citizens?” he fairly snarled. I laughed out loud this time. Jerry looked up. Behind him a baseball landed in the outfield stands. I left my beer half finished and stood up to go.

“Try not to be a victim, friend. Especially if you’re white and male. Doesn’t leave much for those terrorists to take from you.” Jerry waved so long and gave me a quizzical arched eyebrow. The pitcher put a baseball in the manager’s hands and headed for the showers. Me too.

Ever since I got my 2nd Covid shot I seem to have an urge to buy Microsoft stocks. And I don’t usually buy any stocks so this is unsettling. And that purchase of Cortana I made? I don’t even know what Cortana is. Worse yet, I show a receipt for a Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 that I have no recollection of buying. What this can mean is anybody’s guess. On the up side, however, I seem to know, without really trying, most of my friends’ whereabouts at any given time day or night. The ones who haven’t had their inoculations yet don’t show up on my internal GPS, which makes me really suspicious.

In fact suspicion seems to be my main emotion now. I used to trust in my own instincts, trusted facts, trusted my government, trusted the Lord, trusted the warranty on my truck, trusted the advertisers on TV who told me late at night I could get two of the same item if I only paid shipping and handling. Now I wonder how much is that shipping and handling, maybe three times what the item I’m getting two of costs. And those drug ads during the evening news? I wonder now if they really cure what ails me or if all those side effects that take half the commercial to list are going to require additional pharmaceutical purchases, probably manufactured by the same company the way Purdue Pharma is going to make an antidote for oxycontin. The truth is, I don’t trust my advertisers any longer and if I can’t trust American business, who do I turn to, the Chinese? Geez, didn’t they infect us with Chinavirus?

I wake up now worrying about those poor kids in the pizza parlor basement being abused by Democratic cannibals. Yesterday I was afraid to go near the windows where lasers from outer space could place me in their gunsights, incinerating me and my banjo in a nano-second. Today I heard another mass murder was staged to make it look like violence was rampant in my country. A few days ago Asian American women pretended to be killed by another phony psychopath. It never seems to stop. When I go to the grocery store I can’t help wondering who are human and who are Lizard People. My god, maybe, just maybe, they’re ALL Lizard People. With guns!!!

What I’m wondering now is if that Covid vaccine is making me a Lizard Boy. I’m afraid to look in the mirror to check if my tongue is forked, my skin is scaly, my eyes have vertical slits. Something strange is happening, I know that much. For awhile I thought Trump would fix this, save the country, make it great again … now it looks like he wasn’t the savior after all. Now that I’ve joined Qanon, I’m already thinking of quitting but I hate to turn tail and run. Although … I do seem to be growing a tail.

Most of us artists are too sensitive for this world. We’re delicate flowers, blooming nocturnally, our precious scent wafting on the tidal emanations of the moon and lost before dawn. By day we’re ambivalent about our talents. We torture ourselves with questions of skill and worse, of imagination, wondering if we made a mistake pursuing a trade whose rewards are certainly not monetary in a society that judges us by our profit and loss. In daylight we dance with our demons. By nightfall we listen to bacchanalian howls echoing from ravines back in our suspect imaginations.

We are our worst critics. We are our biggest admirers. The push and pull could drive an ordinary person crazy. It certainly does us. Caught between that spark of creativity and the dark shadow it costs, we are trapped between the jitterbug and the dirge, yo-yos to our own ambivalence, see-sawing away until paralysis or delirium gets a grip on our inner child, the spoiled brat who craves attention but wilts under criticism.

And god help us if we find ourselves suddenly ‘marketable’. Try a new style, a variation, an experimental approach, but the buying public may only want that last painting, the hit song, the first novel. The pressure will be to replicate, to plagiarize ourselves, to stay with the tried and true and tired. The saleable. Even the Masters sold out. Dali signing thousands of prints, Picasso scribbling iconic doodles, the spark slowly dying while the money rolls in. It’s a trap, a curse, a blessing, a living. A starving artist, and you can quote me, is a far better artist than a famous ones in their old age, nine times out of ten. The trouble is, eight of them will just give up.

What I tell the kids I sometimes inflict my wisdom on is this: get a part-time job to pay the rent, don’t buy a new car, live frugally, do NOT go into debt. And above all else, keep making art whether it sells or not. And if it sells, keep pushing your limit. Keep experimenting. And whatever you do, don’t amputate ears or other body parts. It’s only art, not life and death. Or you can do what I do and tell yourself every damn day, it beats working for a living….

Little Jimmy was on his second or maybe his third last beer of the night down at the Covid-spaced Pilot Lounge the night he’d gotten his 2nd inoculation so naturally he was celebrating. Maybe a little too hard. Jerry’s grandson had just been accepted into a prestigious private college, a fact that he announced with a toast ‘to the kids’, at which point Jimmy’s ebullient mood did a 180.

‘My kids,’ he said solemnly, ‘are still paying off student loans. Joe’s got a job at Amazon, a mortgage that weighs a ton and just barely hangs on. Ronnie’s out of rehab, totally broke. He just gave up, all I can see. Wasn’t it supposed to be our kids would do better than us? What the hell happened to this country?’

Well, you want to kill a buzz, this is one way to go about it. Two Toke, kidless and not exactly the Poster Child for the American Dream, declared ‘noboy promised us a rose garden, Jim.’

Little Jimmy gave that pearl of wisdom a fat snort of derision. ‘I wanted more for my kids. I expected more. That’s what America was all about, a ladder up to the next rung. Or a rung on the next …. Hell, you know what I mean.’

‘A bigger slice of the pie,’ TT said, not exactly trying to help. ‘Bigger house in the suburbs, trips to Greek islands …’

‘Better vintage wine,’ Jerry tossed in. ‘Two chickens in every pot!’ Harry chimed. ‘Two pots for every chicken!!’ Did I say that?

‘Don’t you guys get it?’ Jimmy moaned with emotion. ‘It’s a downhill slide now. And you think that’s okay?

‘Make America great again?’ Jerry asked, risking a quick end to the night, and sure enough, Jimmy gulped his last last beer and declared it was time to go home. Jerry lives in a 4000 square foot McMansion on the bluffs overlooking views of Mt. Rainier, the Olympics, Whidbey Island and the Saratoga Straits. He retired at 45, a dot.com millionaire, been bored ever since. The rest of us layabouts basically retired early too … but without stock options or 401-K’s or pensions.

TT watched Little Jimmy put on his coat forlornly, muttering ‘night, guys’ and head for the door. ‘Too bad I don’t have kids,’ Tom said, finishing his own drink and standing up to leave too. ‘I guarantee they’d be a rung up on me. But I doubt they’d be happier.’

Downward mobility on the South End never was much of a cause for concern, I guess.

The South End, for more than a few of us xenophobes, has always offered an escape from our past. A chance to bury the dead and make a clean start here on the far reaches of reality. For some of us it was a place to return to, lay low awhile and hope the past had a short memory.

Ruby Reed belonged in the latter category. She was born here over one hundred years ago, went to school in the Mabana schoolhouse, even lived in our old shack with her mom and sister and brother. Not many neighbors back around 1915. Not much work either. Not much to keep a young person with dreams of the city life. Not much, really, too different than today, just more so.

Ruby left the bucolic and boring South End to become a burlesque dancer. We have a full size theater marquee of her we dug out of the shack walls in one of our many remodeling jags. Black leather bra with an X across the sweet spots, black leather bottom with laces on the sides revealing plenty of thigh. Not much else other than a come hither smile. She worked the strip tease circuit from Seattle and Gomorrah to Spokane, Portland to Frisko, married a vaudevillian with the lewd stage moniker Harry Reed. We’ve got newspaper ads of Ruby and Harry at the Temples of Sin. What a time they must have had! What a wild ride! You want to leave the banality of the South End, there you go.

In the mid 40’s she and Harry were sleeping in a hotel in downtown San Francisco when an intruder burst in, hogtied Harry and raped Ruby in front of him. Maybe unpaid gambling debts, maybe promises unkept, who will ever know? Shortly after this incident was reported in the Bay area papers, she and Harry came back to the safety of the South End. They built the house next to our shack which her sister now owned, raised chickens and ducks and geese, stayed home. Ruby taught dance classes in Stanwoodopolis, lord only knows what Harry did.

They didn’t last long. Not here, not their marriage. Way of the world, I guess. We bought their house, the one they built next to ours. We’re now the keepers of their history, we’re their caretakers. I wish we knew more about these two, but like most history, theirs is lost to rot and rust and ruin. Same as ours someday. Same as most of us on the remote South End. Probably for the best. Probably what we wanted in the first place.

Back when I first got off the Mayflower south of Utsalady, I hitched my fortune to an unlikely looking piece of bottomland which had a shack, a large shed (or small barn depending on your agricultural perspective), a chicken coop, doghouse and a pen for some rabbits. Better than raw land, I figured. But not by much ….

Those early years I mostly hunkered down and tried to stay warm. Some folks would just look at this and shake their heads. Can’t say I blame them, but looking back now 44 years, I’m glad I bit it off. Occasionally I’d get friends coming up to see the estate. We were all pretty much layabouts from our days driving school buses in the Big City, not big dreamers, just slackers getting high on getting by, or so the song goes…. We were an aimless bunch, lacking in ambition and drive, plenty short on cash, but optimistic the future would play out all right for us. Why? I couldn’t say, just that a good positive attitude might, in the end, carry the day. I guess we drank the Kool-Aid —- or if we hadn’t, we were more than willing.

Some of those weekends, come nightfall, we’d load up the VW bus and motor into town, figuring to catch some Stanwoodopolis night life. Rudy the Banjo King played every Saturday night at the Hotel, but once was plenty and so we went to the other side of town to see what the Sportsman and the Sundance and the East Side had to offer a half dozen of us thirsty revelers. First tavern up, the Sportsman, we ordered schooners of tap beer. A minute later every barstool was empty and we were alone with the scowling bartender. Couple of beers, some pool, we moved next door. Our absentee barstool pals were all there, waiting, I guess, for us to bring the party.

We bellied up to the bar, ordered pitchers and watched our fellow revelers finish their beers and head for the door, about half a dozen fellas exiting. Was it something we said? The bartender took our money, but offered no clues. An hour later we were at the East Side, little shotgun of a place, shuffle board half its width. The locals kindly gave us their stools, tipped their hats and left. Once again.

Some places the drinking establishments are lively, a democratic conviviality. Alcohol has its negatives, but for loosening up inhibitions, it’s tried and true. I’ve lived here now 44 years. I’ve been to every drinking establishment that’s come and gone, lived and died. The mizzus says you can’t judge a town by its saloons … and she’s a historian … but I say you can. I could live here longer than Methuselah on scotch and soda and I tell you what, it’s way more fun to drink alone. Which is what we got in spades down here on the South End.

If you venture back into the interior of the South End — and I guarantee you very few do — you’ll wander up on illegal buildings, Aryan nation signage, lost homesteads and small forests covered by English ivy, making it feel as if you’ve found some ancient civilization gone to rot and ruin. The last few miles of the island there are no roads running across from east to west, just a few dirt ones that lead to xenophobic neighbors. Most of the roads on the South End that pierce the interior give fair warning you’re not welcome. There are more No Trespassing signs than there are Trump/Pence, which is to say, there are plenty.

Behind our little Shangri-La-La there used to live a man who, if you met him, you’d think to be a very polite, well-mannered person, someone you might enjoy a conversation with over a beer late in any given afternoon. You’d be wrong. He holed up back in the woods, raised a few farm animals and shot anything that came onto his property. One of my neighbors, painter John, rang me up one day, this would be back twenty years or more ago, to ask if I’d seen his dog who’d run off. I said I hadn’t, but … and I hesitated to tell him this … but maybe he should go see Tyler, the man who lived behind us back in the nettle jungle.

“Why’s that?” John asked and I told him because Tyler would shoot his dog if he happened to wander onto his property. John, being a peaceful sort of man, declared that he doubted anyone would do such a thing. But he would ask, if nothing else, see if Tyler had seen his shepard. When John drove up there, Tyler said sure, he’d killed the sonofabitch, seen it menacing his chickens, put a bullet right into him, shot him dead. Now John loved that sonofabitch and you best believe he was upset to hear this turn of events, kind of a shock to his faith in his fellow man. John hadn’t even heard the story of two other dogs found near Tyler’s place, hogtied with baling wire and left to die. Shooting a dog for trying to kill your own animals is one thing, killing them in a slow heinous way is quite another.

However, John heard Tyler’s wife say to Tyler, ‘that dog wasn’t bothering the chickens’. One hard look from m’lord shut her up right then and there, little doubt that a beating was coming once John drove off, but it told John all he needed to know. ‘What you planning, John?’ I asked when he told me he’d found his dog.

I lived for a time in a hardscrabble place in Northern Wisconsin where my neighbor and good friend had found his beagle drag itself home after being shot. Eddie was ex-Marine, a kindly sort, but not when it came to someone shooting his dog Barney. Eddie followed the blood on the snow all the way down to where the road took a turn and knocked on the door of the guy who’d put a bullet in Barney. The guy said he didn’t shoot no damn dog and went to shut the door in Eddie’s face, but Eddie held the door open. ‘If my dog dies,’ Eddie told him, and I have no doubt, knowing Eddie, this was a blood vow, ‘you’ll be dead too. ‘

Barney lived. And so did the man who shot him. I told John this story, but John only shook his head. Like I said, John’s a peaceful man. He did take Tyler to court, got a settlement, if I remember correctly, of 500 dollars. I’m not sure he felt vindicated, I know I wouldn’t have been. I do know this, I’m glad it wasn’t my dog. I loved Gonzo more than most people I’ve met. Sometimes, I have no doubt, it’s best not to know what you’re actually capable of.

Art is a funny sort of investment, let’s say that right off the get-go. It’s worth what anybody is willing to pay for it. If you’re an artist whose work is actually collected as a hedge against recessions, inflation, wars, disasters and the coming apocalypse, you really can’t lower your prices when the bank account dips too low, not if you want to keep your investors happy. Me, I don’t worry too much about this part of the art game. I charge by the square foot for original designs in glass, a price I haven’t changed since 1995, one that’s cheaper than the stained glass shops in the area. The obvious corollary to this is that, well gee, maybe I’m selling product, not art. But let’s not get sidetracked, okay?

This week Christie’s auction house sold a digital painting for 69 million dollars plus change. For what was advertised as an NFT, which for you poor readers living in the comfortable past, means a non fungible token. Huh? you ask and I say yah shure, u betcha, a non fungible token, where ya been? An NFT is basically artistic crypto-currency, see? And don’t say Huh? It’s the future and the future is here.

A guy you never heard of named Beeple is now the 3rd richest living artist after his first sale ever. Not bad. Or is it? Bad, I mean. This Beeple is a graphic designer who lives in Charleston, South Carolina. The idea behind the “Everydays” project is to create art daily, no matter how complex or simple, he said.

“These pictures are all done from start to finish every day,” he declared on his website. “The purpose of this project is to help me get better at different things.” Well now, he certainly got better at selling his work, and hopefully maybe even fine-tuned his graphic art. I mean, he has 5000 images tucked away in that digital painting, some maybe good, some maybe not, and if you owned the painting you could scroll through and find a few you loved and a few you wish you could photoshop out.

Of course I’m trying to figure out a way to digitize my own glassworks. Jam every doodle and design into a collage that would fill my own computer’s hard drive in a South End minute. I was worried at the beginning I wouldn’t know how to make a non fungible token since I wasn’t really sure what an NFT is, but then I realized most of even the non-digitized stuff I have collecting dust down at the glass shack is basically non fungible now since obviously it appears to be unsaleable. Keep a close watch on Christie’s. I’ll be there soon. 4th richest living artist? Why not?? Bid high!!

Back in 1978 I bought my first motorcycle — from my then wife’s boyfriend. I know what you’re thinking, I wasn’t, and you can congratulate yourself for wisdom I did not have at the time. The bike was a beat-up 1960’s Honda 350 that wouldn’t start, which is why my wife’s boyfriend was selling it. Cheap. Maybe it was the despondency over a marriage gone south, but that bike seemed like just the tonic to reinvigorate my depressed life. Right … get a suicide machine.

It took me months to get that crummy motorcycle to start, but there came a day when it sparked to life down in the basement of my ghetto house and triumphant, I brought that Honda out into the sunshine, popped the clutch and hung on for dear life as I menaced the car strewn streets of my shabby neighborhood. No license, no tags, no helmet — that’s right, amigo, bad to the bone!

Only a few blocks from my house the bike quit, stalled in an intersection and so I ingloriously pushed the thing back home, disappointed but still determined. If you’ve never sat a bike, that raw power between your legs, a monster growl snarling with the smallest twist of the throttle, the sudden acceleration from zero to 60 in seconds, you’re the lucky one. Only insane people and Tesla money love that G-force barely under control. Me, I knew this was a death machine. I could all too willingly hurtle into my dark future.

Lucky for me I spent most of my time with the bike working on it, not riding it. Dreams of horrible motorcycle accidents littered my night, recalled next morning as black omens, harbingers of an early and messy demise. An encounter with a black motorcycle gang at an intersection where we all stopped for the red light, the boys surrounding me right left front and back, revving their Harleys to red line RPM’s, then sprinting on the green, all but me, stalled out yet again when my ugly Honda died when I hit the gas, leaving me in their wake of oil and gas fumes and imagined laughter. I knew right there my days of being the Wild One had crashed and burned. Like Peter Fonda said to Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, we blew it, man.

In the end I sold the bike. Back to my then wife’s boyfriend. Same price. Seemed only fair. And every once in awhile I wonder if maybe he took a turn too fast, laid that Honda down on some backroad blacktop in a shower of sparks and screaming metal, wishing he’d just kept my hundred bucks and my wife, called it a good deal all around, lived happily ever after. But then I think, we probably all got what we wanted, or at least deserved. Hopefully the only ones disappointed are the Hells Angels. Sorry, guys, I hung up my bike.