The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Biker Billy was leaned up against the chrome of Johnny Banshee’s old Hudson showing the boys from the Flatheads, our vintage car club, his newest tattoo. Most of the boys don’t sport body art, figuring, I guess, customizing an old automobile is artistic expression enough. Billy had some heart with the knife in it, dripping drops of blood, and under that the words BORN TO OOZE. “Kind of Old School, isn’t it?” Ronnie asked, risking Billy’s ire which, trust me, no one wants to do. Billy isn’t in an Outlaw Club now, but once a biker, always a biker.

Billy grinned, showing his two missing teeth which none of us ever asked how they got missing. He looked like a pirate gone to seed prematurely. I helped Bill and his girlfriend who was an old bus driver friend of mine from our city days build their cabin too many years ago to count. I like Billy okay, at least when he ran solo or he was sober or he was rehabbing. I didn’t like him much when a few of his biker buddies rolled in with bottles of cheap wine and six packs of beer they’d swill down in record time. Wouldn’t take long until you were the odd man out in their gang and if they were looking for a victim, they didn’t have to draw straws.

Billy’s a tattoo parlor’s wet dream. He went for the clichéd stuff and the Needleman could do skulls and crossbones, snarling dogs and the business end of .38’s in his sleep. Billy was practically covered and running out of room. Once I asked him why he didn’t get a tattoo that was, oh, more artsy fartsy. He glared at me like I was some idiot making fun of his Harley. “Just a thought,” I mumbled and dropped the subject.

I never got the attraction for body art. For one thing, it seems like tourist shop art to me. Butterflies and dragons, Celtic crosses and rainbows, sappy slogans and cornball cartoonery. I figured if I had to look at something dyed onto my skin for the rest of my natural life, I’d want something interesting, something arty, something that maybe I didn’t get sick of in about six months. But then, I’m an old geezer now and that explains a lot.

I had a pal, Norm, who walked up to my artist buddy Prof. Jim one summer day when Jim’s tats were exposed out of his short sleeves and asked him, thinking he was being funny, how drunk was he? This was back in the ‘70’s, before tattoos were all the rage. Jim gave Norm the stink-eye and asked what he meant. “The tattoos. You must’ve been drunk on your ass, right?”

Jim pretty much gave Norm an education that day and I learned not to ask much about folks’ body art. It’s their body, as the women’s rights advocates say, to do with as they please. And if you’re thinking of questioning guys like Billy, he’ll do what he wants with yours too. Beauty, worst case, is in the blackeye of the beholder.

Scientists down here at the nationally renowned E-Coli Institute, a South End lab and headquarters for research in viral diseases, recently discovered a new symptom for those infected with Covid-19. Besides loss of taste and smell, researchers found that 90% of new cases of positive coronavirus reported loss of humor. ‘Not surprising,’ claimed Dr. Laffsky, famed virologist from the Mabana Center of Immunology, ‘given the recent election with not one but two winners for the office of President of the United States.’

Obviously Doc Laffsky wasn’t suffering himself from the virus. But the findings point up a problem with the Institute’s etiology. Is loss of humor a symptom of the plague or is it more a corollary symptom of the political pandemic we’ve been experiencing for years, prior even to the outbreak of Covid. Could it be that political stress has weakened our immune systems to the degree that the coronavirus had easy access to our population. When asked, Dr. Laffsky considered the notion. ‘That would be like saying Donald Trump is an auto-immune disease on the body politic. It would be unheard of. A first in the history of viral epidemiology. If it were true, and I’m not saying it is, it would be a breakthrough in medicine the equivalent of Louis Pasteur’s discoveries.’

The good doctor paused in our interview, jotted down some quick notes and said it could essentially be Nobel prize-worthy before hurrying to his laboratory to make a call he said he’d forgotten. ‘But what about the loss of humor?’ this reporter yelled to him as he retreated down the antiseptic halls of the Institute.
‘Knock knock,’ Doc Laffsky called back. ‘Who’s there?’ I replied, playing his game. ‘Funny bone,’ he said, turning the corner out of sight. I thought I heard him, but barely, answer himself, ‘Funny bone you should ask.’

I decided then and there to get myself tested as soon as possible.

I was out in the outbacks of Stanwoodopolis today, down a dirt road I’d never traveled, one no doubt soon to be paved and developed, but for now 35 acres off the highway, down a dead end, where a buddy was clearing out a recently deceased friend’s shop, house and outbuildings to the highest bidders. Actually, to anyone who would take the stuff, pay the daughters of the deceased what you thought was fair.

First time through I rummaged around, took some maple and walnut lumber, shielded my eyes from the siren call of power tools I really don’t need any more of, and was about to take my leave when the old parlor stove caught my eye back in the far corner of a crammed shop. Now … for those who think a thermostat, the kind with a dial and a graduated temperature setting, is an antique compared to the new digital, individual areas with timed on and offs controlled by a smart phone … for those of us who have avoided moving into the late 20th Century, a wood parlor stove is a tempting item. And … if you have a 1930’s stove that heats your woodshop with a gaping crack in the cast iron body, you better believe a 1900 intact, fully functional, nickel top stove would be hard to resist as the perfect replacement in your shop. Which explains why it’s in the back end of my truck waiting until daylight to unload the beast, drag it into its proper place on the throne and keep me warm these cold damp days. With style!

I guess I live an antique life, I know that. And as the world accelerates exponentially, I realize I’m falling farther and farther back, an object no longer closer than it seems in the rearview. Even these — these scribbles on a page written by hand in the upstairs of my old shack — are old school anachronistic musings few people will read and no one will remember. And why would they? This particular past in the digital future will look as obsolete and irrelevant as, oh, I don’t know, heating with wood cut and split and stacked and burned by some old fart in a stove you might see in a museum. You know, if we still had museums by then.

Thanksgiving came and went a few days ago. We usually invite a few friends and neighbors in for turkey and dressing, cranberries and sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie and plenty of libation … but not this year. Just us chickens, Ma and me, plus a turkey, smallest one I could find, too much for two people by double.

These are the dark days of Northwest winter, rain and wind, the dreary beginning of months of northern latitude, early sunsets and late sunrises. The urge to hibernate beckons seductively from under the quilts. Like it does every year. Add to that Covid, be nice to sleep until the vaccines are ready.

But, in all honesty, the holidays find us healthy, still here on the remote South End, busy with our projects, retired or not. Our Thanksgiving was a nostalgic flashback to those first years down here when we knew virtually nobody and nobody knew us. Anonymity, thy name is bliss. We had each other after losing that for a few years, so to reunite was a small miracle and one to be thankful for, not just those early years, but every year. So to spend a Thanksgiving by ourselves during the plague, well, we’ve learned how to celebrate that long long ago. The only difference, I suspect, is we have so incredibly much more to be thankful for.

Sometimes life surprises you with lucky rolls of the dice. We’ve had more than our fair share. But none, if you ask this old codger, as lucky as the year we got back together, two broke kids holed up in a shack at the end of America, on an island far from anywhere, just the two of us and a future we hadn’t yet dreamed.

What more could anyone ask for?

Down a rutted dirt road in the backcountry of Utah, up a pocket canyon where no one goes, stands a twelve foot stainless steel 3 sided something or other, obelisk or monolith or tri-lith, in desolate isolation, waiting for some lost hiker to stumble upon its presence. Discovered by a helicopter flying overhead, the mysterious object has tickled the curiosity of a public weary of politics and pandemic. Is it art? Is it an alien visitation? Is it both? Well, what it is is something enigmatic, something new, something all of us can find fascinating, whether a Qanon conspiracy theorist or a modern art museum curator, it tickles our curiosity.

There are very few artists down here in the remote outback of the South End who haven’t created work that is never seen by other human eyes. Dig around in their cluttered closets and basements and garages, you’ll find artworks no friends or neighbors have seen, you’ll hear music no ears have heard, you’ll find manuscripts no one has read, you’ll discover the secret works of countless unheralded artists squirreled away from society and civilization. Granted, we would like them to be seen, to be purchased, to be celebrated as great works … but let’s be honest here, we’re not Picassos whose every scribble and scratch goes for thousands of pesos. Even the repetitious and uninspired crap the Master cranked out after the muse had long ago retired from active service.

I don’t have a pocket canyon back in our nettle hollow where I can hide my latest creation and hope that in the year 2525 some poor yahoo stumbles back through the jungle of thorns and thistle to catch a glimpse of iridescent color sparkling through the brambles, whereupon he clears an opening only to marvel at, yes, some half rotted structure and its stained glass window still intact all those years. Was it the remains of an extraterrestrial spaceship, he might wonder, or some centuries past trick by the old glass breaker himself, one last laugh no one will hear, a craftily placed artwork in what appears to be, on closer inspection, the artist’s outhouse.

Critics and the public can debate all they want. Ownership may be in doubt. Intent certainly. Was the artist making a statement about his own work, amused enough to put it in a primitive one seater pit toilet? Was he thumbing his nose at society itself? Was he of this earth or some lost interplanetary sojourner? What was his destination? What was his Plan? Who can say? Who really cares?

The obelisk in the Utah outback disappeared last night. Speculation is that the unknown artists may have retrieved their hidden work once it was discovered. Tomorrow the conspiracy theorists will offer up their own paranoid assessment. I certainly haven’t got anything to add. But I will be checking my outhouse today to see if that glass portal placed there 3 decades ago is still intact. Either way, I know this: the truth is out there. The damn artists just keep hiding it.

My grandfather on my mom’s side was a potato farmer all his life in Northern Maine a few miles from the Canadian border. Folks think of Maine, they think the rocky coast of the Atlantic, they conjure up white clapboard houses in a quaint bay, they think lobsters. His fields were rocky, all right, but the ocean was nowhere to be heard. In the winter, though, he had waves of snowdrift piling onto his snowfences that didn’t abate until late into the spring. By May or so he could start plowing that year’s crop. No lobsters migrated up toward his fields and the houses were anything but Norman Rockwell quaint.

Until the day he died, he plowed his fields with a horse, not a tractor. All the other farmers up there in Aroostook County moved into the 20th Century soon as they could get a loan for one of those newfangled Farmall tractors, but not my grandfather, no siree, he had his trusty horse Sarah and he stuck with her til the bitter end. Hard life, spud farming in rocky ground, harder yet working with a horse and harness. Give the man credit, he was a stubborn old codger. When we visited each summer, he’d take us grandkids for a ride in his ‘caddy’, an old battered Chevy that he drove the whole quarter mile into town on U.S. 1 where he’d pick up feed or just shoot the breeze with the other farmers gathered at the grocery or the mill. Small town life, talking weather, catching up on gossip, complaining about the price of a barrel of potatoes. How’s your garden doing? Hear about the Godfrey kid? Randall farm hit with blight, probably lose half his crop. Too much rain, too little rain, no rain at all.

You better believe us kids could never, not in a thousand lifetimes, imagine living in a small town or working outside on a rundown played-out farm. So how was it I found myself 20 years later buying a shack on logged off acreage at the butt end of an island that basically was its own small town? ‘Crazy world’, my 97 year old father likes to say every day when I call, as if that sums up anything and everything inexplicable. If I had a better explanation, I’d let you know, but I don’t.

The other day I was hauling in wood for the stove and got to reminiscing about Grampy, this tired out old North Woods farmer who sat in the evenings in his favorite rocker smoking his pipe, the man who plowed with horses in the late 20th Century, barely made a living, raised a family in hard times, worked til he dropped. The mizzus asked the other day why I don’t quit hauling firewood, just get a propane stove, sell off the 30 cords in the woodsheds and make life easier for myself. And her too, I suspect.

Crazy world, I could have said, but didn’t. But I think I understand in some vague way the need to hang onto the old ways even if life is harder for it. Hard isn’t the worst thing in the world but it does keep you in it. The ground anyway, probably quicker than I’d like.

Well, they just discovered the oldest known art on the planet, some zig zag scratches on a clamshell from 500 thousand years ago. This is about 300,000 years earlier than the next oldest masterpiece from the prehistoric era. I guess that zig zag abstract set us artists back, oh, not quite half a million years. Presumably the philistines of the Neanderthal caves weren’t ready for avant-garde minimalist renderings at their clam barbecues, a lesson us contemporary aesthetes ought to take to heart. Sure wouldn’t want to be responsible for another Dark Ages. And … I notice the Neanderthals have mostly died out. Okay, maybe not died out so much as just kept denouncing art and Western culture. Okay, actually they seem to be making a comeback in the Middle East, parts of Africa, and all of the American South. Kind of a heavy price for a couple lousy scratches on some bi-valve shell left in a midden, you ask me. Course there will be a boatload of theories why art languished from then until the French cave drawings. Everything from comets hitting the salons of the shell carvers’ showings to Obama’s predecessors over-reaching their political positions.

Art, not for everybody. The cave renderings in France awhile later were a little better received. Realistic animals the Cro-Magnon boyz hunted, probably used for target practice with slingshots. Practical art. The mizzus probably complained but they didn’t have wallpaper yet and even some animal scribbles probably Martha Stewarted up the damp cave walls. That happily-received realism held sway for, well, pretty much into the 20th century. For you art historians that adds up to about 300,000 years… or pretty much 99.999% of human existence. That’s a lot of painting and sculptures of horses, cute kids, sunsets and nature scenes. I mean, I can’t really get enough either. And so, apparently, can’t the South End judging by the tourist art cramming up the galleries and boutiques . As the gentleman who sent me a hate letter when we built the decidedly abstract Visitor Center a decade ago stated vehemently, Modern Art was dead and relegated to the ash heap of history according to his fellow art professors … and pretty much my so-called career was too … or so he hoped. Why, he asked, couldn’t I have done a mural of a mountain or a stream, something equally as beautiful as nature? Why too couldn’t I just go away and spare the island my blighted vision of the world?

A good question, Professor, but since you didn’t give me a return address, it’s one that you apparently weren’t interested in hearing a response to. The Zig Zag Man of half a million years ago might have had a better answer than mine anyway, but since Art beat Literature and Writing to the historical table, we’ll never know, will we? And since I beat the good Professor to the finish line, his criticism was a bit too belated to stop the project. He did, however, write a similar complaint to the Senior Center when he got wind of another contemporary window we’d planned for installation in the entryway, more ‘degenerate’ art he might have called it if Adolph hadn’t sullied the description for future critics. Of course, unlike a lot of artists, I’m a bit tone deaf to criticism. So instead of just a couple of door panels we doubled down and did the entire front entryway to the Center. The Perfesser no doubt was apoplectic, but … it didn’t destroy the building after all. Jump forward a nano-second in the Human Timeline and those abstract shell scribbles are dotting the landscape from the South End to Seattle and Gomorrah and beyond. Someday, no doubt, future art archeologists will pry up remnants of broken glass and marvel that nothing like that has been seen on earth for a quarter million years. And my guess is they’ll probably be thankful. Like my old man always said, You can’t please em all…

It’s the holiday season and nothing says holiday quite like Covid. If you watch any news on your favorite media platform, hardly matters which, you’ll see the crowds at the airport massing up for Thanksgiving travel, off to see grandma, no doubt a family reunion right out of Norman Rockwell, big fat gobbler, plenty of cheer, pass the cranberry sauce, please. What I’m seeing is a spike in the pandemic numbers a week from dinner, an economy starting to sputter and stall without any stimulus package in sight so long as the stock market cranks up the capital gains for our legislators, unemployment relief ending soon and plenty of folks who won’t be checking their stock portfolios but will find coal in their Christmas stockings.

Half the country thinks Trump won the election. By a landslide. And that same country thinks Covid is a hoax, a strategy to keep their guy from winning the election. I have no inkling what they think the death numbers mean, over a quarter million, but obviously they’re not too worried grandma might be next. Just a bad cold maybe, nothing to worry about, nothing to make them wear a mask. Like the governor of West Virginia said, first the mask, then they take your guns. Seems sane and logical to me….

I live in an insane country during insane times. I see a bad moon rising is what I see. But … not to sound too pessimistic, there is a vaccine on the way. A couple of them actually. With a 90 to 95 per cent effectiveness. Which, if you study immunological breakthroughs, is a freaking miracle. You could easily imagine in a few months we could stop this pandemic in its tracks, get back to work, socialize again, put kids in schools, return to some kind of normal. Except now I read where nearly half the doctors and nurses wouldn’t necessarily take the shots, not enough testing for long term side effects. If they won’t take the vaccine, take a guess how many of the public won’t either.

I feel like I’m living in Pakistan where the citizens refuse to take the smallpox vaccine, might be a CIA trick. Or in Africa where the folks think the vaccine for Ebola will actually give them Ebola. I live in a country where the President is basically a white witch doctor, don’t wear a mask, it’ll just keep the evil spirits inside you! The doctors are part of a deep state medical monstrosity, don’t listen to that Fauci fool! Send your kids to school, they won’t socialize properly if you don’t!!

Me, I’m ready to offer myself up as one of the first recipients. I’m waiting for that vaccine with a sleeve rolled up right now, mister. Right now! I know, I know, if half of us don’t immunize ourselves, the pandemic will still roll on, the economy will stall, the folks who lost their jobs will be evicted from their houses and apartments, this plague will linger for who knows how long. But I’ve lost hope waiting for Godot. He isn’t coming. I’m waiting instead for that vaccine.