The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Hits: 78

I suppose if I was sitting in the Oval Office looking at the cluttered Inbox of crisis after crisis, wondering which one I should tackle first, the Korean nuclear threat or maybe the devastation from Hurricane Irma in Puerto Rico, the flooding in Houston or the troop buildup in Afghanistan, the repeal and replace debate of Obamacare or the budget battle and debt ceiling, I would have a hard time too. One of the tenets of the 7 traits of successful South Enders —
I’ll mention only the first on the list: START THE DAY BEFORE NOON
At least on work days. The other five days, sleep in. You earned it. —

means that obviously time management and prioritization is of critical importance. Let’s face it, the world and national problems are complex and many. You have personal issues as well, investigations into your financial dealings, investigations into your involvement with the Russians, investigations into possible obstruction of justice. Decisions decisions decisions and so little time! Impeachment is right around the corner, the Rocket Man has his finger on the nuclear trigger, hurricanes and earthquakes are becoming more common than your tweets. What’s a busy guy to do?

Prioritize! Take them one at a time! Don’t tackle too much! Which is why it makes sense to attack the NFL and those ‘sons-of-bitches’ who refuse to stand at attention while the National Anthem is being played. Good choice, Mr. President!! Good choice. Tomorrow, pick another. Hillary! Sure, Hillary’s a safe bet. Benghazi! E-mails! Voter fraud even though she lost! That’s two days covered and five days of well-deserved rest. You deserve it, sir, you’ve worked hard.

Hits: 74

Hits: 40

I probably already mentioned how it doesn’t bother me much the football players who protest racial injustice by not standing for the National Anthem. I understand there’s going to be folks who say it’s the wrong place, the wrong time, let’s not politicize the sacred game of football, kind of like cussing in church. But these guys have a national stage and some serious grievances and they probably figure, if not now, when? If not here, where?

Football fans, unless I miss my guess, are patriotic, don’t tread on me folks who mostly hated Kaepernick when he took a knee on the Anthem. WTF? The man is colored and rich and he STILL can’t keep his uppity mouth shut? Course now he can’t find a team that’ll take him. The fans would go batshit crazy, bringing that commie protestor into their hallowed stadium!

So now we got the Trumpster, the man who equates white supremacist Nazis with the Black Lives Matter protestors, calling out ‘the sons-of-bitches’ who kneel during the Star Spangled Banner, asking the NFL owners to fire them, fire them now! Today was Football Sunday. If you expected mass layoffs, you were sorely disappointed. If you thought teams would stand at attention, hats off, hands over their hearts, you probably needed an extra IV of Bud Light to get you to half time. The Coach-in-chief maybe misjudged on this one. Then again, maybe not.

I’m no huge sports fan and I’m not much of a betting man either. But my money’s on the Knee-Takers. And if the Trumpster doubles down, I bet most of these teams will skip the Anthem, okay by me. If folks thought racism had ended, if they thought the Civil War had put slavery’s sad history to rest, if they thought Confederate statues were simply honoring the Good Soldier, if they think it’s a question of supporting the cops vs. supporting an end to cop killings, if they think standing up for a crummy song is the Test of Patriotism, well, I got some bleak news for them — the Civil War ain’t over, Bubba, it’s only just begun.

Hits: 181

Hits: 75

Every day we get out of our bunks and before the coffee has time to percolate or our brains haul into full consciousness, some new Tweet or soundbite ruins the morning. I’m living as part of a live audience for the Donald Trump Show, a reality nightmare that considers itself bingeworthy despite the sinking polls.

The plot — if you’d pitched it to HBO execs a couple years ago — would’ve gotten you laughed out of Tinsel Town. Some reality show huckster, see, a phony self-promoting real estate developer with ties to the mob and an empire fueled by banks too nervous to let his Jersey casinos fold and drag them down too, decides to run for office. Not just any office, mind you, the Highest Office. And to keep his name in the tabloids he starts the rumor the current president wasn’t born in the United States.

You still with me? So this bombastic know-nothing knows this: how to keep the press interested in every outrageous pronouncement he makes. He tweets constantly. Angry accusations. Outright lies. Mostly hysterical nonsense, but the media eats it with a silver spoon. And then the guy starts winning primaries. He attacks his own party and the voters go wild for it. TV ratings go through the roof. Then he wins the nomination and you guessed it, he wins the election too, all the marbles.

You turned off the TV yet? No? Well, okay, now the mutt is president. What’s he going to do now? Well, he doesn’t have an agenda really, so why not keep on doing what’s always worked for him. Angry tweets, personal attacks, more lies. The citizens can’t get enough. They’re part of the show now. We’re part of the show now, an interactive plotline.

At the United Nations he stepped onto the world stage, top hat and cane, perpetual sneer, and threatened to destroy North Korea and little Rocket Man. You expected Diplomacy, you haven’t been watching the entire first season. And today Rocket Man called him, get this, a dotard. No, it’s not a Korean slurword, it’s English. It means, if you’re like me and didn’t know, an old guy, probably sick and feeble. Oh … and he said he would shoot an ICBM into the Pacific and detonate a hydrogen bomb.

I know, you can’t wait for the next episode. I’m just hoping this wasn’t the Season Finale and we have to wait for Season 2. But what a cliff hanger! Great for the ratings!

Hits: 55

Hits: 57

Hits: 35

Awhile back I took my little six string guitar into the shop up north to have some work done on it. My guitbox looks like it was on the losing side of the last War, missing perfling, broken neck up at the top fixed not by a luthier but by a medic with epoxy, odd bridge, ragged scar on the spruce top, break in the tuning head. When I came back a week later to pick her up, the entire backroom of repair luthiers came out with her. “What’s the story with the guitar,” they asked, not quite in unison.

As always, there’s a story….

I had an irascible buddy whose girlfriend had bought a few stained glass pieces from me and would ‘pay me later’. When I brought it up to them a year later, Bill went ballistic, called me a greedhead and drove away after Marge told him I was correct, they did owe me for those windows.

A few years later she came down with terminal cancer so I ended up on hospice duty. Which meant a small rapprochment with Bill. A couple months after Marge died, he stopped by my shack and handed me a moth eaten Persian rug and a guitar. “What’s this?” I asked and he told me it was payment for the glass. Not feeling like another knock-down drag-out fight, I simply accepted the ruined rug and the broken guitar. “What’s the story on the guitar?” I asked.

Turns out some guy had it up at the Pilchuck School of Glass, our little world-reknowned glass blowing headquarters just off island. They’re fairly infamous for their parties, wild bacchanalias of international instructors and rich kid students, and somehow this guitar had been leaning up against a wall, got knocked over by some drunken reveler who managed to step on its neck before falling directly on it, crushing the soundbox flat and breaking the neck in three places. Its owner next day brought it down to Bill to fix. Bill’s no luthier, but on the other hand, Bill was the kind of guy who could fix anything made of wood.

The owner, probably figuring no one could put that shattered jigsaw instrument back together, never came back. And since Bill didn’t play guitar, it sat in his shop for a decade or so. Until it got handed over to me. Inside its soundhole you can barely see the maker’s label, but when you do, it says Martin Guitar, Nazareth, PA. For you non-guitarists, Martin is the gold standard of early guitars in America. Mine, it turned out, was built in 1963 which means it was constructed of Brazilian rosewood before it got banned from import into this country. Brazilian rosewood is THE tonewood of tonewoods. And I have one of the last guitars made with Brazilian rosewood.

If you are of a certain age, you might remember a band from the 60’s called The Association. They wrote Along Comes Mary, Cherish, Windy, all kinds of hits back then. And when they recorded these or played them live, my little guitar was on stage or on the album. It says a great deal about Bill’s woodworking skills that this double ought-21 still plays, much less that it sounds beautiful, perfectly balanced from high string to low. You know, if someone other than me plays it, someone who knows his way around a guitar.

I think the boyz in the music shop knew that too. Too bad, they probably thought, that a certified luthier hadn’t done the repairs because now the little Martin might be worth a small fortune. Maybe so, but I’m not selling instruments and if I were, this would be the one I’d keep. Or like the song Cherish sez: I could say I need you but then you’d realize/ That I want you just like a thousand other guys.

Hits: 63

Hits: 31