The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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It was sunny today, a few days past the Vernal Equinox. I was back in the woods, splitting trees into firewood, what once upon a time was considered sustainable forestry. Now burning wood is considered about as ecologically correct as using shale oil in Chinese factories or soft coal in Wisconsin power plants or Saudi oil in my pickup truck.

Energy. I wish we had solar panels on my shack roof, wind turbines powering the well pump, battery power in my truck. I wish I weren’t cutting my trees to keep warm, even those alders that are old and dying soon no matter what I burn for fuel. I wish nuclear power plants didn’t blow up and contaminate half the Pacific and we could dump radioactive waste in a deep hole into the earth’s core.

About everything we do, seems like, is denuding the countryside, scarring the mountainsides, polluting the skies, acidifying the oceans and killing the planet. Paper or plastic? Give me a break….

I got friends and neighbors recycling, buying Priuses, moving into the city and using mass transit, downsizing, desperately trying to be Good Stewards of the Earth. Me, I decided long ago it seemed sort of hopeless. So I got a vasectomy at 21 and figured a kid or two less would be a helluva lot more efficient way to reduce waste and consumption than recycling my bottles and papers, cans and plastic containers. And no, I didn’t get a tax deduction for it — in fact, my friends got one for having kids. Don’t ask me, I didn’t make the world. And my progeny won’t have to pay the piper.

I know, I know, without the children our species dies out. Procreative Urge. Breed or go extinct. But I figure we don’t ALL have to make babies, even if it goes against the Genetic Imperative. And I also know we won’t be rewarded, we won’t be thanked, we won’t really be accepted, okay by me. Just don’t think I’ll high five you for recycling or making the right choice at the grocery check-out line when you bring your own cloth bag or you buy a car that gets an extra 5 mpg. Your 3 kids pretty much canceled that out….

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Psychiatrists this week announced the discovery of a new mental malady: Sluggish Cognitive Tempo. This apparently is a sub-order of Attention Deficit Syndrome and is sure to raise a controversy in the medical community as to whether it is really a proper psychopathological disorder. Apparently it is characterized by slow learning, chronic daydreaming and lack of interest in the world around the victim. Patient, I mean. What we used to call Stupid before we became more touchy-feely and enlightened.

No doubt the next step is a pharmacological breakthrough, something akin to coffee, but not as potent as crystal meth, and hopefully (unless you’re the pharmacology company) not overly addictive. Bring the patient back to reality gradually, no point trying to make it TOO interesting. This is great news for the South End, you no doubt realize. All those artists and musicians have been struggling for years with stargazing, cloud watching, daydreaming and other similarly wasteful idle pursuits. We just didn’t have a name for it, but now, thanks to psychiatric research, we not only have a name and a diagnosis, but possibly the hope for a cure.

With counseling and the proper drugs, we South Enders can imagine the day when our idyllic but lachrymose lives are given new leases. Jobs, responsibilities, duties and a focused commitment to meaningful undertakings. Finally we can put down the banjos, drop the paintbrushes, store the blank canvases in the cellar and look forward to normality. We can drive to our satisfying new job at Boeing, we can balance a checkbook, we can scan the TV guide for exciting new programs, we can do all those things the rest of you take for granted, but for us were always far far away.

It is undoubtedly a New Day down here. We’re going to take that sluggish cognitive tempo we’ve been sleepwalking with most of our adult lives and kick it up a notch or three. Multi-task! We’ll be able to juggle half a dozen activities at once while making appointments on our new cellphone for job interviews and doctor visits and financial planning and car repairs and ….well, I get goosebumps just thinking about it. The future is wide open, just like my eyes, and I trust you’ll understand if I don’t finish this, but hey, I haven’t got time for literary nonsense now. It’s a big world out past the garden and I’ve got to make up for lost time so if you’ll excuse me, I have to go march to a similar drummer ….

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— Foggy M

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So okay … admittedly I’m a Slow Learner, one of those yahoos who apparently makes the same mistake repeatedly and goes ahead one more time, hoping, I guess, the previous mistakes were all flukes. I’m building my 4th or 5th banjo, not sure exactly but somewhere in that ballpark, hard to say since some were taken apart and cannibalized for the next attempt at 5 string luthiery. I know what you’re thinking because my folks ask it every time the subject comes up: how many damn banjos do you need? Give me a year or seven and I’ll get back to you on this, right after my doctoral thesis is accepted on the Quantification of Drone Stringed Instrumentation.

I’m actually taking a bit of a break right this minute on the current banjovarius. I’m trying to fit the neck to its body for good playability. I won’t bore you with details — so let’s just say it’s really difficult and I’m fairly frustrated. The thing is beautiful, I’ll tell you that flat out. Laminated hardwoods, walnut and Honduran mahogany and bubinga, a neck carved by a sculptress up the road, gold hardware, a work of wood art I could hang on the wall with all the others. But! It’s a musical instrument, not a sculpture. It needs to play well and sound good. Fitting that neck is really a big part of the Key.

I read today that they blindfolded a pack of violinists, professional fiddlers, and gave them a Stradivarius … plus an inexpensive newly built violin … and asked them which sounded the best, the multi-million dollar Strad or the $30,000 newly crafted one. If you own a multi-million dollar Stradivarius, stop reading right now and get your butt down to the nearest pawn shop ASAP and salvage what you can.

A banjo — well, a banjo pretty much sounds like a banjo. At least mine do. Every last one. But for the connoisseur, for the orchestral banjo aficionado, for the fine tuned elite whose sensibilities are measured in harmonic undertones and percussive rhythmics, let’s assume we merely have to blindfold them to dazzle them with the Yankee Daddle 5 String Deluxe. Beauty, after all, is in the ear of the Bewildered.

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I don’t have kids.   So I watch my friends raise theirs with no real experience on my part, or prejudice or preconceived notions of how I would go about it.  Child rearing for me is like sex is to a eunuch.  Course, I don’t know a whole lot about eunuching either.

Billy Jean lived a couple houses south of us.  Her husband Robert and her were wild kids, even when they got married.  Small town wild.  Drugs, sex, drinking, penny-ante thefts, racing in the streets — they pretty much had it covered.  But when Billy Jean got pregnant, well, she knew it was time to slow down some, take a little responsibility, maybe gear up for adulthood.  By the second kid she was sure it was time and hey, Robbie too!  So by the time Peggy Sue Star was born, Robert had a full time job at Twin City Foods driving lift truck, they’d quit drinking and smoking herb, they joined the Little Chapel in the Ravine and received Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior … and they avoided me as best they could.

Billy Jean had some definite ideas how to raise her children.  She never let them out of her sight and she never let them play with other kids would no doubt contaminate them with bad habits.  When it came time for school, she home schooled them, which was hard, considering she and Robbie had pretty much partied past learning anything in high school themselves, but for the first 6 grades, she could manage to study up.

Like all child rearing, I guess, it was an interesting experiment.  Very hands ON.  Versus, oh, my own kidhood where we’d roam the woods and the neighborhood with other kids, fight, play baseball, shoot marbles, build treehouses, ride bikes, all pretty much unsupervised.  “Be home by ….” Mom would command and vhrooom, we were gone til then.

Billy Jean and Robert broke up awhile back.  For the third time.  This one’s for good, I suspect.  Peggy Sue Star married an army guy, got pregnant, divorced, and now lives with her two kids with Billy Jean.  Randall, the son, quit speaking to his father years ago and he moved away to Utah.  Robbie’s a mess.  Quit Jesus and decided to try his hand at casino gambling.  Last I heard he was dead broke, deep in debt, drinking again and living in a trailer up river.

If you thought I’d wrap this up with a ribbon and a bow, maybe pontificate on how to raise kids the proper way, you’d be optimistic.  I do think kids ought to play with other kids, go to school with other kids, live a little dangerously so they’ll grow up before they’re 35 or 40.  I’m not sure you can really protect them the way Billy Jean tried.  But I suspect you can OVER-protect them.  Then again, I think eunuchs are a misunderstood minority.

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