The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Me being a news junkie and all, I get plenty of news feeds on my computer. I guess the three newspapers we subscribe to aren’t really enough to satisfy my addictions so I just load up the syringe and inject everything from Yahoo news to weird feeds from outfits that I’ve never heard of in my life. Today it finally hit me what this feels like, these headlines about Clinton’s disease or Obama’s new scandal or the latest Kardashian soap opera. It’s like standing in the grocery store line reading the headlines of the Globe or the National Enquirer or the Star or any of those cheezy tabloids that have the latest on the JFK assassination or the breaking developments on Martian architecture or the weight gain of some TV star gone to seed.

Now that most Americans view mainstream news, what Limbaugh calls lamestream drive by news, as nothing but liberal bias, the door is wide open for any yahoo with a laptop and a blog site to weigh in on what is true and factual. Fox News calls itself fair and balanced. Compared to some of these digital news media, that might be more true than they ever dreamed. The glut is so deep and so pervasive it’s as if journalism itself had been buried under a tsunami of radioactive malarkey. No wonder people start to read only what they want to believe. It all looks like the ingredients for sausage and if any of it is less suspect than the others, it all gets ground up and spiced to mask the rodent turds and dead insects.

You might even wonder, if you were conspiratorial minded, if this wasn’t exactly the plan. The internet, that bright and shining hope for the future, the one where all facts were at your fingertips, is now swamped by so much misinformation, the truth, if there ever was such a thing, is now asphyxiating in a morass of opinion and outright lies so as to be unrecognizable by anyone not possessed with a passion for sorting through the debris in search of some small kernel that might be accurate.

I used to wonder who bought those greasy little supermarket tabloids. I used to wonder who watched Fox News. I used to wonder who listened to all those Talking Heads. Now I realize what the answer is. We all do.

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I suspect quite a few of you readers out there in blogland wonder how I make a ‘living’. Meaning, how do I make money? Moonshining is pretty much dried up, so naturally I’ve turned to other forms of petty crime. Currently I’m an artist. Partly a con artist, you might say with the same degree of truth, inasmuch as I have to hoodwink my clients that what I’m selling has real value, no easy thing in this mass produced, low priced WalMart society we live in.

Back in the day folks like me glommed onto a religion. Us artists worked for the church, painted Bible stories or filled cathedrals with portraits of the saints and baby Jesus, maybe throw in some doves and lambs. If we found a rich patron, the patron wanted to curry favor with the priests so same thing, more religious art. The Greeks, the Romans, even the Pagans, the art was to reinforce the rituals, the belief system of the Gods.

Now of course we got Secularism. Meaning, we got Modern Art. If you’re an artist, it means a whole lot of artistic freedom. Artistic freedom, you want to know the truth, means starvation wages. Very few patrons, no church commissions, just a free-for-all helter skelter rush for what few jobs there are, at least in my chosen field, public art.

I’m a glass guy, stained and leaded. Design large murals for courthouses, train stations, libraries, places like that. Build em, haul em across the country, then install em. Usually a committee decides my glass design is more appropriate, say, than a sculpture or a mosaic or an atrium hanging. I have to sell them on that design, justify its expense, convince them I can hoist glass into the heavens without killing anyone below. I have to make them believe what I believe: that this art of glass will do what Renaissance glass did for cathedrals — lift their eyes and their hearts beyond the mundane, upward to an impossible light, what we secularists still call inspirational but seems harder to sell. Even us con artists believe in our art.

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With Hurrican Matt bearing down at a Force 4 storm, we decided to evacuate. Going to Hood River for some R&R. If you’ve chosen to stay, maybe hold a hurricane party, good luck! Check out some earlier blogs, swill champagne, hunker down. We’ll catch you on the back end.

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Our fiddler in the South End String Band is a fiddle maker as well, meaning, he builds violins and violas and cellos. You maybe don’t run into luthiers a whole lot in your neighborhood, but down by us, we got folks who build everything from boats to banjos. I suspect there are a lot more of us than you realize, people who find it necessary to create things. I bet you only know a few, but believe me, the woods are full of them.

Our fiddle maker had quit making instruments about 15 years ago, just stopped out of the blue to pursue a career as a fireman, make a steady paycheck and support his family. At the time he had clients waiting, violins going for $10,000 and cellos for $19,000, not bad in our neck of the wilderness, the South End. I didn’t understand it, this dropping a fairly lucrative trade just when his reputation had grown to the point most of us artists would have celebrated, but then I don’t have a family so maybe it seemed strange to give up a creative career for a guaranteed wage.

A few months ago he rented a studio space, lugged in his tools and his 50 year old woods, mostly flame maple for bottoms and sides and the neck and straight grain spruce for the tops. He built a fiddle for working out the kinks after a 15 year hiatus, then he took the best wood he had and built a violin the beauty of which would knock you out same as it did us bandmates. The craftsmanship, the detailing, the wood — Stradivarius himself would have nodded his approval. And the sound, well, I’m no judge of classic instruments, but it does seem amazing. Now he’s building a cello, same exquisite workmanship, just as nice a wood selection.

I like to think there’s an irresistible urge to create in most of us, whether it be a poem or a garden or a badly made banjo, some spark that demands a bursting into flame. I meet folks all the time who say they haven’t got one artistic bone in their invertebrate body, but I don’t believe them. We might not build a Stradivarius or write the great American novel, but we humans, like God Herself, bend the world to our own imaginations and the music we make changes everything.

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Every blue moon or so I stop loitering in our gardens and tune in briefly to the world at large outside our gates. Actually I don’t so much go searching for it, it intrudes on me. Folks who say the world is shrinking, well, from my foxhole, it seems more like it’s expanding, same as some of the invasive weeds that come creeping in the night, magically appearing next morning.

Try as I might, hoeing isn’t all that effective. Technology, once unleashed, is pretty much an onslaught. Everyone I know walks around with it strapped to their belt, parked in their purse, stuffed in a pocket, carried in their car, enveloping them in a cyberbubble they now feel uncomfortable without. No cellphone, no laptop, no I-pad — they feel naked and vulnerable. Doesn’t matter I don’t attach the umbilical myself, the digital electromagnetic pulses lap at my brainpan anyway. The engineers, aliens to me, have won the battle for our consciousness. More and more we are ruled by technocrats, those busy little beavers intent on morphing their rules and parameters and metrics onto our flesh and bones. Or simply working 24/7 to create Artificial Intelligence… They imagine a future of exponentially increasing efficiencies. They argue this will be good for us humanoids, a gift from the scientists and technicians. Even quite a few of my fellow artists have begun to believe this.

Lately I’ve been hearing the drumbeat to scale back Humanities in universities, substituting more degrees that lead to high paying jobs, degrees in programming, coding, engineering, all those ‘practical’ careers. But I think we need more impractical degrees. We need musicians, sculptors, painters, writers, dreamers. We need to tether ourselves through them to what makes us human, not cyborg.

A sea change is coming, a digital tsunami, a revolution that will implant its seed in all of us. Technology is easy now — being human, soon that’s going to be very hard. Soon most of us won’t know the damn difference. The difference may just be Art. Humanities, well named. And I may be forced, reluctantly, despite a lifetime of self-deference, to admit we artists are somehow special after all.

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The rains of September came last night ending the long drought of summer, a welcome relief for our parched plants. Course, when I got up I discovered new leaks in the old roof. Leaks are nothing new for most of us in these monsoonal regions, but nevertheless, they’re as welcome as a shingles attack. And as hard to get rid of.

You can see where the drips come into the house okay, but finding their original source, that’s entirely another matter altogether. Water zigs, water zags, but it rarely comes straight down from the hole in the roof to the place you see it dripping onto the floor. Leaks are mysterioso, enigmatic, almost supernatural — which is to say they are outside the purview of observable science. They might leak one drizzly day and not a drop on a wild windstorm, what we South Enders call paranormal. Although, really, seems normal to me.

The old shack had a leak I spent years trying to fix. I figured it came through some flashing by the dormer so I slapped enough tar on that valley to build a two lane blacktop to Elger Bay Store. But to no avail. I tore off shingles and put in new flashing. Still leaked. I bought more tar. I doubled the flashing. Every rain my little creek ran like a dagger across the front porch floor. I half expected salmon to return every year to spawn in the living room.

The mizzus got real weary of buckets in the room, but she was gracious enough not to nag an old roofer. Finally I built the roof up a full foot and a half to eliminate the valley, the flashing and hopefully the eternal leak. It worked!

Well, it worked for a few years. Now I got the buckets back in and the Department of Natural Resources wants me to widen my ditch to create better access for salmon trying to return. At least I plan to eat well, plenty of salmon barbecues, but I’m not sure I’ll buy a license.

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