The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/audio-working-man-blues1.mp3[/podcast]audio — working man blues

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These relentless rains this winter have driven me indoors, driven me half crazy and three quarters mildewed, driven me to search for new hobbies to kill the dripping, foggy hours.  Could explain why we have so many artists down here.  Boredom, seems to me, is the midwife of creativity.  You can either sink into the soft cushions of cable TV or you can search for something meaningful to do that doesn’t involve drugs or alcohol.  At least not too early in the day….

I got friends who’ve ‘retired’ now.  Interesting word, retired.  Sounds like slippers shuffling toward the bedroom.  Ssshhh,  Jerome’s retired, let’s keep our voices down.  He’s worked all his life and now he could use a rest.  La-Z-Boy,  all day sweatpants wardrobe, some long peaceful hours of quality daytime television.  He’s earned it, he says.  You’re just tired, I say.  REtired, he adds.

Jerome worked 40 years at a company off island making doors.  When he reached 65, that’s what they gave him instead of a gold watch.  The door.  Sort of left him with a bitter taste in his mouth, he tells me every chance he gets.  And a pension, I add so he doesn’t forget.  He slaps a dismissive hand on the recliner.  Forty years, he growls, and I get the scraps.

We both know I won’t be getting any scraps.  Course, we know I didn’t give some corporation 40 years of my life either.  Fair is fair.  Jerome will gladly tell you I don’t deserve zip.  What I don’t understand is his smoldering anger.  What he doesn’t understand is my undercurrents of happiness.  NOT giving away 40 years to a company makes it seem obvious only to one of us.

Jerome complains about his taxes and I know he’s worried he may have to sell his home and move somewhere less expensive than the gentrified South End.  He talks about maybe starting a little side business, small engine repair maybe or doing a little handyman work.  He’s been talking about that long before he retired.  Long before he was tired.  So yeah, Jerome is bored half out of his bald skull.  Some might say he’s lazy, but HE wouldn’t.  He worked long enough.  I’ve got a very long time of working before I figure it’s quittin time.  I suspect Jerome wouldn’t agree, but I think I might just be the lucky one.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/audio-a-day-late-for-valentines.mp3[/podcast]audio — a day late for valentine’s

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I happened to go by the Tyee Fitness Center last week, what used to be Camano Curves before that and before that was the Pampered Pekinese Dog Grooming Salon.  Even the mutts apparently need toning up down here on the yuppified South End.  Just not enough mutts to keep a canine hair styling salon open, apparently.

My old ex Janice was working up a lather on the stairmaster and ordinarily I might’ve hustled past the big plate glass windows, but the sight of her in gym shorts striding away to some dialed up half jog held me a tad too long to avoid her catching me looking in from outside.  Trust me, it’s not what you’re probably thinking.  No, too many late night arguments for that.  Too many scars.  We didn’t part mortal enemies, but sleeping dogs don’t snarl at each other, I’ve learned.

Janice has worked her way OUT of the South End dating game, she confides over her bottled water and a towel wrapped around her shoulders.   All I asked was how ya doin?, and she cuts right to it.  I guess that’s what the rules are in marriage and so maybe they apply after.    Too many gnarly single men locked into their idiosyncracies and unwilling to budge one iota, even for romance, she informs me with a roundabout swirl of the plastic water bottle that I nearly have to duck to avoid.  There’s not a romantic bone in any of these boys.  She’s done looking for love down here.

She’s dating on the internet, she tells me when I ask what are the options.  Janice is trying to be, what she calls, a Personal Trainer.  When she told me this a year ago, I just thought we never really knew each other, did we?   What next, I asked, and regretted it, if not immediately, shortly after, a Life Counselor??  Maybe I’ll become a minister.     Actually, that might’ve been our last conversation now that I think of it.

Anyway, she’s in a dating service, she tells me, Romeo and Juliet, costs something a month, but she’s meeting more interesting fellas than ‘you losers down here.’  I let that go since I deserve it.  And it’s sort of true when I think of some of the boys she dated, present company maybe not excluded.  ‘Any keepers?’ I ask and for the first time she seems calm, at least not breathing hard.  She’s got a nice sheen of sweat worked up.  We’re the only ones in the place, but she lowers her voice like she’s telling me a secret.  ‘Yeah,’ she says, dreamy almost, ‘I think so.’

I feel a small stab of jealously and it surprises me so I say quick, ‘I hope so, Janice.  I really do.  You deserve someone nice.’  And she laughs, a laugh I remember from way long ago when things were good between us.  ‘Yes,’ she says, “Yes I do.”

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/audio-art-for-the-masses.mp3[/podcast]audio — art for the masses

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I was chatting it up recently with one of the zillion artists we got proliferating on the petri dish of the South End.  Vanessa’s just discovered her bliss now that the kids have gone off to college and her husband has retired early with his dot.com stock options.  He apparently has found his bliss too, not as an artist, but as a gentleman farmer.  Which qualifies him as a definite minority down here.  Not the farmer part, just not being an artist.  I only know a handful of folks who aren’t.  Or who say they aren’t.  A rebellious kid in these parts, if he really wanted to rattle the cage, would smash sculpture or burn a couple of canvasses.  Declare himself passionate about accounting and wear button down collared shirts from J.C. Penney.  Rad!

We got art tours on Mother’s Day weekend, we got plein air painters planting easels on bluffs and beaches any days it doesn’t rain, we got art guilds and art associations and art clubs and art scholarships and art meetings and art sales and art co-ops and art in all the public buildings and art in all the shops and restaurants and cafes.  There’s art in the parks, there’s sculpture parks and the Chamber of Commerce Visitor Center was built by artists so they could advertise, guess what?   Right… art.

Vanessa was going great Gonzo about finding her spiritual center through her watercolor explorations.  Muse this, muse that, painting her way to Nirvana.  Being a cynical sort, I was NOT amused, no pun pretended.  Folks around here, like a lot of places, think artists are somehow special beings, a breed apart from the more common variety homo sapien.  They suffer more, they’re more sensitive, they’re more attuned to nature, they ‘feel’ more deeply.  They are entities set apart from the other, coarser beings who live a life less examined.  Or at least less explained, if I can extrapolate from Vanessa’s hymnal.

No wonder they have nervous breakdowns, these artists.  If I thought about myself and dwelled awhile with my deep sensitivities all the live-long day, I’d spend more time at the pharmacy than pushing a paintbrush.  Luckily, at least Vanessa and 90% of her hypersensitive hobbyists, art doesn’t walk hand in hand with poverty.  She’s happily unencumbered by fiscal anxieties.   Finding your bliss without sweating the groceries seems infinitely easier than digging for it under a stack of unpaid bills.

When the paintings fill her guestroom, she’ll just add another room or two to the hacienda for storage.  When all these Matisses we got filling garages and attics and basements leave their mortal coil for true Nirvana, the sudden inflation from all these masterpieces of deceased artists should make us the envy of Western Civilization.  Practically got the left coast annex of the Louvre tucked away.  That, or the thrift stores better get ready for a tsunami of donated art….

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